Steve Lamar

Just don't pay taxes, almost none.

And to be clear, when I'm talking about rich people, I'm not talking about, like, a doctor or a lawyer.

The lifetime earnings of a doctor, on average, are $6.7 million.

A hedge fund manager earns, on average, $84 million over a lifetime.

Those are wealthy people by any measure.

But they pale in comparison to Mark Zuckerberg's net worth, which is $237 billion.

Jeff Bezos is worth $269 billion.

And, you know, the difference between a million and a billion is massive.

It's literally a thousand times larger.

So we're talking about phenomenally wealthy people, people who are above a paycheck.

We are talking about people who are so rich that they do not need to earn an income.

Because income gets taxed.

Like people who earn a lot of money, the working rich, they pay taxes.

They pay a lot of taxes, actually.

They are our comrades here.

And this, in part, explains why we no longer see the top hats and the tiaras and the cigars wrapped in $100 bills.

All that visible excess attracted too much attention.

The splashy largesse of the rich led to the creation of a tax code that was meant to curb all that behavior.

And yet...

In the years since, that fair tax system we made has been whittled away.