AI may weaken that connection. If machines and software create enormous new wealth while ownership of the companies, models, chips and data centers remains concentrated in relatively few hands, the country can become much richer while millions of families see very little of it. The International Monetary Fund has warned about exactly that possibility: AI could drive economic growth while widening wealth inequality because owners of capital may capture a large share of the gains.¹¹
Picture where that leads. AI produces more goods and services than we ever imagined possible. The country gets richer and the owners get much richer, while everybody else is still checking the supermarket app to see whether hamburger is on sale.
That is the political argument we ought to be having: how do more Americans own a piece of the wealth-producing machinery? Employee ownership and profit sharing can give workers a stake. Retirement and investment accounts can spread ownership more widely. Public investment funds can own assets on behalf of citizens. Antitrust laws can keep today’s giants from simply buying tomorrow’s competitors.
There are a hundred ways to argue about the details, but the principle is simple: if AI makes America vastly richer, Americans should get richer too.
Otherwise we are heading toward fabulous wealth at the top, insecurity underneath it, and a political system increasingly shaped by people who have forgotten what worrying about the checkout total feels like.
Trump calls affordability a “con job.” Ada Torres says a hundred dollars barely buys groceries.
Maybe we ought to listen to the person who actually buys them.
AI isn’t the problem. It may create more wealth than we can imagine.
The question is who gets it.
Bibliography
1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Productivity and Costs, Second Quarter 2026. August 6, 2026. Labor’s share of nonfarm business output fell to 52.9 percent, the lowest since the series began in 1947.
2. PBS News. Trump’s December 2, 2025 remarks calling “affordability” a Democratic “con job”; and May 12, 2026 remarks: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
3. Associated Press. Americans rewire their grocery shopping routines while digesting the biggest price jump in 50 years. July 2026. Source for Ada Torres, her family’s move away from hamburger, her quotation, and the post-pandemic food-price increase.
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Consumer Price Index. 2026 releases. Data on food, rent, utilities and other consumer prices.
5. Forbes. The 2025 Forbes 400. September 2025. Forbes valued the 400 richest Americans at a combined $6.6 trillion.
6. Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 2026. Current estimated fortunes of the richest Americans; the first eight U.S. names together total roughly $2.4 trillion. Billionaire valuations fluctuate with market prices.
7. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System / Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Distributional Financial Accounts. Q1 2026. The bottom 50 percent of U.S. households held approximately $4.3 trillion in net worth. Fed distributional data also form the basis for the estimate that roughly the wealthiest four to five percent of households hold about half of U.S. household wealth.
8. Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 409, Capital Gains and Losses. Long-term capital gains generally receive preferential federal tax rates compared with ordinary income.
9. National Bureau of Economic Research and related economic-history research on wealth concentration, elite persistence, antitrust and the Gilded Age.
10. Reuters. Jack Dorsey’s Block to cut nearly half its workforce in AI overhaul, shares surge. February 26–27, 2026. Source for the planned elimination of more than 4,000 positions, Dorsey’s quotation, 24 percent quarterly gross-profit growth and approximately 25 percent after-hours stock-price increase.
11. International Monetary Fund. Global Economic and Financial Implications of Artificial Intelligence: Lessons from a Scenario Planning Exercise. IMF Notes, 2026. The IMF warns that AI may increase wealth inequality as capital owners capture a large share of productivity gains.