Another issue is that said narrow group is incredibly skilled in exploiting whichever rules are enforced, buying elected officials from all three branches of US government under the current campaign finance rubric and generally making sure their interests are first.
Folks whom have tax accountants, tax attorneys and investment managers are able to hyperoptimize purposefully-byzantine tax code while grandpa does TurboTax (in the US, take a look at the 1040 (full, non-EZ form) for all the odd, special interest tax deductions which clutter up forms and have the own extra forms (Schedule _)). Complexity is a game to catch the unweary, confuse most people and create an official "elite qualifying miles" gambit to reduce taxes in "certain" situations.
It comes down to whom has the most influence over collection, allocation and redistribution of taxation.
Today a successful entrepeneur can go directly international, and with a client base that includes not only the US and Western Europe but also a huge (and quickly growing) middle class all over the world. This is several orders of magnitude the potential reach than 50 years ago. Successful entrepeneurs make billions not millions anymore.
So it's not absurd that we end up with more extreme wealth in the top .01%, and I think it is kind of structural to a modern, global society.
If we focus on the 1%, or rather the delta between the 1% and the 99%, I think we are rather observing skill supply/demand mismatch. In the US and Western Europe there is an oversupply of unskilled or low-skills labour, driving their wages down (relatively to skilled labour). So they will do worse than the more sought after skilled labour. It can partially be mitigated with better education. But part of it is also structural. Not everyone can be a good programmer or engineer. Unless we find a way to change IQ distributions, we may have a long term problem here that we may not be able to solve.
I think the truly disgusting income inequality is at the top 0.01-0.001%. The overpaid CEOs who make absurd amounts of guaranteed cash. We have a tax code that absolutely incentivizes CEOs to look out for their salaries and one time cash bonuses rather than any stock grants they get.
We used to have a tax code that favored capital gains in the extreme, but now we overly favor income. Which would your rather have? A grant of 10 million dollars in a volatile asset that has a one year lock out period and a 20% haircut, or a guaranteed 10 million dollars with no lock out and an effective haircut of ~40%. You're losing only 20% of the money as a guarantee. Most people seem to be interested in the latter option.
Whenever we have debates about raising capital gains tax Republicans rightly point out that capital gains tax doesn't actually generate that much revenue for the US government. They're right, but that's insane, given how much wealth we generate every year.
I'm all for paying people well, but make them earn it!
The 'wedge' on the first dollar earned by a minimum wage worker is 15.3%.
And then don't get me started on the deductions, Mitt Romney's IRA etc. that mean those guys can don't even pay the 15%.
I don't think your math adds up...in NYC a huge cash bonus gets taxed at > 50% combined Fed, state and local. The CEO will always take something that's structured as future capital gain, not in 1 year, but whenever he decides to cash out.
The tax system and rent seeking in this country is a disgrace.
Capital gains is now 20%.
http://www.fool.com/retirement/general/2015/12/14/long-term-...
the idea that minimum wage earners aren't paying taxes is a nonsensical talking point with no basis in reality. It only works if you disregard FICA, which is economically unjustifiable and not done in other contexts (like quantifying big government's size and tax bite). The bottom line is there is a 15.3% wedge between what the minimum wage employer pays and what the employee receives, and that's what has economic impact. The EITC offsets a part of the wedge, but only a part of it.
You're right, but the reality is that even skilled workers rarely make it to the top 1%. In fact, they might not even find a job in their field.
Even if you're super-high-skilled and work in Silicon Valley as a programmer, your net income probably doesn't come close to the entry bar of the top 5%.
http://www.kiplinger.com/article/taxes/T054-C000-S001-your-r... suggest that it was ~$180K in 2013 (this is presumably on a per-return basis, which is neither individual nor household income, but likely much closer to the latter).
Top 5% household income is $220k.
As of the 2014 census.
At Google or equivalent, programmers can hit the household 5% bar ($220,000) within 2-3 years.
I am not saying it is easy, and perhaps the technology doesn't allow it yet, but undoubtfully this is a next step in the medical profession.
With medical professionals, there is simply a huge shortage. Same with researchers, engineers, etc.
My company hires H1B visas not because they are cheaper, but because we can't get anyone here to do the job at reasonable rates. Reasonable being new graduate hires start out at CPI adjusted rates to near top end in silicon valley.
