This WSJ infographic has been making the rounds, which shows an example of a single parent with two children and an income of $260k portrayed looking sad, presumably about their taxes going up by 5%. It's been asked: How many "Single parent, two children" households are there with an income of $260,000 or more?
I believe I was able to determine an answer from the 2011 American Community Survey microdata. First limiting to households composed exclusively of children and a single parent (as depicted), gets you down to 6.5 million households. (Sanity check: Wikipedia cites about 13 million single-parent households, but that includes those with other adults present, and the microdata shows an equal number of single-parent households with a single adult and multiple adults.)
Further restricting to single parent with 2 children, exactly, gets you down to 2.1 million households.
Limiting to those with an income of $260,000 or more, leaves you with 9,489 households total, or the top 0.4% of single-parent two-children household incomes. Median income for this demographic is $23,400. 90th percentile is $70k, and 95th percentile is $94k.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323689604578220132665726040.html#project%3DWEALTH0105%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive
I believe I was able to determine an answer from the 2011 American Community Survey microdata. First limiting to households composed exclusively of children and a single parent (as depicted), gets you down to 6.5 million households. (Sanity check: Wikipedia cites about 13 million single-parent households, but that includes those with other adults present, and the microdata shows an equal number of single-parent households with a single adult and multiple adults.)
Further restricting to single parent with 2 children, exactly, gets you down to 2.1 million households.
Limiting to those with an income of $260,000 or more, leaves you with 9,489 households total, or the top 0.4% of single-parent two-children household incomes. Median income for this demographic is $23,400. 90th percentile is $70k, and 95th percentile is $94k.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323689604578220132665726040.html#project%3DWEALTH0105%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive
How Much Will Your Taxes Jump?
85% of the single-parent 2-children households are headed by a woman (as depicted in the graphic), but of the 9,489 households identified above, only 3,854 (40%) are headed by a woman.
+Paul Fisher, it occurs to me that maybe the retired people were sad because they are "so poor" compared to their neighbors in Infographicville.
As an exercise I took the 100k tax rate and tried tracing back historically to find the nearest year that this rate is lower than the current 28%... And I found that 1941 was the last year that tax rates were this low! (adjusted for inflation)