In case you didn't notice, the USA manufactures more goods, valued by dollars, than any other nation on the planet Earth.
Yes, including the EU, China and Japan.
...
So, wealth distribution! 2004 data from:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/b...ancesurvey.pdf
Wonder what percentile of net worth you are in? Well...
Quote:
2004:
Top 5.0%: 1,430+ k$
Top 10.0%: 831.6+ k$
Top 17.5%: 506.8+ k$
Top 25.0%: 328.0+ k$
Top 37.5%: 170.7+ k$
Top 50.0%: 93.1+ k$
Top 62.5%: 43.6+ k$
Top 75.0%: 13.3+ k$
Top 87.5%: 1.7+ k$
AVERAGE household wealth: 448.2 k$
Notice the MEDIAN is 93.1. The average is highly scewed the the top few percent of households. Only the top 20% of houses, by wealth, have above-average wealth (strange, eh?). This is because nobody but the top 10% of households in the USA has any significant amounts of wealth.
Edit: changed an erronious "income" in the above paragraph to "wealth".
There are roughly 108.2 million families (this will be off by a bit).
So that places the total net worth of the families in the USA at about 50 trillion dollars.
By per-capita share (someone with a 1.0x share would have 1/300 millionth the USA's total net worth -- ie, an equal share).
Median wealth means "half of the families are richer". It is a good measure of the "typical" American.
0% to 10% have about 7 x share, or 33 x median
10% to 25% have about 1.2 x share, or 5.8 x median
25% to 50% have about 0.4 x share, or 1.9 x median
50% to 75% have about 0.1 x share, or 0.5 x median
75% to 100% have, on average, next to no wealth.
Fuzzier data, but might be useful:
0% to 5% have 10.7 to 12.0 x share, or 51 to 58 x median (typical) wealth
5% to 10% have 1.8 to 3.2 x share, or 8.7 to 15.4 x medianwealth
Share of total US net worth by percentile:
Top 5%: 53.5% to 60.2% ~ 27 to 30 trillion$
Top 10%: 69.5% ~ 35 trillion$
Top 25%: 87.1% ~ 44 trillion$
Top 50%: 97.3% ~ 49 trillion$
Top 75%: 100% ~ 50 trillion$
Top 100%: 100% (ie, bottom 25% of asset owners own a trivial amount of assets)
From the bottom:
Bottom 25%: No assets (~ 0$ total)
Bottom 50%: 2.7% of the assets of the USA (~1 trillion dollars total)
Bottom 75%: 12.9% of the assets of the USA (~6 trillion dollars total)
Bottom 90%: 30.5% of the assets of the USA (~15 trillion dollars total)
Bottom 100%: 100% of the assets of the USA (~50 trillion dollars total)
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So, the result...
The top 10% of family units in the USA have 70% of the net worth.
Who pays taxes currently:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/income...hopaysmost.htm
Top 1% of income pays ~1/3
Top 5% of income pays ~1/2
Top 50% of income pays ~ 96%
So, note that a wealth-based tax, even if it was completely non-progressive in percentages,
would be significantly more progressive than the current income tax.
Edit: added in some derived "top 5%" data, and some median data, and fixed a dangling sentence.