Oh, Scott. You really want to have this conversation?

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would like struggling Americans to know what their problem is. Apparently they’re just underachievers. Today, while discussing Americans who support socialism, Bessent described them as: “over-educated and under-earning.” Then: “underachievers who are jealous of those who want to go and work every day.” Sir. You are a former hedge-fund manager whose personal financial disclosure listed more than $500 million in assets. Maybe—and I’m just spitballing here—the nurse working twelve-hour shifts isn’t “jealous” of you. Maybe the teacher grading papers at 9 p.m. isn’t an “underachiever.” Maybe the home-health aide working two jobs isn’t secretly furious because she hasn’t discovered the ancient American secret of going to work every day. Maybe people are looking around at housing, healthcare, childcare, groceries and wages and asking why working hard no longer guarantees economic security. And here’s the part that makes this especially rich: Bessent himself once talked movingly about how social and legal progress changed his own life. He married his husband in 2011. They have two children through surrogacy. In 2015, he reflected that as a young gay man during the AIDS crisis, he never imagined that decades later he’d be legally married with two children. That’s what collective political action can do. Government isn’t merely the thing standing between billionaires and another tax cut. It’s also Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid. Public schools. Fire departments. Roads. Disability benefits. SNAP. And about a thousand other things Americans who “go and work every day” have collectively decided shouldn’t depend entirely upon whether somebody can turn a profit providing them. You don’t have to support socialism to understand something incredibly basic: Being poor isn’t evidence that somebody is lazy. And being extraordinarily wealthy isn’t evidence that somebody worked extraordinarily harder than everyone else. Sometimes it just means you made a fortune managing money while somebody else spent the same 40 years managing classrooms, patients, construction sites, restaurants, farms and families. So perhaps America’s billionaire Treasury secretary could refrain from lecturing working Americans about work ethic. The people he’s insulting? A whole lot of them are reading his comments on their lunch break. #ScottBessent #WorkingClass #EconomicInequality #TrumpAdministration #PoliticalTikTok