Millionaires

Somebody has a piece arguing that having a higher percentage of Americans be millionaires would have beneficial effects on our political culture. Those "beneficial effects" are mainly in the form of promoting government policies more friendly to reasonably rich people, so obviously I don't necessarily endorse them. But there's also just an idea of trying to have a more "broadly prosperous" society, in the sense of having more people about the million-dollar mark in total wealth. A call to have, say, 15% of society be millionaires, when there aren't currently 15% millionaires, necessarily means we need to increase the wealth of the 85th-percentile rich person, as well as all the people between 85th percentile and wherever millionaires currently rank. That wealth has to come from somewhere, in the context of arguments about distributive schemes. The place that the person writing this piece probably wants it to come from (and you can see this in the policies he proposes to achieve this goal) is everyone below 85th percentile, a.k.a. the little people. That's bad, and in no way constitutes broad prosperity. But it could also come from the people at, say, 99th percentile in wealth getting a wee bit less wealthy. Making the top of the income distribution flatter would also be a way to, well, spread the wealth around, which could make more somewhat-rich people as well as making fewer very-poor people. Just a thought.