Sounds like "H1B visa holders are cheaper" to me. High quality engineers should be commanding on the order of $250k. In the absence of H1B visa holders lowering wages, that's what high quality engineers would command as an average salary; same as a good doctor or lawyer.
The main reason doctors and lawyers cost that much: you can't H1B them. Lawyer skills are too specific to a locality and subsection of the trade; for whatever reason, law school doesn't actually help with this -experience, networking (particularly for criminal law) and apprenticeship is how it ends up working. LLD is just a hoop that needs to be jumped through to get such apprenticeships. The AMA is the most effective labor union in America, keeping out highly skilled doctors from abroad by denying their skills validity.
Um... that is the definition of cheaper. In your own justification sentence. H1B must (should) be paid at your prevalent rate -- and this may not be what you consider a "reasonable" rate.
It seems grotesque when human beings in Silicon Valley are left with no viable option but to live in their cars or under a bridge, while folks tool around in their latest Lamborarri/Ferrambo. If some people can't be meaningfully trained or can't find a means of self-sufficiency, we cannot just allow them to freeze to death on the street. It's not civilized. (I asked and found out that a male on street without disabilities in Santa Clara County receives only ~$5/day in cash and ~$4/day for food.)
Certainly more people in the upper brackets may need to pay something more than now in order for all reach a minimum standard of living, but perhaps not quite as much as billionaires. A gradual tax on all income seems like the fairest, least complicated and straightforward method... say tax starting at $25k USD (adjust for inflation/cost-of-living) , then slope up to something like 35% for most people and 50% for the top end. It's a question really of what quality of infrastructure and social investment is desired, because debt isn't free.
I've also noticed the gradual labor oversupply in first-world, white-collar jobs... there's just not enough work to go around. China, India and others also have tons-tons-tons of unskilled labor as evidenced by frequent usage of more people in-lieu of mechanical equipment for small- & medium-scale jobs. This labor supply/demand imbalance seems attributable to peak global population and increasing productivity/automation.
Perhaps an underestimated crisis is the desperate need for more entrepreneurs to create new businesses which add more jobs in order to utilize more untapped, idle value, especially of groups which are traditionally marginalized from interviews, not just because of PR value, but some groups are really good at some things. (Autistic spectrum personalities seem to be quiet good at sorting/organizing/labeling, etc.)
They're just earning most of their income as capital gains or qualified dividends instead of ordinary income, so it's taxed at a lower rate. It's not really all that complicated.
Kill 3 birds with 1 stone.
Second, this is a part of doing business - you can leverage anything (real estate, stocks, bonds, etc)
Another example of an instrument that has benefited tremendously from our recent ZIRP + rising equity markets is the Grantor Retained Annuity Trust, which will likely leave a worse taste in people's mouths compared to Ellison's maneuvers. [1]
It is a fair point for people to ask whether these legal maneuvers should remain legal.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-17/accidental...
People like talking about fair and unfair, and the “spirit of the law”, but that all means something completely different to whomever is reading the law. What might seem fair to someone, won’t seem fair to others. I would assume a ton of “normal” people (i.e non entrepreneurs, income tax paying people) consider the loan thing to be unfair, but wouldn’t consider it unfair if they releveraged their own primary residence to achieve a similar result.
Second, if governments want to limit tax avoidance, they should learn to make proper laws (i.e. no half way, rushing something out of the door). A lot of laws are made in a half assed way. Stuff like this comes to mind: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-03/malone-gai.... ("He avoided paying taxes on his remaining stake, worth about $260 million, by exploiting IRS regulations meant to block a different loophole.")
Spot on! For the less finance lingo savvy, that simply means take a second mortgage/home equity loan or home equity line of credit (HELOC) for a vacation, to invest in another property, pay for college or other large expense, etc.
Though for better or for worse, we seem to be headed towards an age of populism, which may actually start to affect the consensus manner in which the laws are read.
And thanks for the article. :)
Debt != income
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
We can ask all we want, so long as wealthy people buy politicians nothings drastic will happen.
raise capital gains taxes will hit everyone's retirement accounts including those least able to withstand it. the fun of indirect taxation is that when attempting to punish one group there is a lot of collateral damage
Changing how we tax dividends will cause a massive change in how the highly productive structure their income, and if it reduces risk, it seems to follow it reduce productivity.
