The Wealthiest People: Greedy or Philanthropic?
Billionaires have been taking a great deal of abuse in social media, especially since:
• The chasm between rich and poor started to spread, largely due to the influence the super-wealthy wield over the law-making process
• The vast majority of Trump’s enormous tax breaks went to the super-rich.
As a result, when most people think about the effect of the billionaire class, they think about selfishness, greed, and corruption. Solidifying these beliefs are obvious examples of exactly this, e.g., the Koch brothers, who have spent a considerable fortune sewing doubt about climate change, suing various of the U.S. states to nullify renewable portfolio standards, and working hard to roll back environmental protections.
According to this article in “GQ,” It would take an absurd amount of space to document all the money and organizations they’ve scraped together for that purpose. (Investigative reporter Jane Mayer’s groundbreaking Dark Money does basically that.) And they have every reason to: In her book, Mayer notes that “Koch Industries alone routinely released some 24 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year.”
Does that mean they’re all bad people? Of course not.
This piece (from “GQ”) presents the incredible amount of good that is being done every second of every day by some of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
Craig,
While it’s true some wealthy people are extravagant, most “wealth” isn’t what less affluent people consider being as “wealth”.
There are very few “Scrooge McDucks” rolling about in vast piles of cash! Most wealth is only perception, existing only on paper or invested in risk ventures.
This is the wealth the entire population relies upon to create employment, innovation, surplus capital, future funds,investment in education, R&D, conservation, pay for government services and philanthropy.
The President’s tax cuts took time to work fully as the first round was greeted with caution by business after so many years of disruption, neglect and uncertainty.
With a little more nudging from the White House, US business has started to respond resulting in an investment and economic upsurge producing unprecedented growth in employment,(especially among low paid blue collar employment), with an increase in wages rates as the labour market become tighter for employers.
“Taxing the rich”, is a popular but misguided policy for a number of reasons;
1) The really rich pay no tax. The more tax demanded, the more profitable it becomes to avoid altogether.
2) The rich simply move their wealth to more welcoming locations, damaging the whole economy especially the poor and those on fixed incomes.
3) The nation becomes less economically competitive as investment dries up or moves elsewhere.
4) Most employment is created by the production of luxury goods and services. (It takes 0.75 production line workers to produce a Toyota Camry but 612 highly skilled craftsmen to build a Rolls-Royce).
A large part of my working day is spent sourcing surplus money from affluent investors willing to risk funds investing in innovative “Clean technology” and environmentally beneficial industries.
Your idea of “wealth’ is not only inaccurate, but very old fashioned. Over the past four decades, nearly all “new wealth” has been created and owned by self-made tech billionaires working in a new economy that didn’t exist only four decades ago.
The old fashioned, simplistic socialist concept of wealth has ceased to exist decades ago. Resource based billionaires like David Koch are dinosaurs in comparison to folks like Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos whose assets exist largely in the ether.
The development of phenomenon like Blockchain technology, which spawned a whole new plethora of trillion dollar businesses existing only in popular perception is revolutionary. This newly created wealth can’t really be measured, let alone taxed.
It’s easy to understand why a huge part of the population remains baffled by these complex and dramatic changes. This confusion creates a great opportunity for political opportunists to exploit public confusion by peddling emotive, simplistic old fashioned political/economic agenda.
It doesn’t matter to these people their simplistic policies are no longer relevant or practical, (they never were, but even less so today), these new era socialists are about seizing power for themselves.
like Hugo Chavez, these “new age socialists” will cause misery and destitution for the poor as well as the rich. (well the rich will simply move elsewhere.
In the words of French Revolutionary leader, Georges Danton, “revolutions, like Saturn, eventually devours its own children”.
Alex Zuckerberg is estimated to be worth 60.5 billion, but that money is almost exclusively tied up in Facebook. Facebook isn’t “real” in the old fashioned sense of bricks and mortar.
Trying to seize that “wealth” and redistribute it to others would simply cause the supposed “wealth” to disappear.
Much as seizing a $100 million dollar painting, and putting it in a museum, doesn’t provide food or wealth for the underprivileged. The poor can’t eat the painting, (and in most communist counties weren’t even allowed access).
Inventing “baddies” like David Koch also ignores the $156 billion contribution made to the US economy each year. Koch industries employees 140,000 people directly and more than $2 billion indirectly.
Jane Mayer bitterly observes “Koch Industries alone routinely released some 24 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year.”
In that sense, Jane Mayer’s observations are silly and irresponsible. She has no answers herself, just complaints!
Koch Industries pay the US IRA 12 times the tax paid by Apple, but that’s nothing in comparison to that great Democrat, Jeff Bezos, who despite Amazon making a profit of $11 billion last year paid ZERO Tax, both as a corporation and personally!
Strange how ol’ Jane avoids mentioning Jeff Bezos, who coincidentally is her publisher.
Recently, the Huffington Post published an editorial condemning Koch industries and claiming “Can wind and solar displace all fossil fuels? Yes it can – easily “.
The article, (as these sort of articles always are) was long on emotive rhetoric, but lacking in any verifiable detail.
Koch Industries is a hugely diversified corporation producing everything from building materials, textiles, electronics, food, agriculture, space components, energy, glass, and a myriad of other products. A large part of the US highways are built using Koch products.