The combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans is a record-breaking $1.25 trillion. That's about the same amount of combined wealth held by the 57 million households who make up half the U.S. population.

The economy is booming for billionaires. It's a bust for many other Americans.

However, the solutions offered are limited:

Solutions include restoring the link between rising worker productivity and pay, raising the miserly minimum wage, narrowing the obscene pay gap between workers and CEOs, rolling back tax cuts for the wealthy — and stop taxing income from work more than income from capital gains.

This issue of wealth concentration is intricately tied to immigration. There is simply no way the US can remain a high wage, high productivity economy without an immigration policy that has some balance in relationship to its jobs policy.

It isn't just the US. The world economy doesn't have a lot of respect for labor and investment. Many of the world's rich have gotten it in rather questionable ways. There is virtually no type of skilled or unskilled labor that wouldn't face lower market wages if the US were to remove its remaining restrictions on immigration—and allow the 20 million person backlog of "willing workers" in as soon as they can purchase tickets. A few occupations might shield themselves from market forces via protective licensure and similar legal mechanisms, but that really isn't a solution for the bulk of Americans.

Additionally these extreme economic concentations can in fact be taxed via direct taxes on assets over some lefel. The very wealthiest have had significantly higher returns on investment than smaller investors. The simple fact is that the wealthy have been highly unrestrained in promoting open borders, and there is little reason for VDARE.COM readers to support their interests.