For instance, our doctors who invest in their local firm might instead take a salary position at the local big box medical conglomerate and put in their 32 hours a week with Friday for golfing. Instead of 70 hours a week they were putting in at their local firm not counting early morning rounds at the hospital to check on patients.
0.0001% of 6 billion = 6000 people.
I would say that 6000 people easily control anywhere between 20% and 50% of the worlds wealth. Especially considering that if you research "How many billionaires are there?" You come up with something like this:
"A total of 1,645 people made the 2014 billionaire list, representing combined wealth of $6.4 trillion."
So taking the top 1000 billionaires, or perhaps even the top 100 or so, and then you have the families who really have enough money to control things. These would be the people that are impossible to get much information on, but who definitely hold a lot of sway over the planet.
I think these families are the ones we should be concerned with. Either them or once again a small proportion of them, numbering anywhere between 5 families and 100 families.
The 62 richest people in the world own as much as the poorest 3.6billion. In 2010 it was 388.
The 1% owns more than the rest of the world.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2016-01-18/...
All you're really doing here is observing that the 3.6bn poorest people are really poor.
This does not support your statement that "the 1%" owns more than the rest of the world.
However, that statement happens to be true. If you look at the Credit Suisse wealth report that those oxfam figures are cherry picked from, you'll find that the 1% (globally) comprises about half the population of the US.
It's you, in other words.
I agree, however, that "62 richest people own as much as poorest 50%" is really not that interesting. It might give a more astounding number to get the point across in the media coverage, but i. e. "x richest people own 50% of total wealth" would be much more interesting.
What is interesting though is that the number changed from 388 to 62 in just a few years. And the trend that the super rich become much richer even compared to very rich people. Take a look at this graph for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Census_income_discrepa...
(income discrepancies within the top 1.5% of households)
The problem is that since a few decades only a handful of people raked in all productivity gains.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/01/the-cost-conund...
If your point was that nurse practitioners won't help that siutation a lot, then I agree (although I think nurse practitioners are still a great idea for other reasons). But I believe it's wrong to suggest this is not a real problem.
Similarly, salaries for top college and hospital administrators are routinely equally and exceeding that of your $30M hedge fund manager. Perhaps even worse, they justify this based on the size of the organisations they manage, which are easily inflated by hiring lots of non-teaching, non-clinical administration staff (not to mention mergers, which also give hospitals especially more market power to extract rents). It's all financed by easy money from student loans and from insurance/Medicare that doesn't have a choice.
So I totally disagree that looking at the 1% is unhelpful, because all of the things above are real problems that need to be solved even if you think inequality doesn't matter. Anyone born after about 1980 and anyone who has medical insurance or pays taxes is getting fleeced, and they're not getting better services for their money. Fixing that will make a much bigger difference in most people's lives than confiscating a bit from the hedge fund manager (though of course there's no shortage of screwed up incentives in finance to fix either).
Doctors work in an industry where compensation is strongly influenced by government policy. The government is the largest single payer for healthcare services due to Medicare and Medicaid which makeup roughly 40% of heath care costs in the US. The AMA lobbies the government heavily to ensure favorable rates on procedures paid for by those programs and thus ensures a high income for their members. So in the sense that a lot of their economic prosperity is derived from their political influence they aren't all that different from any other wealthy person who lobbies the government for tax breaks and other economic advantages.
In the past they did create wealth, by actually founding those successful businesses. Of course that might have been luck and markets aren't perfectly fair, so maybe they don't deserve 100% of the profits. But still they did create something of value, at one point in time. A thing which continues to produce value today. It's not like Walmart just materialized out of the aether and Sam Walton just happened to find it first.
Of course deontological arguments are silly and it's impossible to know who "deserves" what. I think a consequentialist argument is much stronger, that taxing rich people and redistributing the money to everyone, creates more benefit to society than it harms.
You see where this is going. If Fred really was underpaid relative to the value he produces, why isn't he getting a better offer elsewhere? You could postulate there are lots of Freds bidding for his job, keeping wages low. But then were are the new companies being created for the simple purpose of hiring boatloads of Freds and making 10x their pay?
