Forum Post: Doing the numbers: Good perspective on what the 99% and the 1% really means in America right now

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/about-that-99-percent/

About That 99 Percent … By CATHERINE RAMPELL

I received an e-mail over the weekend from a reader asking for some statistical context for the Occupy Wall Street protesters’ “99 Percent” rallying cry. Who exactly are the people in the top 1 percent of the economy? How much do they make, and how much are they worth?

CATHERINE RAMPELL CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Here are some numbers:

American households right at the 99th percentile (that is, the cut-off for the top 1 percent) will earn about $506,553 in cash income this year, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. The income curve is very steep at the high end, meaning that people just a few tenths of a percentile point above that make much, much more. A family at the 99.5th percentile, for example, makes $815,868; its neighbor at the 99.9th percentile makes more than double that, at $2,075,574 a year.

The top 1 percent of American earners receive about a fifth of the country’s income, according to Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two economists who study inequality.

But as we’ve noted before, economic inequality isn’t just about what you make each year. It’s about how much wealth you have already accumulated, too. And inequality is far, far greater when you include wealth.

According to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, the top 1 percent of Americans by net worth hold about a third of American wealth.

The average net worth for the 99th percentile in net worth was $19,167,600 as of 2007, based on this research. The average net worth of the next 9 percent of Americans was $2,371,500.

That means, of course, that the bottom 99 percent of Americans includes an awful lot of millionaires.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 10, 2011

An earlier version of this post referred incorrectly to the relative standing in 2007 of an individual with a net worth of $19,167,600. That is the average net worth -- not the cutoff -- for the 99th percentile.