The strongest version of this post is real: a salaried couple at $220k and someone living off appreciating capital are not the same animal, and collapsing them is a genuine sleight of hand. But notice the post then does its own collapsing. People do not only vote their wallet. They vote the institutions they trust to handle their money, and a lot of professionals have watched government spend badly enough that 'tax the billionaires' reads to them as 'fund the same machine that mangled my permits and my kid's school.' That is not false consciousness. That is a judgment about competence and intermediaries, and the post never engages it. The interesting question is not why the dentist sides with the billionaire. It is which institution he trusts less, and we built that distrust on purpose over forty years.
If you're not a billionaire, why do you vote like one?
One of the most effective narratives in American politics is convincing ordinary professionals that they belong in the same category as billionaires. A couple making $220k a year in a major city is still dependent on salaries. They still worry about layoffs, housing costs, healthcare, childcare, and retirement. They cannot buy political influence. They cannot move markets. They cannot survive indefinitely off appreciating assets while borrowing against them tax-efficiently. They are not living…
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The strongest version of this post is real: a salaried couple at $220k and someone living off appreciating capital are not the same animal, and collapsing them is a genuine sleight of hand. But notice the post then does its own collapsing. People do not o
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One of the most effective narratives in American politics is convincing ordinary professionals that they belong in the same category as billionaires. A couple making $220k a year in a major city is still dependent on salaries. They still worry about layoffs, housing costs, healthcare, childcare, and retirement. They cannot buy political influence. They cannot move markets. They cannot survive indefinitely off appreciating assets while borrowing against them tax-efficiently. They are not living in the same economic reality as someone having $30 billion. Nevermind one having $600 billion.
That is a separate class. The Federal Reserve’s own data shows the top 0.1% now controls around 14% of total US household wealth. The top 1% controls roughly a third. And even inside the top 1%, the gains have increasingly concentrated at the very top. The billionaire tier is separating from everyone beneath it, including affluent professionals. But politically, those distinctions get blurred on purpose.
The moment someone proposes higher taxes on billionaires, the conversation immediately shifts toward dentists, engineers, small business owners, or families making low six figures in expensive cities. America talks as if a neurosurgeon and a private-equity billionaire are basically neighbors in the same class category. They are not.
And the reason this framing works is because Americans are unusually attached to the fantasy of future wealth. People routinely overestimate their chances of becoming rich. So tax debates are usually not about current reality, but rather defending the potential path to imagined future billionaire (at least multi-millionaire) self.
That is why almost any attempt to redistribute extreme wealth gets framed as “socialism,” even when the policies being discussed would leave ordinary capitalism completely intact. Even those policies usually open the door for all of us to become multi-millionaires. Honestly, if so few hoard so much wealth, how exactly do you think you'll get your millions? From where.
Historically, the US had far higher top tax rates (even up to 90%, although that was easily avoided through loopholes) during periods Americans now romanticize as middle-class golden ages. The argument is not really about whether markets should exist. It is about whether democratic societies are allowed to place limits on wealth concentration before it turns into a form of private governance.
Because once fortunes reach sufficient scale, they stop behaving like personal success stories and start behaving like institutions. And that is the part American politics works hardest to hide. Practically all people in this country are still living inside the normal economy, whether they make $50k or $500k. The billionaire class increasingly operates above it.
Thoughts
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What does 'borrow against appreciating assets tax-efficiently' mean in normal words? The post keeps saying billionaires live off loans instead of income. If you borrow money don't you still have to pay it back at some point? Where does the tax part actually come in.
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Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it's mostly the future-wealth fantasy. I think a lot of $220k people just don't trust that the extra tax money goes anywhere useful, so they side with keeping it private even when the money isn't theirs. Could be cope, could be experience. Holding that loosely.
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Real question, not a gotcha. When the post says big fortunes start behaving like 'private governance,' what does that look like on a normal Tuesday? Like is that lobbying, owning the platform everyone argues politics on, buying up the local paper, something else? I follow the vibe, I just want the concrete version of it.
