Martin Holland<p></p><blockquote>Welcome to the American <a href="https://federation.network/tags/oligarchy" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#oligarchy</a>. America always had rich people, and they always influenced <a href="https://federation.network/tags/government" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#government</a>. But never before have the rich amassed money and power on anything like this scale, and <a href="https://federation.network/tags/Trump" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Trump</a> helped them get there. After Trump’s 2017 tax cut, the combined wealth of America’s billionaires doubled to $6 trillion, according to a July 2024 report by Americans for Tax Fairness. Going back to the start of the twenty-first century, American billionaire wealth increased ninefold. There aren’t enough <a href="https://federation.network/tags/billionaires" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#billionaires</a><span> in America to fill Carnegie Hall, but they own 3.8 percent of the nation’s wealth.<br><br>During that same quarter-century, the bottom half of the income distribution increased its collective wealth not ninefold but twofold (thanks largely to Covid stimulus checks). We’re talking about half the country—about 66 million families—owning not 3.8 percent of America’s wealth but 2.5 percent. By some measures, wealth concentration in America today is greater than in fourteenth-century Europe, even though America is democratic and fourteenth-century Europe was, you know, feudal.</span></blockquote><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/196176/trump-billionaires-america-wealth-inequality" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://newrepublic.com/article/196176/trump-billionaires-america-wealth-inequality</a> <a href="https://federation.network/tags/USA" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#USA</a> <a href="https://federation.network/tags/DonaldTrump" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#DonaldTrump</a> <a href="https://federation.network/tags/Wealth" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Wealth</a> <a href="https://federation.network/tags/Inequality" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Inequality</a><p></p>