You Do The Math - The Top 1%

In case you didn't watch Bernie Sanders at the first Democratic debate for the 2016 primary election, he repeated the mantra that the Democrats and liberals have been saying for many years:  the top 1% of wage earners make as much as the bottom 90% of wage earners.  Can this be true?  Sounds extreme.  If it's true, then that means the top 1% makes 90 times more money per capita. 

Well...   today, You Do The Math!!

Here's the data reported in the NY Times here in mid October 2015.

Mobile site:
mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/business/putting-numbers-to-a-tax-increase-for-the-rich.html?_r=1

Desktop site:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/business/putting-numbers-to-a-tax-increase-for-the-rich.html

If you multiply the number of wage earners by the average salary, you get the total annual dollar amount in each category.  Here are the results:

Top 0.1%   $1,086,381,000,000

Top 1.0%   $2,376,696,000,000

Top Fifth:  $7,619,750,000,000
2nd Fifth:  $2,920,776,000,000
3rd Fifth:   $1,988,491,000,000
4th Fifth:   $1,219,498,000,000
5th Fifth:      $613,515,600,000

Without doing ANY math you can see that the top 1% makes less than what the second fifth brings in.  Also, the top 1% makes a bit more than the 3rd fifth, 2.4 trillion versus 2 trillion.  Doing a bit of math in your head you can see that the bottom two fifths make about the same as the 3rd fifth, 1.83 trillion.   So, the top 1% makes a little more than the bottom 40%.  That's a WHOLE lot different than the top 1% making the same amount as the bottom 90%.

If you add up the bottom four fifths, aka the bottom 80%, it is $6,742,280,600,000.  This is 6.7 trillion and is obviously lower than the 7.6 trillion that the top fifth makes.  Sure, that's bad, but it means that the top 20% make 4 times more money than the bottom 80% per capita.   That's a far cry from what Bernie Sanders and all the Democrats and liberals claim about the top 1%.

What is interesting is that the Democrats are onto a mathematical phenomenon that they probably could never explain.  Math is hard for them!  If you graph salary on the Y axis and the number of people on the X axis, from 1 to 100 percent, you would see the graph shoot up quickly similar to y = x squared.  Actually, it's more like y = x to the 70th power.

All that being said, the rich really ARE horrible narcissists.  The 100 upper level managers at American Airlines gave themselves an average bonus of 1 million dollars each, at the end of the year, adding up to 100 million dollars.  They didn't even earn this money.   A retired pilot came up with an equation to save fuel during flights.  The mechanics came up with a way to build nose cones for the planes, instead of buying nose cones from Boeing.  Together, this saved one or two hundred million dollars a year.  These workers also took a pay cut so AA could avoid bankruptcy.  

Instead of spreading this money out evenly among the workers, which would come out to about $2,400 each, the managers kept it!   Seriously?   Do they really think it's easy to live on middle class wages, then take a pay cut, then watch management buy million dollar vacation homes, or yachts or private airplanes?  Moral would drop, which probably explains why AA did declare bankruptcy a few years later.

Are managers job creators?   Nope.  The corporation is.  The feds should definitely lower the 35% tax on the corporation, and definitely eliminate the 15% tax on each worker.  Make up for that by taxing the managers' incomes a little more.   And cut federal spending, you irresponsible Democrats who can't do math!