2028 Democrats Litmus Test: Billionaires, I’m Coming After Your Money

In short order, a fresh crop of candidate will be vying for our votes for the right to face the GOP presidential nominee. Here’s what we’ll be asking in return.

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........

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