Income of the Superrich in 2005

by Catherine Mulbrandon

in Incomes of the Super Rich, VE Infographics

ADDED NEW VERSION 2/10/2009

Recently the CBO published a supplement to their Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates: 1979 to 2005 report to include a breakdown of top 1% into smaller percentiles. I took the data for income and created this visualization. It is comparing the minimum income for each percentile to the average income in that percentile.

UPDATED VERSION {Click on the image to take a closer look}

ORIGINAL VERSION {Click on the image to take a closer look}

Data from Congressional Budget Office

[tags]United States, High Income[/tags]

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Tagged as: Congressional Budget Office, Income - High, Span Chart, Tax Rates, United States

http://saulpwanson.com Saul

Neat graph. I think it should be reversed left-to-right, and the average income put in the middle of the bar (only really relevant for the highest two segments). The bar could use its width to denote “number of households”; then the area of the bar could be a comparative measure of the total income of that group.

I’ve been reading Tufte, so these things jump out at me now =)
http://www.kathryncramer.com Kathryn Cramer

AT first I didn’t understand it until I realized that that last bit of punctuation in each number was a comma, not a decimal point. The lower figure on the minimum income for the topmost income bracket is missing a 0. It should be 8,579,000, yes?
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http://www.perfecteconomy.com Mario Sikorski

Great, awesome work, but could you substitute is by income pyramid, it would be much better understood.
Your graphically-statistical-art-work on
the Visualization of Global Economics 1500 AD – 2000 AD tread is here
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http://feldsparia.blogspot.com Feldspar

I didn’t realize that bottom edge of the top 1% was $126,000. However since the bottom edge of the top 0.1% one can almost feel the pain of the top bankers who will be limited to a mere $500,000.

Here is my blog comment on the above graph.
http://feldsparia.blogspot.com/2009/02/bottom-of-top-1-of-us-households-not.html
Don

First of all, I love your graphs. Most people just don’t have any perspective on the kind of inequality that exists. I’m certain you are familiar with the “L-Curve.” When I came across that a few years ago it blew my mind. And I am a very math-oriented thinker. The average person has no idea.

I did, however, find a mistake in your figures above. The average and minimum stated for the bottom half of the top percent just didn’t seem right, so I dug into the CBO tables you referenced. The minimum and average you list for the 99.0-99.5% are actually for the 96-99% range. According to the CBO tables, it should read $588,100 average and $305,500 minimum in your chart. Your point stands, of course, but I wanted to bring this up.