This is a graph of the actual income distribution in the US. This is split into 35,000 buckets of $100,000, which is what you need to get the full scale of the range. As you can see, the small sliver at 0 is 99.9999% of the US wage earners.
Note that the x-axis in the Social Security Administration buckets are deceptive because they do not use uniform scaling, so greatly misrepresent orders of magnitude.
This graph has uniform scaling. Each bar represents the people up with incomes in the $10k bucket range up to the current x-axis label. The last bucket is the number of people with incomes $200,000 and greater.
This graph has uniform scaling. Each bar represents the people up with incomes in the $50k bucket range up to the current x-axis label. The last bucket is the number of people with incomes $250,000 and greater.
Each bar represents the people up with incomes in the $100k bucket range up to the current x-axis label. The last bucket is the number of people with incomes $500,000 and greater. 92% of the wage earners are $100k or less.
The one thin bar on the left is almost every single American. Each bar represents the people up with incomes in the $100k bucket range up to the current x-axis label. This is the full range and shows you how far away the elite are, which is usually not properly visualized in truncated data-sets. This also doesnt show the full range. This only goes until $50 million, and the graph should really be 20 times longer.
The one thin bar on the left is almost every single American. Each bar represents the people up with incomes in the $100k bucket range up to the current x-axis label. This is the full range and shows you how far away the elite are, which is usually not properly visualized in truncated data-sets. This also doesnt show the full range. This only goes until $50 million, and the graph should really be 20 times longer.
I encourage you to go dive in to the underlying data here.
View Data for Underlying Google Spreadsheet
I've organized and compiled a lot of the data into one spreadsheet and formatted it in a consistent way.
Social Security Administration Wage Data from 2014
Income Data from the US Census
Income Data from the US Census, Male data
Income Data from the US Census, Female data
Jeremy Keeshin
@jkeesh on Twitter