The Problem with Billionaires
Photo by Soohee Cho
It’s not a hot take to come out of the woods and say, “Hey, I think billionaires are bad, actually.” Or, “maybe we should tax people who make a lot of money a little bit more.” Or even, “we should burn it all to the ground and start over.” Well, maybe not that last one.
My problem with billionaires isn’t one of jealousy due to my financial inadequacy or annoyance at seeing them in headlines every day. No, my problem with both the concept of billionaires and each individual billionaire is the cruel combination of a lack of empathy and an abundance of resources.
Billionaires are so wealthy to the point that it’s almost obscene. For example, I, a college student with a summer job, make under $4,000 for 8 weeks of work during the summer. Elon Musk makes $4,000 every 11 seconds. Every day. Every week. Additionally, some workers at Tesla only get paid $12.96 an hour. Elon Musk can make that amount of money faster than he can blink, yet he can’t afford to pay his employees a little bit more? You might think that Musk would pay the people that are doing the labor that makes him rich handsomely. Not the case, apparently.
Photo by Atqnews
According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, it would cost between 7 billion and 265 billion dollars to effectively eliminate world hunger. Elon Musk’s net worth is around 268 billion dollars. For reference, that’s an absurd amount of money. It also means that Elon Musk has the power to effectively feed everyone on the planet if he wanted to. Why doesn’t he want to? Because it would be humane? Because it might make him remotely attractive? No? Got it.
Listen. I could sit here all day and say things like: “Bezos owning 500 million dollars in real estate is bad, actually.” And as fun as it would be for me to ramble on and list every single horrible action these people have done to screw over millions of people, a list of facts isn’t an opinion. But you know what is?
I think that it is both incredibly immoral and honestly evil to not only hoard resources but exploit workers to get those resources in the first place AND refuse to use those resources to better the world around them. No single person should have more money than they could feasibly spend in their entire lifetime. Saying that shouldn’t be treated as some crazy communist statement. God forbid someone takes the money that billionaires got from exploiting others.
On December 19th of last year, Elon Musk tweeted that he would pay over 11 billion dollars in taxes that year. That’s about 4.1% of his net worth. According to the Tax Foundation, the average taxpayer paid 13.3% in taxes in 2019. Now, something seems a little fishy about those two numbers there. Maybe, just maybe, we could get billionaires to pay a teensy-weensy more in taxes so the government can add more to our military budget. Wait, wrong opinion article.
Okay, so some people are saying you might have to pay taxes at a slightly higher rate than the rest of us. Oh no! Boohoo! Cry about it. Good thing that you can just take some of that money you have and just throw it at the government, so you don’t have to pay taxes anymore. There we go! Wipe those tears, champ! You found a loophole! Hurray! Now, your parents might finally be proud of you. You can finally be the son they’ve always wanted, one who abuses the labor force and keeps all of their money in an off-shore bank account. Who wouldn’t be proud of someone who does that?
What’s that? Your wife is divorcing you and taking half of your money? Oh no! Turns out no matter how much money you throw at someone, they still might just divorce you! So sad! Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, buddy, and get back to work creating the worst working conditions legally possible! Cry. About. It.
For people who claim to care so much about capitalism, the economy, whatever you want to call it, they don’t really seem to care too much about the people who are the fuel for that fire: the workers. Call me a communist or a Satanist, but maybe we should reorganize the system so that the same people don’t keep getting screwed over time and time again. And here’s a hint: it’s not the billionaires who are getting screwed over. It’s you.
