When first looking at this Mercatus Center report (hat tip Daily Capitalist) on the dwindling ranks of millionaires in the U.S., I was a bit surprised about how hard the fall has been, but, after reflecting back on how many of those people reached that status when housing prices were soaring and stocks were booming, I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising.
A good example is the guy who sold us our house in a short sale last fall. We met briefly when negotiating the sale of personal items and I remember he asked me what type of work I did. When I said we were retired, he said he too planned to retire early after they had amassed a couple million dollars, but then he lost it all when the housing bubble burst. I never understood how people could ride it all the way up and then all the way down…
![[Most Recent USD from www.kitco.com]](http://www.weblinks247.com/indexes/idx24_usd_en_2.gif)
You can’t tell who is a millionaire from tax returns. They show only income not wealth. Thank goodness.
Millionaire? Doesn’t that mean net worth, not annual income? A tax return wouldn’t show that.
Personally I’d say someone who earns $1M in a year but pays $500,000 of that in taxes and spends $500,000 a year is less of a “millionaire” than someone who has made $100,000/year and lived on less so that they now have $1M in net worth.
I’d like to echo the other comments. Are people so stupid now that they can’t understand the difference between income and net worth?
I’m sure you’ll find a high correlation between high income earners and high net worth individuals – not perfect, but very high is my guess. Perhaps the word millionaire was not the best choice here since it was based soley on income, but, they probably thought it made a better headline.
I suspect that income “mobility ” is greater than wealth “mobility”. A retiree’s income drops but wealth may very well continue to grow for instance. This is just another misleading study that can not be taken at face value.
This is a Koch funded study.