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(that's the bottom one with all the colors, Freepers)
Imagine that you took all of the tax returns from 2006 and put them in a big-ass pile. Not a big ass-pile... that's Limbaugh's turf and I don't want to go there.
Now, imagine you have this giant pile of 1040s. But they're not in order. So you put them in order. You put the smallest amount of taxable income on the bottom. Then the 2nd-smallest amount on top of that one. Then the 3rd on the 2nd. And so on.
When you're done, you have a giant stack with the richest people on top and the poorest on the bottom. Great, now you're done with step one.
Step two is to find out how much money, in total, was earned by those people in that giant stack of 1040s. So you bring out a scientic calculator ('cuz that cheapie one from the dollar store ain't going to cut it) and add up all the gross incomes in that pile. You'll get about 8.7 trillion dollars in total, assuming the IRS's web site is accurate.
Now we can interpret (figure out) the graph. Let's say you have 100,000,000 forms, for simplicity's sake. That means that a group of 1% of the stack (a 'percentile') contains exactly one million forms in it.
If you take the percentile at the very top, the first 1 million tax forms on the stack, if you take them off the stack and add up all the income, you'd find that the sum is about two trillion dollars. That means that the top percentile of people, the top million or so income-earners took home 23% of ALL incomes. 23% of 8.7 trillion bucks goes to the 99th percentile, or the top 1%.
Okay, now take off four more percentiles from the top. That's percentiles 95 through 98. The next 4 million income-earners, the top 5%-1%. They took home 15% of that 8.7 trillion bucks, about 1.31 trillion bucks for those 4 million people.
Now take off 5 more percentiles, percentiles 90-94. The top 10%-5%. They took home 12% of that 8.7 trillion, about a trillion bucks.
So the top 10%, collectively, took home 50% of all income, well over four trillion bucks. Four trillion bucks spread among 10 million people.
Of course, there were really about 135 million tax forms filed, so add about a third more to the population numbers to have a realistic amount of people.
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