My must read of the day is "Why the rich are freaking out," in Politico:
The nation’s wealthiest, denizens of the loftiest slice of the 1 percent, appear to be having a collective meltdown.
Economists, advisers to the wealthy, and the wealthy themselves describe a deep-seated anxiety that the national — and even global — mood is turning against the super-rich in ways that ultimately could prove dangerous and hard to control.
President Barack Obama and the Democrats have pivoted to income inequality ahead of the midterm elections. Pope Francis has strongly warned against the dangers of wealth concentration. And all of this follows the rise of the Occupy movement in 2011 and a bout of bank-bashing populism in the tea party.
The collective result, according to one member of the 1 percent, is a fear that the rich are in deep, deep trouble. Maybe not today but soon.
While analogies to the Holocaust are beyond inappropriate, maybe one reason the rich feel they are under attack is that they are, well, under attack. From MSNBC anchors to Democratic senators to New York Times columnists to the president of the United States, liberals have turned the wealthiest members of American society into bogeymen.
Instead of focusing on structural problems that result in immobility and poverty, liberals seem obsessed with the fact that there are some really rich people. The theory seems to be that wealth is a zero-sum game—some people get rich at the expense of others. That's not the case, and it also doesn’t provide any solution to poverty.
One of the reasons some Democrats are cautioning the president to avoid professorial phrases like "income inequality" is that, at the end of the day, people really don’t mind it. They are more concerned about how they are doing personally. Most people believe that they earned their wealth fair and square, and they want to earn more of it. Whether you make $30,000 a year or $500,000, my wager is you’d say you’ve worked hard to get where you are and you deserve every penny, which you do.