THE 'OFFENSE' BUSINESS CONTINUES TO BOOM

The U.S. government is still spending... and "offense" contractors are still raking in billions.

A little over a year ago, we noted how the U.S. is involved in so many foreign wars that defense contractors should be called "offense" contractors. We also noted how many folks warned against investing in this industry... due to an expected reduction in government spending. But today's chart shows this hasn't been the case at all...

Our chart displays the performance of "offense" contractors Northrop Grumman (NOC) and Lockheed Martin (LMT) over the past two years. They produce things like jet fighters, missiles, radar systems, and unmanned aerial drones. They rely almost entirely on government spending.

And as you can see, the government is still spending plenty of money on offense. Shares of both Northrop and Lockheed are up about 100% over the past two years – and nearly 80% since our first note. Last week, both stocks hit new all-time highs. Despite claims to the contrary, no cutbacks are affecting these stocks.

Tom Brady Could’ve Been The Tom Brady Of Merrill Lynch

A Stubborn NYC Tenant Held Out For An Absolutely Insane Amount Of Money

There are many valid arguments for and against the concept of rent control. Generally speaking, if you live in a city that has rent control, there are strict rules to how much your rent can be raised every year. For someone looking to rent for a long time, rent control is the greatest thing ever. Your goal should be to lock in a lease at an apartment you absolutely love, then never leave. My neighbors are an elderly couple who have lived in their apartment for over 20 years. They currently pay $700 a month for an awesome apartment that would easily rent for $2500 if it was on Craigslist tomorrow. Their landlord is essentially losing $1800 every month. Another major downside for rent-controlled landlords is that it's basically impossible to kick tenants out. 

This can be a real problem for an owner who is interested in remodeling or demolishing the entire building. The building owner either has to be patient enough to wait for the current tenants to move on their own… or die. If time is of the essence, there's one other option to get tenants to leave: Pay them. And in a city like New York, where real estate is more precious than gold, paying off tenants can be an extremely expensive endeavor. Then there's the story of Herbert J. Sukenik. Herb Sukenik held out for an absolutely insane amount of money to finally vacate his dingy 350 square foot Central Park apartment. It's the most money ever paid to get a single tenant to leave an apartment in New York, possibly the world.

Stubborn NYC Tenant

Herbert Sukenik was born in the Bronx, New York in 1930. He attended Cornell University where he earned an undergraduate degree in physics. He then stayed at Cornell to earn both a masters in physics and a Ph.D. By all accounts, Herb was brilliant. He was also a bit of a social outcast. He worked for General Electric for a while then at Martin Company in their Space Systems division. In 1974, Herbert, who had become somewhat of a recluse, rented a tiny 350 square foot apartment in the Mayflower Hotel building. He never married and seemingly had no friends or family. He basically lived like a hermit for the next three decades.

The Mayflower Hotel building sat on what was arguably the most valuable and highly coveted real estate in the world. Located at 15 Central Park West, the building was situated perfectly for someone to build luxury condos that would fetch tens of millions of dollars apiece. Possibly more. Seeing the obvious potential this property presented, in 2004 the entire building was purchased by real estate tycoons Arthur and Will Zeckendorf for $401 million.


The Zeckendorf brothers quickly began the process of paying off each one of the current tenants to move. Many of the early tenants accepted the first offer: $650,000. That left just a few holdouts. Those early birds should have held out longer because the move-out offer was raised to a mind boggling $1 million. All the remaining holdouts accepted, except one: Herb Sukenik.

At first, Herb offered to vacate his unit if the Zeckendorfs bought him a 2200 square foot, two bedroom apartment in a building nearby, then rent it back to him for $1 a month, for the rest of his life. The Zeckendorfs agreed. But then Herb suddenly backed out. Herb probably realized he was the lone holdout and these developers had very deep pockets. He demanded money. Lots and lots of money. Flabbergasted and unwilling to be held hostage, the Zeckendorfs began demolishing the building anyway. They hoped to drive Herb out from all the construction hassle and noise. Herbert was undeterred.


