This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 8th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Is membership in the top 1% a lifetime appointment or can you lose that status according to Cato

Institute adjunct scholar Don Boudreau membership in the top 1% of income

earners is surprisingly fluid. We spoke yesterday.

A lot of people spurred, I think, by Occupy Wall Street

have been quetching about the top 1%. And they have, I think, in a sense,

conflated people who have high incomes and people who have wealth. And anybody who's read that old book the millionaire next

door knows that there's a difference there's a difference and in many cases there's

a big difference between those two things.

Yeah I mean obviously wealth enables you to earn a high income but the two are different.

Wealth is a stock of things that you either been given, in some cases stolen, or that you've accumulated in the past.

And income is the earnings off of that.

So for example, if someone is given a house or inherits a house from their parents, that

inheritance is not income, it's a stock of wealth that's transferred down to the child.

And so if the people living in the house, you know, not having to pay a mortgage or not having to pay rent,

that's a huge source of benefit, but it doesn't show up in income statistics as a benefit to the people who own that house.

All right, and you've pointed out that even if we grant this idea and talk about just

wealth, there is big overlap between people who have high incomes and people have wealth.

No question.

But there is this, the top 1% has been focused for a lot of people as opposed to the other 99%. What do we know about

this top 1%? Well, the top 1%, first of all you're in a top 1% in the United States if your income is at or over I think it's

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