Highest Paid American Athletes 2007

In honor of the Super Bowl, I am posting Sports Illustrated's Fortunate 50 top-earning American athletes (earnings include salary, winnings, bonuses, and endorsements). However, only one of the players in today's game made the list, Tom Brady of the New England Patriots, Rank: 47. 

I found a nice table of this data on SportsColumn.com. Salaries are based on current or most recently completed seasons (exception: 2007 for NFL). For winnings-based sports (auto racing, golf, tennis), 2006 calendar year amounts used.

Income of United States, Japan, India, China, and Indonesia since 1500

I am comparing the GDP per Capita of the United States with Japan, India, China, and Indonesia over the last 500 years. (GDP per Capita for each country is in 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars, calculated from purchasing power parities (PPPs) of currencies and average prices of commodities.) Data estimates for the population from Angus Maddison Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Groningen.

Share of GDP: China, India, Japan, Latin America, Western Europe, United States

After coming across this graph about the share of world GDP (China, India, and US), I started to wonder what was the percentage back to 1500? The graph below shows the share of GDP over the last 500 years for China, India, Japan, Latin America, Western Europe, and United States. (Keep in mind that the change in population size will effect the size of the GDP)

Data estimates for GDP from Angus Maddison Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Groningen.

See also:

Last 2,000 years of growth in world income and population

Comparing Income of Top 0.1 Percent in Five Countries

I created these graphs to show the change in the share of income going to the top 0.1%, comparing the United States to Canada, United Kingdom, France, and Japan from 1913-2004.

The effect by the two World Wars is clear but what is more subtle is the effect on the share of income going to the very wealthy due to the change in the top income tax rate. This could be due to attempts by the very wealthy to hide their income from the IRS or else having a higher tax rate will impact the distribution of income or both. I didn't have the marginal rates for the other countries but it would be interesting to see if they have a similar relationship between the share of total income captured by the Top 0.1 percent and income tax rates.

The income data can be found here on Emmanuel Saez's web site. I found the marginal tax rate for the United States in the SOI Bulletin Historical Table A at the IRS site via truthandpolitics.org