1 percent of Mitt Romney’s income would not put you in the top 1 percent

at 12:59 PM ET, 01/24/2012

On Twitter this morning, I saw some people saying that if you made 1 percent of what Mitt Romney made in 2010, you would still be in the top one percent.

Unless I’m missing something in his tax return, the math on this doesn’t check out. Mitt Romney made $21.7 million in 2010. One percent of that is $217,000. That’s a lot of money, but it’s about $150,000 less than the $380,000 you needed to qualify for the top one percent in 2010. And though we don’t have Romney’s full tax returns for 2011, he reports that he actually made $20.9 million in 2011 -- about $800,000 less than he made in 2010. So the calculation doesn’t work for that year, either.

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