This one of the graphics that I presented recently at The Big Picture conference here in New York City. It is from a project I am currently working on called An Illustrated Guide to Income in the United States: a collection of infographics, maps and charts looking at the different incomes and occupations in the United States.
Recently the conversation in the news has been about the top 1%, however, in this graphic I show the breakdown of personal income by different percentiles, including the top 0.01% (i.e. income above $9 million). I have used 10,000 “people” to represent the tax returns filed in 2008, each “person” one equals 15,246 tax units. (A tax unit is single adult or married couple living together, including their dependents.)
So the top 1% are represented by the 100 “people” in the four (orange, yellow, magenta & red) rectangles the upper left corner.
Approximately $8.2 trillion in personal income (including capital gains) was reported to the IRS in 2008. Divide that by 152 million tax units you get an average income of $54,315. I have the size of the “people” represent the average income for each percentile group. For example the Average Income for the Top 0.01% = $27 million.
Data is from Saez and Piketty research which is now available at the The World Top Incomes Database
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A simple example showing what happens when you only pay the minimun monthly payment on your credit card debt. I submitted this to Longshot magazine’s issue on Debt but my graphic didn’t make it in but you can take a look at the other submissions on their site.
A quick recap of my experiences fundraising via Kickstarter for my Illustrated Guide to Income in the United States. (If you missed the deadline to back the project and you like to be notified when it is done then please subscribe to this blog by RSS or by Email.)
Overall it was a very successful: over 60 days I got 325 backers and $14,124 dollars pledged. Average pledge of $43.46
A few observations:
- Weekends were slower than weekday (especially Sunday).
- Pledges always spiked the day I posted something new on my blog but this effect decreased over the 60 days.
- When my graphs from my blog were reposted by Huffington Post this increased traffic to my website but other sites (like The Big Picture) recommending my Kickstarter project were more helpful in generating pledges
- As the pledge drive went on I received more attention from Kickstarter “veterans” i.e. backers who pledged to multiple projects before pledging to mine. Because of the backers from VisualizingEconomics.com I was high on the list of popular projects in the Writing and Publishing category which meant other people could discover me. In the end, the money raised from this group (54 backers) covered the 5% Kickstarter fee especially since many of them contributed more than the minimum amount.
For other other funding experiences check out Craig Mod’s review and this overview posted on the Kickstarter blog.
My posts will slow down for a while as I work on the Income Guide over the summer. But in the meantime you can checkout the interview I did for OWNI in April which you can read in French and in English.
A large part of personal income is not considered “taxable” income by the IRS. In the graph personal income (as calculated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis) is around 80% of GDP. This includes all employee compensation + after tax business income + rent + interest + other income but no capital gains. However, the taxable income is around 30-40% of GDP (but it does add back capital gains as well as employee share of payroll taxes). While the taxes paid on income is only around 8% of GDP. Realized capital gains in the graph are from returns with positive net capital gains and you will notice that they peak in years 1966, 1986 as people sell off right before the capital gains tax rate increases and in 2000 when there was a bubble in the stock market.
Data from: Personal Income and Income Tax data; Capital Gains Tax Data; GDP from Measuring Worth
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