Being underpaid seems like an unstable state in a free market.
Someone taking $10/hr for $100/hr creation in value in order to get the job over the guy who offered $11 is what is actually happening.
Often when the greedy capitalist loses, everybody who works for him also lose. People talk about the risks capitalists take and try to compare them to workers using sheer dollar values. That valuation completely sidesteps the diminishing marginal utility of cash.
If a capitalist goes out of business and his $10 million factory ends up getting sold off for a net of $3 million after paying his debts, we can say he lost at least $7 million. His workers, on the other hand, don't lose anything but their jobs. However, those workers might have been living from paycheck to paycheck, leaving them far worse off than the capitalist who still has $3 million in his pocket.
Why would an owner do that?
Bob, Ted and you convene secretly and agree you won't poach each others employees or pay them more than $15/hr? And since you're the only game in town and can afford to undercut any competition until they're run off, everyone's forced to deal with it.
For example, suppose I have a machine that, when a lever is pulled, it manufactures a gold nugget. A worker is needed to pull that lever - but is the bulk of the value being created by the worker or the machine?
It gets down to how one does the accounting for productivity. Get it too far wrong and one is likely to go out of business.
Unions have sometimes priced themselves out of the market, meaning the business closed. Didn't that happen with Hostess?
Not everyone has good information about this market. I don't get to see how much someone paid for Fred's labor. That means someone is likely to underbid for my labor if I'm in the same business, to which I must take time to convince them otherwise. I can also try to get them to overbid for my labor, to which they must convince me otherwise. And off we go to the negotiation. Why is it good that we have different people producing similar levels of output and are paid differently?
As a Fred, assuming you want to continue to be an employee, you should sell your labor to the employer who gives you the best overall deal for you. As an employer of Freds, you should seek to get the best mix of Freds you can for the lowest sustainable rate. Bringing in other actors to arbitrate and equalize pay doesn't add anything that the actors in the system can't already do, IMO.
(Maybe Fred1 values that his employer allows dogs, or has bike parking, or is a short walk from his house. Maybe Fred2 likes his employer's stance on social issues, or benefits package, or likes working 4-10s instead of 5-8s. How will the central pay authority value those things better than independent actors making their own choices?)
If the market was actually fair, it would be a lot easier to do a startup or a small company and start competing.
I was thinking more along the lines of ALDI, which never took a loan or credit, and was started by the two brothers taking over a tiny store from their father, and later expanding into a global chain.
And one way to do that is to put taxes on taking exorbitant capital returns as personal income; build something you want in the world with it instead (and in the process put it back into the economy). Another way, and one I'm partial to, is to institute a basic income, that way people will never work for exploitative wages, will always have a base of capital to pull from, and will bring the labor market to something much closer to a free market (where price discovery will actually work).
And this very same difference applies not only to financial investment but also to how young people approach the topic of careers: with a golden spoon fat enough to feed them and their future children for the rest of their life, people can focus 100% on aiming high. In fact they even have to, because it's their only chance of ever getting any sense of personal achievement. The lower ranks however have to split their attention between big dreams and ensuring basic hirability for when the big dreams fail. This distraction alone should be enough to keep the dynastic wheel rolling.
And maybe another thought, I don't really want it to be part of my argument, because I think it is too speculative, but I think it is an interesting idea to consider: there might be a little Dunning-Kruger at work here as well. What if the most intelligent 99ers would focus the strongest on hirability/food on the table, due to being least delusional about actually making it into 1% territory? Then the only people who are both intelligent and aiming high would be golden-spooners who got lucky with both brain and parents, while their less intelligent peers would duke it out with equally not-so-intelligent risers. Certainly no rule as in "refuted by a single counterexample" (as I'm sure there are many), but maybe one of the forces at work nonetheless.
Edit: see "Edit" in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11364978 , totally missed the part about 1% vs 0.1%. This all applies much less there, but still somewhat, because the "rich dentist" from the original article would surely be closer to middle class than to dynastic wealth in most aspects. Offspring will enter the workforce knowing that they will eventually need to put their own food on the table and personal investment strategies will still revolve around sustaining a given lifestyle until the end, not around concentrating power.
