How Rich Is Too, Too Rich?

 

Nothing captures the national Zeitgeist like a political cartoon, this one by Matt Wuerker.

 

Today’s Wall Street Journal carried a report that I didn’t find shocking, but I did find profoundly sobering. According to recent Federal Reserve data analyzed by the Journal, America's top 0.1% have accumulated a staggering $14.5 trillion in new wealth just since the end of 2019. Driven by a historic stock market boom, this ultra-wealthy fraction now controls roughly 15% of the entire nation's wealth—a $28 trillion buffer separating them from even the merely affluent.

 

Reading it brought me back to a book I published nearly thirty-five years ago, How Rich Is Too Rich; Income and Wealth in America (Praeger, 1992), and a subsequent post I wrote on this blog fifteen years ago.

 

The book visualized the American economy as a "sixty-minute grand parade" where marchers’ heights represented their incomes. It noted that for the first 50 minutes, the marchers are dwarfs. Only in the final seconds do you see skyscrapers—giants whose faces you can’t see, only their feet.

 

The Wall Street Journal’s data confirms that the parade has warped into something entirely unrecognizable. The skyscraper class has pulled so far away from the rest of the procession that we have effectively broken into two distinct societies. On one side are the ultra-wealthy, flying in private fleets, purchasing sports franchises, and—as in the case of Larry Ellison—quietly buying up entire neighborhoods just to house their estate staff.  On the other side is everyone else.

 

This hyper-concentration of wealth is the structural reality behind the political promises of a new "Golden Age." But for the 99.9% of Americans walking below that top-tenth-of-a-percent threshold, it feels like a different age entirely.

 

To see how we arrived at this point, I used an AI research assistant to audit the fiscal math behind our national debt. I asked it to isolate what the balance sheet would look like if we had simply maintained the 39.6% top marginal tax rate from the Clinton administration—the last time the country ran a balanced budget—assuming it didn't impact growth. The data it surfaced from the Center for American Progress was startling: the legislative choice to dismantle that late-90s tax framework via subsequent rounds of sweeping tax cuts is responsible for roughly 57% of the total increase in the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio over the last 25 years. If you strip away emergency crisis spending—like the funding required for the 2008 recession and the pandemic—those tax cuts are responsible for more than 90% of our structural debt expansion.

 

The math is as clear as it is devastating: our public deficit was largely manufactured to fund private windfalls at the very end of the parade.

 

So, how rich is too, too rich? We passed that boundary line long ago. The tragedy today is not just the lopsided accumulation of wealth, but the quiet, pervasive acceptance of it. The prevailing cultural message from the top has shifted from one of civic stewardship to a blunt, systemic "I got mine; now you get yours." It is the architecture of inequality that is actively fracturing the country—and it is a far cry from the America many of us grew up in.

 

December 7, November 22, September 11, January 6

 

 

The 1976 Bicentennial three years after the Twin Towers were built

These are my generation’s days of infamy. They were all shocking events, ones that left an indelible mark on history. In terms of immediate loss of life, September 11 and December 7 stand apart, although all were national traumas.

 

These dates are so burnished in our minds that we can remember exactly where we were when they occurred.

 

And now, astonishingly to me, it has been 25 years since the horror of September 11.

 

I have written before about that morning in these pages and this is something I wrote years ago:

On Sept. 11, 2001 Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk, Ct., a clear somewhat breezy day with a deep blue sky. We had the TV on and, in complete disbelief, the tragedy unfolded before our eyes.

 

Although we were fifty miles away, we could see the smoke drifting south from the Twin Towers. To this day I still feel that sense of incredulity. Did this really happen here? My son, Jonathan, had been interviewed only a couple of weeks before by Cantor Fitzgerald, and offered a job to work on the 102nd floor of One WTC. They lost 658 employees on that fateful day. Jonathan decided to take another job. Is it merely coincidence and accident that governs life’s outcomes? Or is it simply Shakespeare’s more cynical line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

 

My older son is the poet of our family and this is what he wrote on that very day. One line in particular resonates: “If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life, it could not compete with what witnessed, I.”

