indeed. we have a nice stable of absolute fucking freak billionaires to point to and go "that's the enemy who wants your children to die of polio and who wants to make you his starved and beaten servant."
This was the chart that did it for me.
There's no functional difference between being broke and having half a billion dollars (and I'm not particularly upset with the 1500 people between 500K and 1B).
"How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10th of the people to eat? The only way to be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain't got no business with!" -Huey Long
"Now, how are you going to feed the balance of the people? What's Morgan and Baruch and Rockefeller and Mellon going to do with all that grub? They can't eat it, they can't wear the clothes, they can't live in the houses."
"But when they've got everything on God's loving earth that they can eat and they can wear and they can live in, and all that their children can live in and wear and eat, and all of their children's children can use..."
"then we've got to call Mr. Morgan and Mr. Mellon an Mr. Rockefeller back and say, come back here, put that stuff back on this table here that you took away from here that you don't need."
"We're not going to destroy the Gulf Refining Company; we're not going to destroy the Standard Oil Company, but we're going to say that the limit of any one man's stock ownership in the Standard Oil Company is from 3-to-5 million dollars for that individual..."
I think the problem is that when you point that out, a big chunk of America will sidle over to them to lick their boots rather than light them on fire like they should.
A certain segment of the Trump vote was based on admiration because he's a rich asshole. I'm not sure how we combat that.
and it happens to be indisputably true that Trump, Musk, and all their freak-ass billionaire friends absolutely DO want to turn the American people into subjected human chattel.
it's not exactly conspiracy thinking to notice that this is exactly why America's billionaire freaks are pushing the AI thing so hard. (AI can't actually replace workers, but these fucking demons are both stupid enough and evil enough to think it can).
Whoa, you really need to review what departments they want to downsize; the VA using AI to review claims could be super efficient . If you count the ways to say ‘no’ as effective.
its a bit tricky, but folks need to sort of break through that billionaires are not millionaires or even multimillionaires. They are not people who won the lottery and have a big house now. They are people who own large fractions of multinational global infrastructure companies.
If you work from the time you're 25 to 65, and put at least five percent of your paycheck into an IRA, you'll be a millionaire at the end of it. There's absolutely no equivalent to that for billionaires.
The point is that one million dollars isn’t an unthinkable amount of money - it can be earned passively and actually achievable for people; being a billionaire isn’t.
And perhaps this even furthers the original point - to become a billionaire, you would only need to put away five thousand percent of your paycheck every month
The big difference is that you can’t become a billionaire without exploiting people. It’s not possible to legitimately earn that much money through one’s own labor. That’s not true of millionaires.
… at best, the unrealized gains on my mortgaged house in PDX are $250,000 if I sold it today at the top-ish of the market. And it would effectively be all the wealth I have.
So, $1,000,000 still seems like more than plenty to me, I wish I’d had a life where that much was reasonable to just have
Sure, I’ll concede people can have “a few million dollars” from earned income because they were really good at saving or inherited a house or something so didn’t have to pay rent/mortgage and could put more away
We could call it the "Could Buy Iceland" line; if their net worth is greater than the GDP of Iceland, they're in a different class than folks who collect sports cars.
I think we'd be in a better place if most Americans realized that with hard work and a lot of luck, they could someday be millionaires, but even if they were immortal and they could put in that same work and have that same luck for 300 centuries they could never be billionaires.
There's 801 billionaires in the US. Some just over a billion, some lots over a billion.
Suppose you taxed that down to a flat billion. You still have 801 billionaires. But the excess taxed could fund a one-off check of $32,843 to *every taxpayer* in America.
If you were a millionaire in 1920, you'd need to be worth about $16 million today to have the same worth. You can consider that a reasonable number if you'd like, but a Billionaire is still worth more than 50x that.
The richest American in 1918 (John D. Rockefeller) would be worth about $21 Billion today. That's absurd, then or today, but Bezos and Musk are worth 10x that.
The thing that folks really struggle with is that a billionaire is rich. Obviously. But they are *far far far* richer than you think they are, even knowing how absurdly rich they are.
Once it was phrased to me as "a billionaire is the sociopolitical equivalent of an unregistered nuke" it brought the scale down and drove home how much they alter society by their presence.
Folks always assume in these conversations that this is "class warfare" or whatever, but it's not. These sums of money are outside of the realm of ordinary comprehension. They aren't about purchase power and investments, or luxury. You can buy every plausible luxury you can imagine at < $100m.
Wait... does that $32,843 include the 801 billionaires getting that as well since they are (presumably) paying taxes? I'd really rather everyone else get $32,842.08 and the billionaires get nothing back if I'm being honest ;-)
Yeah. Especially considering that having a net worth of single-digit millions by retirement now is functionally equivalent to the “American Dream” of past decades: it means you own a house, buy things for your family without stress, retire while healthy, and leave something for your kids.
