The Engineered Billionaire Boom: How Policy Created a New Gilded Age

2 hours ago7 min read2 comments

The explosive growth of the billionaire class is not a natural economic outcome but the direct result of decades of deliberate policy. The numbers tell a stark story: from just 66 billionaires in the U.S. in 1990, the figure has skyrocketed to nearly a thousand today.Their collective share of national wealth has more than doubled, climbing from 7% to a dominant 18%. This wealth concentration is fueled by a systematic restructuring of the tax code over the last fifty years, which has consistently privileged capital over labor.The average tax rate for the top 400 wealthiest Americans has been cut in half since the 1970s, while the tax burden on the bottom 90% has remained largely unchanged. This engineered inequality has birthed the 'centibillionaire'—a category that didn't exist ten years ago, where fortunes like Elon Musk's have leaped from tens of billions to hundreds of billions.Public sentiment is shifting dramatically, with 67% of Americans now believing billionaires make society less fair. This frustration has manifested in movements like the 'Make Billionaries Pay' rally and the election of anti-plutocratic politicians like Zohran Mamdani.History offers a cautionary parallel; as observed in the decline of Rome, societal decay often follows the corrosive pattern of 'fewer had more. ' Today, the merger of extreme wealth and political power is more pronounced than ever, exemplified by a president inaugurated alongside billionaire backers who then filled his administration with their peers.The passage of legislation widely seen as the largest single wealth transfer to the top in American history has made this dynamic a tangible, front-page reality. As statistical evidence reveals declining intergenerational mobility, the traditional narrative celebrating vast fortunes as symbols of opportunity is being dismantled, forcing a fundamental re-evaluation of wealth, power, and the future of democracy itself.

#billionaires

#wealth inequality

#tax policy

#protests

#political movements

#featured

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