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.
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.
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.
They are parasites.
But, I hear the rich are delicious on toast.
Better then avocados on toast.
Billionaires have to say that, otherwise poor people would be a drain on their capital assets
Time to tax the rich
