Discussion: If the billionaires paid for everything

[TGLS]

62% of people are OK with citation free statistics.

[Darth Wedgius]

I did provide data. I just didn't back them up. Anyone who really disagrees can look up the numbers themselves. Anyone who wants to ignore the numbers can as well. Whatever makes you feel happy.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Your honor I proved that he was innocent, I just didn't present the evidence to the jury. Like why would I even be here?

[TGLS]

So I decided to try replacing my divot and try looking up some statistics.

Tax stuff was easy: https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2018-update/

Saying the top 1% of Americans pay 37.3% of the income taxes. They also have a 19.7% of the income. This is about 1.9x of some hypothetical flat tax. Unless you like the idea of a flat tax, the people who have about 20% of the income are paying about 40% of the tax is not a big deal.

The millionaire one was hard. This was the best I could do: https://www.markford.net/2017/10/04/how-hard-do-you-have-to-work-to-become-a-millionaire/?doing_wp_cron=1569523753.9454998970031738281250

Some guy's blog cites Barron's that Self-Made Millionaires work 59 hours per week. I decided I wanted to see how it compared to the general public and the Bureau of Labour statistics (https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/TUU10101AA01002864) claims that people employed work 5.11 hours a day. Thus, employed people work on average 35.77 hours a week.

I couldn't find a standard deviation, so I can't evaluate whether the claim that the average millionaire working 60 hours a week makes sense, for example, by estimating the number of people who work 60 hour weeks and comparing that to the number of millionaires. I can do the reverse, though, by estimating the standard deviation assuming that about 6% work over 60 hour weeks. This would suggest the standard deviation is about 15, which in turn suggests about 5% of the workforce is working under 8 hours a day.

Of course, the statistic from Barron's was already further selected to just "Self-Made" Millionaires, however that's defined, probably selecting out the inherited, the lucky, and (far larger) bought a house 20-30 years ago in a really hot market today.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Becoming a millionaire typically means being at least a salary level worker or being an entrepreneur. People who have a 150k salary aren't really called millionaires, but it's very possible to achieve the title technically.

[Robovski]

Especially if you are a homeowner. Millionaire doesn't mean what it used to, less Daddy Warbucks, more middle/upper middle class.

[PapaPalpatine]

Millionaire doesn't mean what it used to, less Daddy Warbucks, more middle/upper middle class.

If even that. The value of the dollar keeps going down and the price of stuff keeps going up.