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.
Their net worths are already made up anyway. It’s all merely speculative. Once we’re all gone, who’s going to be left to remind them that those numbers don’t mean anything?
It’ll be the same circular lending schemes, only instead of self-fellating about becoming trillionaires, they’ll be self-fellating about becoming quadrillionaires. And so on…
They’re like children playing imagination, arguing over whose stick is really “the most powerful sword in the game.” The adults have left the room.
Affluence is a mental illness.