Perhaps what's happening is that in their attempts to reach a personal all-time high in their bank accounts the ultra-wealthy are destroying value and economic systems en mass with little regard to the efficiency of their money siphoning process?
It's kind of like a drug dealer selling brain burning addictive substances to a few people on a street. Sure they're going to extract a person's life savings to date and whatever money that person can steal once they're addicted but that value pales in comparison to what that person could have made over their career, what it could have made if properly invested, the cost of law enforcement to deal with these addicts, the cost of the stuff that they destroy in their quest to get money to buy drugs, the opportunity cost of them not raising their kids to be productive members of society... like it all just snow balls all so some asshole can make a few bucks...
The ultra-wealthy are doing that shit where people burn acres of pristine forests to get some biochar -- but to the entire world.
Isn’t it strange
That princes and kings,
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders for eternity?
Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules;
And each must make-
Ere life is flown-
A stumbling block
Or a stepping stone.https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stumbling_block
Turns out it's a fictional object created in the translation of the Koine Greek for "obstacle".
I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".
Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.
Also, a UBI is likely to cause inflation.
Were you talking about specifically how do you restrain the power of massive corporations to harm people? AI is coming but a lot of the other things that are happening are preventable - like the rise of no-benefit gig work.
Money is just a way of keeping track to how high of a fraction of the future output of the civilization any one person or entity is entitled to. This is by consent.
With AI all is subject to change.
The richest nation in world history and we can’t spend any of it for the betterment of our citizens. It’s disgraceful.
"Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use."
Moreover, these people do not simply lobby the government, but directly elect it, and actually have many times more money at their disposal than the rest of the world.
Salary (income) is a horrible choice to serve as the marker to determine a person's (family's) fair share contribution to the burden of paying the costs to operate a society. Not everyone is so poor that working for a living is a matter of survival.
I can think of only one universal marker that would assure every citizen shares the burden of paying for society's costs equally: wealth.
Adjusted in a manner that the financial impact of one thousand dollars to a full-time MacDonald's counter worker is transformed into a dollar amount that causes the same relative financial impact to everyone, all the way up to the wealthiest family in America.
1 Normal person
3 Doctors / Lawyers / Engineers ($1M+ net worth)
3 Successful Entrepreneurs ($10M+ net worth)
3 Ultrawealthy ($50M+ net worth)
1 Normal person
3 Professional ($100k+/yr passive)
3 Successful ($1M+/yr passive)
3 Wealthy ($5M+/yr passive)
Are the in-betweeners part of the problem? Sure, but we have a foot on either side of the problem. We could get hype for many of the plausible solutions to aggregate labor oversupply (e.g. shorter workweeks) even if it meant our stocks went down. Not so for 6/10 people in that sample. The core problem is still that the economy is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly owned by people who own things for a living and all of the good solutions to the problem require rolling that back a little against a backdrop that, absent intervention, stands to accelerate it a lot.
EDIT: one more thing, but it's a big one: the higher ends of the wealth ladder have the enormous privilege of being able to engage in politics for profit rather than charity/obligation. A 10% chance of lobbying into place a policy that changes asset values by 10% is worth $1k to a "Professional", $50k to a "Wealthy", but $8B to Elon Musk. The fact that at increasing net worths politics becomes net profitable and then so net profitable as to allow hiring organizations of people to pursue means the upper edge of the distribution punches above its already-outsized weight in terms of political influence. It goes without saying that their brand of politics is all about pumping assets.
/s
The electoral college system, coupled with it's winner-takes-all implementation in most states, means that voting is a sham for 80% of the population. The other 20% live in a swing state and their vote can at least potentially affect the outcome of an election, but even there "your vote" will literally be cast opposite to what you put on the ballet unless you end up being part of the winning majority.
Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion
Forbes 400 (US only): 2025 cutoff was $3.8 billion to make the list. Forbes publishes the aggregate annually and recent years the total net worth was over $5.4T for the 400.
It appears you are the one very confused about wealth distribution in the US. Maybe you are confusing "income" with "wealth hoarding". The hoarding is happening to a gross amount, and this is why there should be a 1% tax on fortune portions over 100 million and 2% on portions over 1 billion. That and going back to the 70% tax over incomes in the top bracket (eg > 10million / yr)
Those taxes are coming. Trumpty Dumpty and the oligarchs brought it on themselves. Maga grifters are getting f'd in the midterms. Maybe maga should have picked a few dear leaders with some integrity instead of greedy frauds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Edit: downpout all you want, doesn't change the facts.
Maybe Notch when he sold Minecraft, apparently he had $2B sitting in a bank account, but I'm sure by now he has deployed it.
They've also stolen a good economy. The economy in this country worked best when corporate profits were taxed at a much higher rate and companies were incentivized to grow business and we could create more jobs for people. Through their grip on society they have stolen that wealth and good economic output.
We have plenty of evidence that tax cuts do not fuel economic growth look out our industry right now there are massive layoffs everywhere and it's not because of dogshit LLMs
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/olig...
But we can't talk about this because it includes a large tract of the white collar everyday man workforce.
This is why the focus is so heavy on billionaires, so heavy on increasing minimum wage, so heavy on protecting immigrants. Those are all virtuous values that also bolster the value of the 70-95%, while piling all the blame (and responsibility) on the 1%.
The wealthiest group in America is doing an excellent job at protecting (and growing) their wealth.
(for those wondering, the "back breaker" of this class is zoning laws and new housing, everyone is aware how intense NIMBYism is in the middle/upper middle class hives).
The middle class has the gold vault (well the closest thing), and that's where the redistribution would happen.
If you don't believe me, look at Europe. You can be a baker and make $35k yr, an SWE and make $65k yr, or a doctor and make $100k/yr.
You may say "Yeah, that's great, they live happy lives!"
But then convince American engineers they need to take a $140k paycut and the doctors a $220k paycut so that we can pay bakers $10k more a year. They'll just tell you the billionaires are the problem, and you'll believe them.
The group you’re talking about, 70-95 percentile, are often people that just own a house near a big city or a farm/small business.
Once the Democrats who are elected on the fantasy of making Musk and Bezos pay for everyone’s past and future college/student loans, Medicare for all, UBI, high speed rail, while simultaneously closing every fossil fuel plant and subsidizing clean energy to replace it at the same cost — once they’ve failed to raise enough to pay for 1/10 of those promises, they’ll be coming for everyone more “wealthy” than $100k net worth.
You can just look how successful the USSR was, or China before they sold out their own Communist ideals. Most people were just subsistence farmers, or factory workers living in crowded minimalist apartments if they were lucky.