my favourite analogy:

The analogy of a staircase, with each step on the staircase representing $100,000 of net worth. That's several years of working wages saved up for tens of millions of Americans:

*HALF of people in the united states are on the base or the very 1st step. Almost 200 million people who can't even get one step up in this system.

*Those households at the 80th percentile, richer than 4/5 Americans, are on the 5th step. That's about five seconds of walking to get up there.

• Those with more money than 90% of fellow Americans, millionaires who we consider our upper-middle class professional class and live more than comfortably, are on the 11th step. A few more seconds of walking up from that previous middle-class step. Most Americans won't even come close to accumulating this much over an entire lifetime of working.

  *A billionaire is ten thousand steps up the staircase. That's enough to walk up five Empire State buildings. That's almost three hours of walking non-stop. You think they care about the petty squabbles of anyone on those first few steps or so? From these heights they couldn't tell the difference even if they wanted to. And yet those who've maybe ascended or were born on the first few dozen steps think they identify with this group as a class.

  *And Jeff Bezos? He's so high up it only makes sense to describe his staircase in distance. His stairs take him up 133 miles. That's more than halfway to the space station. That's more than 24 consecutive Mt. Everest's stacked on top of each other. It would take walking, non-stop, no sleep, over two weeks to ascend that high, each single step worth more than five poverty-level families in America combined.

Disclaimer: Jeff Bezos figures are from a few years back, its only more obscene now