AMERICA'S 400 RICHEST:NOT A CLUB BUT A COLLECTIVE(REALLY!)

摘要

Thanking the IRS is probably not the sentiment most in your heart at this time of year, but in fact the revenu-ers have given us something valuable. It's a trove of data that paints a picture of America's super-rich, and the picture wouldbe unrecognizable to many people. We should study it especially at tax time, as the topic of economic inequality inevitably heats up. The Occupy Wall Street movement will try to revive itself, and once again we'll hear plenty about the outrageous wealth of the 1%. But almost all the discussion is built on a flimsy foundation, an unspoken assumption that's wrong. The debate generally assumes that the 1% are a group of plutocrats who have found a way to rake in staggering incomes year after year. For example, a recent New York Times report on research by economist Emmanuel Saez begins, "Incomes rose more than 11% for the top 1% of earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else, according to new data," prompting an image of someone in a Manhattan skyscraper or a Silicon Valley corporate campus whose huge income just gets huger year after year.