

Where is the One Percent? - econner
http://thekeesh.com/onepercent/

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veyron
Is median income the right measure to use here? This leads to weird anomalies
like how is Bergen County is 1% but New York County (Manhattan) is 4%?

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jeffdavis
Agreed, I thought the same thing. It seems kind of strange to use median
income to find the "1%".

I guess it all depends on the point this is trying to make, which I'm a little
unclear on. It seems perhaps useful (it's data, after all), but if the intent
was to tie it to the "occupy" movement, then I missed that connection.

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bgentry
Cost of living. Cost of living. Cost of living.

$85,000 in San Francisco will not get you much. The same amount in Kansas will
have you living like a king.

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guelo
Yea but living in San Francisco will get you lots of culture, restaurants,
etc. that you won't get in Kansas. Living in SF is just a luxury that some
people are willing to pay for, you could live in Oakland and pay half the
rent.

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bgentry
I'm not knocking on SF, I live there and I love it. I'm just pointing out that
this "top 1%" article is useless since it does not account for cost of living.

The difference in CoL is so drastic between NYC/SF and Kansas that the study
might look drastically different if it looked at net income after living
expenses.

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guelo
The point I was trying to make is that CoL should not be a factor.

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fennecfoxen
Of course, you can break into the _global_ top 1% with a mere $34,000 a year.

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TruthElixirX
I believe it is 54k a year now, but I may have been looking it up incorrectly.

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rprospero
According to the Wiki, 40% of the US population made over $54k in 2003. That's
125 million people or 1.8% of the world's population. Since there are
obviously people outside the US also making over $54k per year, we can assume
that at least 2% of the world population is making over 54k.

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jakeonthemove
Whoa, so any small business owner who is more or less successful is considered
the 1%? The situation is worse than I thought...

Seriously, I think the 1% should include only those earning over 500K a year
(there's about... oh 1% of them in the world :-))...

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SomeCallMeTim
No. You need $380,000 in income, i.e., PROFIT, from a small business to be
considered part of the 1%.

A "successful" small business owner could take in $2-3M in receipts and still
only clear $150k a year after expenses. Or less. Some businesses don't have
much of a margin. And most don't have more than a few hundred k a year of
receipts.

That's what I find crazy about all of the "you'll hurt small business!" anti-
tax rhetoric. If it's only targeting more than $380k in PROFIT (for a sole
proprietorship, or that much per owner for a partnership/jointly owned
business), then raising the MARGINAL tax to 50% or higher would only encourage
the business owner(s) to spend the money on expanding their business instead
of buying a second yacht.

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lsc
Yeah, I see something similar about the capital gains debate. You only pay
capital gains when you /sell/ your business. If you want to take money out of
an existing business, you have two options; issue a dividend (and pay both
corporate taxes /and/ capital gains taxes, which usually makes the second
option attractive) or pay yourself bonus/salary at the usual tax rates.

A lower capital gains only helps you if you are building to flip.

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SomeCallMeTim
>issue a dividend (and pay both corporate taxes /and/ capital gains taxes

This is only true if you're a C-corp. I know on HN most folks are creating a
C-corp because it's easier to invest in, but if you're doing a small business,
a partnership, S-corp, or LLC filing as an S-corp are likely the best options
for you.

In all three of the latter cases, taking money out only causes you to be taxed
once.

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lsc
right, I'm an S corp. you get taxed once, but you pay the income tax rate, as
if it were salary or bonus, so you still end up paying well north of twice the
capital gains rate.

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hkmurakami
What I'm really curious in these days is how this map would look if we had a
map of the World instead of the map of the United States.

Where would the 1% be then? How many of us would be in the 1%?

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rprospero
More of us, but not as many as you'd think.

The top 1% of the wold is ~70 million people. This is 22% of the US
population. The top 22% in the US earn about $85k per year. So, if you're
making over $85k, you're in the global 1%.

Except, this is rather America centric. If we expand out to the entire G8
(pop. ~880 million), we find that you need to be in the top 8% of G8 salaries
to be in the global 1%. This corresponds to about $150k, taking the zeroth
order approximation that the G8 distributions are the same as the US one.

