Here's a chart that gives a better picture of what we're talking about when we say "the bottom 50%". It shows that 66.4 million Americans earned a total of (about) $1 trillion, in other words the AVERAGE income of the bottom 50% - one half of all Americans who earn a living - is $15,060 annually. These are the people who paid only 3% of all income taxes collected. Now that, my friends, is a travesty: that people who earn so little money should have to shell out
any of it to support the various Federal projects (such as wars) that enrich those top 1%.
Notice on
this chart that those top 1% earners make AT LEAST $402,000 annually, and their AVERAGE income is about $750,000 per year, or FIFTY times the income of the Average person in the lower 50%. And yet they pay only TWELVE times the proportion of their income in taxes.
Let's look at that again. Fifty times as much income, twelve times the proportion of their income in taxes.
Shall we explore the proportions of
disposable income next?
Hey, when it comes to manipulating data, the WSJ ain't got
nuthin' on me!
