The Where's Waldo Game of Finding The Part of the Budget Bill Just for Oligarchs

A lot of it is for rich people, but only one part is specifically for billionaires.

Is there any other way to travel?

I have a little game I play when boarding an airplane. As I walk past the people in first class I try to find the smallest sign that they are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, different from you and me. They aren’t! Not so’s you can tell by looking at them, anyway. Of course some of them are just regular dopes like you and me who lucked into an upgrade. But on the whole we’ve managed to erase most visible differences between the middle class and the haute bourgeoisie—not because the latter have given up their lives of privilege, but because over the past century clothing has gotten relatively inexpensive and fashion has embraced a vaguely proletarian aesthetic. Spotting a poor person is still relatively easy, but spotting a rich person (as opposed to a middle class person) is not.

Does that hold for the super-rich too? Some of them, like Warren Buffett, work hard to look middle class (except once Buffett became famous he came to look to most people like Warren Buffett). Others (especially if they’re women) give off a je ne sais quoi that tells you a bit more about their net worth. One can’t really generalize, because quite a lot of these people don’t travel commercial at all. But certainly within the Big, Beautiful Bill the oligarch class does a brilliant job of blending into the background—so much so that most news accounts fail to identify what part of this execrable legislation is a special (and quite expensive) gift to them. In my latest New Republic piece, I explain what that bauble is. You can read it here.

Also, I discussed on Arne Arnesen’s podcast yesterday my New Republic cover story about how the billionaires took over, which, if you haven’t read, please do so, because it will be on the final. You can listen to that interview here.