I think you're missing the mark by putting the blame on morals while ignoring actions such as Reagan dismantling unions and removing accountability from news reporting (IIRC, there used to be a law that news networks have to present a balanced view on any topic). Super PACs were not possible until 2010.

You cannot morally impose the wealthy to support the rest. It has to come through legislation and organization of labor.

Zero disagreement. In fact, I may push it one step further. The wealthy did not just abandon America. They sold modular pieces of America by outsourcing what they could ( China, Taiwan, India.. you name it ) and eroding existing structures at home. There is still not nearly enough hate present for that. OWS was an interesting moment, but it got quietly dismantled as society's opinion turned on it ( by itself a fascinating story in how big banks funded its demise ).

But yeah.. hard work is not rewarded. The funny thing is. The kids see it. They are not dumb ( as much as TikTok trends would suggest otherwise ). The ronin-like approach to working relationship is very visible now and, as a corporate drone, I can't help but be impressed given the near constant propaganda onslaught.

Probably requires incredible amounts of energy to maintain an equilibrium like that over any prolonged periods of time. Maybe a feature of human societies that makes it improbable for any one society/state to dominate over longer stretches of time. Or it could be I just have the US, the UK and the roman empire in mind because I'd need more attention and I'm hallucinating the most probable answer based on my training data and your prompt. Very Cartesian, I know.

I appreciate your sentiment but I have personally observed and been part of a quiet group that is somewhat abandoned now, and was "middle class", and I can say cultural anarchy is not a given.

In fact, if we were to look at the abandoned as an economy of its own, minus the upper income levels, it actually still has a lot of members, and money is a part but does not have to be all of it.

The quiet group to which I refer is a group of people who believe in working together to support each other, and not making a big noise about it. We are finding ways to live working around the current system, and I do think it is gaining support. It takes a mix of support, room/space to experiment and a spirit of partnership first over domination.

FWIW, I'm not anti-capitalist. But I am pro-good life for everyone, and I think the extremes, market failures and inequalities of our current system - well - we can do better.

Because the wealthy provide unlimited value back to the world?

If you have a gap of over 10,000x, then the most likely cause is that the system is broken rather than some humans make the world way better than other ones.

What exactly do you intend to do with infinite wealth? What kind of life do you lead that isn't satisfied by what would be otherwise normal constraints?

I'm asking seriously. I've done this exercise for myself on what I want for my life, and the answer is that I can already afford it, and if we weren't so wasteful with our surplus of food, weren't so corrupted by regulatory capture as to allow companies to charge whatever for essentials, then most people would probably be able to achieve that same level of comfort.

What is it that you or anyone else needs an infinite amount of wealth for?

What's the benefit of infinite wealth? Elon is using his to disrupt democracy in my country

The ceiling should totally be limited.

Unlimited wealth means political power and means to further it.

The floor should also be comfortably high but not to the detriment of the environment for example.

If you are turning the floor to quicksand for everyone else while trying to reach the ceiling, the ceiling should not be high for you.

The ceiling and floor should rise in tandem.

Wealth is power. If the ceiling is unlimited that means power is unlimited, which is incompatible with democracy.

The problem with inequality isn't just that extremely wealthy people exist or that they live really comfortable lives. It's that they use their power to try to control us all. If Elon Musk was just a trillionaire who messed around with cars and rockets and women, there wouldn't be a problem. But he got into politics, and his wealth means his political opinions count for far more than yours or mine, and that is a serious problem. You or I can't destroy a federal agency we don't like or make major foreign policy decisions as a private citizen, but he can.

No, I don't think that's true. That's a delusion people with money tell themselves.

I mean, we can put you in the matrix and you can have that be true if you care zero about the rest of reality. Cypher.

also, social economics has demonstrated what most people care about is their wealth relative to their neighbors so you're going to create poverty whether you like it or not if there's no ceiling.

But is this related to the distributional inequality discussed in the article, or something else?

Isn't that due to the cheapness of communication? When your options were a long-distance phone call or a letter, incoming communication could be treated as if it had some value. When a message costs an amortized fraction of a cent, incoming communication is on average valueless and gets treated accordingly.

3 million out of 300,000,000, sounds like one percent.

Too oblique and vague. What are you trying to say?

The way I see it: Health insurance is actually getting more expensive. Tariffs are making imports more expensive. (Which also makes domestic production more expensive.) The Iran "conflict" was retarded. TFA wasn't really wrong about that stuff. It's obvious.

Edited to add: You edited your post after I published my response. My original comment, which is that you weren't making much sense, is rescinded. Only now what you've written amounts to: "it's not Trump's fault and the outlet is crooked!" which is really just lol. lmao even.

