We don’t need a great fortune teller to explain what’s going to happen. We have been letting high income people and large companies avoid paying their share of taxes. Do they pay taxes? Yes. But it’s not unusual for a high income earner to pay at a 15 to 20% rate. Their employees might be paying at the 25-35% rate.

We recently had an anti-trust ruling on Google that, while they were a monopolist who caused a lot of market damage, stifled competition, and hurt their customers, nothing will happen to them. The same “nothing’ happened to Microsoft decades earlier. Nothing happened to Wall Street executives after the mortgage markets imploded due to their fraud. Nothing is likely to happen to Apple in its anti-trust case. Meta’s AI chat bots have lewd conversation with children, while admitting to basically stealing their training data from authors. Nothing will happen to them. Unusual options trades on thinly traded companies just before major announcements feel like they’re happening on an almost daily basis. No one is being picked up for insider trading.

What happens at the end of this, when we let major companies and the rich skirt on their tax burden, when we’ve destroyed the competitive business landscape to help make them a little more money, when we’ve gone into debt over and over again, in administration after administration, to cut their taxes or drive away burdensome regulations? What’s going to happen is that the people in the bottom 95% will be left to bear the burden of cleaning up after a party that they didn’t attend. They will own nothing, because anything worth owning will be held by the rich, who have super-charged the rate they accumulate wealth. They will use those piles of cash to buy anything worth having, from housing, to farm land, to water rights, to pristine wilderness.

The wealth gap between the top 1% and the bottom of the top 10% is becoming stupidly large. Never mind the middle 50% of Americans. And this is happening all over the world. A little faster in some countries, and a little slower in others. But at the end of the day, the super-rich will walk away just fine, but it will be rank and file citizens that will have to pay back the debt. At some point the acceleration of debt will be so unsustainable that either brutal austerity or massive inflation will follow.

And who owns that debt? Who do we need to pay back? It is the super-rich, the large investors, and the large corporations.