Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/170

156 This analysis indicates that figure as the maximum limit of possibility without, however, giving us any positive evidence as to what the percentage really is.

Too much emphasis can not be put upon this being the maximum limit of possibility. Instead of “the rich” owning all of certain classes of real estate, to the aggregate value of 56.4 billion dollars, it will subsequently appear that their receipts from rentals capitalize at only about 6$1/2$, billion. It will appear, moreover, that instead of 43 billion in industrial property the dividends received by them capitalize at only about 35$1/2$ billion dollars.

Fortunately we may approach this subject in quite a different way and one that is more positive. In 1916 there were 437,000 income tax payers, among whom the number of farmers was negligible. The year 1916 was not one of extraordinary abnormality in the light of what we subsequently witnessed, the general index number of that year being only about 125. Assuming that the 437,000 income tax payers were all heads of families and that their average family comprised four persons we shall account for 1,748,000 people out of a total population which is estimated at 101,722,000 for the middle of 1916. In other words the income tax payers represented 1.7 per cent of the total population on the assumption that they were all heads of families, which of course is the maximum that can be assumed.

These tax payers reported among other things their income from rents, interest and dividends. We may reckon that gross rentals averaged 10 per cent of the value of the property from which derived. We may reasonably conjecture that interest averaged 5 per