Similarly the concern over billionaires are overplayed. They’ve got too much skin in the current game to destroy the current game.
Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite. Those are folks who will destroy a country for their own marginal gain.
There's a billionaire in the White House who's hosting billionaire guests on the regular, there was a line of billionaires behind him at the inauguration, and a temporary trillionaire living in the White House for a while and shredding every agency that had power to regulate him.
Wrong. The billionaires want the public focused on the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit.
It's just a different spin on the ages-old strategy of dividing the non-ruling-class and pitting them against each other. The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence.
Personally I prefer to avoid "Reign of Terror" (1) or similar situations where a "unified public" wantonly destroys the ultra wealthy. That revolution was led by educated elites clerks, lawyers, etc and not by commoners. The peasants were pawns.
> the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit.
Billionaires wealth may need curbing, in particular unlimited mergers. However in my estimation it's the millionaire class level actively destroying the economic foundations of the west, not just the USA.
It's CEOs like the ill fated Brian Thompson worth only tens of millions who made those millions by driving exaggerated profits and share price at UnitedHealth. It's Jim McNerney former CEO at Boeing who drove up share prices by gutting engineering that made himself a centi-millionaire.
Meanwhile SpaceX and Tesla made Musk a trillionaire, but you don't need a Tesla. Similarly for Bezos or Zuckerberg's products.
However food, healthcare, education, etc are all continuously increasing their profit margin's at the expense of everyone else and their companies/brands. For example Dorito's market share plummeted recently after they kept driving up prices to over $7 / bag.
Regardless of who's actually at fault, if the low-end millionaires were to publicly and materially side with the remaining middle class, working class, poor, and indigent, their combined influence would be irresistable - which is basically what you said, I'll admit. But my point is that the millionaires are the last holdouts. Everyone else is ready to party.
If every American with a sub-8-figure net worth held back their property payments for 6 months, they could collectively have anything they asked for. Anything.
That'd not affect the federal government. It would however hurt schools & teachers, garbage men, police, etc as property taxes largely go to city and county governments which run those services.
Nitpick: At a certain level of millions, below a billion, this is also true, however. But it makes for a longer / worse soundbite.
I have often heard people talk about how Capitalism keeps the middle class in check by having a large number of people in poverty but it seems to me like a large number of middle class people feel that they are living in poverty.