Wilbur Ross, wealthy person you’ve never heard of (and currently the U.S. Secretary of Commerce). is only the latest person to not know how reality works for most people. When he took time off from being wealthy Thursday to say he didn’t understand why unpaid federal workers were having financial difficulty, he became just one more in a long line of exceedingly rich people to wade stupidly into this same muck.

It immediately reminded me of the 2002 governor’s race in Oklahoma, when (this might surprise you) the Republican candidate lost to a Democrat. The Republican happened to be a record-setting former NFL player, had previously been named to People’s “Most Beautiful People” list, and was quite well-known (and liked) in the state. “Experts” say he lost the vote due to (1) an independent who stole some GOP votes, (2) and using a “vulgarity” (“bullshit”) during a TV interview, and (3) his opponent’s support for cockfighting, which was astoundingly still popular in Oklahoma then. But I remember it differently. I remember that GOP candidate sitting for an interview in which he was asked about the price of various consumer items like a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk — and he had no idea. I heard the recording replayed on radio stations and recapitulated in newspapers around the state. People at work were talking and laughing about it. Whatever the reason pretty boy lost, the memory of that out-of-touchness stayed with me.

Another one that sticks out in my mind is the 2008 John McCain debacle in which the oft-lauded war hero failed to remember how many houses he owned, some years after marrying into a vast fortune. Not long before, he’d mused that “five million dollars” was his threshhold for thinking someone is rich.

And then of course we have a TAINTUS, who thinks health insurance costs “$12 a year”, while also somehow simultaneously believing health insurance costs “$15 a month”.

So it’s no surprise that Ross, estimated to be worth $700 million (formerly estimated to be worth $2.5 billion), has no idea what money does or how it works — for the rest of us. “I don’t really quite understand why”, Ross said, wondering why furloughed federal workers don’t just get loans.

Look, there are plenty of things that each of us doesn’t understand. For example, I’m not a sailboat repair specialist, so I don’t know what a cam cleat with fairlead is, what it does, how much it costs, or why anyone would want one. And if you don’t know what a “gradient map” or “unsharp mask” is, it’s because you’re not familiar with Photoshop.

But Photoshop and sailing boats aren’t things that the average President or Commerce Secretary is expected to know about or deal with. Money is. Even if we, through an accident of poor constitution-writing, accidentally elect a president unwanted by the majority, we still want that person to pretend to know what it’s like to live my life. And if that second-place-winning president appoints a commerce secretary who probably thinks a million dollars is a fair price for a kitchen makeover, then that commerce secretary should keep his mouth shut.

It’s insult enough to us to wake up each day knowing we have a very stable genius in the White House, and that seemingly everyone in his circle is a criminal, and that all his appointees are either incompetent or corrupt or really look like they are. But on top of all that, we have to be poked in the eye by myopic gajillionaires who stumble on the most basic of financial topics — that it’s tough to be forced to work without pay.

In case I haven’t made myself clear, the issue here isn’t President Aryan or Secretary Not A. Poor, but rather the very real and very thick cushion that wedges itself between “regular” people and wealthy people.

This cushion isn’t anyone’s fault, per se. People born into wealth don’t know any better — perhaps they can’t. And people who aspire to riches, while intending to distance themselves from the effects of not being rich, typically don’t intend to become out-of-touch with their former reality. It happens, but I don’t think they were trying to. I admit, though, that it’s this latter group that confuses me the most. Because I’ve been poor — foregoing food so I could buy gas to get to work, for example — and I never forgot what that was like. I went a decade without medical insurance of any kind — because the cost was too high — and I don’t think I can ever forget how it felt every time someone suggested “go see a doctor” and I would respond “with what money?”

But it happens. Your life changes as you forge into the happy world of — (checks notes) — “buying bankrupt companies...and later selling them for a large profit”. You forget your roots in 1930s New Jersey, where you — (checks notes again) — attended an exclusive all-male, all-white prepatory school in Manhattan (which produced a long list of military officers, senators, and other rich people) and went on to both Yale and Harvard. At some point, you lose touch with what it’s like to buy groceries, pay rent, and never be assured of your future. At some point, you’re appointed to a cabinet-level position by an illiterate buffoon and say something insensitive on TV.

This cushion was evident again in Davos, Switzerland, where the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people meet each year to discuss how much they’re trying to help. One of them even admitted it; the chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners (“which manages more than $265 billion in assets”) said: “I think, in America, the aristocrats are out of touch. They don’t understand the issues around the common man.” The best solution these magnates could think of to combat increasing wealth inequality is to train workers in digital technology, which they called “upskilling”. When asked about how to pay for training millions of workers in new skills, everyone at the World Economic Forum agreed that it should be “not with our money, that’s for sure” (paraphrase). Meanwhile, just twenty-six people own as much wealth as HALF the world’s population. The fortunes of the world’s billionaires are growing by $2.5 billion per day, while the “wealth” of the bottom half decreased by 11 percent last year.

The answer, of course, isn’t to eat the rich. In fact, I’m convinced the answer is more complex than Elizabeth Warren’s soon-to-not-be-implemented tax proposal would have us believe. But I know one place we can start. We can quit voting for people who want this cushion to get thicker (read: Republicans). Those who work in the news media can quit perpetuating the myth that a spike in the Dow Jones Industrial Average or GDP means “the economy is doing well” (and we readers can quit falling for that myth). In other, older blog entries, I have floated other ideas that could be called “pie in the sky” — including a “maximum wage law” (placing an upper limit on salaries that’s tied to the minimum wage law) and a law that redefines “income” to include all sources of income (because the very wealthy currently enjoy sources of wealth that aren’t taxed in the same brackets as our paychecks).

While all of these might have some positive impact on average people’s lives, they probably won’t make a dent in the idealogical cushion between the wealthy and the rest of us.