Thereâs something that I feel like alot of people donât understand about money
Rich people are evil. That isnât a generalization or an exaggeration. Every single rich person in the world is sufficiently evil that I wouldnât feel a single moral compunction about gunning them down in cold blood. Why? Letâs do some math.
Using nice round numbers: A salary of $100,000 per year is a pretty good income, and will allow someone to have a pretty good lifestyle. Nothing super extravagant, but definitely sufficient and not wanting for anything important.
A million dollars per year ($1,000,000) is 10 times that. Thatâs enough to support 10 people on that pretty good lifestyle. Or, more likely, 2-5 people on a luxurious lifestyle, since most households donât have 10 people, or have more than one person producing income.
For the sake of round numbers, letâs say the average person lives 100 years. A person who makes a million dollars per year, for a hundred years, would make a hundred million dollars over that lifetime. $100,000,000. With that amount of money, a person is entirely capable of supporting themselves and a modest family, on a luxurious lifestyle, for 100 years, without working a single day. That isnât subsistence or just-getting-by, thatâs luxury the likes of which the vast majority of people canât even dream of experiencing.
Letâs say a person has a billion dollars. Thatâs $1,000,000,000. Ten times that lifetime-luxury level. A person with that much money could literally set 90% of their money on fire and still be set for life, without ever working a day. That is, their quality of life and overall happiness would be completely unchanged if they got rid of 90% or more of their money.
According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the poverty line for most of the US is $11,770 for an individual (and increases somewhat linearly with the number of people in the household). Letâs round that to $10,000. That is, a person who makes $10,000 per year is considered in poverty. By definition, that person doesnât have enough income to survive, and needs significant increase in income in order to have anything resembling a comfortable lifestyle. Stats from the same Department show that in 2015, 43.1 million US residents were below the poverty line. Weâll round that to 40 million (thatâs 40,000,000).
According to the most recent Forbes report (March 2017), there are 2,043 people in the world who have at least a billion dollars; letâs round that to 2,000. Keep that number in mind. And those 2,000 people have a combined wealth of $7.6 trillion. $7,600,000,000,000.
Letâs consider a hypothetical billionaire who has exactly 1 billion dollars in wealth. As previously established, this person could give away 90% of their wealth and still be set for life. 90% is 900 million dollars. $900,000,000.
For the sake of round numbers, letâs say that taking a person who is at that poverty level of $10,000 up to $20,000 per year would move them from unable to survive, up to a getting-by level. Not a great income, but enough to survive on. Definitely a major increase in quality of life. Keeping our assumption that the average person lives 100 years, that means a total lifetime income difference of a million dollars. Our hypothetical billionaire could, therefore, take 900 people completely out of poverty for life, without noticing a single change in their own quality of life, while still keeping themselves at a luxurious lifestyle and never working a single day.
Letâs go back to that $7 trillion amount. 90% of that is $6.3 trillion. That means those 2,000 people could, right now, pull 6.3 million people out of poverty for their entire lives, and not a single one of those 2,000 people would notice any change in their happiness or quality of life. 6,300,000 people taken out of poverty, instantly, and at no real cost.
And thatâs by just handing out money at random. If that money was put toward actually improving the systems that cause poverty in the first place, developing infrastructure, distributing resources, improving healthcare, and generally working toward a better world, the effects would be substantially greater.
(Also, none of this accounts for the fact that wealth isnât static. Someone with that much money is bringing in vast sums via investments and financial trading, meaning the actual amount they could afford to give up would be significantly greater.)
The thing about rich people? They know this. Every single one of them is aware of how rich they are. They know perfectly well that they could make the world a vastly better place for everyone. They know that spending that money wouldnât actually require them to change their lifestyles in any significant sense. And they choose not to. Because to them, the only thing that matters is being better than other people. To them, money is some abstract thing where all that matters is having their number go up. When they see people starving, or dying of treatable illnesses, they feel *good* about it, because it means theyâre "betterâ than those people. They revel in death and suffering, and do whatever they can to spread it, because thatâs the only way they can feel good about themselves.
And also, bear in mind that wealth distribution isnât even across demographics. It isnât an accident that poverty disproportionately affects women, people of colour, LGBT+, the mentally ill. They target people who are already vulnerable specifically because they know they can get away with it.
The act of being rich is, ultimately, an act of violence, and one specifically targeted at people who are already less able to defend themselves. Itâs a deliberate and intentional process by which to inflict pain on the vulnerable, in order that a few sadists with poor self-esteem get to watch an imaginary number go up.
Every single rich person is evil. Full stop. Every single one of them needs to die before a healthy society is possible. The sooner the better.