afloweroutofstone:

Four comments:

• “The top 1%” includes far, far more than just billionaires. There’s only a few billionaires, all of whom sit at the top of the 1%. For this reason, some economists studying inequality like to focus on the top 0.01%; in other words, the top 1% of the top 1%. It was estimated in 2014 that this group had an average annual income of $7 million (even before capital gains), and in 2012 it was estimated that they had an average wealth of $371 million. Each of these numbers would be larger today.
• Wealth and income are two different measurements, though they are obviously connected over an individual’s lifetime as they save. People who have recently started high-paying jobs may have high income but low wealth; rich retired people may have low income but high wealth. The distribution of wealth is even more unequal than the distribution of income.
• I’m a believer in analyzing “the rich” in different strata. Billionaires are important to analyze because they are the most powerful people in the world, but smaller-scale rich people still hold an extremely disproportionate amount of power. Think of it like this: a successful orthodontist gets to help decide who your mayor is, while a corporate executive gets to help decide who your president is.
• Billionaires are far more wealthy than the “small rich,” but there’s so many more “small rich” people than billionaires that the “small rich” actually hold a larger portion of our national wealth. Overall, the top 1% owns 31.1% of all US wealth. But when you break it down further, the top 0.01% owns 12.6% of our wealth, while the remainder of the top 1% owns the other 18.5%. This is why progressive tax reformers shouldn’t exclusively focus on billionaires, because there’s more total wealth among all the combined almost-billionaires.

Small rich heir of a Silent Generation lawyer who’s now an estate planner because that’s where the lifetime clients of a guy like that are at

Coming from a farm capital that became an exurb and then “favored quarter” suburb in my life the “power” thing is kinda weird cause of how rich people live where rich people live now

It’s not just the factory owner in the small town and the “courthouse gang” of professionals; it’s them, and the guys who managed to assemble small portfolios of land from farmers selling out, and the owners of the big multistate chain developers, and the hundred $150k/yr Obama donors living in the development just built on part of those portfolios (who might be executives for the multi-state developer)…