I fundamentally think people lack the understanding of how much a billion is. Just lots of millions put together is what they think and technically that’s not wrong. But I think we need to go back to visualizations of how fucking large one billion is in comparison to even regular rich people.
Right? Because the local car dealership owner is a millionaire. The orthodontist, the local building supply company, the owner of a few franchise restaurants all fall into the millionaire category. You need to differentiate between these individuals and billionaires.
Yup. Spend a thousand dollars a day, and it'll take you roughly three years to spend a million dollars. At the same rate, it would take you roughly three THOUSAND years to run through a billion. That's insanity.
Anything above that is just scorekeeping and not really a standard of living change that's measurable. Brewster's Millions territory: presuming competent management, you will never run out of money in your lifetime spending on anything you actually use your own self instead of hiring someone to use.
That’s what confuses me so much about these billionaires wanting tax cuts. They wouldn’t feel it! Not even for a minute! They just might not have enough to buy a whole president- and I think that’s something a lot of folks can agree on.
Like, that rich family down the road who are millionaires? They worked hard, lucked out, have a boat they don't use, fancy cars, go skiing in the alps?
Now imagine there's a special event. People only that rich can send one person to a special concert held at Michigan Stadium. Every seat packed
Here's the classic visualization for how unfathomably huge a billion (or trillion) is
Sadly, the horizontal scrolling UX is less rhetorically effective on mobile than desktops, because it's easier to flick past intervening messages (w/out forced pauses)
Note that even this is an area-based visualization. Because nobody's gonna sit still for a linear visualization while @tomscott.com puts things in human scale:
$1 = a few mm thick
$10K = a few parking spots
$1M = a minute's brisk walk (~1 min)
$1B = driving across England to the sea (>1 hour)
Some days it feels like these fellas run the corporate media and then use that power to make these incredibly obvious and simply things deeply confusing... I don't know. It's probably just too complicated for my weak liberal mind to understand the importance of billionaires.
My ultimate take is that inside every billionaire is a child screaming for help saying
"I don't know what to do so I'm just gonna keep accumulating stuff and power until I feel good..".
They are mentally ill and should be framed as such.
People thinking Musk is smart is a colossal failure.
The left is conceding the framing at the most basic level.
I don't wanna be a billionaire. I don't like billionaires. I think having more than 7 figure wealth is morally difficult to defend.
And most media, mainstream or not, frames billionaires as "successful".
make Billions mandatory viewing. Every tenth grader in the country has to write a paper about what a billion dollars does to the soul and what its owner does to the world.
When you have the sort of money and wealth that Musk has, it's not more money he wants. It's power. And that's exactly what he's chasing now. He can't ever be President of the USA, but he is now the closest he could ever be. And he's going to tear the checks and balances down.
It used to be legacy: Donate to a museum or art gallery or university and get your name on a wing or a building. Why isn't that good enough for today's billionaires?
Because they’re also convinced that they’re gonna successfully biohack themselves into living forever so there’s no need for a legacy LATER they just want power NOW
Nowadays you can be a single-digit billionaire being good at a cute gimmick in a corner of the economy; then you have people like Elon or Bezos, who are well on their way to being trillionaires, controlling systemically important businesses.
How about a new economy entirely premised on the idea that if you make more than $999,999,999 you’re going directly to jail and your wealth is expropriated? Imagine the opportunities for innovative tax strategies as billionaires scramble to stay rich, but avoid the haircut.
I think it’s more like target doctors, lawyers, and corporate managers, where a reasonably successful person can accrue a $5-10M net worth by retirement. These people aren’t even subject to the estate tax!
i grew up poor and republican (kept the poor lost the republican). believe me that voting against taxes because they'll take your lotto winnings is a serious concern
explaining that you're not going to win the lotto doesn't work. maybe you can convince people they aren't targets though. maybe idk
though to be clear i think trying to get republicans to vote dem is a waste of time. fuck em. but there are people who don't vote and would vote dem and this kinda thing could be a reason. who knows
you think doctors and lawyers are the enemy? they worked for their money. they have more of it but they are subject to the whims of employment like everyone else
doctors? Maybe the really old ones but the average new physician is over $500K in debt and that’s before residency/specialization. Private equity is also hollowing out private practice. Bring back the estate tax by all means but even moderately wealthy docs have to work for a living
I keep saying "thousand" millions when i'm trying to make that point. Somehow it makes a difference when you mention Musk has $300 thousand millions of dollars vs $300 Billion. It puts into better scale.
Well one problem is that a good chunk of those 200m sincerely believe that the plane guys deserve it because they're smart and hardworking. I cannot sway my stepmom from thinking Musk is "a brilliant self-made man."
I really liked Neil Degrasse Tyson's analogy. He thinks about a coin on the street and he figures a dime is the cut off point of whether he'd bother to lean down and pick it up depending on how much of a hurry he's in. The relative equivalent for Bill Gates would be 45,000 sitting on the street.
