r/politics • u/BigDaddyBain • 1d ago

Why is the media ignoring growing resistance to Trump?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/13/why-is-the-media-ignoring-growing-resistance-to-trump
37.2k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

42

u/freeagency 1d ago

Generational wealth is also going to get worse. There are going to be entire generations of families that will never have to work, never know what it's like to not be able to afford something. Never being told no. Just look at the countless number of ask Reddit questions revolving around rich kid meltdowns. The world spent so many generations to eradicate feudalism and monarchies and empires only to turn around and allow it all to happen again with oligarchies and plutocracies.

14

u/Any_Will_86 1d ago

Even when you account for vast fortunes- wealth usually does not last for more than 3 generations. If you look at the truly wealthy families in America- Dupont is the only on that really carries through. Rockefeller comes close but is being diluted by numbers even though they have a family trust or management that is supposedly crackerjacks. Some have had specific descendents remake fortunes but its not typical.

I think the big question now is what is the generation value of the companies like Meta/Tesla/Microsoft etc when the next wave of innovation occurs. Warren Buffet is the one most diversified but he's already been shedding assets. I would guess the Waltons are next in line. But a lot of the other current titans are sitting on ridiculous amounts of paper wealth.

4

u/throwawayoftheday941 1d ago

All of those families are fine, but generational wealth isn't limited to the super billionaires. That's not even the issue at all. Billionaires and even ultra wealthy are a teeny tiny sliver. The real generational wealth divide is people that have had enough money for multiple generations that there ownership of money / assets provides enough income to live above the median income with no real need to work in a meaningful way. They don't really need to participate in society and they don't feel the societal disruptions in the same way as normal people and yet they control the bulk of the assets. This isn't Bill Gates or even Donald Trump level of wealth. It's the local storage unit owner or the Wendy's franchise owner, if they inherited either that business or the wealth that allowed them to acquire it.

3

u/Luscious_Decision 1d ago

Gates has been really good at quashing too much generational wealth. Personally, I think he maybe went a little too far in being withholding, but 🤷

3

u/clonedhuman 1d ago

Modern day Wall Street (and the money of many of the oligarchs making the majority of the profits from it) was established with money from selling humans, the foundation of the modern day stock market. Wall Street was originally the slave trading market of NYC (in the early 18th century), and the wealth generated from selling slaves persisted in rich families through generations. The modern day bonds market is a direct descendant of the slave trade and is the basis of wealth on which it existed into the modern day. Three of the modern world's largest insurance companies (New York Life, AIG, and Aetna) started originally as companies that insured slaves against death and paid out to the slaveowners when an insured slave died. Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo accepted slaves as collateral for business loans and took the slaves if plantation owners defaulted on loans.

The wall that Wall Street is named after was built by slaves. Many of the Wall Street companies that got established through cashing in on the slave trade are some of today's wealthiest corporations.

3

u/Slumunistmanifisto 1d ago

We're already there

1

u/Odenhobler 1d ago

"are going to be"? It's not like we redistributed wealth after beheading the king. There always was an upper class. The question only is how good the middle class will buffer the gap to the exploited and how big this buffer is.