The Upper East Side pays more in federal income taxes than any other neighborhood in the nation, a new Bloomberg report reveals. 29,820 individual returns were filed from the 10021 zip code in 2008, 93 percent of which were from households making more than $200,000 a year, adding up to a $2.85 billion payout to the IRS.
Unsurprisingly (New York City is so expensive, it's on this list three times) 9 of 10 of the most taxed neighborhoods in the country are in the NYC metro area.
Bloomberg takes a look at some of the superrich living in Manhattan:
General Electric Co. Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt owns a condominium in the 10022 zip code, which covers the East 50s in Manhattan. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein lives in zip code 10023, which covers part of the Upper West Side. Citigroup Inc. CEO Vikram Pandit owns an apartment across from the Museum of Natural History in zip code 10024.
Jeff T. Blau, president of real estate developer the Related Cos. owns a residence in 10028, which also was the residence of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(Also, let's not forget a certain billionaire mayor, and Bloomberg magazine namesake, who lives in the Upper East Side.)
"We're subsidizing the slackers in the rest of the country," Mitchell L. Moss, an urban policy professor at New York University's Wagner School, told Bloomberg, arguing that the top '1 percent' of the nation's income bracket doesn't need to be taxed more, as Occupy Wall Street advocates. "This is the most productive part of the United States of America, in terms of taxes paid."
An Occupy Wall Streeter countered Moss by saying the local share of taxes paid "is irrelevant and a distortion of the fact that as a percentage, wealthy people pay far less as a portion of their earnings."
A report The Congressional Budget Office last month that after-tax income for the richest 1 percent of U.S. households grew 275 percent between 1979 and 2007 and for the lowest 20 percent, after- tax income grew 18 percent over the same period.