Wealth Distribution Data

There are two ways of thinking about who is rich. One is income. How much money does a person make? Another is net worth. How much does a person own? I think that net worth is really a better way of thinking about wealth, since the very rich have all sorts of ways of hiding their income. A billionaire might report an income of only $1 a year, after all, and still be increasing in net worth by millions every year. Therefore, I've based most of the material on this site related to wealth distribution on net worth. (However, I'm currently working on adding income based material in the future.) The bottom line in each case is this: In order to break into the top one percent by net worth, you'd have to be worth over 110 million dollars! (really?) In order to be in the top one percent by earnings, you'd have to be making over $780,000 a year! It was people worth more than $110 million and/or earning more than $780,000 a year that Al Gore was talking about during his campaign. It is these people that Gore claimed George Bush would favor in his policies. (And things have certainly turned out as he predicted.)