After living in a construction zone for over a year, Herbert's stubbornness finally paid off in 2005. Admitting defeat, the Zeckendorfs caved and made an offer Herbert could not (and did not) refuse. In order to finally get Herbert to leave his decrepit 350 square foot apartment, they offered him a one time cash buyout of… get ready for it… $17 million. That is by far the most money ever paid to get a single tenant to leave a New York City apartment. It's probably the most money ever paid to get anyone to leave any apartment. But it gets better. Not only did the Zeckendorfs agree to give Herb Sukenik $17 million cash, they also agreed to let him live in a $2 million apartment on Central Park South where he will pay $1 a month in rent for the rest of his life.

$17 million plus a $2 million apartment basically free for life! This guy is my idol! With Herbert finally gone, the Zeckendorfs were finally clear to completely remodel the Mayflower Hotel pretty much from scratch. They sunk $1 billion into the building and turned it into what is now the most expensive and highly coveted address in all of New York City. Today, "15 CPW", as it is called, features a completely private driveway hidden from paparazzi, a cinema and 14,000 square foot gym that has a 75 foot pool. A one bedroom apartment averages $7 million. Two bedrooms $12 million. Three bedrooms $15-$30 million. Four bedrooms (only one available) $60 million. Five bedrooms, (only two available) $65 million and up. Current tenants include Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Sting, Jeff Gordon, Alex Rodriguez and Denzel Washington.

 By Brian Warner on March 7, 2014

The First Trillion-Dollar Startup

In 1957, eight entrepreneurs decided to do something that seemed crazy. They launched a new tech company called Fairchild Semiconductor in a small town south of San Francisco. The entrepreneurs had a difficult start, but Fairchild eventually became the first major computer chip company in the region. 

Although many people are familiar with Fairchild’s success, few know the full extent of its impact. During the last year, our team at Endeavor Insight has traced the story of Fairchild and gathered intriguing new data. We uncovered something that was quite surprising: if the value Fairchild created is measured in today’s dollars, we believe the firm would qualify as the first trillion dollar startup in the world.

Fairchild’s Launch and Early Success 

The achievements of Fairchild’s co-founders are even more impressive when you consider where they occurred. The San Francisco Bay Area is now a thriving tech hub, but it was a very different place in the mid-1950s. At that time, there were no venture capital investors in the region. Stanford University did not produce any of the major research on computer chip components and immigrants made up only a small percentage of the population.

As the chart below illustrates, the San Francisco area was far behind other U.S. cities in the development of the transistor companies that made up the early computer chip industry. No one expected the region to become a hub for these technology businesses.

Seven of the eight co-founders of Fairchild had recently moved to the San Francisco area from cities with more established transistor firms and investors. Three of these entrepreneurs – Jay Last, Bob Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts – had earned PhDs from MIT in Boston. Eugene Kleiner and Julius Blank were engineers in New York City, and Jean Hoerni and Gordon Moore had worked at Caltech near Los Angeles. (The final co-founder, Victor Grinich, was a former researcher and PhD student at Stanford.)

They leveraged their professional networks in these cities to find two key supporters who helped them raise capital and sign contracts with their first customer. These connections set them on the path to success. After just three years, Fairchild’s annual revenues were over $20 million. By the mid-1960s, the group had invented a new product, the integrated circuit, and was generating $90 million in annual sales. Yet, this was only the beginning of the co-founders’ accomplishments.

The Fairchild Valley 

As Fairchild started to grow, employees began to leave the firm to launch new spin-off businesses. Many of these firms also grew quickly, inspiring other employees still working at the company.

“You got these guys leaving and starting companies and the companies are running, working,” a former manager recalled. “You get a look around and look in the mirror and say, ‘Well, you know, how about you? What are you going to do?’”

The eight co-founders supported a number of these new businesses. Kleiner encouraged an employee to start a company that made the glass components Fairchild used in its manufacturing process. Noyce served on the board of Applied Materials, a local electronics equipment manufacturer, and mentored the company’s young founder.

It wasn’t long before the entrepreneurs at Fairchild began to create their own spin-off firms. “That experience of starting this company and watching it grow – I thought I’d like to do that again,” recalled Last. In 1961, he partnered with three of his Fairchild co-founders to create Amelco, a new business that produced specialized devices. Two other co-founders, Moore and Noyce, left Fairchild several years later to start the computer chip firm Intel.