We desperately need to get away from the idea that because someone has accumulated tremendous wealth through rent-seeking or wage theft is the same thing as working for a living. Some people can make millions through labor alone, but nobody can make billions that way.
It’s so hard for the human mind to conceptualize what a Billion is, it’s estimated it’d take a person 11 days to count to a million, it would take a person almost 32 years to count to a billion
Even the not actively evil billionaires make no sense to me. Paul Allen was a quirky guy and had some side projects he threw money at just because. MOPOP famously but also little things like buying up a historic theater he used to go to when he was kid and saving it:
Definitely. But I just don’t get how you do your brother like that. He just made you one of the richest people in the world and you respond by shitting all over what he cared about? Why? Does having $22.3B v $22B actually mean anything?!?!
Additionally, the BLM protests of 2020, I believe, convinced them that risking widespread #ChronicIllness with a "let 'er rip" Covid strategy was preferable to workers feeling financially comfortable enough to take time off to protest...billionaires.
Messaging aside, going after corruption is going to be important. I just worry this is one of those everyone cheats on their taxes so all tax enforcement is about them problems.
Comments
There's no functional difference between being broke and having half a billion dollars (and I'm not particularly upset with the 1500 people between 500K and 1B).
A certain segment of the Trump vote was based on admiration because he's a rich asshole. I'm not sure how we combat that.
The dentists still have decent PR, but the others are easy to paint as evil.
That’s an unbelievably high bar for most people
https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/average-savings-by-age#:~:text=How%20many%20Americans%20have%20%24100%2C000,Reserve%20and%20other%20government%20agencies.
5% without compounding interest you have to make $500,000/year for 40 years have $1,000,000 at 5%
It does reinforce that the only vehicle that returns enough money is the absentee “passive” capital in the stock market , not actual work
I have been consistently surprised for decades when people say “a million dollars isn’t that much”
I have been working, mostly non stop for 25 years. I have a good job.
…
So, $1,000,000 still seems like more than plenty to me, I wish I’d had a life where that much was reasonable to just have
This is what a Trump Administration will mean.
Destruction
About one billion dollars.
That concept messes with a LOT of people's heads.
Now you can use that billion to shop, pay your bank back, pay tax & net save a bunch of dollars
If you want, you can buy a treasury bond and earn interest
Now you can use that interest to go shopping
There's 801 billionaires in the US. Some just over a billion, some lots over a billion.
Suppose you taxed that down to a flat billion. You still have 801 billionaires. But the excess taxed could fund a one-off check of $32,843 to *every taxpayer* in America.
Period.
Money does not come from either tax payers or bond holders
Our government creates our currency and banks issue loans
our brains aren't really built to comprehend the scale
Because I don't think people realize just how much money the (still very few) ultra wealthy have soaked up.
- If a millionaire loses a million dollars, he's broke.
- If a *billionaire* loses a million dollars, he's still a billionaire.
(please don’t block me for this bad joke)
Now imagine there's a special event. People only that rich can send one person to a special concert held at Michigan Stadium. Every seat packed
Sadly, the horizontal scrolling UX is less rhetorically effective on mobile than desktops, because it's easier to flick past intervening messages (w/out forced pauses)
A better mobile #dataviz might zoom instead
$1 = a few mm thick
$10K = a few parking spots
$1M = a minute's brisk walk (~1 min)
$1B = driving across England to the sea (>1 hour)
"I don't know what to do so I'm just gonna keep accumulating stuff and power until I feel good..".
They are mentally ill and should be framed as such.
People thinking Musk is smart is a colossal failure.
I don't wanna be a billionaire. I don't like billionaires. I think having more than 7 figure wealth is morally difficult to defend.
And most media, mainstream or not, frames billionaires as "successful".
Nowadays you can be a single-digit billionaire being good at a cute gimmick in a corner of the economy; then you have people like Elon or Bezos, who are well on their way to being trillionaires, controlling systemically important businesses.
you won $40 mil and get to retire now. congratulations on escaping the system. we aren't talking about you, enjoy
this is easy to explain
explaining that you're not going to win the lotto doesn't work. maybe you can convince people they aren't targets though. maybe idk
https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg?si=9CdlojzCXPOtx207
It is a perplexing messaging problem and maybe we should call billionaires the Illuminati to tap into conspiracy images of people who run the world.
These billionaires want to be thought of as Lords, Counts, Vons, Barons.
Thinking out loud:
KleptoCounts
Crooked Counts
Vile Lords
Those are easily marketable terms that summon a charicature in mind.
And she refused to support a single of his projects that he hadn’t set up trusts for.
Not one. He gave her TWENTY BILLION DOLLARS and she couldn’t throw a few bucks for his legacy?
WTF?!?! Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK?!?!
I for real just don’t get it.
Hell yeah. We didn’t start it. We haven’t kept it going.