1970. WTF happened in 1970?

Partisan divide on the causes of inequality masks the true reason for widening inequality, and it's a simple matter of math. It's so goddamn simple, but fixing it is REALLY overturning the economy, so the socialists don't want it, and the rich people don't want it either.

The wealthy pay the vast majority of taxes because they make so much more than everyone else.

Completely hilarious argument because the more asymmetrically wealthy the richest get, the larger proportion of taxes they’ll pay. Then they’ll whine some more about paying such a huge portion of taxes.

Anyway, the US government is designed to be inefficient. It is a purposeful safeguard against autocracy and more pedestrian corruption. It will not be as efficient as private enterprise because private enterprise doesn’t need to be accountable to everyone.

Surely government services can and should be more efficient than they are today, but “I’ve managed things more complex than healthcare.gov” is only true in a world of frictionless spherical cows and a bureaucracy-free government of 380 million people — that is to say: not reality.

> The blame is always shifted to the wealthy by these politicians. It still won't fix the problem, if we don't have a better way to spend it.

The wealthy and the politicians are complicit in this. Take healthcare, wealthy insurance middlemen lobby to cripple any form of public healthcare initiative, politicians go along for some scraps and because their healthcare isn't affected. Suddenly, healthcare.gov is unaffordable and doesn't provide quality service even at unaffordable prices, no one is better off except for private insurers and politicians. Bring in the damn guillotines.

We have a class of people voting to get anything that reduces the taxes on their ultra wealth and then a class voting to get anything that keeps the free money from the government flowing. Not a surprise it's not working out.

The vast majority of tax take by the us government is tax on income (person invoke tax and payroll tax), not wealth, thus the wealthy can’t be paying the vast majority of tax

"The wealthy pay the vast majority of taxes in the US by almost every metric."

In a progressive tax system that's the way it is supposed to work. People pay what they can afford to is kind of the point.

Anything less than a progressive tax system means the poor pay more and the rich pay less. Is that what we're advocating for?

There is a fundamental issue when 50% of consumer spending is being done by 10% of the population.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/09/17/top-10-of-earne...

This is the root cause as to why fast food and other companies do not care to keep raising prices, and why fundamentally, even things that "rich people" can enjoy are getting worse, be it media or video games or anything else.

A destruction of the middle class results in a worse society for all, not just the people that earn less, that's not a hard concept to grasp but whatever... I don't think many people will want to change their ways until it is too late.

The wealthy pay more than their share of taxes, if you define "their share" as a percentage of income, but they do not pay the majority of taxes, let alone the vast majority.

The top 1% (which includes a lot of people we'd consider to be merely quite well off rather than wealthy) paid 23.9% of all taxes and 25.5% of federal taxes in 2024. That's while making 20.1% of all income, so it's not a massively unfair burden on them.

https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/

Even if you only look at federal income tax, which is more progressive than other American taxes and thus exaggerates how much the wealthy pay, the top 1% pays 40.4% of the taxes.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

Healthcare.gov was widely discussed in the tech community at the time. People were constantly incredulous at how bad it was and how much it cost. Maybe you forgot, or weren't there, or expect people to still be talking about it over a decade later.

In any case, that's not where the money goes. That kind of waste is almost incomprehensibly large to an individual, but it's insignificant in the federal budget. Social Security was $1.6 trillion last year. Medicare was another trillion, Medicaid was two thirds of a trillion. Nearly all of that spending is paid out to recipients/providers. Overhead is low single-digit percentages of the total. Defense is another trillion. Interest on the debt is another trillion. You could wave a magic wand and make every single project similar to Healthcare.gov free and it wouldn't make a noticeable difference in federal spending.

During what people like you would generally refer to as the "golden age of the US" during the 50s -> 80s, the progressive tax on the wealthiest was around 91%. And they still managed to be insanely wealthy, and the country had lots of burgeoning social programs that benefitted from it.

Why exactly do you feel the need to defend the right to hoard money? What does that extra money do? Buy you a yacht? Buy you a media empire to control propaganda? Buy you a private island for your wealthy friends to "party" on? A measuring stick to satisfy your own incomplete metric of self worth?

What exactly do you need all that money for?

The CEO of XYZ corp might pay more than a worker on food stamps. But they benefit massively by the food stamp program allowing them to pay workers unlivable wages and allowing them to keep margins higher. On net they are benefitting more as an individual than they are paying into the system.

America has some of the lowest tax rates for the ultra wealthy. And since I can tell you're in the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset. The delta between you and "them" is not even close. Even with a tech job even with options and bonuses. 50 million dollars a year is a nearly absurd amount of money.

I support Elizabeth Warren's "2 cent" tax on income above 50 million dollars.

> if we don't have a better way to spend it.

I agree that DOGE was disastrous and ended up costing us money. A pound foolish and a penny wise is not the way to run the government.