Protesters using an incorrect label of "99 percent"

As much as I appreciate the catchy slogan that is, I am annoyed by the usage "99 percent" to describe the population seriously affected by the ongoing economic crisis.  This is more serious than my irritation with the phrase "buy local" when it ought to be "buy locally."  At least that is a grammar issue, unlike this one which is completely messed up.

We might want to think that it is 99 percent, but if only we stopped to find out where the 99 percent line is. 

American households right at the 99th percentile (that is, the cut-off for the top 1 percent) will earn about $506,553 in cash income this year, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. 

That is right; by chanting "99 percent" the mob is including in the same category those corporate lawyers and Wall Street investment bankers too, when these are, along with a few others, the very people the "99 percent" chanters oppose and detest.

If the definition is based not on incomes but on wealth, then the story is no easier:

The cutoff for the 99th percentile in net worth was $19,167,600 as of 2007, based on this research.
That means, of course, that the bottom 99 percent of Americans includes an awful lot of millionaires.

Surely the protesters are not fighting for more cakes and wine for the millionaires, are they? 

All this because we fail to grasp what income distribution means, and how steep that distribution is at the higher end:

And because we don't get a handle on this--emotionally and rationally--we then walk around with mistaken notions of where we are along this economic continuum:

Poor people consistently overestimated their rank, and rich people consistently underestimated their rank:

 

The authors suggest that this misperception may be related to the types of people respondents interact with, and therefore use as a reference point. If you’re mostly exposed to people earning about as much as you, you’re likely to think your earnings are average.

Now, this is within the United States.  What about our individual standing in the world?

The Global Rich List can help you out: at this site, you can type in your annual income and it will tell you where you rank in the world.  For all the awfully low salary I earn as a college professor at Podunk U., it turns out that I am in the richest 0.9 percent of the world!

Meanwhile, there is this poster going around to describe this global 99 percent perspective:

Even more crappy is this poster--as if Africa is nothing but a continent of starving toddlers.

So, what is my point?  Drop the damn slogans and discuss the problems.  The biggest problem of all, here in the US, is the nasty level of unemployment, with seemingly no end in sight.