Chart of the Day: How the Rich and the Rest of Us Earn Our Money
This won’t come as any big surprise, but the chart below from the Tax Policy Center does a very nice job of showing how the rich are different from you and me. Most of us earn money from our jobs. Even up at the 90th percentile (about $150,000 or so), ordinary income makes up 77 percent of all cash earnings. Business and investment income make up only 9 percent. But in the top 0.1 percent, the domain of millionaires and billionaires, business and investment income make up 57 percent of cash earnings. As Jared Bernstein says, this explains a lot about economic policy preferences:
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