“We are living in a new Gilded Age” From Apple News Here are some edited quotes (for better flow) from New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos on the extravagant lifestyles of the #wealthy and their outsized influence on #politics. I highly recommend them if you are interested in income #inequality. If you look at polls, you'll find that about 59 percent of Americans say that billionaires are making the country more unfair. And an identical share, about 59 percent say they want to become billionaires themselves. In 1990, there were 66 billionaires in America, and today there are more than 800. But in that same period of time, the median hourly wage for Americans has only gone up about 20%. 10 years ago, there was nobody in the world who had more than $100 billion. Today, there are more than 15 of them. Elon Musk had about $10 billion 10 years ago. Today, he has more than $400 billion. If you were a baby born in 1940, you had a 90 percent chance of out-earning your parents. But today, that number has dropped by more than half. Ruxurious, almost unthinkably luxurious super yachts are longer than a football field, and the world on these yachts is quite different, really, than the world that we inhabit on land. As both owners and crew members put it to me, it's really much more like the world of a 19th century British aristocratic household, like Downton Abbey or something, than it is on land. Because you might have, say, 12 guests staying on a yacht. But then they'll be attended by 50 or 60 staff members. You really don't see that kind of ratio on land anymore. In addition to the idea that you'll have, obviously, salons and spas and what's known as cryo saunas, which can cool you down to very low depths. Or you have helicopter pads where you'll put on your ski stuff on the boat and then they'll fly you in a helicopter to the peak of a mountain so that you can ski down. A lot of them are kitted out with very advanced medical equipment, things that allow you to detect pathogens in your guests or in the air. And if need be, you can get surgery in some cases using robotic instruments on the boat being manipulated by a doctor far away who is doing his work essentially over the digital Wi-Fi. back in 1965, the CEO of a typical large public company would make, on average, about 20 times what the frontline workers at those companies made. According to the latest numbers, the median CEO of a large public company makes about 350 times what a frontline worker makes. If you have the money to afford the right kind of lawyers and tax advisors, you can assemble a toolbox of techniques that really protect you from having to pay many of the taxes that other people pay. According to ProPublica, Jeff Bezos at one point, even after he was worth $18 billion, had been able to engineer his income down to such a small number that he actually qualified for a child tax credit at one point. And during the pandemic, in fact, 18 billionaires, according to ProPublica, were able to avoid some of the ordinary measures of income to such a point that they qualified for COVID stimulus funds. Perpetuities meaning fortunes so large that they pass down and create economic dynasties. This was something that even the Royals back in Europe decided was just probably no good. It was going to put too much money in the hands of too few. Well, that more or less held for a few hundred years until about just in the last couple of decades when South Dakota, Nevada, and other states have started to get rid of the law of perpetuities. And as a result, if you have a trust in one of those states, you can actually end up passing down a huge amount of your fortune without paying much in the way of inheritance taxes, to the point that actually Gary Cohn, who was the economic advisor for Donald Trump in the first term, he told members of Congress that in effect the estate tax has now become so easy to avoid that, as he put it, only morons pay the estate tax. in 2004, billionaires in the United States put about $13 million into the presidential election year. But 20 years later, because of decisions by the Supreme Court and other reasons, you now have 200 times as much coming from billionaires in this country. $3 billion dollars went into the 2024 political race. In the eight years since Donald Trump was elected the first time, the net worth of America's billionaires more than doubled. One of President Biden's last comments as president. In that statement, he issued a warning about the rise of oligarchs in our country. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights, freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We know on issue after issue, things like achieving more safety around guns, making steps towards mitigating climate change. We simply know that these are popular policies, but they don't actually come through. And the reason they don't come through in law is we now have people in our society, Elon Musk being the prime demonstration, who, as his own tweet put it, was able to determine the result of the 2024 presidential election, as he said. The people who built the pyramids were living in a less unequal society. There was a great scholar named Ramsay McMullen who was once asked, you know, what explains the collapse of Rome? And he said it took 500 years, but you could distill it into three words. He said, fewer had more. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-living-in-a-new-gilded-age-how-the/id1577591053?i=1000716733882