The Average American Income

America has always been known as the land of “opportunity.” Citizens have come here from other countries with hopes of creating a better life for themselves and their families. So, how much does the average American make every year? Certainly, our people live in comfortable houses and enjoy many other “luxuries”…for the most part. Did you know that half of the American population makes less than $32,000 per year?

That is an incredible number. I personally was shocked to hear those statistics. These statistics were recently released by the Internal Revenue Service. Americans who made the most last year (the highest earning one percent of all taxpayers) made over 22 percent of all of the income that was reported to the IRS. The lowest earning 50 percent of employees made, collectively, 12.51 percent of the total amount of U.S. income. That means that over 1.4 million taxpayers earn 22 percent of the income. On the other hand, 68 million people share only 12.5 percent.

Those 1.4 million people who make the most of American income pay over 39 percent of all federal income taxes. Only 2.99 percent of federal individual income taxes are paid by the bottom 50 percent of earners. These numbers are from individual income-tax returns from 2006. The IRS recently analyzed these returns and reported its findings.

Income tax is something that nobody wants to pay. Luckily, those people who make less aren’t taxed as heavily as those who do make more annually. $32,000 certainly isn’t a high salary, especially for those people who are trying to raise a family on such a small income. The failing economy certainly isn’t helping anything. Hopefully, the new bailout plan will stimulate the economy enough to generate cash flow into our economy.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.