How many stinking rich people are there in the US?
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in the midst of a long Twitter exposition the other day about wages and taxes and her adjustment from being a waitress relying on tips to making a congressional salary of $174,000 a year when she made a provocative statement about how many rich people she’d like to tax.
“When we say ‘tax the rich,’ we mean nesting-doll yacht rich. For-profit prison rich. Betsy DeVos, student-loan-shark rich. Trick-the-country-into-war rich. Subsidizing-workforce-w-food-stamps rich. Because THAT kind of rich is simply not good for society, & it’s like 10 people.”
She immediately got dinged for it, because it’s not “like 10” people. But her point — that the merely well-off don’t have to be afraid of her, or the Green New Deal, or “socialism” — is sound, because not very many people make more than $10 million a year.
Turns out the IRS publishes exactly how many. In 2016, the most recent year for which information is available, the IRS estimated there were 16,087 tax returns claiming income of $10 million or more.
The top 26 billionaires own $1.4 trillion — as much as 3.8 billion other people.
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