I mean, we stole the colonies from the king . . . in the second place amirite?
Before that we were stealing his masts.
With no king to rob anymore, we instead rob ourselves.
To be a 1913 millionaire in July 2026, you'll need 33.73 of them, and a high capacity magazine.
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| July 2026 cpi inflation 3.4% |
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| July 2026 core cpi inflation 2.5% |
That's the single largest tax loss expenditure on the list of tax loss expenditures.
Adding health insurance benefits for employees was a WWII era work-around to FDR's anti-capitalist wage controls, instituted to curb inflation.
When too many were unavailable to do the work because they were off fighting the war, the price of work sky-rocketed. Adding untaxed health insurance benefits helped employers attract and keep workers during wartime.
The untaxed health insurance benefit was & remains tax-free compensation, estimated as today's single largest tax loss expenditure at $500 billion/year.
But Biden's national policy director for his 2020 campaign goes off on a $20m CEO because high compensation earners are the easy target she only pretends are the problem instead of the one you see in the mirror every morning not paying taxes on everything you make.
She needs your votes for the public option, and isn't going to get them by telling you the truth.
The public option, to be sure, would have been superior to the Obamacare Rube Goldberg machine, and is clearly preferable to Medicare For All because the latter would end employer-provided health insurance.
But as with FDR it's still not capitalism, and if you push here something is going to pop out over there and become a problem. The iron laws of supply and demand will always assert themselves, but with capitalism the consequences are immediate, severe, and self-correcting by the market.
If you tax health insurance benefits, you will simply get less health insurance of the kind we have, accompanied by more cries for options from the marketplace for the health insurance we don't have, which if free to provide them . . . will.
Meanwhile a comprehensive federal income tax reform taxing all income at high rates above $102,230 for a single filer and $136,306 for married filing jointly as of June 2026, and at 0% below, is the place to start to reimagine fairness in the United States.
84% of individual earners made less than $100,000 in 2023. The vast majority of them would not notice that an average of $9,500 of employer provided health insurance was being counted as income under the new threshold of $102,230 because they would owe zero taxes anyway.
We need more reality in economics and less fiddling with it, and certainly none of what Abdul is selling, which will require taxing everybody, not just the rich, much more. He is selling "free at the point of care", but nothing is free. Nothing.
It's always great to see the pretensions of progressives skewered.
Democratic Senate candidates sling mud in post-debate spin room
... “Standing up for Michiganders when their jobs were on the line during the Great Recession, standing up for Michiganders when their jobs were on the line yet again during COVID and the COVID pandemic and securing our manufacturing supply chain. I work to get things done. I am not trying to be a celebrity or famous or to sell a book or to push a podcast. I’m also not a millionaire like Abdul is. I am a hard-working gal who rolls up my sleeves, fights like heck for Michigan and delivers for us.” ...
You have the government you deserve lol.
Millionaires Are Overrepresented in the U.S. Senate — By a Lot
... “The Senate is packed with multimillionaires, and the fact is some of them have lost touch with the real world challenges faced by Americans all over the country,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, told NOTUS in a statement. “It is part of the reason that we have a tax system that favors people who make money off of money and penalizes those who earn a paycheck through hard work. We need to change that.”
Van Hollen is one of at least 11 senators whose median net worth is less than the median household net worth of their respective states, according to a NOTUS analysis of senators’ financial disclosures and U.S. Census Bureau data. Van Hollen has a median net worth of $7,500; the median Maryland household has a net worth of $152,400. (Census Bureau data does not include median household net worth for seven states: Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.) ...
The median net worth in the Senate is nearly $4.4 million — more than 70 times the Census-reported median U.S. household net worth, which similarly excludes equity in primary residences. ...
The median net worth for members of the Senate Democratic Caucus is more than $2.9 million, while for Senate Republicans, it’s nearly $5.7 million. ...
A full table for the current Senate is here.
33.19
AI estimates between 208-225k Americans had net worth of $30 million or more in 2025.
... There is not much data on individuals in the $50 million to $1 billion range, which distorts the picture, according to Mazeau. He also said the wealth growth among middle and lower wealth brackets is underappreciated. For instance, the number of individuals with $1 million to $5 million, whom UBS dubs “everyday millionaires,” has more than quadrupled since 2000 to about 52 million.
“They have more wealth collectively than all the billionaires in the world,” he said. “It is often overlooked how much wealth is rising and is going towards the middle of the pack.”
The middle of the pack. Yeah right.
It takes $33 million in 2025 to be a 1913 millionaire.
More in "The U.S. added a thousand new millionaires a day in 2024: Report".
Meanwhile . . .
From the story:
Even among millionaires, only 8% would characterize themselves as wealthy these days.
Roughly 60% of investors with $1 million or more of investable assets said they are more likely upper middle class, according to a recent Ameriprise Financial survey of more than 3,000 adults.
To that point, 31% consider themselves decidedly middle class.
The GOP seems more determined to go down with their captain than they did a month ago, however so slightly.
Meanwhile many-mucho-mega-multi-millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, age 37, born in Cincinnati in 1985, surges to third place.
Greenspan: Let more skilled immigrants in :
"Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world," he said. "If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income."
Yeah, the problem isn't millionaires and billionaires concentrating wealth in their hands, it's the goddamn skilled laborers who must be stopped, the engineers, scientists, doctors and teachers, the crane operators, CDL truck drivers, machinists, drafters, plumbers, craftsmen, cooks and accountants.
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| Stephen "I don't feel like a wealthy person" Schwarzman is worth about $10 billion |