The eight co-founders also reinvested their capital into a number of new local startups. In 1961, four of them helped to fund the Bay Area’s first venture capital firm. Another founder provided the financing that helped a former employee launch AMD. When Moore and Noyce launched Intel, the other six co-founders helped to fund the new business.

The growth of these new companies started to reshape the region. In just 12 years, the co-founders and former employees of Fairchild generated more than 30 spin-off companies and funded many more. By 1970, chip businesses in the San Francisco area employed a total of 12,000 people.

“That’s part of the legacy of Fairchild that maybe doesn’t get the attention it should,” Moore has said. “Every time we came up with a new idea, we spawned two or three companies trying to exploit it.”

The achievements of these companies eventually attracted attention. In 1971, a journalist named Don Hoefler wrote an article about the success of computer chip companies in the Bay Area. The firms he profiled all produced chips using silicon and were located in a large valley south of San Francisco. Hoefler put these two facts together to create a new name for the region: Silicon Valley.

Hoefler’s article and the name he coined have become quite famous, but there’s a critical part of his analysis that is often overlooked: Almost all of the silicon chip companies he profiled can be traced back to Fairchild and its co-founders.

Adding Up Fairchild’s Impact

Fairchild’s success continued to fuel the growth of companies in the Valley in the years after Hoefler’s article was published. When Steve Jobs was starting his career in the 1970s, he often rode his motorcycle to Noyce’s house and spent hours listening to the older entrepreneur’s advice. According to Noyce’s wife, Jobs also had a unique habit of calling their home around midnight. The first investor in Apple was also a former Fairchild employee.

The 92 public companies that can be traced back to Fairchild are now worth about $2.1 trillion, which is more than the annual GDP of Canada, India, or Spain.

In 1972, Kleiner co-founded the venture firm Kleiner Perkins, which has gone on to invest in hundreds of companies, including Google and Symantec. While Kleiner was starting Kleiner Perkins, a former Fairchild executive named Don Valentine was launching another venture firm called Sequoia Capital, which has also invested in several hundred companies, such as Cisco and LinkedIn.

Many of the companies funded by these two firms were led by entrepreneurs and executives who have gone on to become important investors. Companies like Sun Microsystems, Netscape, and PayPal spawned investment firms such as Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, and 500 Startups.

Our team at Endeavor Insight recently worked to quantify the impact of Fairchild Semiconductor and its co-founders. We identified over 130 Bay Area tech companies that were trading on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. Our analysis indicates that about 70 percent of these firms can be traced directly back to the founders and employees of Fairchild.

The total impact of these businesses is staggering. The 92 public companies that can be traced back to Fairchild are now worth about $2.1 trillion, which is more than the annual GDP of Canada, India, or Spain. These companies also employ over 800,000 people.

If we look beyond the publicly traded businesses listed above, Fairchild’s impact is even greater. In total, we can trace over 2,000 companies back to the firm’s eight co-founders. This includes companies such as Instagram, Palantir, Pixar, Nest, WhatsApp, Yammer and YouTube.

The story of Fairchild illustrates how entrepreneurs can reshape their local communities. When successful founders generate new spin-off companies, mentor others and act as early-stage investors it increases the opportunities available to new generations of entrepreneurs. The intellectual, social, and financial capital that successful founders reinvest into new companies strengthens the local entrepreneurship community and enables successful hubs, like the original Silicon Valley, to develop.

Fairchild trades on the NASDAQ with a market capitalization of around $2 billion. However, the full value of the company can only be measured by tracing the way the firm’s success has been reinvested into new founders and companies. By this measure, Fairchild is the Valley’s first trillion-dollar startup. It might even be the most important entrepreneurial company of the last hundred years.

Posted Jul 26, 2014 by Rhett Morris

Editor’s note: Rhett Morris is the director of Endeavor Insight, the research arm of Endeavor, a nonprofit that supports more than 900 entrepreneurs in 20 countries.

China is reportedly thinking about building a bullet train that reaches America

China already has the world’s longest high-speed rail network. And the country aims to more than double the amount of high-speed railway by 2015 from the existing 10,000 km (6,000 miles) to 19,000 km—and eventually 25,000km by 2020. Officials want to build everything from an undersea railway tunnel from the Chinese shore to Taiwan—twice the length of the Channel Tunnel between France and Britain—to 1,776 km of high-speed rail through isolated deserts in the west of the country.

