OT alternative wealth statistics

Renata wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Merrill Lynch did a survey on "high net worth" individuals (it is, of course, their business to find such people & sell them services). They found there to be ~2.2 million millionaires in the US. That's considerably less than 1% of the population. I don't know if

2.2 million is a "lot of people" by your standards...

The Merrill Lynch survey is here:

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if you go by the Census Bureau numbers, which include the value of real estate (self-assessed value, at that) you come up with about

8 million millionaires, or rather less than 4% of the population (note too, that the Census Bureau would be counting 1999 wealth, in other words before the stock market declines of 2000-2002).

Of course, the number of people who claim to have a million bucks, especially in singles bars, is probably quite a bit larger.

John

(who hopes to have a million bucks, someday)

Reply to
John McCoy
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Renata wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

This is another one that's hard to figure out, because it depends on who's numbers you look at, and how they choose to slant it (sort of like counting millionaires :-)

Prior to the most recent tax cut, federal income taxes (in terms of actual tax paid, not the marginal rate) were, for the middle 20% of the population, at their lowest since 1957. This was not true for the highest income 20%, in other words the top 20% was paying proportionally more tax than the middle 20%. So it would not be totally unreasonable if the top 20% were to be brought back to the proportion previously in effect (I don't know if this will, in fact, happen; it probably depends on the proportion of ordinary income versus capital gains the top 20% incur).

One set of numbers supporting the above is here(*):

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about the wrap). Note that the middle quintile's individual rate for 2001 of 4.8% is the lowest for any year, while the top 20%'s rate of 15.8% for 2001 was higher than that for 1983 (14.1%).

Note that in comparisions like the one described above, the bottom

20% tend not to be included. As far as I can tell, this is because the bottom 20% of the population pay essentially no federal income tax, which makes the statistics much more boring than those for the middle & uppermost 20%.

(refering again to the above site, the lowest 20% had an effective tax rate of -5.3% in 2001)

(you can see where the income quintiles break here:

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'd be surprised at how low the boundry between the fourth quintile & the top 20% is...)

John

(* those numbers come from the congressional budget office. I had another set from the IRS, but I can't find that link)

Reply to
John McCoy

Were you just looking for an excuse to post your favorite quote? I thought I made it clear that I'd go along with it.

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

I would suspect that number... First, how do they know everyone's net worth? Second, everyone owning a house around the L.A. area (for example) is already halfway or so toward becoming a millionaire just because of the real estate prices... I know, many (most) have a mortgage, etc... But having $1M to your name is not that tough to achieve nowadays...

Why, I'm well on my way just with tools alone! (had to keep on topic, sorry)

Reply to
gabriel

Because, although factual, they appear so selectively presented as to be propoganda-like.

Reply to
Stephen M

gabriel wrote in news:e6e70$4011757a$d01d981e$ snipped-for-privacy@msgid.meganewsservers.com:

Well, they have a strong incentive to figure it out, since, as I alluded to, those people (the wealthy) are the people they intend to sell to.

If you had looked at the URL I quoted, or read upthread, you'd have seen that that number refered only to "liquid assets", that is, the 2.2 million people are those with over $1 million in cash, stocks, bonds, etc.

In the part of my post you snipped, I quoted a stat from the Census bureau indicating that about 4 times as many people are millionaires, when you include real estate.

That's true - you can take any random group of 100 people and figure there's a millionaire amoung them :-)

John

Reply to
John McCoy

The U.S. population is approximately 285 million; thus, 2.2 million people is about 0.77% of the population. Less than 1%, yes, but not all that much less.

-- Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?

Reply to
Doug Miller

You kinda missed the point there... the point being that you are, by your own admission, quite willing to countenance evil (in the form of taking wealth from those who earned it and giving it to those who did not), as long as _you_personally_ are not harmed in the process.

I find that attitude despicable.

Reply to
Doug Miller

I always amaze myself at the capacity I have to stick a foot in my mouth, sorry.

I always remember a quote from on of my business mentors (it kind of applies): "There's only two things a person can never hide about himself: Being poor, and being an idiot." I loved that quote because it's so true. Some people might dress to the nines have a Mercedes-Benz, but after 5 minutes of chat, you know the truth without asking a question...

Anyway, some random, Friday quote for ya...

Reply to
gabriel

having a million bucks might be OK, as long as it doesn't mean I have to hang around in singles bars....

Bridger

Reply to
Bridger

OK, one more try. I'd be perfectly willing to adjust my income downwards (i.e. be harmed) to help out poor countries if others who have a lot more than I would do so first.

Originally you bitched because you thought I wanted to soak the rich for my own benefit. I tried to respond that such was not the case.

I don't find you despicable, just a perfect example of G.B.Shaw's axiom "Intelligence is an experiment that failed". One more stupid response and into the bozo bin you go.

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

I just read in the paper today that there are ~9 million unemployed folks in this country. This does not include children and retired seniors. Why you would try to include folks who either can't be employed (ain't too many 2 year olds who are being sought for those CEO positions) or are done w/employment is crazy

Renata

smart, not dumb for email

Reply to
Renata

Read the remarks of whomever I was responding to. When the first poster said that x number of families was about equal to the number of unemployed (by which he meant the number of people not making an income), the next poster wanted to extrapolate families to number of people. That is fine if you also extrapolate the comparitive the same way, thus you need to try to determine the number of people in the population not earning any money. I realise that this is all meaningless drivel as comparisons go, but if you are going to try to compare two things, at least try to keep them comparable. Of course if you like to confuse those you are having discussions with by comparing apples to sea turtles, enjoy!

