More erroneous information posted above.
George, your understanding of AGI is wrong. AGI is the last line on the front page of your tax return — it is AFTER this that the standard deduction and personal exemptions are then applied (on the back page of Form 1040).
Always right, the number is a simple calculation from the data IRS tables, as explained above. But you can do the math from the data in my story: $5,743 times 26 million (tax returns), then divide the product by 60 million (people who are taxpayers and dependents) and then divide that product by 365 days and you will get $7 rounded.
Tax return statistics do not identify people as legal or illegal, immigrant or tenth generation and in any event are not relevant to the story I wrote back 14 months ago.
TomB, we do have excellent data on Social Security income. My report was on what the latest IRS tables show, not on the broader issues you raise, some which I have covered in other articles and in books. I used my 1,116 words to pack in a great deal of information that was relevant to the just released data tables I wrote about.
Read the story, for free, and see the chart, at www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/business/28tax.html
The relevant portion says:
**Analysis of the I.R.S. data by The New York Times found that average reported incomes fell or were virtually flat at the end of the period at every level of income except for the poorest 26 million taxpayers, the bottom fifth. Those impoverished taxpayers made less than $11,166 each in 2004 and had an average income of $5,743, up $135 or 2.4 percent, from the year 2000.
A taxpayer can be a single individual or a married couple. The poorest taxpayers consist of nearly 48 million adults and about 12 million dependent children. This means that the poorest 60 million Americans reported average incomes of less than $7 a day each….
The I.R.S. data does not include the value of government benefits like food stamps, the earned-income tax credit for working families and subsidized medical care.
It also excludes unreported income, which the Treasury Department and the I.R.S. have said is a major and growing problem among the highest-income Americans, especially those who own businesses, invest in stocks and have overseas financial interests.**
As I show above, the math is transparent and as the quoted language shows, people who read the article were informed as to the data limitations.
