Our Handy Calculator Lets You Pretend You’re a 1-Percenter For a Day

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Do you ever wonder what your income would be like if it had grown as fast as the average investment banker’s since 1960? Well, wonder no more! Click here, enter your current salary, and our handy-dandy calculator will tell you how much you’d be making today if ordinary incomes had gone up as fast as the top 1 percent.

Now, before you ask, no, it’s not realistic to think that everyone’s income could rise as fast as the superwealthy’s has. Still, this calculator provides a concrete sense of what a 270 percent increase really means. When you hear that the head of Goldman Sachs used to make $20 million and now makes $75 million, it just seems like two ginormous numbers. When you find out that a similar growth rate means that you would be making, say, $150,000 instead of $50,000, it kind of brings it all home.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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