Ownership of the economy is split roughly 30/30/30 between the top 10%/1%/.1% with the bottom 90% of people making an entrance as the rounding error. If you picture "the owners" by drawing a representative sample of 10 people:

    1 Normal person
    3 Doctors / Lawyers / Engineers ($1M+ net worth)
    3 Successful Entrepreneurs ($10M+ net worth)
    3 Ultrawealthy ($50M+ net worth)

It's worth putting these through the fundamental theorem of capitalism (rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are) to solve for passive income from asset appreciation. Plugging in the crude figure of 10%/yr (feel free to bring your own rate):

    1 Normal person 
    3 Professional ($100k+/yr passive)
    3 Successful   ($1M+/yr passive)
    3 Wealthy      ($5M+/yr passive)

You get your incentives where you get your money. Most people get most of their money from working, but the wealthy get most of their money and incentives from the assets they own. In between it's in between.

Are the in-betweeners part of the problem? Sure, but we have a foot on either side of the problem. We could get hype for many of the plausible solutions to aggregate labor oversupply (e.g. shorter workweeks) even if it meant our stocks went down. Not so for 6/10 people in that sample. The core problem is still that the economy is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly owned by people who own things for a living and all of the good solutions to the problem require rolling that back a little against a backdrop that, absent intervention, stands to accelerate it a lot.

EDIT: one more thing, but it's a big one: the higher ends of the wealth ladder have the enormous privilege of being able to engage in politics for profit rather than charity/obligation. A 10% chance of lobbying into place a policy that changes asset values by 10% is worth $1k to a "Professional", $50k to a "Wealthy", but $8B to Elon Musk. The fact that at increasing net worths politics becomes net profitable and then so net profitable as to allow hiring organizations of people to pursue means the upper edge of the distribution punches above its already-outsized weight in terms of political influence.

> Ownership of the economy is split roughly 30/30/30 between the top 10%/1%/.1%

This is simply not true and a cheap attempt at manipulation.

> If you picture "the owners" by

A practically useless characteristic. A more relevant would be to look at "the spender". Possessions is simply what hasn't yet been spent and poorly reflects the controlled resources.

> for passive income

Frankly, mentioning passive income in this context isn't even idiotic, it's a clinical diagnosis. Or, more likely, a cheap attempt at manipulation.

It's simply true.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSN40176

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSN09149

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBS99T999259

There's more to say, of course. The role of housing, the role of the government, using DCFs for apples-to-apples comparisons of assets, jobs, social services, and the incentives thereof, behavioral economics, and so on. If you reflexively recoil at the notion that assets have returns, however, you aren't even at the starting line.

> mentioning passive income in this context isn't even idiotic, it's a clinical diagnosis

We could use the IRS term if you prefer: "unearned income"

>>Until people with salaries

Salary (income) is a horrible choice to serve as the marker to determine a person's (family's) fair share contribution to the burden of paying the costs to operate a society. Not everyone is so poor that working for a living is a matter of survival.

I can think of only one universal marker that would assure every citizen shares the burden of paying for society's costs equally: wealth.

Adjusted in a manner that the financial impact of one thousand dollars to a full-time MacDonald's counter worker is transformed into a dollar amount that causes the same relative financial impact to everyone, all the way up to the wealthiest family in America.

Yes, a billionaire and substitute teacher have the same political power in America. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

/s

Of course not, that's crazy to think that.

Teachers have way more political power simply by virtue of their superior numbers.

GP said “a substitute teacher” vs “a billionaire” - why have you decided to pretend they said something else?

You’re also flatly wrong, given you’ve utterly ignored the trivial things wealth buys (for starters), but hard to expect accuracy when basic honesty is so lacking.

Yep, that's why substitute teachers' interests are more zealously guarded by Congress than the interests of billionaires are. Teachers have wielded the enormous power they hold to get a <= $250 deduction for school supplies they purchase with their own money.

America only has the shallowest appearance of a democracy where voters get to control who is elected.

The electoral college system, coupled with it's winner-takes-all implementation in most states, means that voting is a sham for 80% of the population. The other 20% live in a swing state and their vote can at least potentially affect the outcome of an election, but even there "your vote" will literally be cast opposite to what you put on the ballet unless you end up being part of the winning majority.