On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Since the 1980s, new wealth generated by the U.S. economy has remained in the hands of an almost invisibly minuscule fraction of the population. The number of the oligarchs is numerically insignificant. The people in question are not really the 1 percent made notorious by the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the 1 percent of the 1 percent. Not 1 percent, but 0.01 percent. Not 1 of 100, nor even 1 of 1,000, but 1 of 10,000. Essentially all new wealth generated by the American economy since 1980 is in the hands of that tiny percentage of the population. The group of Americans who control as much wealth as half of the population is even smaller: as numerous as my high school class. And those few hundred oligarchs are paying less tax now than the actual members of my high school class—which is to say they have a lower effective tax rate than working-class and middle-class Americans.