California may be home to some of the deepest pockets in tech, but when it comes to the average income of its 1%, the Golden State trails five other states.
That’s just one of the nuggets cost-estimating website HowMuch.net highlighted when it crunched Economic Policy Institute data to uncover the amount of income needed in each state to be considered among the 1% as well as the average earnings among the gilded slice of households.
Here’s an illustration of the numbers:
“Our visualization represents both the minimum amount needed to be counted as an elite one-percenter, and the average amount for that cohort,” HowMuch.net’s Raul Amoros explained. “This methodology reveals a startling level of inequality even among the richest Americans.”
In Connecticut, for example, you need to take home $700,800 a year just to be counted among the elite 1%, but the average income for that wealthy group is a whopping $1.8 million higher.
Estelle Sommeiller, who co-authored the original report, says that, in 2015, a family in the top 1% nationally received, on average, 26.3 times as much income as a family in the bottom 99% — a trend that’s been getting worse each year.
“Income inequality has risen in every state since the 1970s,” Sommeiller wrote. “Rising inequality is not just a story of those on Wall Street, in Hollywood, or in the Silicon Valley reaping outsized reward.”
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