Tax the Epstein Class

A dispatch from the desk of Pathos Romaniac

Here’s what nobody explains in plain language:

In 2021, the 25 richest Americans paid an average federal income tax rate of 3.4%.

Not 34.

Three point four.

Less than a teacher.

Less than a nurse.

Less than the people actually holding the line.

It’s called Buy, Borrow, Die.

Don’t sell assets; no sale means no taxable income. Borrow against them; loans aren’t taxed. Die; pass it on, mostly untouched. Dynasties don’t grow. They are protected.

And who protects them?

Let’s stop pretending this is anonymous.

Donald Trump didn’t hide the game; he said the quiet part out loud. Policy as transaction. Access for sale. Power as a loyalty program.

Elon Musk lives inside the math; wealth that exists but rarely becomes taxable. He didn’t start Tesla. He forced the original innovators out in a hostile takeover, then leveraged family wealth tied to apartheid-era mining.

Jeff Bezos built a system where workers track bathroom breaks while the tax bill disappears. He didn’t reinvent retail; he exploited a loophole in the USPS code and undercut the competition with cheap Chinese knockoffs.

Mark Zuckerberg turned attention into currency and routed the profits through a maze. He built a rating game to judge college girls, then appropriated the core idea behind Facebook from the Winklevoss twins while cutting out his closest collaborator.

Peter Thiel treats politics like venture capital; invest early, control outcomes later. He built his position through acquisition and leverage, not original creation.

These aren’t villains in a movie.

They’re outcomes of a design.

And the design has authors.

The Supreme Court gave it legal cover with Citizens United v. FEC. Money became speech. The loudest voices bought the biggest megaphones.

Congress filled in the details. Loopholes, shelters, carve-outs, PACs. Complexity as camouflage. Just look at the latest fuck you for the American people; the much touted “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

The Executive branch? Enforcement bends when power leans on it hard enough. It’s pay-to-play, baby, and the orange felon pedophile president is the collector.

This isn’t chaos.

It’s alignment.

They told us billionaires are job creators.

No.

Teachers create jobs with every student they educate, they teach people how to read, write and do math. They are building the future one child at a time.

Nurses create jobs with every life they save.

Farmers, drivers, builders, artists… they create jobs, feed the community, enhance our lives…

But billionaires?

Billionaires collect. They create nothing. They hoard wealth, influence, and time itself. They don’t build ladders. They buy them, lock them up, and charge admission.

Let’s make it real.

In one warehouse, workers skip bathroom breaks to hit quotas. Median pay hovers around $32,000.

The owner makes that in about nine seconds.

Not nine minutes.

Not nine hours.

Nine seconds.

In the time it took you to read this paragraph, he made your annual salary.

That’s not success.

That’s extraction.

Now zoom out.

During global crises, when everyone else got “thoughts and prayers” and a free trial of unemployment, billionaire wealth exploded by trillions.

In one recent year, 55 major corporations paid $0 in federal income tax.

Zero.

The same amount most people have left after rent, groceries, and staying alive.

And we’re the ones getting lectures about “fiscal responsibility.”

We like roads. Hospitals. Electricity. Courts that function. A currency that holds.

Civilization is a shared subscription.

But the top tier gets full access without ever paying the fee.

“If we tax the rich, innovation will die.”

What innovation?

Another app to deliver food colder, faster?

Another platform to harvest attention and sell it back?

In 1960, the top marginal tax rate was 91%.

The country didn’t die. It built.

Innovation happened. ARPANET, the ancestor of the internet, emerged. The middle class was solid and college was affordable. We had the first successful heart transplant and polio was nearly eradicated in the U.S. We went to the moon and back, so innovation truly happened.

But in 2026? Today the top marginal tax rate is only 37%, and billionaires don’t even pay that.

They pay 3%.

Or 1%.

Or nothing.

This is the gilded age on steroids while our world is on life-support.

Meanwhile:

U.S. median household income (2024): $83,730

Cost of median home (2024): $512,800

Ratio: 6.12x

U.S. median household income (1980): $21,023

Cost of median home (1980): $47,200

Ratio: 2.2x

So housing costs have tripled relative to income in 40 years. But sure, it’s avocado toast. It’s our failure to budget. It’s definitely not a systemic transfer of wealth from workers to asset-owners.

Student debt: $1.8 trillion

Billionaire wealth: about $7.7 trillion

We could erase the debt twice and they’d still be billionaires.

But that would be “unfair.”

At $45,000 a year, it would take over 22,000 years to earn $1 billion.

That’s longer than human civilization.

But sure.

They “earned” it.

Let’s say this clean:

This is not envy. This is not resentment. This is recognition. A society that produces billionaires alongside homelessness is not a success. It’s a policy failure. Call it what it is: The Epstein Class.

We are not all in the same room all playing the same game. We want the source code.

A global minimum tax on ultra-wealth. A 2% annual wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million would raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years. End stock buybacks (which were illegal until 1982). Companies spent $9.6 trillion on buybacks over the last decade instead of raising wages. That’s not capital allocation. That’s stock price manipulation.

End the billionaire welfare scheme (subsidies, bailouts, golden parachutes). No more tax havens disguised as philanthropic foundations.

So no, we don’t burn it down.

We rewrite it. Tax wealth like they tax labor. Close the loopholes. Treat stock-backed loans as income. End subsidies that reward failure at the top and punish survival at the bottom. It’s not irrational. It’s not envy. It’s the appropriate response to a system that has been rigged so thoroughly that the riggers no longer hide it anymore.