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US billionaire wealth surges to $8.1 trillion as affordability crisis hammers working class
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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The way accounting works, if the money is going on to their books, it had to come off of someone else's. So the rest of us are not the same, you are correct, we are actually poorer, collectively.
Billionaires' accumulation of wealth is basically self perpetuating once they get to the point of being a billionaire. They can't possibly spend it all, so they invest anything left over, which gains more profits, which they invest again and so on.
They eventually run out of regular investments to invest in (see stocks just going up and up), so they move into investing in things like housing, which is why that bubble refuses to burst. Meanwhile, you can't afford to buy your own house because of the astronomical cost, and you're left renting your housing from the billionaire class who effectively own it, creating more profit for them. Even if you buy a home, you likely have a mortgage, with that money having been lent by... investors (see above), creating more profit for them.
Unfortunately, every dollar lent for anything requires an interest payment, which, if you know how that works (see "fractional reserve banking" to get an idea), forces money to be printed in order for there to be enough money supply to keep the whole system working. Printing money causes inflation, which lowers the buying power of any money you do have.
For regular people, that means we're collectively poorer.
For billionaires, they'd never notice the inflation, both because they already have more money than they could ever spend, and the growth is self perpetuating because they have no other way to spend it.
If you follow that out, obviously they'll end up owning absolutely everything.
But people have to eat, so one day, shit is going to hit the fan. The longer taxing billionaires heavily is delayed, the larger that shit storm is going to be. The people who are right now living in shantytowns, in their cars or RVs, are the tip of the iceberg.
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This doesn't even touch on things like shrinkflation (which is just another part of general inflation).
Some people might say "oh, fractional reserve banking is dead", but what they don't say is that the reserve part is dead, meaning the engine is now fully pinned instead of just red-lining.