Thinking Tree Massage

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how billionaires shouldn’t exist. A billion dollars (let alone multiple billions of dollars) is way, WAY too much wealth for any single individual to own. A few years ago, I learned a way to conceptualize a billion as a tangible number and it completely shifted my perspective on billionaires. It’s a simple statement that packs a punch:

One million seconds is approximately 11 days. One billion seconds is 33 YEARS.

Earlier this summer, Jeff Bezos added $13,000,000,000 to his net worth - in one SINGLE DAY. 429 years worth of seconds, translated to dollars, in 24 hours. And yet...Amazon got a tax *refund* for $129 million in 2019. For 2 years in a row, the mega corporation that allows a single person to have a net worth of 198.8 billion dollars...paid $0 dollars in federal taxes.

Our country’s unemployment rate is insane right now. People are drowning in medical debt, student loan debt, credit card debt...because of a predatory system. I really like this Ted Talk about poverty and basic universal income. We’ve accepted the lie that poverty exists because of the failure of the individual. We’re so enamored with the bootstraps, american dream mythos - if we work hard enough, we could be millionaires and billionaires too! Therefore, if people are poor, it’s because they aren’t working hard enough.

Nothing - absolutely NOTHING - could be further from the truth. Some people are born into generational wealth. Our buddy Bezos got a $250,000 loan from his parents; for all that amazon “started in his parents’ garage”, it also started with a quarter million dollars the bootstrap myth conveniently leaves out. Similarly, some people are born into generational poverty; I have friends who grew up in food-insecure households where dinner was far from a guarantee.

And frankly...it pi**es me off. The wealth gap in this country (frankly, across the globe) is appalling. The pandemic has poured gasoline on the issue - the uber-wealthy have hoarded even more money; those on the edge of (or living below the poverty line) have suffered exponentially. After all, a large part of the “will schools reopen” conversation is, “what about the kids who rely on school for food and safety?”

I don’t have a clear-cut answer. The question of “how do you completely alter the existing structure of a country to make it more equitable, particularly when the system is rooted in white supremacy” is...a daunting task, to say the least. But I want to help keep the conversation going. All I know is - no one person needs billions of dollars. It’s inhumane and greedy, plain and simple.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=860379517791685