Dave Hall

Reply to
David Hall

I reread the articles and it must be late. I'm not sure where either of you were going with the comparisons to family size and percentage of unemployment or what kids and retired folks have to do w/ unemployment - since they don't count

I calculate that there are ~150,000,000 folks that want to or should be employed (6% unemployment rate, population of 285 million). Forget gramps and junior.

The statement that strated these shenanigans, " It is not acceptable that the 13,000 wealthiest families in this country earn more income than the bottom twenty million families."

That's 13,000 vs 20,000,000. And, I'd guess those top 13,000 don't have mom and dad going out to be wage earners and contributing toward the total like the bottom

20,000,000 do (with a few of the kids maybe working at Mickey D's too).

Renata

smart, not dumb for email

Reply to
Renata

Let's imagine that a good portion of those 13,000 have created companies that employ large numbers of people. Now, I wouldn't disagree that some of the corporate CEOs are overpaid, but not because of the amount of their compensation, but because their companies just aren't performing. For the ones that perform well, who's to say that they are compensated too much? I liken this to the idea that athletes are paid too much. IMHO, if they generate a certain level of revenue for their team, they have a right to a fair percentage of that revenue. The same would go for a CEO. There are still a few communist countries around. If you think we should emulate their economic model, please suggest one where you'd like to live. The truth is, capitalism isn't a perfect system, but it seems to be the best one going. Some people, because of better opportunites, better preparation, harder work, just plain luck, etc, are going to do better than others. There's a quote on this topic that I happen to agree with. "...there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can't. But I don't believe that the Federal Government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there is a moral factor involved.". Who said this? Ronald Reagan? George Bush? Nope. This was said by (are you sitting down?) Jimmy Carter in 1977. I'm nowhere near that 13,000, but I don't feel the need to punish them in order to even things out.

todd

"Renata" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Reply to
todd

On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 11:42:21 -0500, Renata brought forth from the murky depths:

Isn't that just a chart of those who are CURRENTLY on the unemployment payroll? After your time runs out, you may still be unemployed (for 8 months) but are no longer tracked; no longer one of their statistics.

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Reply to
Larry Jaques

I don't either, FWIW. I do think they're greedy bastards though. If I had a $100 million a year job, I'd put in my notice the day I took the job, work out my two weeks, and retire for life. :)

Reply to
Silvan

I would like to throw a little different slant on this and that is the fact that corporate America is doing two things that are undermining the middle and eve lower classes and the government isn't doing anything about it: (1) out-sourcing jobs like engineering, IT, help desk, accounting, etc. and (2) abusing to the hilt the H-1B and L-1 visas saying that there is a shortage of American workers for the jobs.

Now, a previous poster said something like Wal-Mart is providing a wage and if you don't like it, don't take it. By utilizing the above scenario, companies are forcing wages DOWN and if you say you don't want it, they will find somebody to give it to by giving it to a foreigner who would gladly accept even LESS than what was previously offered.

If you don't think this is true, look again. I work in the IT field and I See it happening everyday. In fact, it is worse than you can imagine. They hire Indian outsourcing firms to come in and replace the programmers but first those same programmers must train their replacements--talk about humiliation. And I witnessed this first-hand because 38 others and myself went through it.

This is nothing other than discrimination; at least age discrimination if not some other kind. I do not think it would be lawful in this country to replace everybody in the company with other Americans because it would be considered discrimination but for some reason this is permitted.

I could rant on but I think you get the point.

As for the notion that shopping at Wal-Mart is un-American, I actually feel that is true. A few years back, they touted themselves for selling American. Now, anything that is not Chinese or on the same level is what is sold because they mandate that distributors sell to them for 2-3% less this year than last. Here is an article published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that I totally agree with:

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don't agree with the federal government sticking its nose into thing too much else you end up with a socialistic society but I do think it should do something to help make the American worker more attractive to the American company.

And we need to rid ourselves of the Wal-Mart mentality that the only thing that matters is low prices because we can't have it both ways: low prices and decent wages.

(Rant off.)

Reply to
Ray Kinzler

I agree completely with your comments about the abuse of H-1B visas. The most telling events to me were sitting in senior management meetings at a fortune 100 company a few years ago and discussing how we were going to get labor costs down. I was disgusted to observe the same HR VP that was strategizing about ways to "retire" higher priced labor (older workers) in favor of lower priced help testifying before the US House of Representatives about the need for increased H-1B visas. The reason he gave was that there are not enough qualified workers. The honest reason would have been to complete the statement: "there aren't enough qualified workers at the salary we want to pay."

Either our elected representatives are dumber than a rock or they have a ring through their noses. My opinion is that they have joined the world's oldest profession and are selling out to any one with a PAC that will help to perpetuate their employment and position.

If the current trend continues I foresee the destruction of this country as it is reduced to the level of the third world nations were are importing.

RB

Ray K> I would like to throw a little different slant on this and that is the

Reply to
RB

The article said, "not a 'Hey' to the 9 million unemployed Americans" (Molly Ivans in the WashPost yesterday). I believe she was commenting on shrub's SOTU.

But, based on my estimate that there are 150 million Americans who CAN be employed, 9 million unemployed would be around the current official unemployment rate.

So, yeah, apparently not counting those who have fallen off the rolls.

Renata

Reply to
Renata

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