I must say that I consider the phrase 'tax the rich' . . . when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs, and even the phrase 'from the river to the sea,' Roth said on the call. The rich whom the politicians are targeting started with nothing, are the epitome of the American dream. They are at the top of the great American economic pyramid for a reason.
The biggest winners from the Conservatives' help to buy scheme were high-earners who were already likely to buy a house, with the top 10% of earners receiving the largest cash benefit.
Billionaireism describes both the pathology that affects you when you are so wealthy that you're effectively above consequences and above moral consideration for others, and the pathologies that having a society dominated by such people inflicts on the rest of us.
This is really about trying to put power in the hands of people. There's 70% of workers who want a union, and 10% have them. If it were a company, they would figure out how to get the product into the hands of the 70% who wanted it.
"It's almost like a cop-out. You get to demonize this group of folks without fixing the actual system that exists, that's in play."
The core of the argument is that agentic AI will replace human labor in most white-collar industries and will do so with dizzying speed. The consequent abrupt and massive job displacements will lead to crashes in property values and local tax bases, with devastating impacts on communities and much of the public sector.
Nearly half of the apartments in the seven tallest towers in the area sit empty. At night the picture is even starker, with dozens of darkened floors turning the glittering status symbol into a vertical 'ghost neighborhood' scraping the sky.
I would say, Rachel, that my takeaway from today is that the president or Trump 2.0 is definitely living in a gilded bubble. I would say, even if you compare it to his first term, the president is now surrounded by an administration that says yes, yes, please, thank you, and yes again. He truly is living like a king in this White House.
He says that for boomers, who lived through an economic boom, accumulating wealth was easy-or at least easier than it has ever been since. Baby boomers currently hold more than $85 trillion in assets, making them the richest generation by far. Therefore, they earn the title "all about the money." Millennials, meanwhile, were handed a map and told the exact steps to follow to find the financial success their parents enjoyed.
Trump ran on a promise to lower costs on day one, but a year into his presidency, the real beneficiaries are his billionaire donors. Instead of making life more affordable for everyday Americans, Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself and his billionaire allies, while making the largest cuts to Medicaid and food assistance in history and leaving working families behind.
Vibes-wise, the event was classic Trump 2.0-chic. Guests were handed monogrammed buckets of popcorn, framed screening tickets for their trophy shelves, and a limited-edition copy of Trump's 2024 book of the same title as her documentary, "Melania. " Prior to the screening, the black-tie guests were greeted by a taxpayer-funded military band that playing famous movie themes, as well as "Melania's Waltz," featured in the documentary and composed by Hollywood's Tony Neiman.
"At the end of the day, it's the investors and billionaires at Davos who have his attention, not the families struggling to afford their bills," said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank.
Since taking office, Trump has imposed a range of tariffs on countries, including key trading partners, leading to predictions of inflation skyrocketing, manufacturing screeching to a halt and unemployment soaring. None of those scenarios came true. Inflation, while above the Federal Reserve's target, was a modest 2.7 percent in December. The unemployment rate was relatively low, at 4.4 percent, last month.
Billionaire wealth jumped three times faster in 2025 than in the previous five years to its highest peak ever, new figures have has shown, sparking warnings of dangerous political inequality. Figures published by the charity Oxfam show that in the UK, the richest 56 people now hold more wealth than 27 million combined. Calling on the government to impose a wealth tax,
Co-founder Arthur Clifton, a former leading figure in Just Stop Oil, explained the first strategy would involve a series of "take backs". Speaking to roughly 200 activists, he said: "We have seen that food is locked behind skyrocketing prices. Less and less people can afford less and less food. "So what we do is actually pretty obvious - we go in there, we take it out and we redistribute it to the local community. This is what we are going to be doing in March."