The Top 5 Facts About America’s Richest 1% (Left Wing Groups Spread The Message)

Yahoo News ^ | 10/11/2010 | Yahoo News

[Dallas59]

The American dream is alive and well for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, but unfortunately, if you are in the other 99% the jury is still out.

"America is obviously a country where you can go from being middle class to upper class, but right now class mobility has sort of collapsed in the United States," says Zaid Jilani, senior reporter for the progressive think tank ThinkProgress.org. (See: America's Middle Class Crisis: The Sobering Facts)

This grim reality is in part the impetus for the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, now in its fourth week, will take to the streets of Manhattan's Upper East Side Tuesday in what it is calling the "Millionaire's March." Demonstrators will rally outside the homes of some of the city's wealthiest, including News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon, to protest New York state's 2% millionaire tax set to expire at the end of the year.

[Dallas59]

Progressive Coalition supporting socialist agenda

Americans for Democratic Action
Campaign for America's Future
Campaign for New Priorities
Center for the Advancement of Public Policy
Center of Concern
Coalition on Human Needs
Demilitarization for Democracy
Development GAP
50 Years is Enough Network
Friends of the Earth
Fund for New Priorities in America
Institute for Policy Studies
Institute for Women's Policy Research
International Labor Rights Fund
National Jobs for All Coalition
National Organization for Women
National Priorities Project
NETWORK: A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby
Peace Action
Preamble Center for Public Policy
Public Citizen, email: Public Citizen
Stakeholders Alliance
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
United for a Fair Economy
Washington Chapter Alliance for Democracy
Working Assets
Women, Law and Development
National Council of La Raza
The Campaign for Health Security
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
Friends Committee on National Legislation
Center for Defense Information
Council for a Livable World
Citizens for Tax Justice

U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines
Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
Americans for a Sustainable Economy
National Education Association
USA Network for Habitat II
Catholic Charities
National Council of Negro Women
Center for Law and Social Policy
Witness for Peace

Children's Defense Fund

Child Welfare League
National Black Child Development Institute
Urban League
Economic Policy Institute
Brookings Institute
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
Defenders of Wildlife
Veterans for Peace
National Rainbow Coalition
AFL-CIO
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
UNITE
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
National Association of Public Hospitals
National Council of Senior Citizens
Long-Term Care Campaign
Consumer's Union
Center for Responsive Politics
Latin American Working Group

Public Campaign

ThinkProgress.org.

[wjcsux]

The who’s who of the Looney Left.

[fight_truth_decay]

"DShawnC lmao why did Kanye show up to #OWS, wearing thousands of dollars worth of jewlery..."

http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet

Up to the minute postings on the Occupy Wallstreet website wall -Adbusters

[VeniVidiVici]

And the Communist Party is siding with the Democrat Party in expressing Solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street idiots

http://www.cpusa.org/

[evad]

Even if these top 5 facts were true, it would be irrelevant.
The problem is SPENDING, not that taxes aren't high enough.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Zaid Jilani is Senior Reporter/Blogger for ThinkProgress.org and The Progress Report at American Progress. Zaid grew up in Kennesaw, Georgia, and holds a B.A. in international affairs with a minor in Arabic from the University of Georgia. Prior to joining ThinkProgress, Zaid interned for Just Foreign Policy and was a weekly columnist at The Red & Black, University of Georgia’s official student newspaper. He is a co-founder of Stand Up Magazine, a co-editor at the Georgia-based blog Georgia Liberal and on staff at BasedonBooks, the first website ever dedicated to movie reviews of book adaptations.

Zaid Jilani: loose cannon or meme generator?

@ThinkProgress employee Zaid Jilani indulges in ugly speculation on Twitter. Should Zaid be more careful with what is written under a Twitter account connected to Think Progress? Is Zaid trying to generate a meme on behalf of OBL? Does this kind of rank speculation undermine Zaid’s trustworthiness as a reporter and blogger for Think Progress?

Pentagon official Monday said OBL “was firing behind her” [the human shield]. Now it turns out there was no gun and no shield.Reply Retweet Favorite
elliottjustin 03/May/2011 11:43:19 AM PDT .....

..@elliottjustin eventually this story is going to morph into OBL begging for his life and an assassination style killing.Reply Retweet Favorite
ZaidJilani 03/May/2011 11:44:36 AM PDT .....

http://chirpstory.com/li/1314

The True Meaning of The Tea Party Phenomenon - Zaid Jilani ...
http://trueslant.com/zaidjilani/2009/11/22/the-true-meaning-of-the-tea-party-phenomenon/

[evad]

LOL...his answer...are you ready.....

MORE UNIONS!!!