Very insightful. This may get me pilloried in this thread, but that's the exact amount and structure of wealth that I'd like to give my kids (it will never be 0.01% level, but with the right structure, I think it's possible to provide a private "basic income" to them). I don't want them to have a golden/silver spoon, but in my own life and estate planning, an important goal for me is that I want to provide them with support, love, education, and a basic financial nut to underpin their life-nowhere near enough to do "nothing", but enough that they can take some risks and pursue what it is that they want to do, not what they must do to put food on the table and keep the lights on.
If you think in term of investment opportunities, clearly there are many investments that are only accessible to wealthy people, because of the amount of risk they involve, or because owning a tiny fractional share of a company is a sort of anomaly. Most investments (building, company, project) have few and require few investors, not the least to ensure proper governance.
But at one point the marginal benefit of the accumulation of wealth becomes zero. I don't think someone who own 1 billions lives much better than someone who owns 50 millions.
You are severely underestimating the importance of peace of mind. When you are poor, you are always worried about making rent. When you are middle class, you might be a few paychecks (or a hospital bill) away from insolvency. The wealthy don't have to worry about those things.
John Scalzi has an awesome post about the cost of being poor[1] on his blog.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
Edit: d'oh, my reply is off-topic because I misread GP's post - missed that the distinction is between 1%ers and 0.1%ers. Considering that; I suspect the difference is in influence (my guess is the 0.1% are likely to be more 'politically involved' or better connected)
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Walton#Automobile_inci...
As others have said, even most of the top 1% isn't immune. They have to work to make money. Many people who are not billionaires probably spend more than they earn making them vulnerable to losing almost everything if they have to spend a year or two in prison.
Why will they be killed by the police? Are they threatening someone or do they look like they will?
All of the things you listed come down to attitude and personal choice.
In many places in the U.S. "look like they will" is synonymous with "having dark skin". What a horrible attitude and personal choices these people must have.
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4bpjxo/what_item... 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4bpjxo/what_item...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...
If you make most of your financial returns from capital gains, rather than income, you are in the 1%
In theory, if you own and live in a £1m home in London you are very wealthy, you could sell it and live off the proceeds in a cheaper place. But in practice you are not really wealthier than someone who owns a £200k home in a village. That home is likely much smaller and the population of London is not going to migrate away from London. Real estate bubbles have made parts of the population much wealthier on paper but they still live in the same houses than before the bubble.
Actually income has a similar bias. You can earn twice the median salary in the UK and still not afford to live on your own in central london. Most junior bankers live in flatshare, but are on paper earning much more than an average family in a cheaper village.
These bias are what I think make comparisons of nominal wealth or income between countries a pointless exercise, and in a country as vast and heterogenous as the US a difficult exercise.
Or they could buy a huge rental house in a student town and make around £60k to £90k a year in rent.
If they rent cheaply themselves and put all the profit into more property, they can easily double the £1m in less than a decade without having a day job at all.
Repeat for another couple of decades, and they have a sizeable property empire. With some medium risk/return investing they can be well into the high net worth bracket well before retirement age.
This is the point of being in the 1%. Beyond a certain level you don't need to contribute anything useful in the way of imagination, creativity, or talent. You just need to own stuff and have cash to spare. As long as you take some fairly simple steps the money grows itself with very little effort or skill on your part. It's a classic feedback loop, and it will work for you as long as you let it.
Compare this with someone in poverty, where it's likely that whatever they do they will remain in debt once they get into debt. Unless they start dealing drugs, or winning the lottery, or building an unusually successful app or business (in their spare time while working three jobs at once), the feedback loop pushes them down and keeps them down.
Real estate investing may not fit a tight definition of "day job", but the part of it that you describe above is absolutely hard work, IMO.
Yes, you absolutely 100% are. You could sell your London home, move to that village, and live off the proceeds.
Saying you aren't wealthy because you happen to live in your biggest asset is delusional (and part of a dominant political narrative promoted by the homeowner class).
Consider what would happen if a major financial bill struck each family (like, $500k). The London family might be forced to sell their flat and move into an apartment (or move out of London). The village family would lose everything they own and still be in debt.
I would much rather own a $1m house than a $200k house. Pretending otherwise is just ridiculous.
The additional option available to you is brought to you by your wealth
I'd say they were more wealthy for their property value and converted that value into liquid wealth by moving locations.