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In that context, it almost seems feasible that China would be considering a recently discussed project—13,000 km of high-speed railway that crosses from China to Russia and North America that includes a 200-km tunnel under the Bering strait. A railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering told the Beijing Times that officials are having discussions about the project. 

A railway from China to the US might bring the two countries closer, at least geographically, but it would be an absurd project. China is already spending an estimated $32 billion on an underwater tunnel that measures just 123 km long. And officials estimate that 1,776 km of railway being built from Lanzhou in the western province of Gansu to Xinjiang will cost about $24 billion, which is cheap compared to China’s previous high-speed rail projects.

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If those costs are any comparison, the so-called “China-Russia-Canada-America” line could cost north of $200 billion—$52 billion to construct an undersea tunnel to cross the Bering strait and $172 billion for the rest of the railway across land. That would account for well over half of China’s already massive high-speed rail budget of $300 billion. China may be one of the best examples of countries that love mega-infrastructure projects, but even this may be too much.

50 Reasons We're Living Through the Greatest Period in World History

By Morgan Housel 

I recently talked to a doctor who retired after a 30-year career. I asked him how much medicine had changed during the three decades he practiced. "Oh, tremendously," he said. He listed off a dozen examples. Deaths from heart disease and stroke are way down. Cancer survival rates are way up. We're better at diagnosing, treating, preventing, and curing disease than ever before. Consider this: 

In 1900, 1% of American women giving birth died in labor. Today, the five-year mortality rate for localized breast cancer is 1.2%. Being pregnant 100 years ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer is today. The problem, the doctor said, is that these advances happen slowly over time, so you probably don't hear about them. If cancer survival rates improve, say, 1% per year, any given year's progress looks low, but over three decades, extraordinary progress is made. 

Compare health-care improvements with the stuff that gets talked about in the news -- NBC anchor Andrea Mitchell interrupted a Congresswoman last month to announce Justin Bieber's arrest -- and you can understand why Americans aren't optimistic about the country's direction. 

We ignore the really important news because it happens slowly, but we obsess over trivial news because it happens all day long. Expanding on my belief that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, here are 50 facts that show we're actually living through the greatest period in world history. 

1. U.S. life expectancy at birth was 39 years in 1800, 49 years in 1900, 68 years in 1950, and 79 years today. The average newborn today can expect to live an entire generation longer than his great-grandparents could. 

2. A flu pandemic in 1918 infected 500 million people and killed as many as 100 million. In his book The Great Influenza, John Barry describes the illness as if "someone were hammering a wedge into your skull just behind the eyes, and body aches so intense they felt like bones breaking." Today, you can go to Safeway and get a flu shot. It costs 15 bucks. You might feel a little poke. 

3. In 1950, 23 people per 100,000 Americans died each year in traffic accidents, according to the Census Bureau. That fell to 11 per 100,000 by 2009. If the traffic mortality rate had not declined, 37,800 more Americans would have died last year than actually did. In the time it will take you to read this article, one American is alive who would have died in a car accident 60 years ago. 

 4. In 1949, Popular Mechanics magazine made the bold prediction that someday a computer could weigh less than 1 ton. I wrote this sentence on an iPad that weighs 0.73 pounds. 

5. The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51. Enjoy your golden years -- your ancestors didn't get any of them. 

 6. In his 1770s book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote: "It is not uncommon in the highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne 20 children not to have 2 alive." Infant mortality in America has dropped from 58 per 1,000 births in 1933 to less than six per 1,000 births in 2010, according to the World Health Organization. There are about 11,000 births in America each day, so this improvement means more than 200,000 infants now survive each year who wouldn't have 80 years ago. That's like adding a city the size of Boise, Idaho, every year. 

7. America averaged 20,919 murders per year in the 1990s, and 16,211 per year in the 2000s, according to the FBI. If the murder rate had not fallen, 47,000 more Americans would have been killed in the last decade than actually were. That's more than the population of Biloxi, Miss. 

8. Despite a surge in airline travel, there were half as many fatal plane accidents in 2012 than there were in 1960, according to the Aviation Safety Network. 

