I can understand why some folks get upset about the .1%. If you ignore the whole private property aspect of it, it is pretty easy to make a "moral" against Bezos having so much money. He didn't exactly 'earn' it, after all. He just started a company that grew and grew and grew. And besides, you could take 95% of it without having any impact on his quality of life.

The same is not true of the 9.9%. These aren't household names with ungodly amounts of wealth. However the article tries to spin it:

> So what kind of characters are we, the 9.9 percent? We are mostly not like those flamboyant political manipulators from the 0.1 percent. We’re a well-behaved, flannel-suited crowd of lawyers, doctors, dentists, mid-level investment bankers, M.B.A.s with opaque job titles, and assorted other professionals.

Presumably the inclusion of 'investment bankers' and 'M.B.A's with opaque job titles' is an attempt to convince you that these people don't actually work. The actual data say the most common jobs in the top 10% are Managers, Software Developers, Salespeople, Lawyers, Execs, Sales Managers, IT Professionals, Marketing professionals, Accountants, and physicians.[0] These folks aren't mysterious people doing god-knows-what for unseemly amounts of money. Their your neighbors. If you want to know what they make, you can google it. You'll find that it's not unreasonable. I sure as hell don't want to be a manager or a doctor.

So how do they get so much richer than the 90%? It's so easily explained that it's almost tautological. They trade their labor for money, then invest it. People who make more money have more disposable income and, importantly, disposable income doesn't scale linearly. A guy who makes 100K might see 25% of his income (25K!) in disposable income. A guy who makes 50K is unlikely to have 25% of his income (12.5K) in disposable income, and someone earning the average minimum wage of ~25K is VERY unlikely to have 25% of his income (6.5K) in disposable income. Why would it be surprising that our high earner was worth much more than the others?

And while these folks are undoubtedly rich, they're far from obscenely rich. The median member of the 10% is worth $2.4 Million. Let's think about that number in terms of a retirement nest-egg. Assuming that's all in liquid assets (it's not), that gives them a safe withdrawal rate (4% per year), which would mean ~230K per year in retirement income. These people are planning for reasonable retirements with comfortable but relatable lifestyles.

There's nothing nefarious going on, but (as is clear in the article) it's important that you think there is. It's hard to convince you to tax your Software Developer friend, Tim, or the Doctor that you've known your whole life. The trick is to mention them without making you think about them by intentionally conflating normal white-collar folks with mysterious sounding "mid-level investment bankers" and "M.B.A.s with opaque job titles". Once we're talking about an abstract group of 'others', it's easy to convince you that they're bad. Just mention some stats about racial disparities and allude to institutional racism. They're only rich because of their White privilege! It's also helpful to pretend that not taxing someone is somehow a government handout. Isn't that just unfair? Now Tim and Dr. Philbert are far from your mind. You're angry at these cheaters, these bad people in the 9% who got their money in dubious ways! Having been lulled into a state of moral hypnosis (in which poor Tim's retirement savings has somehow been transmuted into ill-gotten gains) you're happy to vote his money out of his pockets. If you buy in hard enough, you can even do so while enjoying a sense of moral superiority!

[0]https://taxfoundation.org/most-common-jobs-income-bracket/