Hundreds of Thousands Make a Million!

Is this a great country, or what? Certainly ultra-high incomes are proliferating. Forbes reports on the latest data here:

A new Internal Revenue Service report shows the rich have been getting richer, and more Americans can properly be called rich.

According to the just released data, 240,000 tax filers reported an adjusted gross income of $1 million or more in 2004, up 33% from the 181,000 millionaire filers in 2003.

Moreover, those with an adjusted gross income of at least $328,049 in 2004 (1% of all income tax filers) reported 19% of all adjusted gross income in 2004, up 2.2 percentage points from 2003. They paid 36.9% of the income tax, up from 34.3% in 2003.

But that old AMT just keeps rolling along. The "minimum tax" brought in $9.5 billion in 2003, $13 billion in 2004 and, by preliminary estimate, $15.9 billion in 2005.