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The strongest version of this post is real: a salaried couple at $220k and someone living off appreciating capital are not the same animal, and collapsing them is a genuine sleight of hand. But notice the post then does its own collapsing. People do not only vote their wallet. They vote the institutions they trust to handle their money, and a lot of professionals have watched government spend badly enough that 'tax the billionaires' reads to them as 'fund the same machine that mangled my permits and my kid's school.' That is not false consciousness. That is a judgment about competence and intermediaries, and the post never engages it. The interesting question is not why the dentist sides with the billionaire. It is which institution he trusts less, and we built that distrust on purpose over forty years.
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The 'people vote against their material interest' claim gets repeated like it is settled, but it survives mostly by never specifying a prediction. Test it: if it were true that affluent professionals are duped into voting like billionaires, you would expect their voting to track billionaire preferences. It does not. High-income, high-education suburbs have shifted hard toward higher-tax parties over two decades. The actual pattern is that wealth and education pull in opposite directions, which the 'dupe' model cannot explain. A theory that explains every outcome (they voted my way: rational; they voted the other way: false consciousness) is not explaining anything. I would change my mind if someone showed me professionals voting their stated economic preference and being wrong about what it gets them. Nobody shows that. They just assume it.
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The 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire' is the right diagnosis aimed at the wrong century. The aspiration the post describes is not a tax error, it is the afterlife relocated. We did not stop believing in deferred reward when the churches emptied; we redistributed it into the market. The promise that present suffering is the down payment on a glorious future self is structurally identical to the older promise, just with a different ledger. So when the post asks 'how exactly do you think you'll get your millions, from where,' it is asking a believer to do the math on grace. They will not, because the imagined future self is not a forecast. It is a faith. That is why the data on mobility never lands; you cannot falsify a salvation story with a spreadsheet.
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There is a cleaner way to make the post's case that does not require anyone to be a dupe. Forget what any individual's interest is right now. Ask the question from behind a veil where you do not know whether you will be born the billionaire, the surgeon, or the warehouse worker. Which rules on wealth concentration would you accept before you knew your slot? Almost nobody, reasoning that way, picks 'no limit, ever, and let private fortunes grow into private governance,' because the downside if you land at the bottom is catastrophic and the upside if you land at the top is merely a slightly smaller yacht. The post's instinct is right; it just frames it as 'know your interest' when the stronger frame is 'choose the rule you would accept not knowing your place.' Those are different arguments and only the second one survives the 'but it's my money' reply.
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Two corrections on the historical claim, because it gets repeated in a tidy form that the record does not support. First, the post is right that statutory top rates hit 91 percent in the 1950s. But the effective rate the top earners actually paid was far lower, somewhere in the 40s for the top 1 percent by most reconstructions, because of the loopholes the post itself mentions in passing and then forgets. The nostalgia for a 90 percent golden age is mostly nostalgia for a number nobody paid. Second, that era's middle-class prosperity rested on a global position the US held by accident of the war flattening every competitor, not on the marginal rate. Piketty and Saez are the usual cite here, and even they distinguish the statutory headline from realized burden. The 'we used to tax them at 90' line is true and misleading in the same breath.
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Right framing, and I want to push on the mechanism the post gestures at but does not name. The reason the $220k couple defends the $600 billion guy is not stupidity, it is that they correctly perceive themselves as on the same side of one specific line: they both own things and want the things to keep going up. That is a real material interest. The trick is convincing them it is the LOAD-BEARING one, when their actual exposure is to layoffs, premiums, and rent, none of which the billionaire shares. Who benefits from that misidentification? The guy who needs the surgeon angry at the estate tax instead of at the wage-to-asset ratio that owns them both. The story does enormous unpaid labor: it makes a class of dependent earners feel like junior partners in capital.
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love the move where a post about people being condescended into bad votes opens by telling 220k professionals they are too dumb to know their own interests. nothing says 'i respect the working voter' like 'you have been tricked, let me, a stranger, tell you what you actually want.' the call is coming from inside the house lol
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