Top 400 Earners Income Drops: “Their Taxes, Tied to Income, Also Fell”
Hard to soak what they ain’t got. As well, it wreaks havoc with both your rosy projections, because there’s an interesting fact attached to these upper echelon guys:
…Of the people in the Fortunate 400, only 27 percent made it into the group more than one year between 1992 and 2009. Only 2 percent made it every year. That means the majority of the 400 top earners fall out of the club after one year – suggesting that we have more of a revolving door of riches rather than permanent plutocracy.
The 400 is most likely filled with entrepreneurs or executives who had one-time income events, like a stock sale or company sale or IPO (think Mark Zuckerberg) rather than a group of entrenched rentiers.
Entrepreneurs or one time scores, they have a tenure of a year or two at most at that income and the aggregate income of the 400 as a whole swings too wildly to estimate any given year.
Great basis for a tax level that you quote a static expected return for.
What am I thinking? All the more reason to grab it while the bastards still HAVE it.
Biz, Nanny State, Politics | tree hugging sister | 
June 8, 2012 9:06 am
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Your typical government employee generally doesn’t have a solid feel for economics — when someone hands you a budget every year, regardless of how you perform, that connection with reality gets a little more tenuous every budget cycle. The longer you spend in government, the more likely one is to ignore genuine facts in order to facilitate budget estimates.
Add socialism to the mix, and you have a recipe for a psychoactive drug that makes bath salts look like aspirin.
It’s especially sad watching Federal employees retire, and take a job with a non-Federal agency. Say, a county. They need several years of being slapped by reality before they stop producing budgets based on they think they deserve, rather than what they’ll actually get.