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A $15/hr wages makes all Americans rich!

from Jim Miller at Sound Politics

If you are single, then by world standards, probably in the top 5 percent, almost certainly in the   top 10 percent.

Here’s how I come to that tentative conclusion:   A $15 an hour wage gives you a yearly   gross income of $30,000, assuming you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year.

In 2005, a net yearly income of $34,000 put you in the top     1 percent,   world wide.

The United States holds a disproportionate amount of the world’s rich people.

It only takes $34,000 a year, after taxes, to be among the richest 1% in the world.    That’s for each person living under the same roof, including children.   (So a family of four, for example, needs to make $136,000.)

So where do these lucky rich people live?   As of 2005 — the most recent data available — about half of them, or 29 million lived in the United States, according to calculations by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic in his book The Haves and the Have-Nots.

If we allow for economic growth and inflation, that $34,000 might be, say, $40,000   now.

And that would be after taxes, so even in 2005 a gross income of $30,000 would not put a   single person as close to the 1 percent as you might think, at first glance.   So that is why   I suggested that singles earning a wage of $15 an hour would now be in the top 5 or 10 percent,   rather than, say, the top 2 percent.

Different people, depending mostly on their ideologies, will draw different conclusions from   my back-of-the-envelope analysis.   But I think most of you will agree that those   who live in the United States are fortunate.


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