You now need to make more than $500,000 a year to be in the 1% in America, new study shows — and that's the highest it's ever been
- You'd need to make at least $515,371 a year to be considered one of the top 1% of taxpayers in 2017, an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by Bloomberg's Alexandre Tanzi and Ben Steverman found.
- The median taxpayer's income in 2017 — $41,740 — may have grown 20% since 2011, but the threshold to join the 1% has grown 33% in the same time frame, according to Bloomberg.
- America's wealth gap is widening — and it could cost the economy between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion between 2019 and 2028, Business Insider previously reported.
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It's getting harder to join the 1% in America.
You'd need to make at least $515,371 a year to be in the top 1% of taxpayers in 2017, the most recent year for which data is currently available, an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by Bloomberg's Alexandre Tanzi and Ben Steverman found. That's 7.2% higher than the year before. No more recent data has been released, Bloomberg said.
While median taxpayer salary is growing, the threshold for being in the 1% is rising even more quickly. The median taxpayer made $41,740 in 2017, according to Bloomberg. Their income may have grown 20% since 2011, but the threshold to join the 1% grew 33% in the same time frame.
But if the bar for being part of the 1% is getting higher, it's gotten even more difficult to join the 0.1%, Bloomberg found. The annual earnings you'd need to join that group — $2,374,937 in 2017 — grew 38% between 2011 and 2017.
In total, 1,432,952 taxpayers fall into the 1%, Bloomberg reported. For comparison, only 143,295 taxpayers fit into the 0.1% category, according to Bloomberg.
America's wealth problem
America's wealth gap is widening — and it could have detrimental impacts on the nation's economy, Business Insider previously reported. An August report by consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that the concentration of wealth among America's highest earners could cost the economy between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion between 2019 and 2028.
The top 1% of Americans now own 40% of the country's wealth, the University of California at Berkeley's Gabriel Zucman wrote in a paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February.
A wealth tax has been proposed as a potential solution by presidential candidates and billionaires alike. One of the most frequently cited proposals, Sen. Elizabeth Warren's "Ultra-Millionaire Tax," calls for a 2% annual tax on households with a net worth between $50 million and $1 billion, and a 3% annual tax on households with a net worth over $1 billion.
Sen. Bernie Sanders released his own, considerably more aggressive, wealth tax proposal in September.
The idea also has the support of ordinary Americans: An Insider poll from January 2019 showed that more than half of the Americans surveyed support Warren's wealth tax proposal.
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