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.