It is well-known that US wealth inequality is now at record spreads, thanks to five (and counting) years of Fed-mediated wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the superrich (while placating the lower social strata with distracting welfare trinkets and EBT). Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the following chart courtesy of just released data by the Social Security administration showing the net compensation breakdown by income bucket for America's 153.6 million workers.
As an aside, in 2012 the average wage was $42,498.21, while the median one was far lower, ot $27,519.10.
But that is a broad average. Narrowing the data down, is what we have done in the chart below which shows that in 2012, the poorest 23.3 million working Americans, who earned between $0.01 and $4,999.99 at an average net comp of $2,024.79, earned a total of $47.2 billion. And on the other end, we looked at the richest 2,915 Americans who earned $10 million or over in the past year, an average of $22 million per worker, and cumulatively, some $64.3 billion.
In brief: in the past year, the poorest 23.3 million Americans earned 36% less than the richest 2,915 Americans (and less than twice more than the richest 166). Needless to say, this excludes wealth from capital and asset appreciation, usually a benefit reserved exclusively for the latter; it also excludes the amount of taxes paid by either of these two income extremes.
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Source: Social Security [3] [3]