19% of Americans thought they would benefit from tax cuts for the top 1%

[No Elephants]

It's a slow news day, so I thought I would find a story about something I had heard recently, namely that 25% of Americans think they are in the top 1%.

That exact premise turned out to be an urban legend.


However, I did find this, which is close enough:

An October 2000 Time-CNN news poll showed that 19 percent of Americans thought that they were in the high income group that would benefit from proposed tax cuts - defined as roughly the top 1 percent of the distribution.

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2003/0623useconomics_graham.aspx

This could mean that a significant portion of us are clueless and/or lie to pollsters, neither of which possibilities I discount.

Or, it could have something to do with illusory superiority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority

In a related story, I once heard that more nearsighted people tend to think of themselves as attractive, when compared with the rest of the population.