Everyone Can Be Rich

Let me start where my grandfather started, because he had this fight by the throat before I was born, and he never once mistook it for a fight against rich men. In the worst years of the Great Depression, when the bread lines wrapped the block and the want was a physical thing you could smell, he sat down and wrote a column with a title that needed no help from the paragraphs beneath it. He called it Three Per Cent Own All the Wealth. That was the whole argument. That was the scandal, laid flat on the table where a working man could see it over his coffee.

He was not a bitter man — and this is the part people always get wrong about the ones who fight. He loved the world ferociously. He was funny. He wrote about drunken sailors and meddlesome neighbors and the small comedies of ordinary life with a tenderness that had no quarrel with joy. When the doctors finally told him, at forty, that the cancer would take him in two months, he sat down and wrote that he meant to meet it as a lover of life, with neither fear nor bitterness. A man like that does not hate abundance. He wanted more of it — for everyone. What he hated was the arithmetic of three per cent, and the greed that guarded it, and the lie that the other ninety-seven had only themselves to blame.

That is the spirit I want to carry into the numbers that follow. Not envy. Not a hunt for villains. Just an honest picture of the ordinary man’s struggle, set beside an honest picture of where it all goes — and then a plain question about whether any of it has to stay this way.

My grandfather has been gone since 1947, and the arithmetic he found scandalous has not improved. It has concentrated. The gap between what a person earns by working and what a person collects by owning has stretched into something he would have struggled to believe, and he believed quite a lot.

Now, here is the honest part, and it matters: a chief executive is not 281 times smarter than the woman running his warehouse floor, and he does not work 281 times harder. The institute that tracks these numbers put it as plainly as it can be put — CEOs do not work hundreds of times harder than their workers; they simply have the power to set their own pay. That is the tell. When the reward stops tracking the contribution and starts tracking the leverage, you are no longer looking at the fruits of merit. You are looking at extraction. And extraction is the precise thing we are here to name.

So let me say the thing this whole publication wants understood, as clearly as I can, because it is the hinge on which everything turns. We are not against the rich. We are not against wealth, or ambition, or the person who builds something real and is paid well for it. America should be a place where you can dream big and win big. The drive to create, to build, to prosper — that is a glory, not a sin, and a country that punished it would deserve to be poor.

What we decry is something narrower and uglier: greed at the expense of others. There is a clean line between the two, and everyone who has ever worked for a living knows exactly where it runs. On one side is wealth created — value built, problems solved, people employed, a thing made that did not exist before. On the other side is wealth extracted — taken from someone else’s labor, someone else’s health, someone else’s rent, and called success. The first makes the pie bigger. The second just carves a thinner and thinner slice for everyone who isn’t holding the knife.

And here is the argument the greedy least want made, because it cannot be answered by calling it envy: extreme inequality does not only hurt the poor. It hurts everyone — the rich included — because it eats the very foundation that lets wealth be created in the first place.

Think about what wealth actually grows in. It grows in a society with customers who can afford to buy — and when the bottom half holds two and a half percent of everything, demand withers, because you cannot sell to people who have nothing left after rent. It grows where there is trust, stable rules, and the shared belief that the game is roughly fair — and nothing dissolves that belief faster than watching the rules get written by and for the three per cent. It grows in a country that is calm enough to plan, to invest, to build for twenty years out. Despair, debt, and rage are not the soil wealth grows in. They are the rot that brings the whole structure down — mansion and tenement together.

The greedy are not just taking a bigger slice. They are sawing through the table everyone is eating at — their own seat included.

My grandfather’s “three per cent” was never a complaint that some people had more. It was a warning that when ownership concentrates that far, the thing becomes unstable — that a society can be hollowed out from the inside until a hard shove topples it. That warning is not radical. It is something closer to maintenance. We are trying to keep the house standing, for the people in the penthouse as much as the people in the basement.

If you want to see what greed at the expense of others looks like when it stops even bothering to pretend, consider what was done to a small agency most Americans had never thought twice about — an agency that stamped its work, all over the world, with four plain words: From the American People.

The U.S. Agency for International Development was founded in 1961. It was never large — in a typical year it ran on well under one percent of the federal budget — and yet that sliver made the United States the source of roughly forty percent of all humanitarian aid on Earth. It vaccinated children. It fought famine and HIV and malaria. According to an independent analysis published in The Lancet, its programs prevented something on the order of 92 million deaths over two decades. It was, by almost any measure, the single most visible expression of American generosity and American values the world ever saw — soft power in its purest form, the open hand instead of the closed fist.

In early 2025 it was destroyed in a matter of weeks. The cost-cutting initiative led by the richest man on the planet moved through it like a storm: roughly 83 percent of its programs canceled, nearly all of its ten thousand workers fired. And on the night of February 3, 2025, the man who oversaw it went on his own social network and bragged about it. He wrote that he had spent the weekend feeding the agency “into the wood chipper.” He added that he could have gone to some great parties, and had done this instead — as a kind of amusement, a weekend’s sport.

Sit with the full obscenity of it. This was not even greed for money; the savings were a rounding error against the national budget. It was destruction for the pleasure of destruction — the richest human being alive taking visible joy in shredding the very program that fed the hungry of the world and carried America’s name to its farthest, poorest corners. Researchers writing in The Lancet projected that the cuts, left in place, could mean more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 — roughly a third of them children under five.

I find that more repulsive than I have the polite words for. Not because the man is rich — remember the distinction — but because it is greed’s truest face: a contempt so total for ordinary human life that feeding the world becomes a punchline, and four and a half million children become the cost of a good weekend. That is not who we are. It is the exact opposite of who we are.

Because here is what we actually are, underneath the wood chippers and the spreadsheets: a generous, big-hearted people. We are the country that fed the world and meant it. The cruelty is the aberration; the open hand is the character. And that character is exactly what gives me hope for the thing this whole project is finally about.

Our hope is a country where everyone can be rich — and where you get to decide what that word means. For some of us, wealth is money, and there is no shame in that; build your fortune and Godspeed. But for a great many of us it was never mainly money at all. It is a family that has enough time to actually be a family. It is a community that knows your name. It is a morning with nothing owed and nowhere to rush. It is land, or quiet, or a river, or work that means something when you lay your head down. Wealth is whatever lets you live pointed in your own chosen direction — and the measure of a decent country is simply whether it gives every one of its people a real shot at theirs.

None of that requires hating the wealthy. It requires only that we refuse to let greed-at-the-expense-of-others go on hollowing out our own people while the foundation cracks beneath all of us. That is a fight that belongs to the penthouse and the basement alike, because the rot does not check your balance before it spreads.

So I’ll borrow my grandfather’s instruction, written in the last clear months of his life: be pointed in your chosen direction, and fight like hell to get there. Fight the greed that hurts our own citizenry — loudly, stubbornly, together. And then, because we are also a people who know exactly what the fighting is for — let’s set it down for the evening, crack a cold one, drag the chairs out into the yard, and watch the fireworks go up together.

That, too, is wealth. Maybe the realest kind there is. Fight like hell — and for the living.