Pick the guy you know with a large salary, let’s say the best surgeon in your state. Someone who’s exceptional, has studied their whole life and has a lot of responsibility. Let’s say that surgeon makes a cool million a year. (Generally speaking, it would be closer to 800K) Now the best of the best in the country (1%) make up to 4 million a year.
How much billionaires make? Well, that every two hours.
So basically, we society are giving the same worth to one of these billionaires as 4380 of the best of the best surgeons.
One of the best conceptualizations of how much money the richest people have is to imagine stacking US dollars, but horizontally instead of vertically. Imagine there was a game where you could walk next to this stack and, when you stopped walking, you’d win all the money you walked past.
In just a few seconds you’d have earned over $10,000, a large sum for most people, but nobody would stop walking then. After just a minute you’d have $1,000,000, a life changing amount of money! What if you kept walking? What if you wanted to be in the top 100 richest in the world?
You’d die from exhaustion well before getting anywhere near the wealth of the top 100. It took only 1 minute to get a life changing amount of money, but it would take more than 4 days of continuous walking to make the $19,500,000,000 needed to crack the top 100.
I got this from this Tom Scott video where he drives for an hour on the highway in order to pass $1 billion.
No need to rely on imagination. Here’s Wealth, Shown to scale.
A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31.5 years.
But also, billionaires don’t have billions of dollars sitting in the bank. While I don’t think any individual should be that wealthy, it’s important to understand what wealth actually means. My own wealth is much more than just the money I can scrape together for next week.
But also, billionaires don’t have billions of dollars sitting in the bank.
No, but some have billions of dollars in the stock market which they can use as a ‘bank’ anytime they want to buy something. Conveniently for them, all of that stock is unable to be taxed until it’s cashed out. Though, why would they ever cash out when they have the free money glitch using it as collateral? If they had it in the bank, then at least the interest could be taxed, I guess.
In the bank, yes the interest is taxed. Investments attract tax on dividends, since it’s impractical to tax unrealised capital gains
Most of my wealth is on the stock market as well but I’ve already paid income tax on the money I’ve invested and when I decide to cash it all out I need to pay income tax on the profit too. I don’t see why someone should be taxed for having invested on the stock market.
Unless you are a billionaire, or close to one, you aren’t doing what I was referring to.
Billionaires commonly use their stock as collateral to get low interest loans. Then they use these loans to buy investments with better returns than the low interests loans that they took out. They leverage this additional capital from the investment to take out an another lower interest loan to pay off the original loan.
They get to rinse and repeat this, unless the economy takes a huge nosedive. In that case, the amount of loans they have exceed the gains they are making and they actually have to liquidate assets and actually have to pay a lot of tax. The thing is, this doesn’t really happen often.
Unless they get real unlucky, most of them eventually die and pass down these investments to an heir before the economy ever nosedives. The heir can cash out without paying capital gains tax, because they get a fresh starting point at whatever the accumulated wealth was.
Basically, the capitalist class gets to avoid ever paying capital gains tax, and that sucks. This is just one of the ways they avoid paying anything back to the working class, there are plenty of others. They also use lots of legal loopholes to avoid estate tax, but that is another topic.
Okay, I hear you, but I can totally keep up 4 days of walking. Just wanted to say.
I like this conceptualisation: let’s say you need $20b to make the rich list.
If you earned $1m a year, you’d need to work for 20,000 years.
If you earned $1m a day, every day of the year, you’d still need 55 years: probably your entire working life. If you only worked weekdays, you need to work for 80 years: your entire life.
If you want to make it to the top ten: just add a zero to each of those numbers: 200,000 years, 550 years, 800 years.
That’s a pretty good idea. I just dislike the concept of money being a resource. I would like to convey that money is just a bunch of IOY (I owe You) society prints to be exchanged for goods and services. Billionaires are receiving a lot of IOYs, but can we really say they’re “earning” them?
That’s why I’m comparing their “earnings” with our top of the top of the top, the people that work the hardest, know the most and provide a crucial service to society. (There are more, but their salaries are hilariously unfair, also known as teachers).
Sorry about the rant. :-/
No one earns more than their labour could possibly produce. That labour however does have greater or lesser value to society, hence different pay rates.
My example above show that it’s impossible for any one human to earn that much even if they were immortal and had lived since Homo Sapien migrated out of Africa.
That we have billionaires shows that a very large amount of people have been paid far far less than their labour was worth.
That value extraction goes away when
labour owns the means of productionthe employees own the company (i.e. employees are the shareholders and reap the dividends).
The best of the best of the country is not 1%, it’s one in millions
Pretty sure there’s not millions of surgeons in the country.
I was curious about this, so I looked it up. Apparently there were about 71,000 surgeons in the USA in 2022, according to the AAMC.
Ah, you’re right 😋 1 in tens of thousands then
Work is effort generating positive effects for everyone. Rent-seeking is extracting wealth from workers who actually contribute to the economy.
This group will also fight tooth and nail by lobbying, hiding assets, and opening specific bank accounts to avoid paying as much taxes as possible.
The top 1% are hoarders and I hope one day it’s identified as a detriment, as other hoarding is, within the DSM.
Bunch of dragons with no St. George in sight.
They are parasites.
Billionaires have to say that, otherwise poor people would be a drain on their capital assets
Time to tax the rich
Taxes or axes, mofos!
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Neoclassical economists say rich people contribute to the economy by “allowing people to use their capital,” but allowing someone to do something isn’t work, it’s the absence of work. If I disallow someone to use my factory machines, it would require work for me to prevent them from using it, as I would have to get the police involved or at least some sort of private security. Allowing someone to use something is just choosing not to do anything, and supposedly they would have us believe that capitalists not doing anything contributes to the economy.
damn i am providing so much value right now by not burning every building in the city down
But, I hear the rich are delicious on toast.
Better then avocados on toast.
I wouldn’t do that disservice to my toast
Love it.
CuredFührerd meats are bad for your health anyways.
BuT tHeY pRoViDe JoBs
/s
My labor produces food packaging for literally tens of millions of food packages every day, and that scaling is even after you divide it up by the number of people we’ve got doing it, so it’s conceivable that certain capacity to organize things is so extremely valuable.
That said, our billionaires are not that.
organizing work is extremely valuable, but that doesnt mean that it takes hard work to do…
the work can be hard, but never harder than the lowest paying jobs in the same proportions as the pay difference.
Thanks for this, it’s very clarifying.