 9. No one has died from a new nuclear weapon attack since 1945. If you went back to 1950 and asked the world's smartest political scientists, they would have told you the odds of seeing that happen would be close to 0%. You don't have to be very imaginative to think that the most important news story of the past 70 years is what didn't happen. Congratulations, world. 

 10. People worry that the U.S. economy will end up stagnant like Japan's. Next time you hear that, remember that unemployment in Japan hasn't been above 5.6% in the past 25 years, its government corruption ranking has consistently improved, incomes per capita adjusted for purchasing power have grown at a decent rate, and life expectancy has risen by nearly five years. I can think of worse scenarios. 

11. Two percent of American homes had electricity in 1900. J.P Morgan (the man) was one of the first to install electricity in his home, and it required a private power plant on his property. Even by 1950, close to 30% of American homes didn't have electricity. It wasn't until the 1970s that virtually all homes were powered. Adjusted for wage growth, electricity cost more than 10 times as much in 1900 as it does today, according to professor Julian Simon. 

12. According to the Federal Reserve, the number of lifetime years spent in leisure -- retirement plus time off during your working years -- rose from 11 years in 1870 to 35 years by 1990. Given the rise in life expectancy, it's probably close to 40 years today. Which is amazing: The average American spends nearly half his life in leisure. If you had told this to the average American 100 years ago, that person would have considered you wealthy beyond imagination. 

 13. We are having a national discussion about whether a $7.25-per-hour minimum wage is too low. But even adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage was less than $4 per hour as recently as the late 1940s. The top 1% have captured most of the wage growth over the past three decades, but nearly everyone has grown richer -- much richer -- during the past seven decades. 

 14. In 1952, 38,000 people contracted polio in America alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 2012, there were fewer than 300 reported cases of polio in the entire world. 

15. From 1920 to 1949, an average of 433,000 people died each year globally from "extreme weather events." That figure has plunged to 27,500 per year, according to Indur Goklany of the International Policy Network, largely thanks to "increases in societies' collective adaptive capacities." 

16. Worldwide deaths from battle have plunged from 300 per 100,000 people during World War II, to the low teens during the 1970s, to less than 10 in the 1980s, to fewer than one in the 21st century, according to Harvard professor Steven Pinker. "War really is going out of style," he says. 

 17. Median household income adjusted for inflation was around $25,000 per year during the 1950s. It's nearly double that amount today. We have false nostalgia about the prosperity of the 1950s because our definition of what counts as "middle class" has been inflated -- see the 34% rise in the size of the median American home in just the past 25 years. If you dig into how the average "prosperous" American family lived in the 1950s, I think you'll find a standard of living we'd call "poverty" today. 

18. Reported rape per 100,000 Americans dropped from 42.3 in 1991 to 27.5 in 2010, according to the FBI. Robbery has dropped from 272 per 100,000 in 1991 to 119 in 2010. There were nearly 4 million fewer property crimes in 2010 than there were in 1991, which is amazing when you consider the U.S. population grew by 60 million during that period. 

19. According to the Census Bureau, only one in 10 American homes had air conditioning in 1960. That rose to 49% in 1973, and 89% today -- the 11% that don't are mostly in cold climates. Simple improvements like this have changed our lives in immeasurable ways. 

 20. Almost no homes had a refrigerator in 1900, according to Frederick Lewis Allan's The Big Change, let alone a car. Today they sell cars with refrigerators in them. 

21. Adjusted for overall inflation, the cost of an average round-trip airline ticket fell 50% from 1978 to 2011, according to Airlines for America. 

 22. According to the Census Bureau, the average new home now has more bathrooms than occupants. 

23. According to the Census Bureau, in 1900 there was one housing unit for every five Americans. Today, there's one for every three. In 1910 the average home had 1.13 occupants per room. By 1997 it was down to 0.42 occupants per room. 

 24. According to professor Julian Simon, the average American house or apartment is twice as large as the average house or apartment in Japan, and three times larger than the average home or apartment in Russia. 

 25. Relative to hourly wages, the cost of an average new car has fallen fourfold since 1915, according to professor Julian Simon. 

26. Google Maps is free. If you think about this for a few moments, it's really astounding. It's probably the single most useful piece of software ever invented, and it's free for anyone to use. 

