The slow-rolling demise of Twitter has proven more clearly than anything that out of control wealth is toxic. For no other reason than he could, Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter and then proceeded to burn it to the ground. Because he could.
That’s the extreme version of billionaire psychopathy and everything wrong with wealth distribution in our society, so it makes a handy jumping off point for this discussion: how much richer the rich have gotten in recent years and how wide the income gap has become even since the Trump tax scam.
“Last year the 237,000 highest paid employees in America together made more money than the lowest paid 60 million workers,” David Cay Johnson found in his analysis of the latest federal wage statistics. Those 237,000 people made $659.3 billion just last year. The 60 million people at the bottom of the wage sale earned $628.3 billion, collectively.
“Million dollar and up positions are the fasted growing jobs in America both in growth rate and pay,” Johnston found. “And the rate of growth is accelerating.” In 30 years, the “executive class” making more than $1 million has grown 325%, while the rest of the job force has increased by just 33%.
