Income PER EARNER Has Actually Risen For All Groups, And Rose Fastest For The Lowest Quintile (A renda per capita por indivíduo aumentou para todos os grupos nos EUA, e cresceu mais rápido para os do mais baixo quintil)

Neste segundo post, retirado do blog do Prof. Mark Perry de ontem, temos uma nova fotografia da economia americana que difere em muito daquela que a atual crise financeira (e sua mídia) vêm pintando.

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Income PER EARNER Has Actually Risen For All Groups, And Rose Fastest For The Lowest Quintile

 

From The Skeptical Optimist:

Median household income since 2001 looks stagnant at best, doesn’t it (see chart above)? Something must have been really wrong with a growing economy that left the median household out of all that growth, don’t you think? No wonder we hear so much about it from our politicians.Census data here).

Bottom Line: A previous CD post highlighted 5 problems with the Census Bureau’s data on median household income, and showed that on a “per household member,” real median household income actually reached an all-time high in 2007.

Hold on though. Try to think of one company — just one, large or small — that has ever written a payroll check to a “household.” For example, has Microsoft Corp. ever written a payroll check to “The occupants of the house at 2345 Main Street, Redmond, Washington”? No, of course not.

A household has a group of people in it; most of those groups contain at least one specific person who earns a paycheck. The U.S. Census Bureau calls those people “Earners.” The amount of money income received by a household depends to a great degree on the number of “earners” in that household (

So the question about stagnated incomes is really a multi-part question. Here is the better question, and its multi-part answers:

1. Did household income stagnate or decline for households with no earners at all? YES.

2. How about for households that had a decline in the number of earners? YES.

3. How about those that had the same number of earners? NO.

4. How about those that had an increase in the number of earners? NO.

By now it should be obvious that an even better question is: Did the middle class income earner participate in the overall economy’s growth? It’s a better question because it removes the confusion caused by differences in the number of earners per household.

So let’s take a look at how “income per earner” did for each of the quintiles of household income.

The chart below shows the result for the period 1994-2007. Note that any possible definition of the “middle class” would show that middle class earners’ incomes did not stagnate or decline. In fact, they grew in tandem with the 3.2% average growth rate of overall disposable income per capita (a derivative of GDP).

The Skeptical Optimist now provides evidence that on an “income per earner” basis, income grew at about the same rate (3.4% to 3.9%) for all income groups between 1994 and 2007, and actually grew the fastest (3.9%) for the bottom quintile (see chart above). In other words, between 1994 and 2007, the rich have gotten richer, the middle class has gotten richer, and the poor have gotten richer, all at about the same rate.

The Top 1% of Taxpayers Paid More in Federal Income Taxes in 2006 Than the Entire Bottom 95% (O 1% dos principais contribuintes de impostos pagaram mais Imposto de Renda em 2006 do que os 95% da base dos contribuintes)

Gostaria de chamar a atenção dos leitores para dois posts que o Prof. Mark Perry colocou em seu blog hoje.  O primeiro (abaixo) trata do perfil dos pagamento de impostos nos EUA nos últimos tempos. Ou seja, tem havido uma substantiva transformação neste perfil, e isto demonstra que algo novo está ocorrendo nos EUA.  O segundo post vem a seguir!

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The Top 1% of Taxpayers Paid More in Federal Income Taxes in 2006 Than the Entire Bottom 95%

 

According to the most recent tax data from the IRS through 2006 (available here from the Tax Foundation):

The top 1% of taxpayers earned $1.79 trillion (22.06% of the total) in 2006 and paid $408.4 billion in taxes (about 40% of the total). The bottom 95% of taxpayers earned $5.14 trillion (63.34% of the total) and paid $408.1 billion taxes (about 40% of the total).

In other words, the top 1% of U.S. taxpayers paid slightly more in federal income taxes ($408.4 billion) in 2006 than the entire bottom 95% of taxpayers paid ($408.1 billion), see top chart above.

Moreover, the tax burden on the top 1% has increased over time, while the tax burden on the bottom 95% has decreased (see bottom chart above). For example, in 1980 the top 1% paid only 19% of total federal income taxes paid, while the bottom 95% paid more than 63%. Over the last 25 years, the tax burden on the top 1% increased from 19% to 40%, while the tax share of the bottom 95% has decreased from 63% to 40%.

In 2002, before most of the “tax cuts” went into effect, the share of income taxes paid by the top 1% was below 34%, and by 2006 that share increased to almost 40%. If we assessed tax policies by the share of income taxes paid by “the rich” (i.e. top 1%), the “Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003″ wasn’t a tax cut, it was a tax increase, since it increased the tax burden on the top 1% to record levels (40%), and resulted in more tax revenue from the top 1% than the entire bottom 95% of taxpayers!

Now, it’s also true that the share of adjusted gross income earned by the top 1% has increased over time, while the share of income earned by the bottom 95% has decreased (see chart below), although the income share of the top 1% has been fairly stable at around 20% for the last ten years.