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For many US citizens, the financial landscape over the past five years has been difficult. Expenses have escalated while salaries remains flat. High mortgage rates have made buying a home a bleak prospect. The jobless rate has been creeping up.

Most people have stated they're delaying major life decisions, including having kids or switching jobs, because of the instability. But for a tiny fraction of people, the past five-year period couldn't have been any better.

Fortune Expansion

The wealth of the world's billionaires grew 54% in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. And even during all the market volatility, the stock market has only kept rising. This expansion has mostly helped just a limited group of Americans: 10% of the population owns 93% of stock market wealth.

Despite the imbalance as this distribution seems, it's the system working as it is presently configured.

"Affluent individuals have purchased their jets, they've purchased their multiple houses and mansions, but now they're acquiring senators and media outlets," explained economic inequality analyst Chuck Collins. "We're now moving into this other chapter of maximum resource removal where the wealthy are taking advantage of the system of inequality."

Analyzing Income Brackets

To help others comprehend what exactly it means to be "wealthy" in the US, Collins borrows a concept from journalist Robert Frank who, in a 2007 book on the rich, imagined the different levels of wealth as "Wealthville" villages: Wealth Borough, Lower Richistan, Middle Richistan, Upper Richistan and Billionaireville.

To update the concept, Collins organizes these "economic communities" based on income levels:

• At the foundation, Affluent Town, are the 10 million Americans who have a household income of at least $110,000 and an total assets of over $1.5m.
• The villages get more select as wealth goes up: Lower Richistan has 2.6 million households who have wealth between $6m and $13m.
• Middle Richistan has 1.3 million households who have assets worth an average of $37m.
• Upper Richistan, made up of 130,000 Americans (roughly the size of a small city) has between $60m to $1bn in wealth.

In total, the residents of these villages make up the top 10% of the wealth income distribution, about 14 million Americans altogether, though their lifestyles vary dramatically.

"You could be in Lower Richistan, and you're still traveling in the coach section of a commercial plane," Collins explained. "Whereas in Upper Richistan, you're flying in a private jet. That's a really distinct lifestyle. You fly private, you have no interest in the commercial aviation system. You don't care if the whole system fails – you're set."

The Billionaireville Effect

The highest hill in "Richistan" is Billionaireville, which is made up of about 800 American billionaires who are some of the world's richest. The power that this group has greatly exceeds those who are simply wealthy, let alone the average American who doesn't reside in "Richistan" at all.

But Collins thinks the progressive slogan "billionaires shouldn't exist" doesn't capture the real problem and has a "whiff of exterminism" to it.

"It's the distinction between individual behaviors and a framework of policies," Collins commented. "We should be worried about an economic system that directs so much wealth upward to the billionaires."

The Four Pillars of Billionaire Wealth

To understand how wealth at the billionaire level works, Collins breaks it down into four parts: acquiring fortune, securing fortune, political capture and hyper-extraction.

When many Americans think about wealth, they usually think solely about the first step, Collins said. People can create a limited sum of wealth through starting or running a successful business, which could get them membership in Affluent Town.

But getting to Billionaireville requires substantial commitment and tactics in those next three steps. Collins describes what he calls the "fortune security field": the tax lawyers, accountants and wealth managers who use their skills to ensure that the super rich are being calculated about their taxes.

"Wealth defense professionals use a broad range of tools such as legal entities, offshore bank accounts, undisclosed businesses, charitable foundations and other methods to hold assets," he explains.

Political Influence and Hyper-Extraction

To further a wealth defense strategy, a family needs government backing. Wealth of over $40m becomes political power, Collins says, and can be used to secure fortune and protect its accumulation.

The ultimate step is a different kind of wealth accumulation, one that Collins calls "maximum taking" to describe how the wealthy have come to affect nearly every single part of an Americans' daily existence largely through private equity, which allows wealthy individuals to support private companies.

"Private equity is looking for those sectors of the economy where they can squeeze things a little bit harder," Collins said. "One thing I don't think people realize is these billionaire private-equity funds are what happens when so much wealth is parked in so few hands, and they can kind of turn around and say, 'Where else can we generate returns out of the economy?' Healthcare? Great. Mobile home parks? These people can't go anywhere, [so] you can boost their expenses."

Tangible Effects

The effects of this inequality go beyond the wealth getting wealthier. It's about people facing higher costs for their healthcare, rent and vet bills without seeing any meaningful wage increases. And Collins said the pain and frustration of this kind of society can lead to profound dissatisfaction.

"The most powerful oligarchs understand people are being marginalized [and] are economically suffering," Collins said, adding that Republicans have been good at connecting with a potent "phony populism".

Policy Situation

The irony, Collins points out in his book, is that elected representatives have appointed a series of billionaires to administrative posts. Along with wealthy entrepreneurs who had brief but powerful roles overseeing substantial reductions to the federal workforce, other important roles for commerce, treasury, education and the interior are also all billionaires.

This government structure, along with help from political partners, helped pass significant fiscal policies, which will make lasting reductions for the wealthy and corporations.

The Path Forward

While political parties continue to argue that immigration and unfavorable commercial treaties are the source of everyone's economic problems, "the challenge is: Will the other major party, which has also been captured by the billionaires and big money, be able to meaningfully address the underlying harms?" Collins said.

Left-leaning officials, he argues, know what policies are needed to "change wealth distribution", including deep changes to the tax system, raising the minimum wage and strengthening unions.

"It was so, so close, and the bill really did represent the will of the bulk of people who really want lawmakers to solve some of these urgent problems," Collins said. "Oligarchic power is not about building so much as stopping. It's easier to block than it is to make something substantial take place, but the muscle memory is there. We know what that looks like."

Collins is optimistic that there can be change, but said it would require ongoing legislative effort.

"It may be sooner than expected that the tide turns, and then it really is about maintaining a continuous public campaign to make progress on this profound imbalance we're living in," he said. "We can fix this. It is fixable."