Pitketty & Saez

Income Gap and Marginal Tax Rate 1917-2006

by Catherine Mulbrandon

in Other

From the Nation. The top graph shows the average income of the top o.o1% compared to the bottom 90%. The higher the peak the bigger the gap between the two groups. In 2006 you would need an income of over $10 million to make it into the top 0.01% while your income would have to be less than $100,000 to be in the bottom 90. The second graph shows the marginal tax rate over the same time period. Here is graph I created plotting similar data.

{Click on the image to take a closer look}
magnifying glass

[tags]Income Inequality, United States, Marginal Tax Rate[/tags]

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Historical Tax Rates by Income Group: Part 2

by Catherine Mulbrandon

in Other

In an earlier post, I had a graph showing the Historical Tax Rates by Income Group using data from Pitketty & Saez. Here is another graph (found on Greg Mankiw’s Blog) which shows historical tax rates by income group but this time the data is from the Congressional Budget Office.

CBO total effective tax rate

Addendum 3/3/08
The large difference between the two graphs is due to the treatment of payroll taxes paid by employers and the corporate income tax. The Pitketty & Saez data assumes these taxes are actually paid by employees and stockholders but the CBO data in the above graph does not include them.

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Historical Tax Rates by Income Group [NYTimes]

by Catherine Mulbrandon

in Comparing Tax Rates by Income

A recent NY Times article included a graph showing the amount of taxes paid to the federal government based on income groups. While I like the graph it does not explain what the income thresholds are for each income group. However, I was able to pull out of the original journal article that the average income for the highest earning 0.01% was $18,113,612.

taxes

See also: What does Top 1%, Top 0.1%, Top 0.01% mean?
2005 US Income Distribution part 3

[tags]NYTimes, Taxes, income inequality, wealth, income distribution, superrich[/tags]

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Breakdown of Income Share Top 1% (1917-2002)

by Catherine Mulbrandon

in Growth of Income Inequality, VE Infographics

Finally lets breakdown the Top 1% of income earners into three groups (99.0th to 99.5th, 99.5th to 99.9th, and 99.9th to 100th percentiles). The last group is graphed in red and shows the share of income going to the Top 0.1%. Their income share begins with a high of over 8% of total income then dropping below 5% and jumping back up to over 7%.

It is much more volatility than the next highest .4% (99.5th to 99.9th in lavender) or the lower .5% (99.0th to 99.5th in yellow)

breakdown_top1

Datasource: Excel file produced by Emmanual Saez and Thomas Piketty

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