I’d recommend reading the late David Graeber’s “Debt” which does a good job illustrating exactly what you described, which is how currency is at its core an IOU

I cannot recommend reading this book enough.

So… does it follow that the very wealthy basically hold a massive IOU to the general public?

To expand the sibling comment. In principle the money would reflect IOUs the general public owes them. But also following this logic the way I see it is they accumulated their money was by getting more IOUs through: people employment (being able to command a big pool of work and get a cut of IOUs from it), arbitrage (exchanging lower value IOUs with higher value IOUs), or simply stealing (eg. siphoning government resources).

They hold IOUs from the general public.

If by wealthy you mean people with a lot of money specifically, than no, the IOU is the other way around.

That’s the implication I believe

I love this articulation.

Strong opinions tightly held

I try as hard as I can to have strong opinions, loosely held

For me, at least, despite being obviously powerful, I just can’t find anything useful to do with it beyond toys.

> most cars are in the ballpark

If you’re in the Bay, maybe, otherwise it’s $35-50k depending on how new

That's why I wrote "depending on where you are"

I mean, I code?

Context for the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgiC8YfytDw

(The guy is joking in the video)

CIS is an anti immigration think tank and Washington times is pretty blatantly conservative outlet. I’d be wary of those sources.

Sure but don’t they quote BLS data? Or do you believe their interpretation of the data is incorrect?

I haven't had time to inspect it myself, but off the top of my head, I'd be wary of taking their interpretation at face value.

Are there any sources that you consider more reliable that have analyzed this data? Those were the first 3 articles that came up when I searched the story.