Rich in America Secrets to Creating and Preserving Wealth PHẦN 2 docx

while the bottom 60 percent lost in relative shares of total assets, with

the biggest gains accruing to the richest 1 percent. Consequently, the

most affluent Americans regained their relative position of influence,

and their absolute level of income also rose to a new high. From

$221,000 in 1953, the top 1 percent saw their average incomes soar to

$791,000 by 1998. Furthermore, their share of the national income

returned to what it had been, 18 percent, in 1903.

By any standard, wealthy Americans find themselves in an un￾usual position, having enjoyed one of the most prosperous 20-year

periods in history. The fortunes of many families who were already

rich have soared since 1980, but so did the ranks of the newly wealthy,

with the number of households worth at least $1 million increasing to

7.1 million, or 6.6% of all U.S. households, by the turn of the century

(see Table I.5). More than 2.7 million of the 130 million families fil￾ing tax returns in 2000 reported at least $200,000 in income, up from

1.3 families million in 1995 (see Table I.6).

Still, according to the U.S. Trust Survey of Affluent Americans,

being in the upper 1 percent of incomes doesn’t make everyone feel as

though they are rich. Although 38 percent of those surveyed believe

that they are wealthy, a majority of the affluent (56 percent) consider

themselves only upper middle class. You can certainly understand this

16 Rich in America

TABLE I.5 DISTRIBUTION OF U.S. HOUSEHOLDS

BY NET WORTH, 2001

Household

Net Worth

($000s)

Estimated Number

of Households

(millions)

Percentage of

Households

<100

100−500

500−1,000

1,000−5,000

>5,000

53.1

32.0

7.7

5.9

1.2

49.9%

30.1

7.3

5.5

1.1

SOURCE: Author’s tabulations based on the 2001 Survey of Consumer Finances.

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if you live in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles and earn around

$300,000 a year—you don’t feel rich. And 5 percent still think of them￾selves as middle class.

By the beginning of this century, even the super affluent have suf￾fered a reversal of fortune as shown by the drop in the aggregate new

worth of the Forbes 400 (see Figure I.2).

Introduction 17

0

250

500

750

1,000

1,250

1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002

Billions of dollars

Forbes magazine has tracked the aggregate

net worth of the nation's wealthy since 1982.

The start of the 21st century marked the first

decline in aggregate networth in nearly a decade.

TABLE I.6 DISTRIBUTION OF TAX RETURNS BY AGI, 2000

SOURCE: David Campbell and Michael Parisi, “Individual Income Tax

Returns, 2000,” Statistics of Income Bulletin 22 (Fall 2002), pp. 7–44.

2000 AGI ($000s) Tax Returns (000s) Tax Returns (%)

< 20 50,522 39.1%

20−30 18,362 14.2

30−50 23,960 18.5

50−100 25,673 19.8

100−200 8,083 6.3

200−500 2,135 1.7

500−1,000 396 0.3

>1,000 240 0.2

Total 129,373 100.0

Reprinted by permission of Forbes Magazine © 2003 Forbes Inc.

FIGURE I.2 CHANGES IN AGGREGATE NET WORTH OF FORBES 400

(1982–2002)

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