You think of the top 1% of income earners and thoughts turn to Bugatis or Bentleys, River Oaks estates and tax shelters.
The Economic Policy Institute looked at state and national income averages and places Texas 11 on the list, considerably behind the big top 3 – New York, Connecticut and Florida. “In the state of Texas you need an annual income of just over $440,000 a year, and relative to the nation that’s about $20,000 more than the national average,” says Mark Price, one of the authors of their study The New Gilded Age: Income Inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County.
The most unequal area of the state is to the west. “The most unequal metropolitan area in Texas is the Midland metropolitan area. In that metro the average income of the Top 1% is $2.9 million dollars,’ Price says. The top 1% in the Midland/Odessa area make 35 times what the bottom 99% make, compared to the state average of 24.2%.
At a national level, it takes a minimum of $421,926 a year to make the Top 1% with an average of $1,316,985.