27. High school graduation rates are at a 40-year high, according to Education Week. 

 28. The death rate from strokes has declined by 75% since the 1960s, according to the National Institutes of Health. Death from heart attacks has plunged, too: If the heart attack survival had had not declined since the 1960s, the number of Americans dying each year from heart disease would be more than 1 million higher than it currently is. 

29. In 1900, African Americans had an illiteracy rate of nearly 45%, according to the Census Bureau. Today, it's statistically close to zero. 

30. People talk about how expensive college is today, but a century ago fewer than one in 20 Americans ever stepped foot in a university. College wasn't an option at any price for some minorities because of segregation just six decades ago. 

31. The average American work week has declined from 66 hours in 1850, to 51 hours in 1909, to 34.8 today, according to the Federal Reserve. Enjoy your weekend. 

 32. Incomes have grown so much faster than food prices that the average American household now spends less than half as much of its income on food as it did in the 1950s. Relative to wages, the price of food has declined more than 90% since the 19th century, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

33. As of March 2013, there were 8.99 million millionaire households in the U.S., according to the Spectrum Group. Put them together and they would make the largest city in the country, and the 18th largest city in the world, just behind Tokyo. We talk a lot about wealth concentration in the United States, but it's not just the very top that has done well. 

34. More than 40% of adults smoked in 1965, according to the Centers for Disease Control. By 2011, 19% did. 

 35. In 1900, 44% of all American jobs were in farming. Today, around 2% are. We've become so efficient at the basic need of feeding ourselves that nearly half the population can now work on other stuff. 

36. One of the reasons Social Security and Medicare are underfunded is that the average American is living longer than ever before. I think this is literally the best problem to have. 

37. In 1940, less than 5% of the adult population held a bachelor's degree or higher. By 2012, more than 30% did, according to the Census Bureau. 

 38. U.S. oil production in September was the highest it's been since 1989, and growth shows no sign of slowing. We produced 57% more oil in America in September 2013 than we did in September 2007. The International Energy Agency projects that America will be the world's largest oil producer as soon as 2015. 

39. The average American car got 13 miles per gallon in 1975, and more than 26 miles per gallon in 2013, according to the Energy Protection Agency. This has an effect identical to cutting the cost of gasoline in half. 

 40. Annual inflation in the United States hasn't been above 10% since 1981 and has been below 5% in 77% of years over the past seven decades. When you consider all the hatred directed toward the Federal Reserve, this is astounding. 

 41. The percentage of Americans age 65 and older who live in poverty has dropped from nearly 30% in 1966 to less than 10% by 2010. For the elderly, the war on poverty has pretty much been won. 

 42. Adjusted for inflation, the average monthly Social Security benefit for retirees has increased from $378 in 1940 to $1,277 by 2010. What used to be a safety net is now a proper pension. 

43. If you think Americans aren't prepared for retirement today, you should have seen what it was like a century ago. In 1900, 65% of men over age 65 were still in the labor force. By 2010, that figure was down to 22%. The entire concept of retirement is unique to the past few decades. Half a century ago, most Americans worked until they died. 

44. From 1920 to 1980, an average of 395 people per 100,000 died from famine worldwide each decade. During the 2000s, that fell to three per 100,000, according to The Economist. 

45. The cost of solar panels has declined by 75% since 2008, according to the Department of Energy. Last I checked, the sun is offering its services for free. 

 46. As recently as 1950, nearly 40% of American homes didn't have a telephone. Today, there are 500 million Internet-connected devices in America, or enough for 5.7 per household. 

47. According to AT&T archives and the Dallas Fed, a three-minute phone call from New York to San Francisco cost $341 in 1915, and $12.66 in 1960, adjusted for inflation. Today, Republic Wireless offers unlimited talk, text, and data for $5 a month. 

48. In 1990, the American auto industry produced 7.15 vehicles per auto employee. In 2010 it produced 11.2 vehicles per employee. Manufacturing efficiency has improved dramatically. 

49. You need an annual income of $34,000 a year to be in the richest 1% of the world, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic's 2010 book The Haves and the Have-Nots. To be in the top half of the globe you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it's $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000. America's poorest are some of the world's richest. 

50. Only 4% of humans get to live in America. Odds are you're one of them. We've got it made. Be thankful. 

source-www.motleyfool.com