Are Billionaires Bad for Democracy? nyti.ms/33BAGpR There's a turn of phrase here that's not helpful: "we have spent the last 30 or so years transferring trillions of dollars from the middle class to the people at the very top."
This is not quite what's happened. The middle class has remained stagnant: median household wealth is slightly lower, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was three decades ago. But it isn't so much lower that we can say, "The middle-classes wealth was transferred."
It wasn't, IOW, taken from the middle class. The problem is that the middle class didn't get wealthier, while the very did--it's not that the very rich stole from the middle class. This matters to how we think of this.
Vast income inequality certainly is bad for democracy, in two ways. First, it makes people unhappy about democracy. Second, the very wealthy have outsized political influence. But the very wealthy aren't stealing it.
They're often using this political influence to create outcomes that aren't great for democracy. But that's a separate problem.
