The Misdirection

There’s something profoundly wrong with our country. This isn’t a hot take. It’s not political posturing. Walk into any coffee shop in Calgary or corner store in rural Alberta and you’ll hear the same refrain with different accents. The specifics change. Someone’s worried about their kid’s school, another can’t afford their medication, a third is watching their small business bleed out. The underlying current is identical. [Groceries cost too fucking much.](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/canadians-save-groceries-food-costs-survey-9.6986295) The housing market reads like a practical joke. Your job, assuming you have one, demands everything and offers nothing. The institutions we were told to trust feel like they’re actively working against us.

We agree on the *what*. The material reality. The day-to-day grind of trying to survive in an economy that seems designed to extract rather than sustain.

But then comes the *why* and everything fractures.

Some say it’s immigration. Others point to over-taxation. There’s talk of a dangerous ideology infecting our institutions, of people being asleep when they should be awake, or is it awake when they should be… you get the idea. The explanations multiply like rabbits, each one offering a neat target, a clear enemy, a simple solution that somehow never quite materializes.

Most of these explanations are *symptoms* being mistaken for *causes*. And that confusion is not accidental.

## The Numbers.

Let’s start with something concrete and inarguable. [The top 1% of Americans now hold 30.8% of all wealth in the country](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-the-1s-share-of-u-s-wealth-over-time-1989-2024/), up from 22.8% in 1989. Meanwhile, the bottom 50%—half the country—holds 2.8%.

But it gets more precise, more obscene. In 2024, [the 19 richest billionaires increased their share of national wealth from 1.2% to 1.8%](https://inequality.org/article/the-swelling-wealth-share-of-our-richest-00001-percent/), the largest single-year increase ever recorded. These nineteen people. Not nineteen thousand. Nineteen.

During the same period you’ve been watching grocery prices climb? [These individuals added $1 trillion to their collective wealth](https://inequality.org/article/the-swelling-wealth-share-of-our-richest-00001-percent/). One trillion dollars. While you’re deciding between paying for your kid’s medication or fixing your car’s transmission, [Musk’s net worth](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-is-richer-now-than-john-rockefeller-was-and-it-still-might-not-be-enough-for-his-ambitions-ed085ea6) is 1.6% of GDP, the largest personal fortune in human history.

[100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion on political contributions in 2024](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/01/bil