Tuesday, August 30, 2011

More Ugly: Income Numbers

This is just plain nasty.

U.S. incomes plummeted again in 2009, with total income down 15.2% in real terms since 2007, new tax data showed on Wednesday. The data showed an alarming drop in the number of taxpayers reporting any earnings from a job -- down by nearly 4.2 million from 2007 -- meaning every 33rd household that had work in 2007 had no work in 2009.

Average income in 2009 fell to $54,283, down $3,516, or 6.1% in real terms compared with 2008. ... Compared with 2007, average income was down $8,588 or 13.7%
.  --Vox quoting TaxProfBlog

Note well:  those are 2009 figures.  '10 and '11 are not going to be much better--at best, a flatline, at worst, they just get worse.

1 comment:

steveegg said...

It may be old news (TaxProf posted on August 4), but here's a couple of kickers from the source Reuters article:

"Just 8,274 taxpayers reported income of $10 million or more in 2009, down 55 percent from 18,394 in 2007. Compared with 2007, total real income of these top earners in 2009 fell 58.6 percent to $240.1 billion, but average income slipped just 8.1 percent to $29 million.

"While the number of people who earned enough income to file a tax return fell, the share of those filing who paid no income tax rose to 41.7 percent of tax returns in 2009, up from 36.4 percent in 2008."