Sources of Income for Top 0.01 Percent

by Catherine Mulbrandon

In my earlier post on Sources of Income of the super rich I plotted the percentage of income that comes from wages, entrepreneurial income, dividend income, interest income, and rental income for the Top 0.01 percent; but this did not include capital gains. In 2005 capital gains was 18% of the income of the super rich (if you exclude capital gains when determining the Top 0.01 percent).

In the graphs below, I have plotted the all 6 income sources for Top 0.01% (this time including capital gains as one of the income sources).

{Click on the graph to take a closer look}

The income data can be found on Emmanuel Saez’s web site.

[tags]income distribution, US income distribution, US income inequality, income inequality, capital gains, super rich[/tags]

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Tagged as: Area Graph, Income - Share of, Income - Types of, Pitketty & Saez, United States, Wages

http://www.discursivemonologue.com/ Liquidity Crunch

I think the two most interesting graphs in this post are wage income and dividend income.

Wage income is high and reflects the severe detachment of executive pay from fundamentals. Meanwhile, average dividend yields are historically low and practically insignificant. Regular investors are left out to dry while corporate raiders are compensated egregiously. It’s strange that in such a climate, American ownership of stocks is historically high.

I wonder how long it will be before a purging brings corporate governance into grace.