What's the most downtrodden and persecuted minority in America?

If you said it's transgender youths, immigrant workers, or women trying to access their reproductive health rights, you're on the wrong track.

The correct answer, judging from a surge in news reporting over the last couple of weeks, is billionaires.

Concern about the welfare of this beleaguered minority (there are about 2,000 billionaires in the U.S.) has been triggered--or re-triggered--by the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City's June 24 Democratic primary.

A self-described "democratic socialist," Mamdani has had to weather bizarrely focused questions from cable news anchors and others about comments he has made about extreme wealth inequality in the U.S., and specifically in New York.

"I don't think that we should have billionaires," he told Kristen Welker of NBC's "Meet the Press" on June 29.

Welker had asked Mamdani, "Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist?" This was a weirdly tendentious way of putting the question. She made it sound as though he advocated lining billionaires up against a wall and shooting them. In fact, what he has said is that the proliferation of billionaires in America, and the unrelenting growth in their fortunes over the last decades, signified a broken economic system.

Nevertheless, the billionaire class and their advocates in the media and on cable news expressed shock and dismay at the very idea. "It takes people who are wealthy in New York to maintain the museums, maintain the hospitals," John Catsimatidis, a billionaire real estate and supermarket tycoon, fulminated on Fox News. "Do you know how much money we put up to contribute toward museums and hospitals and everything?"

Catsimatidis may not have realized that he had proved Mamdani's case: In New York and around the country, a tax structure that indulges the 1 percent with tax breaks has forced austerity on museums and hospitals and services that should be publicly supported. They're public goods, and they shouldn't be dependent on the kindness of random plutocrats.

The sheer scale of billionaire wealth in the U.S. prevents most people from understanding how historically outsized it is. "To own $1 billion is to possess more dollars than you'll ever count," observed Timothy Noah of the New Republic in a must-read takedown of the American oligarchy published last month. "It's to possess more dollars than any human being will ever count. And that's just one billion. Forbes counts 15 Americans who possess hundreds of........

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