Get ready for this lie. The richest people have worked the hardest and therefore deserve their wealth. Income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game. CEOs of large corporations and Wall Street's top traders effectively set their own pay. And their pay has gone into the stratosphere. They've linked their pay to the stock market through stock options, used corporate stock buybacks to increase stock prices, and timed the sale of their options to those increases.

Some get inside information about corporate profits and losses before the rest of the public and trade on that information. Others create or work for companies that have monopolized their markets. That means they can charge consumers higher prices than if they had to compete for those consumers. And they can keep wages low because workers have fewer options of whom to work for.

Others use their political influence to get changes in laws, regulations, and taxes that benefit themselves and their corporations while harming those who don't have this kind of influence. Others were just lucky enough to be born into or marry into wealth. These days, the most important predictor of someone's future income and wealth in the United States is the income and wealth of their parents. Sixty percent of all wealth is inherited, and we're on the cusp of the biggest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history, from rich boomers to their children.

Meanwhile, the pay of average workers has stagnated because they've lost economic power and the political influence that goes with it. Corporations have lowered wages by outsourcing work abroad, replacing workers with software, and preventing workers from unionizing.

Wealth doesn't measure how hard someone has worked or what they deserve, but how well our economic system has worked for them. Thank you for watching.