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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42481 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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at an annual salary at least 2X the American average income (something like $250k)

The American average income is $125k a year?

Total personal income (including income from dividends and asset sales) divided by the workforce is something like $150k. But then you want to take out imputed rent from the Personal Income number, and also maybe include seniors earning income as well in the divisor. The best way to do the calculation would be total aggregate income as reported to the tax authorities, divided by number of people with taxable income.

But lots of those dividends and asset sales are from retired people, so you are overestimating average income very substantially when you divide by the workforce. One approach would be to look at BLS CEX survey, which has annual average household income of $102k in 2023, with 1.3 earners, so really more like $78k per earner, which is in line with the income per earner for the 80-90th percentile. Top decile income is $168k, so we are probably not getting to $125k per earner until about the 90th percentile. (https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm)

Or you can look at average personal income directly, which gives only $67k in 2024, though I agree that this one is too low because it is everyone 14 and up. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N

$125k seems way too high as an estimate of average income, and $250k is an extremely high salary. I would think a more appropriate threshold would be around $175k. Though I am fairly confused on why a numerical limit on visas would be needed with high salary thresholds and required time commitments, which are already ensuring that you're only bringing in pretty rare abilities.

But lots of those dividends and asset sales are from retired people, so you are overestimating average income very substantially when you divide by the workforce.

Yeah, it would be better to divide by total people with taxable income, to include the retirees.

I think the Census and BLS surveys have problems, I'm not sure if they include dividend/asset income, and I've also heard they cap the income recorded for privacy issues (because high earners are rare enough that if they were reported, it would deanonymize the data)

You want to include dividend/corporate profit income as part of the average income calculation, because the whole idea is to put a floor on how much the owners of capital can push down wages using immigration.

It seems like it would be more that sample size starts to get small at crazy high earners and that response rate is probably pretty low for extremely highly paid people. I'm also not sure what privacy issue there is when the max granularity is top 10% of households - this is roughly 30 million people or whatever.

We can also look at the CPS and start to get a lot closer to the question of "What is the normal income for working people in the US?", as there is a specific category of 18+, full-time. Average total money income was $96k in 2024, which seems pretty reasonable to me as an estimate. This sounds to me like it would also include that investment income you are looking for, though I don't think I agree that this should be included for the purpose of this exercise since the idea seems like it is to ensure that a prospective immigrant worker truly is valuable to a company and not easily replaced by a domestic worker with up to double the average earning power... is your idea on including all income to capture things like stock options as compensation or something? Even a 100% average threshold if using $96k would go a long way to fixing the problem of H1Bs frequently going to mediocre-tier workers. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc/pinc-02.html

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