Matt Yglesias pulls this chart on pre-tax income out of the CBO report on income inequality and what are "the minimum cutoff points were for entry into different American income cohorts."

He comments:

One interesting thing you see here is that the amount of inequality happening at the bottom level is tiny in absolute dollar terms. In real human welfare terms, the difference between living on less then $15,000 (as the bottom quintile does) and earning in the $45,000-$70,000 range (as the middle quintile does) is gigantic. But the extra $40-$50k it takes to move from the bottom quintile to the middle quintile is a very small number of dollars compared to the $110,000 or so it takes to get from the 96th percentile to the 99th percentile. That's just a reminder of the enormous power of redistribution to improve human welfare. [...] Moving consumption opportunities down the income ladder does much more benefit to the people who get the money than it does harm to those at the top.

Which brings to mind this, from Daily Kos member Gaius in his post, A Voice from the 1%.

Here is a secret about rich people: we wouldn't have noticed a 3.5% tax increase. That is not only because there isn't a material difference between having $1 million and $965,000, which is obvious, but also because most of us don't actually know how much money we are going to make in a given year. Most income at that level is the result of profits rather than salary, whether it comes in the form of bonuses, stock options, partnership distributions, dividends or capital gains. Profits are unpredictable and they tend to vary wildly. At my own firm, the general rule of thumb is that if we are within 5% of our budget for the year, everyone is happy and no one complains. A variation of 3.5% is merely a random blip.

The people in the 96th to 99th percentiles aren't even going notice that 3.5 percent, or the change in income that moves them around in that stratosphere. For the bottom percentiles, who can't even imagine earning something like $110K, a 3.5 percent hit to their budget would be devastating, whether it came in the form of losing Medicaid or food stamps or unemployment benefits, or a gimmicky new tax plan.