It is very true while real-estate in the abstract is liquid enough, nobody likes to move so owner-occupiers are hard to compare to landlords, traders of real estate, etc.
And it's not like there are high barriers of entry. Everybody can call local Bloomberg office and arrange for trial terminal subscription (I did it once). Or pay around $75/month for realtime market data feed and test strategies on it. Compare it to, say, becoming a dentist.
There will always be problems when trying to draw these lines.
Of course putting someone who makes $30MM vs $250k is absurd. What about $1MM vs $250k? $300k vs $250k?
There's an inordinate amount of conversation about this subject on HackerNews, which has some irony, since I'm sure the demographics here skew "wealthy". Everyone wants to believe they're in the "99%", but the fact is the vast majority of the population in America, and more so the world, would consider people here the 1%. $250k is more than most people need, in terms of sharing the wealth, even in a household. If there's a populist shift, your doctor may find some empathy for that kind of salary; the guy who coded the latest photo app won't.
"The 1%" is just a simplification for the benefactors of gross income and wealth inequality.
Four years of school, many of residency, maybe specialty, those salaries are to a large degree paying off accumulated debt and opportunity cost.
It would be cruel to try to take even more of that highly delayed income in taxes.
Before he got divorced and moved to Florida, anyways, and the glut of dentists there has him making around $250,000/year max so far (lived there about 4-5 years now.)
He's planning to retire when he is 50 and he's 44 now. He got his pilots license in the last few years and now flies between his practices in Florida and owns his own plane (just a small little Beechcraft Bonanza.)
But either way, he's made great money in his lifetime through dentistry. Unfortunately my other brother that is a dentist I don't talk to that much so I have no idea of his earnings, but I know he also does very well.
I just think OP was being a little bit generous with who is in the 1%, particularly if you look at net worth which is a better metric.
To be in the top 1% nationally, you had to have earned $383,000 in 2015.
In some cities that number is as low as $175K, very doable for a doctor or dentist.
I'm sure Elko, Nevada has some doctors, but probably not many investment bankers. With less representation from other well-remunerated occupations, a doctor in Elko is likely to be in the top 1%; however, a similar doctor in Manhattan probably isn't.
Asset wealth may make more sense.
Feel free to cite a better source.
This paper gives a more up to date chart on P. 62 in Table C.3: http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2015/files/20...
Table C.3. Net Worth Fractile Thresholds (Thousands $)
SCF Bulletin Wealth, HHDs
1989 1992 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013
90th Percentile 364 357 381 494 740 834 910 953 942
99th Percentile 2,251 2,318 2,460 3,793 5,787 6,356 8,360 6,815 8,155
99.9th Percentile 9,703 9,207 13,898 15,346 20,338 25,109 30,826 27,488 30,894
The summary, in case the chart is hard to read, is that for 2013, the 90th percentile threshold for household wealth is about 1 million dollars, the 99th is about 8 million, and the 99.9th is about 30 million. The adjusted estimates (see the paper) are generally 10-30% lower.
No one gets to save 100% of their income from their entire life.
tl;dr, the things this article points out are definitely bad, if only for the immediate justifications given rather than the article's thesis.
Actually that's not true at all. Even if those people are just under/barely millionaires, they're still getting most of the advantages over poor people.
They're probably also not paying rents, in debt as much, and probably had higher educations.
Nobody is mad at the concept of being able to improve your situation with hard work.
I think sometimes a picture really does say 1,000 words. This short info-graphic video makes is pretty clear how dramatically top heavy wealth distribution in the U.S. is:
It also does a nice job of comparing the "ideal", to the "perception" to the actual.
When people complain about billionaires, they don't think that $1.1Billionaires are monsters and $0.9Billionaires are middle class.
It's absurd to put together hedge fund managers making $30 million a year with the established doctor who works two blocks from your house making $250k. These are entirely different phenomena.
You can see it by the section where they realize, shockingly, that the most common workplace among the 1% is the doctor's office. Well, duh. That's what makes it so clear that the 1% is much too broad of a target.
When people (innumerately) rage against the 1%, they're not thinking of real estate agents and local doctors and lawyers and dentists and university or hospital administrators. But that's who the 1% is.