Imagine you were buying a car, and the only thing you knew about it was the color. Not the horsepower, not the number of cylinders, not the options; none of that. Just the color.
Obviously, you wouldn’t make such a purchase. You’d demand to know more, and quite rightly so. Well, voters choose candidates on the basis of scant information all the time, especially when it comes to the economic realities that obtain in this country. This is largely the Democrats’ fault. The Republicans don’t want people to know these facts. The Democrats should, but they don’t talk about them nearly enough. Now that America has freshly minted its first actual trillionaire in Elon Musk, and Donald Trump has made working people’s lives far harder than they already were with his pointless, gas-price-raising little war, those of us who do know those realities need to demand of Democrats that they talk more about them.
Before I get into it, let me say clearly: I’m not calling voters stupid. It isn’t their fault they don’t know this stuff—it’s, as I said, the Democrats’, and to some extent the media’s, which doesn’t talk about these things enough because they aren’t “news.” People do know in their bones that the American economic system is rigged—although, as we shall see, they generally have no idea how rigged.
Okay. So: Let’s start with the fact that the top 1 percent of Americans now owns about 32 percent of the wealth. You may know this. This one fact does get reported or mentioned pretty frequently. It’s a shocking number, though. It’s not okay, and it’s not normal. Look at this historical chart from the authoritative St. Louis Fed. In 1990, it was around 22 percent. It’s been above 30 percent since 2014. And it just keeps going up—except, interestingly, for three dips, two during George W. Bush’s presidency and one during Trump’s first term; not because they were warriors on behalf of income equality, but because they tanked the economy.
A pretty big chunk of that 32 percent is owned by not just the 1 percent, but the .1 percent. That’s about 135,000 households. I couldn’t find precise current numbers for 2025-26 on deadline, but I did find this study, from 2013, by the formidable duo of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. In that year, the top .1 percent owned about 22 percent of the wealth. Again, this is not normal. It’s not “just the way things are.” The last time the top .1 percent owned that much wealth was—of course—back in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.
Trump wants to take America back to the 1950s, does he? In this one respect, we should all wish he would. From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, the top .1 percent owned around 10 to 12 percent of the wealth. The current madness started after Ronald Reagan’s two big tax cuts. (The famous joke about everything about the United States going bad after the Reagan presidency isn’t quite as hyperbolic as it sounds.)
Now—you may consider the above information old hat. If you read someone like me on a regular basis, you’re more likely to know this sort of stuff. But people—voters—generally do not. In fact, what they don’t know is astonishing.
A week or so ago, I tripped across this video on YouTube. It’s old—it’s from 2013. So the reality described in it has only gotten worse. The narrator starts like this: “There’s a chart I saw recently that I can’t get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed in the United States.”
They thought the top 20 percent probably owned around 58 percent of the wealth. Then they were asked what they thought the ideal distribution should be. They thought that ideally, the top 20 percent should own around 33 percent of the wealth. The actual distribution, in 2013? The top 20 percent owned 82 percent of the wealth.
This was 2013, but in the intervening years, people’s perceptions haven’t changed much. I did find a study from this year in which researchers asked people how many times wealthier an average member of the top 10 percent is than someone in the remaining 90 percent of the population. People said about 13.5 times wealthier. The actual answer is precisely twice that, 27 percent.
You get the idea. So, what does all this mean for Democrats?
I suppose some would say, well, a few things. First, they need to disenthrall themselves from the idea that talking about all this stuff is too “left-wing.” Undoubtedly, such rhetoric will be labeled that by Republicans and elements of the media. But so what? It’s just reality. This country is on an unsustainable economic path. It must be changed. You don’t change things by being afraid of how you’re going to be attacked. Non-confrontational Democrats are, to be blunt, not fit for purpose.
Others would contend that even if the mass of voters knew these numbers and more, they wouldn’t care; it wouldn’t move them, and they wouldn’t vote on the basis of them. I think that, too, is cowardly nonsense. The study I cited above, in which people’s ideal income distribution is well to the left of where they think it is and way to the left of where it actually is? (And by the way, I’ve seen other such studies, and they all show the same thing.) That suggests to me that most people would welcome a message of income redistribution.
And by the way—and this too is a crucial point that Democrats need to get through their skulls—if that many people hold that view, it’s not even “left.” It’s mainstream. Democrats need to accept this and act accordingly.
Also, always remember: Be suspicious of people who tell you such-and-such an issue won’t move voters. One question in a poll or focus group isn’t the same thing as a charismatic candidate making something the centerpiece of his or her campaign in speech after speech. And besides, no candidate has to move “voters,” generally and generically. Candidates have to persuade small, decisive percentages of voters that they will fight for their interests.
So, as these billionaires become trillionaires; as their share of the wealth grows ever greater; as some of them express open contempt for democracy itself; it’s time that we demand that the 2028 Democratic aspirants be willing to say: “My fellow Americans, if you elect me and give me a Democratic House and Senate, we’re going to take some money away from the billionaires and give it to you.” How on earth is that a losing message?
And while they’re at it, they need to tell Americans the economic facts of our society, over and over and over until they start to hit home. Republicans want voters to think only, “My, what a pretty red car.” Democrats have to tell them what’s in the engine.
