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The income of those who attacked the U.S. Congress on January 6, 2021 and were subsequently arrested is estimated using the income in the neighborhood of their residence as a proxy measure. Contrary to common wisdom, we find that the income of the arrestees deviated markedly from that of the population at large. Two groups were conspicuously underrepresented from this subset of the insurrectionists: the poor (whose estimated annual per capita income was below $20K), and those who earned more than $50K per annum. Fully 83% of the arrestees resided in areas with an average annual per capita income between $20K and $50K. This finding dovetails with the argument that the right-wing populist movement is driven largely by the struggling lower-middle class who have been left behind by the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy.

The textbook theory of public finance delineates three primary functions of government: 1) to provide for public goods, 2) to provide for an equitable distribution of income, and 3) to stabilize the economy. However, it has become evident with the rise of right-wing populism especially, but not exclusively, in the U.S., that this conceptualization contains a crucial oversight of historic proportions because the gap between the haves and have-nots in a society is not merely a question of equity but also a question of the maintenance of political stability. The January 6, 2021 insurrection against the U.S. Congress by an angry mob made it evident that the distribution of income has bounds beyond which social forces exert such pressure on the political system that the whole edifice of liberal democracy is seriously threatened. Hence, democratic governments must consider income distribution also from the vantage point of sustaining itself.

Maximizing output without taking into consideration the negative externalities generated, including the harm to the mental and physical health of the population creates psychological stress. Focusing on the bellwether indicators of economic performance including working more, generating income, accepting more risks, while disregarding its effect on work-life balance, on income distribution, and the quality of life in general creates stressors that harm the human biological system. Stress is the biological reaction to external stimuli that threatens the self-preservation instinct of a human organism. The stress was generated by debilitating poverty, financial insecurity, by the highest level of inequality among rich countries that led to the hollowing out of the middle class, by the lack of social safety nets that might have mitigated the turbulence of adjusting to a knowledge economy, by the downward social mobility of millions disadvantaged by globalization, and by the inadequate retraining opportunities that prevented those displaced by the penetration of imports to find employment in the expanding IT sector. These stressors have been accumulating in the U.S. population for decades, as indicated by the deterioration of mental health, by the propensity to relieve the pain through the use of illicit drugs, by deaths of despair, by the incarceration rate, by mass murders, by the fall in life expectancy, by the attenuation in life satisfaction, and by the rise of populism, creating many mental, biological, social, economic, and political quandaries.