The idea of 100 being a large number is not new. In the Bible, there is a story about a man who had 100 sheep. He lost one, and he went out and searched for it. The next day he found it, and he was so happy that he called his friends together to celebrate with a feast.

If you have 100 sheep, you probably have plenty of wool, milk and meat. You might even have some money to buy things with. If someone has 100 sheep, they are rich. But what if you have 1 million sheep? How rich would that be? You would never have to worry about losing any of them, because there would always be more where that came from!

In the past few decades there has been a lot of talk about how many people make up 1 percent or even 0.1 percent of the population. These are very small numbers — only 10,000 or 1 million people in all of America — but they are still large enough to make an impact on society as a whole.

The top 1 percent of income earners pay more than 20 percent of all taxes collected by the federal government each year — about $500 billion in 2012 — while earning just over 20 percent of total income

Last modified: October 4, 2022