Who really makes up the so-called “1 percent”?
To the extremists of Occupy Wall Street, the nation’s wealthiest are all Wall Street vultures — hedge-fund managers and venture capitalists who make millions in a day by picking apart troubled companies and casting vulnerable workers aside.
The reality, according to a surprisingly eye-opening piece in the normally pro-OWS New York Times, is quite different.
The paper studied those with incomes in the top 1 percent of selected regions around the country.
Folks falling into that category are less likely to be “fat cats” than they are to be doctors (one in five) — or people who’ve built thriving family businesses from the bottom up.
Indeed, some 60 percent have succeeded on their own, without inherited wealth.
They’ve done so through a combination of education and intense hard work — three times more likely than the “99 percent” to work 50 hours a week or more.
They account for nearly one in three dollars of all philanthropic giving.
And while they earn less than 20 percent of all pre-tax income nationally, they pay more than 25 percent of all federal taxes.
They’re also spread out across the heartland — not just in New York and Los Angeles.
And their income varies regionally, too — it takes $790,000 a year to make the cut in Manhattan and $900,000 in Stamford. But in Macon, Ga., it takes just $270,000 — a figure that would be just upper-middle-class in Manhattan.
And while they have more children than middle- and upper-middle-class families, they don’t have more cars.
In other words, they’re hardly the idle rich.
Nor are they overwhelmingly Republican. Many even endorse the OWS notion of paying more taxes — though most prefer cutting their own entitlement benefits, like Social Security.
None of this is likely to deter President Obama and the Democrats from the class-warfare rhetoric they’re already sharpening for the campaign trail.
But before embracing the divisive and inaccurate rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street, voters would do better to ask the question posed by one Long Island insurance company owner:
“If those people could camp out in that park all day, why aren’t they out looking for a job? Why are they blaming others?”