That’s the argument in a new book by the economists Owen Zidar of Princeton University and Eric Zwick of the University of Chicago. “The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There” looks beyond the billionaires often invited to the White House and explores the country’s wider world of wealth. Drawing on labyrinthine Internal Revenue Service records, the pair study a group of rich business owners that looks more like a suburban chamber of commerce than an oligarchy: car dealers, dentists and a leading supplier of hamburger buns. What they find is tremendous wealth and power.
This group of roughly three million “Main Street Millionaires,” as the authors call them, have an average net worth of $25 million, and as a group, they commanded $54.8 trillion in 2022, the most recent year cited in the book. That’s more than 13 times the collective wealth that year of the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list, which includes household names like Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos. The multimillionaires of Main Street are getting richer even faster than the famous Forbes 400, propelled by tax breaks largely created by Republicans and local regulatory advantages.
Addressing those policy handouts, to the authors, should be at least as urgent as passing a wealth tax. In an interview, Mr. Zwick called a wealth tax a “sideshow” that may not be as effective as its proponents promise, though he and Mr. Zidar acknowledged that it is not necessarily an either-or question. Congress could, after all, pass legislation that includes both a wealth tax, or something like it, as well as a host of less sexy changes to how noncorporate business income is taxed.
But the authors have good reason to worry that the path to raising taxes is only getting narrower. As Mr. Zidar and Mr. Zwick describe, these millionaires are everywhere, serving in Congress, forming lobbying groups and presenting themselves as the sympathetic, familiar small businesses in your city or town. Raising taxes on a small, world-shaping set of billionaires may be politically easier than revoking a deduction for the nation’s manufacturers of garage doors and electric toothbrushes. The rhetorical preoccupation could become a substantive one, which would, at the very least, leave lots of tax revenue on the table.
In 2020, when Mr. Sanders last ran for president, he proposed a wealth tax that would apply to people with at least $32 million in assets, with even wealthier Americans owing a larger tax. This spring, he and Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat and potential presidential candidate, released a new wealth tax plan. It would apply only to people worth at least $1 billion.
