The middle moves up

Contrary to what you may have heard, the U.S. economy is doing a remarkably good job of making Americans wealthy.

The number of millionaires in America is now an astounding 8.7 million, as of the end of 2025. And now a recently published book documents three million previously overlooked millionaires across every region of America.

Titled The Everywhere Millionaire, the book by Princeton economist Owen Zidar and University of Chicago economist Eric Zwick, shows that most of these additional millionaires are owners of unglamorous private businesses—car dealers, construction contractors, beverage distributors. Zidar and Zwick also found that the number of Americans with $100 million in wealth has, adjusted for inflation, quadrupled since 2001.

Zidar and Zwick wrote on Substack that “most very rich Americans own ordinary companies outside of tech and finance.”

These millionaires come mostly from the middle or lower class, Zidar and Zwick found. Successful business founders are 2.5 times as likely to come from a poor family as from the top 1%, they wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, and only about 25% of business owners worth $5 million or more inherited their companies.

And it’s not just business owners getting wealthy. The middle class in America shrunk between 1979 and 2024 because more people moved to the upper middle class. That was the conclusion of research published earlier this year by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

After adjusting for inflation, the AEI study found that the portion of American families with poor or modest incomes ($67,000 or less in 2024) fell by about 50% while the portion with upper middle-class incomes ($133,000 or more) tripled. The portion between those two groups remained roughly stable while those with incomes above $400,000 soared 12-fold.

Christians should regard these trends favorably. Just as God did not create us to be sick, He did not create us to be poor. Of course, the sinful brokenness of the world has brought us plenty of both. Christians have historically worked hard to alleviate poverty, and they should never stop doing so.

Economic growth helps with poverty-fighting in two ways. First, it creates more and better opportunities for people to work to earn their way out of poverty. Even though the AEI research showed faster growth for higher income levels, even Americans at the 10th percentile of income saw their incomes grow by 29%, even after adjusting for inflation.

Second, it inevitably leads to more donations to charity. Charitable giving last year exceeded $600 billion for the first time ever. That’s nearly as much as the U.S. government spends each year funding Medicaid.

And yet, many Americans say they don’t feel wealthier. In fact, only a third of people with $1 million in investable assets say they’re wealthy. One reason is that prices have spiked nearly 30% since the COVID-19 pandemic. Most painfully, the prices of homes rose even more. Combined with continuing high costs for education, these prices make it hard for many Americans to get started on the road to prosperity.

The combination of surging wealth and surging prices has led to rising calls for redistribution. Nineteen Democratic primaries for Congress were won by candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, which calls for the end of capitalism. And Californians will vote on Proposition 40, which would institute a one-time tax on billionaires’ wealth to fund health care, food, and education assistance programs.

There is also an effort underway for a national and permanent billionaire’s tax. U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced a bill in March that would tax the 938 billionaires in the United States to fund annual $3,000 payments to all Americans with household incomes below $150,000.

“Billionaires cannot have it all,” Sanders said in a press release. “It is time to enact a wealth tax on billionaires and use this revenue to address some of the major crises facing working families, the children, the elderly, the sick and the most vulnerable.”

But these efforts at redistribution are trying to solve the wrong problem. Americans don’t need government to give them more money—the economy is doing that quite well. Instead, they need help keeping the price of the things they need to get started in life—especially housing and education—from rising faster than their growing wealth can keep up.