From the technological Olympus of Silicon Valley to the urban canyons of Wall Street, a narrow club of vastly wealthy plutocrats sits on a ballooning share of the nation’s resources. One percent of Americans at the apex of the economy are hoarding over 31% of the nation’s total wealth, a cool $55tn in net worth.
Getting them to share with the rest of society, to fund redistribution or pay for public goods, is proving pretty much impossible. Their ability to move resources around, hide profit across jurisdictions, and minimize income to hoard wealth until they die appears to put them beyond the reach of taxation.
One recent research paper found that the country’s richest 384 oligarchs paid only 24% of their economic income in 2025, compared with 30% for the average taxpayer. And not all of them are getting top notch tax advice. Reporting by ProPublica revealed that some of the richest Americans – like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg – live largely tax free.
Here’s how it works: They pay no taxes because they own the government. So we pay taxes and give them our money.
Then they take our money and and use it to fund their terrible ideas that usually just fucking crash and burn and tank the entire fucking economy. So then they need more money. So you continue to pay more money, and they take your money. Now they have more money.
But we can’t ask them to contribute money to fund public services let alone their own harebrained schemes because “Something something… Milton Friedman… Blah, blah, blah Hayek and the road to Serfdom, and the CIA is busy defending our freedom, yada, yada, yada.”