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The rich table of contents

Many Americans don't have a clue about what comprises real wealth in the USA

Many Americans long merely to reach the status of upper middle-class, mistakenly believing that would place us in the realm of the wealthy

Most of us likely have never met a truly rich person face-to-face

The average American household may bring in a total of $40,000 a year

The 'poorest' rich as defined here could enjoy at minimum ten times the material goods and services of the average American family

So how many folks in the US qualify as truly rich by this standard? Roughly just one percent of all households

The super-rich, the 'plain rich', the 'poorest' rich...and everyone else

A summary of very rough approximations of the fractions of US population fitting into these classifications as of 2003

• The top 1% of income households in the USA

  • The super rich: making at least $175 million a year each

  • The 'plain' rich: making at least $1 million a year each

  • The 'poorest' rich: making at least $400,000 a year each

• The bottom 99% of income households in the USA

  • The upper middle-class: making at least $145,000 a year each

  • The low to intermediate level middle-class: making at least $18,000 a year each

  • The official poor: making as little as zero per year

Sorry, but even winning a much vaunted Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes will NOT make you rich-- at least by the standards listed here

Sorry again, but winning the likes of a Nobel Prize, or Pulitzer, or MacArthur Foundation Award will NOT make you rich, either

So how do the newly rich attain their wealth?

How badly are the 'poorest' rich hurt by income taxes?

• Even in a 'worst-case' scenario they're still better off than a $40,000 before tax household which won a $5000 per week for life sweepstakes

According to many Republicans, households making less than $75,000 a year simply have too much money and receive more than their fair share in government services. But households making between half a million and one thousand millions of dollars a year don't have enough money or government services to get by

The top 22.6% of the wealthy (the richest of the rich) often aren't even included in many statistical analyses-- which means the results of such reports are misleading at best (and lies at worst)

So who would benefit most from this appalling fudging of the stats?

These same highly 'spun' stats make it appear that the upper middle-class of America are the actual rich, when they really may often make as little as 36% of what the 'poorest' truly wealthy households do-- and have to work for their living to boot, when the true rich don't

Vanity accelerates the decline of the American middle-class

In general, it appears the top one percent of folks are not nearly as generous or altruistic as we (the other 99%) are

History and basic economics show that excessive disparities in wealth are bad for everyone-- including the rich themselves-- and so should be avoided where possible

But how does America compare to other countries worldwide in terms of wealth and income distribution? Not very well at all

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CLICK HERE to delve deeper into The super rich...

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FORWARD to What the rich do with their astonishing freedom from taxes

BACK to The enormous costs to society of 'right-wing' political governance

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