 

Twenty-five years later, I can still summon that morning almost physically.

 

In later years I was reading a short story by John Updike and it was with some trepidation that I realized his story, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” is about that very day. Until then I had assiduously avoided 9/11 literature, as the pain of remembrance was too great. But I relented.

 

It begins with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.” The protagonist was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights. To get through the story, written from various perspectives, including a woman on ill-fated United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, I had to continually take deep, slow breaths just to control my anxiety.

 

Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details. It was the constant, unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day. One knows where it is all going. And if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, religion seems to become a source for justifying anything.

 

One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:

 

Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism.

 

So, other than to somberly mark this date, I have struggled with whether to say anything about the moment in which we are living. I am reluctant to turn September 11 into another occasion for a political argument. But I cannot pretend that what is happening in this country does not affect how I experience this anniversary.

 

Passing the Brooklyn Bridge and the Twin Towers on our boat, 1994

And this is where I become angry.

 

We are living through what feels to me like a slow-motion national trauma. Not another September 11, obviously. Nothing could be another September 11. But the same awful sensation of watching something happen that you cannot stop, of knowing that something fundamental is being lost while those with the power to prevent it seem unwilling or unable to do so. Where are our justices, judges, representatives, senators, and cabinet members who have sworn allegiance to our Constitution?

 

The presidency was never intended to be a vehicle for one man's perpetual self-dramatization, enrichment, grievance, and pursuit of personal power.

 

Yet that is increasingly how it feels.  One by one, traditions, institutions, relationships with our allies, assumptions about presidential behavior and even elements of our national culture are being pulled apart. The White House itself has become a stage for the president's carefully constructed image of omnipotence. American culture becomes spectacle. Foreign policy becomes personal theater. Even the possibility of war can be addressed with the casualness of playing a video game.

 

And while all of this is going on, the president and those around him continue to test how much power can be accumulated in the executive branch and how much the other institutions of government will tolerate. That frightens me. What frightens me even more is how quickly the extraordinary can become ordinary.

 

A president says something that would once have produced days of national outrage, and we move on to the next statement. An institution is challenged, a norm is violated, a traditional restraint disappears, and we shrug because there is another outrage waiting tomorrow.

 

Perhaps this is what a slow-motion national trauma looks like: not one building collapsing before our eyes, but the gradual realization that traditions we assumed were permanent may not be.

 

I have lived through wars, assassinations, Watergate, political upheavals and other periods when the country seemed to be coming apart. I have always believed that, however ugly American politics could become, the underlying institutions were stronger than the people temporarily occupying them.

 

I am no longer sure. I cannot look at what is happening and simply reassure myself that American democracy is too strong to fail. Democracies survive because people defend them.

 

This brings me, uncomfortably, back to UA Flight 93. Those passengers eventually understood that they were not going to be rescued by someone else. They had to act themselves. This is not a call to violence; but citizenship sometimes requires people to stop being passengers.

 

Our equivalent is not storming a cockpit. It is voting. It is speaking. It is paying attention. It is refusing to accept lies simply because they are repeated often enough, or the increasingly fantastical AI-generated images and videos of a president who seems determined to turn himself into a character in his own mythology. It is supporting institutions when they are under pressure. It is insisting that the Constitution applies to everyone, including the person sitting in the Oval Office, no matter how festooned that office may be in gold.

 

But I can put into words what I see and what I feel. That is the only power I have, in addition to voting.

 

Twenty-five years ago, Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk CT, where we lived each summer, and watched those towers disappear from the television screen while the smoke could be seen from our boat’s bridge across the western Long Island Sound some fifty miles away. I remember the disbelief and fear and wondering what had happened to the country I thought I knew.

 

I now find myself asking a different question: What are we willing to do to make sure we do not lose it? I don't know the answer.

 

But I know I don't want to be silent.

Capturing the void: The New Yorker, 2001