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.
Ineffective, half measure that achieves nothing by itself. Rearranging deck chairs on the titanic doesn’t fix the problem that the existence of billionaires is itself an abomination of a broken economic system. Some inequality is inevitable. Inequality that extreme is evidence of dysfunction. The emotional appeal is simply a tool to build public support for a naturally healthy check on systemic abuse. I’m not taking your bait of deriding emotion. People should be passionate about economic justice. Right wing fear mongers wield emotion like a cudgel while whining like children about the left being bleeding hearts. Enough. You are claiming to be “Rational” while ignoring that a tax on wealth is the only way to re-balance a system so far from free market it makes the excesses of feudal mercantilism look nearly egalitarian. If you believe hard work should count for something, wealth concentration needs limits or you believe that human effort and skill don’t have value. Ironically, your investment income tax could be the most effective tool to deter capital flight if used right, but without a wealth tax, its just bread and circuses while human dignity is further degraded by the degenerate rich.
the broken system is direct evil corrupting social governance. Money=speech means money= fraud, theft, terrorism, genocide. But it is the latter application of money that is evil rather than money. It is cause for liberating the evil from their money. Your view is simply dead wrong.
The only path to wealth is accumulated propensity to savings. Extremely large yacht and epstein island orgy budgets, and MC hammer entourage hookers and blow, is wealth avoidance path. These lifestyle choices are the only path to trickle down, but you might hate them too, perhaps for the one trick “billionaire haters” hate.