[fight_truth_decay]

KeithOlbermann ShowPlug3: Past and present meet in Zuccotti Park as 1968 Olympian/Protestor John Carlos goes there to rally #OWS - he joins us live

KellyRek RT @willspencer: Hey #OccupyWallStreet, the same guy who funded Obama's campaign also funded #OWS. You can't fight the status quo when you are tools of it.

MarkinTenn Occupy L.A. Speaker: Violence will be necessary to achieve our goals http://t.co/HmD0Yvg5 #ows #tcot29 seconds ago · reply · retweet · favorite

alexsobolev RT @HalfSight: RT @lclarkx3: Protestor being grabbed by the throat by Boston police. Wow. #occupyboston http://t.co/jKttgf9y #ows #bostonpd #corruption

wigglefishy RT @OccupyMapUs: Some Cops Furious NYPD Officer Flashed Peace Sign In Photo With Occupy Wall Street Protester #OWS http://t.co/VynTYuia

lavendargoose RT @AKaczynski1: @AndrewBreitbart #OWS outside the home of David Koch. A greedy man who has donated 750M$ to fight cancer & 100M$ to renovate lincoln center.

tedkeystrio RT @DownWithTheBull: BREAKING: VISA rejected $144,000 in donations for #OWS and froze $40,000 that had already been donated but not yet pocketed

http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet

[JimSEA]

Dimon at least was an O crony. I guess there is still room under the bus.

[justlurking]

I went and read the "top 5 facts". I could immediately disprove #2. The Congressional Budget Office publishes these figures, back to 1979 (after adjustment for inflation).

The top 1% collected 19.4% of national income, not 24.5% as the article claimed. While that may seem to be a small error, it leaves out something very important: the income for the top 1% tends to be heavily concentrated in capital gains, rather than wage and dividends.

And in case you didn't realize it: those capital gains could have just as easily been capital losses. If you lose your job, your income stops until you get another. If you take a loss on an investment, you end up with less money than when when you started.

Examining the data over the past three decades reveals that the top 1%'s share of national income varies wildly, as the economy goes through boom and bust cycles:

Note that the latest comprehensive data is for 2007. The CBO published this report in June, 2010. They haven't published an update this year that would presumably include 2008.

As you may remember, 2007 was a pretty good year, at least for the stock market. Then, the bottom fell out in 2008.

[pallis]

Should the left get what it wants, we won’t have to worry about upward mobility, middle class or wealth. There will be the ruling elite and the poor. Most of the Occupy terrorists will fit into the latter category.

[VeniVidiVici]

Key thing to keep in mind too is that the Left Liberals Democrat Communist Party speak of “percentage of income” like income is a pie. A finite number. The Left ALWAYS speaks of income this way.

They never express income as a number that can grow and be shared by all who are part of the producers.

[EQAndyBuzz]

They would rather destroy the world than repeal two bad laws that would turn this all around on a global scale.

[wizardoz]

How do they reconcile the “Rich are evil” cry with the “and why can’t I be rich too?” whine?

[justlurking]

They never express income as a number that can grow and be shared by all who are part of the producers.

That's a good point, and another graph from the same source illustrates it:

The numbers in this graph has have been adjusted for inflation, so that the numbers are 2007 equivalent, all the way back to 1979. The top 1% has certainly been growing through that period, with a lot of variation (because of the reliance on capital gains, which aren't consistent).

But, the scale of the graph is misleading. If you were to look at the actual numbers here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/USFederalTaxRatesAndTaxShares.1979-2007.PDF

and scroll down to page 7, the second table on that page shows that income has been rising for ALL quintiles and categories for the entire period. The lowest quintile hasn't gained much in comparison, but it has gained.

However, there's another secret that is buried in another CBO report: income mobility. Liberals like to look at income categories as static: i.e. you are destined to be in the same category your entire life. That's simply not true. See this report:

Changes in the Distribution of Workers’ Annual Earnings Between 1979 and 2007

Skip to pages 27 and 28 in the PDF (pages 17 and 18 in the document). Look at tables 4 and 5: Earnings Mobility for Men/Women, 2000 to 2005.

The tables are a bit hard to read unless you understand what you are looking at. But, I'll sum it up with a simple statistic: 50% of men and 54% of women in the lowest 20% income category back in 2000 were in a higher income category in 2005. In other words, slightly more than half of the lowest income people in the US in 2000 were no longer low-income five years later.

Want a real surprise? 2% of of men and 3% of women in the lowest 20% were in the top 1% 5 years later.

This is what so many people miss: over their lifetimes, almost everyone that puts ANY effort into themselves: either education, on the job training, or just experience -- will climb into a higher income bracket. Those that sit and complain and blame everyone but themselves will be stuck.

So, where did the other people in the lowest 20% come from in 2005? Some of them fell from higher income brackets. But, I believe that the lowest 20% are mostly new entry level workers, who move up to the next income bracket as soon as they gain experience and/or training.