U.S. income distribution (2010 edition)

I'm providing this as an update to an earlier post, "Portrait of the Bush Economy". Perhaps I should call this one "A Portrait of the Obama Economy"; we'll see.

It begins with a fascinating article by Catherine Rampell in a New York Times economics blog which attempts to determine why despite their wealth, the rich feel insecure economically (yes, it's counter-intuitive, I know).

The writer's bottom line is that because the last part of the income curve is so very steep, the closer someone is to the end of it — anywhere above the top 1%, for example — the further away you are from the next richest person.

Here's the writer's graph of that income curve:


The dots from 0 through the 80th percentile mark five-percent increments. From 80 to 99, the dots mark one-percent increments. The last two dots are at 99.5 and 99.9 — in other words, the top .5% and the top .1% in income. (The top .01% and .001% are literally off the chart, at least off this one. But count on it, they exist.)

Paul Krugman discusses this article here and offers Brad DeLong's log-scaled version of the graph.

An interesting analysis, but I'd like to focus elsewhere, on the income table that produced the writer's data.

In my earlier post I generated some magic numbers, easy-to-memorize data points to show the income breaks in the Bush economy. For example, I said the top 20% starts at $100,000 per year, the top 10% at $150,000 per year, and so on. That table included some guess work and averaging, since a single source for a single year was not available.

Now thanks to this article and the data it draws on, we can update that table with solid 2010 numbers.

Note that all of my revisions are upward. Rampell didn't provide data for the top .01%, so I left that number alone. As before, I did some rounding to make this easy to remember. See her spreadsheet for the rounded-to-$100 actuals.

Top 20%   = $100,000 per year
Top 10%   = $150,000 per year (actually $160k)
Top  5%   = $200,000 per year 
Top  2%   = $375,000 per year 
Top  1%   = $500,000 per year
Top  .5%  = $800,000 per year
Top  .1%  = $2 million per year
Top  .01% = $10 million per year (not represented in her data)

And lest we forget, the top income I'm aware of is David Tepper, a hedge fund king, whose 2009 personal take was estimated at $4 billion. Yes, billion. That's not the fund's income; that's the guy's income, for one year.

Offered as something worth remembering, a snapshot of money in today's U. S. of A.

GP