Posted on 11/17/2009 6:19:01 AM PST by Graybeard58
One in every 100 Americans have a net worth of $1 million or more, but millionaires are much more common on Capitol Hill; 237 members of Congress, or 44 percent, claim the distinction, according to opensecrets.org, though it's likely many more are millionaires.
As corrupt Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd and Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York have demonstrated, members are allowed to undervalue their foreign real-estate holdings without consequence.
Further, rules made by members for members exempt their residences (at home and in Metro Washington) and six-figure congressional incomes from disclosure and thus the net-worth calculation.
Meanwhile, as joblessness has reached 10.2 percent and the ranks of the unemployed have swelled to 15 million, members who were instrumental in running the economy into the ditch took raises this year that increased their base pay by $4,700 to $174,000 and cost taxpayers $2.5 million.
Raises have been on autopilot since Congress passed the ironically titled Ethics Reform Act of 1989.
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
If you want on or off this list, let me know.
Gotta luv'em all in Wash DC....
I find this very hard to believe.
They go there as paupers, make @ $169,300 annually, and retire as multimillionaires.
Now, how does this happen? Where does this "extra" money come from?
Under the table deals? Pay offs? Self serving legislation?
By 2006 real estate values, maybe.
But I agree 1 in 100 has gotta be false today. Many of the 1% have lost the millionaire distinction as their real estate values have plummeted.
I’ve heard that statistcally, Moscow has the most mill-bill-ionairs...
our gov must run a close second... somehow this stat smells REAL bad.... like who represents who?... follow the money...
Yeah, but a millon bucks just doesn’t buy what it used to buy...
This is one gigantic reason we need to put more business oriented people in office and reduce the number of lawyers. They conveniently make the laws that only they can interpret and can change them anytime they want.
main assets -
real estate - $18.3 trillion (mostly houses)
consumer durables - $4.6 trillion (cars etc)
deposits - $7.76 trillion (mostly CDs, also money markets)
bonds - $4.33 trillion (mostly corporate, also munis)
stock - $6.27 trillion (directly held)
mutual funds - $3.74 trillion (excluding money markets)
life insurance - $1.20 trillion
pension funds - $10.66 trillion (indirect beneficiaries)
equity in small business - $7.0 trillion (includes professional practices etc)
liabilities -
home mortgages - $10.4 trillion
consumer credit - $2.48 trillion (cars, cards, etc)
all other - $1.19 trillion
net worth - $53.14 trillion
If one wants, one can back out the durables as really consumption items more than assets, and perhaps the pension assets as too indirect - one still gets $38 trillion in net worth. That comes to $125,000 per person with those exclusions, or $175,000 per person without them. Men women and children in that "per person" total. The persons per household runs a bit under 3 as an average, call it 2.5 to be conservative. Then an average household has something like $300-450k in net worth.
That is a mean and it is a skewed distribution with a heavy top, of course. But if you didn't have even 1%, higher than a couple of times the mean, there is no way you could reach that average.
There are 100,000 businesses in the US with more than 100 employees. There are another 536,000 with 20 to 99 employees, 647,000 with 10 to 19 employees, and a little over 1 million businesses with 5 to 9 employees. Every one of them owned and a decent portion of them profitable. There are tens of millions of employees at the largest public companies; the top few percent of those employees are a class as big as the owners of medium-sized private business. Many of them make more than a typical small business owner. There are 31.5 million retired Americans based on social security payments; the wealthiest few percent form another group of a million people. The retired are asset-rich even when their incomes are modest.
I find it a perfectly believable figure, if anything on the low side...
Hey! What about those of us on the SSA tit?
All your raises are belong to us!
hey.....they suckle, I want my pie too. Obama Money.
I am in no way doubting your figures I would just like to book mark something along these lines. Do you have a source for this information?
thanks again.
Flow of Funds data aka Fed's Z.1 dataset
That data set gives the net worth of the various major sectors of the US economy - household, corporate, non-corporate business, government. The data goes back to 1945 if you poke around, with quarterly frequency, yearly for the older stuff. The whole data set goes into excruciating detail about everything owned and owed by all the sectors, in minute line items etc. But the balance sheet tables alone are an excellent summary of what is happening. The Fed has been keeping this data since WW II; they know where stuff goes because of their role in bank clearing.
On a lot of the other stuff I cited, the source is the US census bureau - I'll get you a link in a second...
Census bureau on US businesses
I hope this helps, and a fine question BTW...
Thanks again Jason
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