I believe success comes from luck and effort. Luck in that many successfully wealthy people stumble their way into problems so large that, with effort and risk, they can make a successful business. Effort in that running a business is super hard and working hard enough to be on the path of stumbling into a big problem. I also believe that many who came up in the lower and middle class aren’t given the opportunities that many of the upper-middle and upper class can see. Many work hard and barely earn enough to cover all their costs, barely have the time to explore and find new opportunities, etc.

The number of American households worth $50m+ as of 2026 is 300k. Meanwhile, wages for the bottom 99% of Americans grow far slower. Adjusted for inflation, since 1980, the top 1% have seen income grow 635% while the bottom 99% has only grown 337%. The top 0.01% and 0.1% have grown 2.2k% and 3.4k%. I’m advocating for slightly higher taxation on the top 0.1% and above and lower taxes for the bottom 99.9%. I’ve had conversations with conservative values, libertarian ideas, anti-communist immigrant vibes, etc. who are against increasing taxes on the ultrawealthy, but it’s not like many don’t believe in the progressive income. I think most rational Americans believe that risk and effort should not be punished to the point that the government takes all your money away. I view the world in a spectrum; I think when wages were rising fast in the latter half of the 1900s, when home prices were cheap, when food came easily, taxing the wealthy extremely highly wasn’t needed.

But now that Americans’ wages are stagnating, especially in an era of hypercompetitive globalism, my view is that today the ultrawealthy should pay more in taxes. Not because they’ve been coasting for too long. Not because our government is fiscally irresponsible, and that rich people should foot the bill. Not because I’m advocating to create or fund more social programs (definitely not). And not because of fairness. It’s because of social unrest in America, stagnant wages for the lower and middle class, and the global economy making it harder for the average American to sustain themselves.

Firstly, people’s lives are getting tighter in the global economy, making the opportunity to take risk, to grow, to increase their wage harder. And that difficulty and wage stagnation should be compensated for.

Secondly, the number of opportunities to start a business in America is shrinking. Not that there aren’t that many; there’s plenty. But America is competing with many competitive countries that are heavily subsidized by their governments. America’s approach is very hands-off (unless it’s political like for farmers), but this makes starting a business harder when nation-state-backed companies are your competitors.

I want to talk about shrinking opportunities now that we live in a global stage

• Why a global stage is shrinking opportunities
• How we’ve overcome high amount of poor signal matching through meritocratic systems like LeetCode interviews
• Why fair signals still need subjective bias
• I want to provide opportunities to those who would’ve never in their life been able to stumble into such opportunities because their starting line is too far back. But what matters the most is the human; the attitude.