Economix: Where Do You Fall on the Income Curve?

The Tax Policy Center has updated its figures on the income distribution in America, which we’d previously written about in a post about why most rich people don’t feel very rich. They have now crunched income levels for every single percentile, and the numbers refer to 2011 rather than 2010. So I’ve updated my chart on this subject.

The graph below shows how much income is earned by a household at any given percentile in the income distribution, based on these new numbers for 2011:

Tax Policy Center

Incomes grow much, much faster at the top end of the income distribution than in the middle or at the bottom end. That is, the disparity in income between one percentile and a consecutive percentile is bigger among the very rich.

For example, the difference in income between a household at the 50th percentile and a household at the 51st percentile is $1,237 ($42,327 versus $43,564). But the difference in incomes between a household at the 98th percentile and the 99th percentile is $146,118 ($360,435 jumps up to $506,553).

The gaps become even wider at the extreme top of the income ladder: A family at the 99.5th percentile makes $815,868; its neighbor at the 99.9th percentile makes more than double that, at $2,075,574 a year.

In fact much of the rise in inequality over the last few decades has been because of the increasing inequality isolated among the very top members of the income distribution, as America’s wealthiest have pulled further and further away from their slightly less wealthy peers.

(Addendum: “Income” in this case refers to cash income, without energy assistance, imputed corporate income tax liability and the employer’s share of payroll taxes.)

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4cb8d6efac18259848b7d71fecaa9fee