Americans Can't Decide What They're Worth
If you were to ask any American employed in full-time labor whether they consider themselves to be a decently hard and scrupulous worker, they would say yes. If you were to ask them whether they deserve to live a decently comfortable life, they would say yes. If you were to say they were a liar, and were actually lazy, stupid, and undeserving of scraping by on even the most meager and wretched of existences, they would object, perhaps loudly and violently. They would insist that they work hard, and though they may not deserve a mansion to live in or a new car every year, they are an honest, hardworking, and capable person, and they and their families deserve to live a comfortable life for it.
If you were to ask most Americans employed in full-time labor on what grounds a single billionaire could amass more wealth in a year than their own lineage, past, present, and future, will produce in its entire existence, they would tell you that billionaires earned their fortunes fair and square because they put in the time and effort to work harder than the rest of us, and they found out how to contribute to society because they're more clever than the rest of us. They would tell you that life's not fair, and if you can't find a skill or make a product worth paying for, then you only have yourself to blame for your crippling poverty. This they will say as they grind their one chance at life away in the gears of crippling poverty. The contradiction is lost on them.
Americans cannot decide what they're worth. In a vacuum, we know we deserve to live a decent life for the work we do. But we can't help ourselves but stand in our own way and lionize people who think we deserve nothing.