The top 400 taxpayers..

Over the 16 tax years a total of 6,400 returns were identified for the table. There
were 3,472 different taxpayers representing the top 400 returns of each year. Of these taxpayers, a little
more than 27 percent appear more than once and slightly more than 15 percent appear more than twice
(see columns 2 and 3). In any given year, on average, about 40 percent of the returns were filed by
taxpayers that are not in any of the other 15 years (see columns 4 and 5). In each year, 7 (or 1.75
percent) of the returns are for taxpayers who can be found in all 16 years. Thus, the data shown in the
table mostly represent a changing group of taxpayers over time, rather than a fixed group of taxpayers.

...it's not really the top 400 earning households, it's more like a pool of the top 4,000 earning households, out of whom 400 appear to occupy the top spots in a given year. Increasingly, it's more like a pool of the top 20,000 to 40,000 households around the world who are involved in the more or less loose networks or global community of the superrich.


Most of these entities get to show whatever US income they like. They have a leeway unimaginable to most of us in the ability to defer income, reinvest it prior to taxation, show revenue as loss, show revenue in other countries, put it into their own foundations, or shift it around different institutions. (One part of an empire appears to lend money to a separate unit that is also part of the empire. Or, at the extreme, one part of an empire bets on the failure of another which runs a speculative plunder scam for a few years and then predictably goes under - the Goldman-Sachs/AIG model.)

And just plain hide it.

The assessed values of assets like multiple large real estate holdings can vary by hundreds of millions from year to year. The main flows of cash can be kept offshore and in foundations, where many of the true levers of power lie, largely unaccounted. Control of a variety of corporate entities translates into a control of a far larger multiple in assets than those that appear as individual wealth. Ultimately this class (top half percent at most) also owns the largest voting shares in the big banks and corporations (in US and increasingly worldwide as a single global class). Thus they own and can control the majority of the economy.

The absolute largest fortunes are unlikely to appear on this list. They are older money that has diversified into many holdings and is administered by foundations or obscure structures of holding companies owning holding companies. These complexes (or "empires") maintain whole tribes descended from robber barons, but generally there is one monarch or small group actually running the empire at any given time (e.g., for the Rockefellers over the last half-century that would have been David). They rise and fall, but generally maintain stability through the generations. They can reach more easily into politics in the guise of charitable and political institutions (from the Koch complex on the "screw everyone" right financing the Teabaggers, to the Rockefellers on the "noblesse-oblige" right financing ostensible social initiatives, which bizarrely is called "liberal").

Some on the top 400 list of income earners are relatively trivial fortunes of the moment garnered from single-source successes (sports, pop/movie stars, overnight Internet fortunes). These may not yet have diversified and institutionalized themselves via foundations and the like. They may be household names, but they don't have the power yet of the established empires. These occasionally crash and burn. They also provide a spectacular version of the life of the rich that helps to divert attention from the majority of the rich. Instead of Mellons or some demented European aristocrats dating back to the Hohenzollerns, people think the world's owners are Tiger Woods and Tom Cruise.

Recently we saw how the Gates fortune diversified and institutionalized itself for the next century. The Gates were able to present this logical business move as "giving away their money." This is the classic process by which robber barons appear to turn into "philanthropists," perhaps the most important PR term ever invented by the well-paid propagandists of the super-rich. (If it's a give-away, how is it that a century later most of the supposedly given-up fortunes are still around, telling you they're bringing you NPR and PBS for free?)

And all that still doesn't account for the shadow world of the multinational spook and criminal industries (arms, drugs, money laundering, smuggling, bust-outs, etc.) or the religious enterprises ("churches") who get to evade taxation and accounting and accumulate vast fortunes while having an enormous impact in shaping politics and society to their advantage.

Finally, even for the large portion of the total income tax collected that they do pay, you can be certain that the superrich get more back in the way of corporate welfare and other government services:

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