I have a more scientific definition of "wealthy" but I can't remember the source of the study. The study found very few people worldwide consider themselves as wealthy. On the other hand most people consider someone with 3x their income level as wealthy. This being the case, I'd say 3x28,654 (the median) = $85,962 should be considered the "wealth" line. Alternatively, you can assume symetrical distribution to the definitions of "poor" and "wealthy". The poverty line has been mostly around 12% so we can qulify the top 12% as wealthy.
That's a reasonable way of defining it. Though I would probably take the easy way out and just pick the 10 percentile because the statistics are more readily available.
Interestingly enough, this method produces numbers very close to the subjective measure of 3xMedian.
It would because you've defined the wealth [income] curve as symmetric, ie., a normal distribution which over the range you're speaking of median to 3xmedian would look to be pretty linear.
It's puzzling to me, why it's so difficult to find a comprehensive look at income/tax distribution. The raw data exists...you should be able to find income by percentile, but all I've seen so far is selected percentiles, e.g, 1% or 10%.
Of course, IMO, wealth should be measured in terms of assets owned rather than annual income.
I would agree with that. That measure could lead one to develop a "fair" tax system. Grossly generalized...ideally you would like the wealth of the population to grow slightly above an average percentage. If a person has wealth n with an income of $25K than a person with an income of $100K should have wealth of 4xn. If the wealth of the country goes up 7% then you would expect that respective wealth would be 1.07xn and 1.07x4xn. Give some additional growth to the wealthy as an additional stimulus if you like. You then establish your marginal rates to manage the growth of wealth.
While there is an argument the wealthy pay far more than their fair share of the tax burden, it has not affected their wealth in any non-motivatational manner. The wealthy continue to get wealthier at a much higher rate than the majority. As such, I see no rational for flattening the tax curve and a reasonable argument for increasing it.
jttmab |
