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.