Americans who report more than $200,000 in annual adjusted gross income may also skimp on retirement savings when the economy tanks.
Justin Bryan, an economist at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), has written about the latest data on “high-income tax returns” in an article published in the the latest IRS Statistics of Income Bulletin.
Bryan presents data from 2008, when the recession had just started to roll in and many individuals had started out thinking they were having a good year.
In 2010, Bryan wrote a similar article based on 2007 high-income tax return data.
The number of taxpayers reporting $200,000 or more in adjusted gross income fell 3.5% between 2007 and 2008, to 4.4 million, and, mainly because of a 45% drop in income from sales of capital assets, those taxpayers’ total income fell 14%, to $2.5 trillion.