The authors Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar say that the true wealthy class isn’t made up of the billionaires you see on Hollywood screens or manosphere podcasts. Instead, they point to people who own car dealerships, sell hot dogs and frozen mini-quiches, run waxing salons, supply fabricated metal and urinal cakes, and even operate dental practices. According to their book, The Everywhere Millionaire, these everyday business owners “Main Street millionaires” generate more income than the celebrity billionaires who launch rockets into space.
The Stealthy Wealthy
The book’s authors Zwick and Zidar say there are roughly three million private business owners in the country. Each one carries an average net worth of around $25 million. They refer to these people as the “stealthy wealthy”, a term that simply rhymes, which seems to be the only reason they picked it.
Not all of these millionaires are pleasant figures. Some of them embody the American Dream, rising from humble beginnings by offering consumers better products and services. Others have used their clout to shape public policy in their favor. They have triumphed in major battles to lower their tax bills, and they have fought for — and often won — rules and regulations that can protect their profits while raising costs for consumers.
“They are the protagonists, but some of them are protagonists in the same way Tony Soprano is a protagonist,” Zwick says.
The Quiet Revolution in Business
A quiet revolution has reshaped the American economy: the rise of a distinct breed of private enterprise. Not long ago, these enterprises together earned far less than Corporate America did. By 2011, however, they produced more income than all traditional U.S. corporations put together — and accounted for most of the growth in the share of income flowing to the top “one percent.”
How the Tax Ninjas Found Them
Back in 2014, the tale starts with three young economists toiling away in the basement of the U.S. Treasury Department. The older staff members referred to them as “the Three Amigos,” most likely an allusion to the 1986 film featuring Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short.
Millennials grew up watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the movie 3 Ninjas, which led them to privately adopt a much sillier name for themselves: “the Tax Ninjas.” That team was made up of Danny Yagan, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick. Since then, they have all moved up the academic ladder: Yagan became a professor at UC Berkeley, Zidar went to Princeton, and Zwick landed at the University of Chicago.
They were fresh out of grad school back in 2014, working as unpaid experts at the U.S. Treasury. The leaders there needed to know how much private businesses were paying in taxes, and they brought in these young brainiacs to help.
The Mess at the IRS
The Tax Ninjas had a daunting foe to contend with: the state of data and technology at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS’s machines were ancient and sluggish. The tax information was chaotic. One set held details about individual taxpayers, while a separate set held information on businesses.
Private business tax records were not linked to the individuals who owned them, so economists, tax analysts, and policymakers lacked a full view of where the wealthy got their income. By connecting those two sets of records, the Ninjas could answer basic economic questions. They could determine:
- What types of businesses drive people into the top of the income distribution
- In which sectors they build their fortunes
- How crucial they are to the success of their enterprises
- How much their companies actually pay in taxes
The treacherous journey began with the Ninjas, flipping and slashing through data as they linked millions of private businesses to the millions of individual taxpayers who owned them.
Before the Dataset Existed
The Tax Ninjas built this dataset after little was known about who was rich in America and how they made their money. A key source of such data has been the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which polls roughly 5,000 American families about their finances once every three years.
That is a small sample size compared to the massive administrative datasets that dazzle today’s econ nerds. And the Fed’s surveyors literally get financial information by interviewing people in person, on the phone, and on Zoom.
“Interviewers often struggle to convince rich people to respond,” Zidar and Zwick write. “Only one in ten who are contacted cooperate with the survey, and they volunteer only the information they’re willing to share.”
The Real Power of the Stealthy Wealthy
Statistics and stories make these wealthy groups less stealthy, and the book uses both to do so. Yet Zidar and Zwick aim to understand them rather than cast them as either heroes or villains.
America’s story of inequality and political power extends beyond billionaires alone. The millions of private business owners who earn more income than the rocket-launching celebrities have gone largely unmentioned in the national conversation. The book seeks to correct that by bringing their experience into focus.
The Hidden Class
The book argues against the common story that a new Gilded Age is ruled by a few billionaires, pointing instead to a far bigger group of wealthy people who are easy to miss. The author urges readers to look past Silicon Valley and past Wall Street for evidence of this wider class.
The Bottom Line
The book makes clear that wealth does not come from a single source. Some of the wealthy build their fortunes through business success, offering customers goods and services that outshine what came before. Others use their standing to push for laws and regulations that work to their own benefit. These two kinds of wealth exist side by side, and both demand close study.
These authors wish for millionaires to stop hiding their wealth. They want the public discussion to bring in the car dealers, hot dog sellers, and waxing salon owners — the individuals who earn more than the billionaires who send rockets into orbit.
Investigators keep examining these wealthy individuals, and their studies form a wider push to grasp how wealth and political influence operate in American society.