Billions for war
can't afford universal healthcare - what's up?
Billions for war - can't afford universal healthcare - what's up?
I read the news a lot. It's kind of depressing and infuriating but I am continuously interested in how things develop over time. I've noticed a sort of inflation. The super rich are getting richer faster than everyone else. Not only do we have billionaires. Now we have a bunch of people worth many hundreds of billions. For a while we had a trillionaire.
For a person like me who lives on a couple of thousand dollars a month quite comfortably those riches are unimaginable. I did a quick calculation to find what it would cost to give all 350 million americans $2000 a month for a year. It comes to about $8600 billion.
Medicaid costs the American government something like 870 billion dollars a year
And I read that the war against Iran costs a billion dollars a day.
For comparison, the net worth of Elon Musk and Larry Page and Jeff Bezos is about 1200 billion dollars just to give an example of scale. These are people who could finance the war from petty cash.
Krugman says that the ultra rich don't think like us. In their world mundane things like paying for rent or food don't exist. They have other problems like building yachts or triumphal arches. Perish the thought that they contribute to healthcare.
I've noticed that the blossoming of the super rich class has been accompanied by the damages sought in civil lawsuits. Now it's almost routine for people to be sued for billions of dollars over nebulous stuff like 'damage to reputation'.
Trump sued the IRS because a contractor stole information about his taxes. The contractor went to jail. Trump wanted ten billion dollars in damages. I think that a part of the reason for the huge sum was just that a smaller amount wouldn't be satisfying to a guy who is so rich.
When I was young in Saint John we had a local millionaire named KC Irving. Irving owned a chain of gas stations, an oil refinery and ocean terminal, a pulp and paper mill, and the newspapers and tv station. He was quite influential. But he was a mere millionaire. His concerns were very local.
I worked as a new film editor for his tv station. One day I got sent on an errand using the TV station newsmobile. KC came up behind and got on the blower complaining about the long haired guy driving around in the newsmobile. He was a hands-on sort of rich guy.
Just before that I worked in a camera store. We noticed an interesting (not nice) thing. The richer a customer was the more of a discount they wanted. One perspective on that was that they were using their riches to get richer.
A person's worth is a tricky issue. For the ultrarich most of their wealth is held as shares in companies. Their income might be small in comparison.There are years when Elon Musk pays no income tax because he had no income. Even as his net worth exploded.
I think that huge wealth like that can detach you from reality.
It enables things like building huge data centers is good if it's profitable. And it presents those who object as communists. The irony is very great.
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.