Note: Population data pulled from Mathematica and US Household income data
pulled from wikipedia
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States)).
Note that the income data is dated, so corrections are welcome.

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mguarascio
Campbell County, Wyoming. Just as I suspected!

This is great, thanks. What technology did you use for the map and parsing the
census data?

UPDATE: Looks like this js library was used
<http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/choropleth.html>

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tansey
The idea that Caroline County, VA (my home town) is the 9% is fairly
ridiculous. It's a very poor county, with most people working in the food
industry or at King's Dominion nearby. I suppose DC commuters may be skewing
the stats, but that certainly wasn't reflected in my high school.

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stephanerangaya
Here's what CNN says
[http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/20/news/economy/occupy_wall_str...](http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/20/news/economy/occupy_wall_street_income/index.htm)

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jinushaun
Not surprised about Virginia, which is where I live. 3 of the top 5 richest
counties in the US are in Virginia. If you count Maryland, then 4 of the top 5
are in the DC metro area.

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igorgue
I think Occupy refers to the claim that "the top 1 percent owns more financial
wealth than bottom 95 percent combined" popularized by Michael Moore in his
latest film.

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learc83
Wow check out all the counties in metro Atlanta. We always joked that paulding
county was full of rednecks, but it's in the top 5%.

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Rusky
Is this adjusted for living expenses at all? New York may have high salaries
but they also have high cost of living.

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jerf
Personally I'm not a huge fan of so-called "cost of living" adjustments. I've
lived in a range of "cost of living" areas, and areas with a higher CoL are
generally nicer, by which I mean, everything in the area is just _generally
nicer_. Stores don't have missing tiles, produce is fresher, crime is lower,
the lights on the stores outside don't have missing bulbs for long, the roads
are smoother, the houses are nicer, and the local culture is richer, in most
senses of the term.

If we're talking about things like global levels of true wealth, you probably
_shouldn't_ adjust for CoL. Areas with high CoL are areas with a higher
ambient wealth, and for questions of who is better off, trying to normalize on
CoL lines someone in semi-rural China vs. a Manhattenite is normalizing away a
critical truth.

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lsc
I find this especially true in labor markets. I've moved from the central
valley to the silicon valley and back several times during my life, and yeah,
silicon valley has higher wages (and higher rents) - but you know what? it
also has higher expectations.

I noticed that whenever I went to silicon valley, I was, well, mediocre. I had
to put some effort in just to stay in the middle of the pack, and I've had
some jobs where it took my all just to keep my head above water. In the
central valley? almost everywhere I worked, I was like a little god, even
without all that much effort.

Sure, the average worker gets paid more here in silicon valley; but if you
hire the average silicon valley sysadmin/programmer, you are getting a whole
lot more than the average central valley sysadmin/programmer.

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CGamesPlay
El Paso County, TX (the leftmost one) has a median income of 36,78? A few
others in Texas are similarly quite off.

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TruthElixirX
Have you ever been to El Paso? Its miserable.

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m_myers
Judging by the percentage given, I'm pretty sure the trailing 0 was stripped
and it's really $36,780.

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lunchbox
Double Click to zoom in; Shift + Double Click to zoom out.

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InclinedPlane
Or use the scroll-wheel.

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nirvana
Seems they're concentrated in Washington DC primarily, with New York, San
Francisco, Boston and Seattle taking the rear.

The North Slope of alaska, however, shows an error here. The cost of living in
Barrow is really very high... much higher than, say, Adams County, Washington.
So, I suspect someone making the median income in Adams County is probably
doing better than someone making the median in Barrow, in terms of take home
pay....

Though, interestingly, those oil workers will be taxed on their income, not
accounting for their expenses, and thus are marginally poorer as a result.

Also, according to the standards of this map, I'm the %1. This is good to
know, because previously, I'd felt a little sheepish when I made that claim.

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seldo
It seems like having the center of political power inhabited by the 1%
explains why the concerns of the 99% are so easily dismissed by national
politicans.

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strait
Keep it up, Hari.

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seldo
Heh. So few people get the reference...

