Originally published in The Chronotype.
When I was 16, my father asked me if I wanted to go to college. I said yes. “You’ll have to work,” he said. There was no further discussion. After a year stocking shelves at a supermarket in Platteville, I got a job clerking at a liquor store. I was making minimum wage. After taxes, I cleared about $40/week.
If I had a ten-spot in my wallet, I had money. My parents paid my tuition, but I was responsible for my living expenses, and that meant rent, groceries and gas for the old car my grandfather had given me. Every month, I balanced my checkbook, looking for every stray penny.
Half a century later, I still do. I’m not miserly, by any means, but thrift was something my folks practiced and tried mightily to instill in their boys. After college, it took me some time to get a handle on it. Getting my first credit card didn’t help. Marrying a woman with an accounting degree did.
Now, after we’ve combined for a century or so of working and saving, we enter retirement as what used to be called “comfortable.” Only, that’s too much, according to some people in our country. I don’t consider us rich, by any means; the IRS officially considers you “rich” if you make at least $45,000/month, which is less than the minimum salary for a Major League Baseball player. I could never hit a curve ball, which is one reason why I’m not in that income category.
I’m certainly not in Elon Musk territory. The South African immigrant who founded Tesla and SpaceX is the richest American of all, with a net worth of $342 billion. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are a rather distant second at about $215 billion apiece. Musk could spend a million dollars a day and never run out of money. His descendants would run out sometime in the 30th century. But maybe nobody will be using money by then, so they’ll be fine anyway.
But we’re still early in the 21st century, and for a lot of people, those guys and all the other billionaires—902 in the US, according to Forbes—have way too much money. Presumably, the complainers don’t have anything close to even a million dollars. You see them all over Reddit and YouTube and other platforms, railing at the unfairness of it all. “Why should so much wealth be in the hands of so few people, while many others go hungry, or homeless?” A good question. But perhaps a better question is: how much money should anyone be allowed to have?
I’ve posed that question in some online discussions and never get an answer. Should there be a “wealth cap”? If so, who decides what that is, or how those excess assets should be seized, or where they go next?
Margaret Thatcher, the late British prime minister, said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Let’s do the math, shall we? If the entire wealth of the top ten billionaires on that Forbes list was seized, it would amount to about $1.5 trillion. A lot of money, to be sure…and it would fund the federal government for about 3 months. Then what? Well, let’s just take all the billionaires’ money. That’ll pay for about a year, but there’ll be another year after that, and with all the super-wealthy folks’ money gone, who do you think will be next on the list?
The millionaires, of course. There are a lot more of them: 23.8 million. Now, you might say the fact that about 1 in 10 American adults is a millionaire might speak well for our capitalistic system, but that’s still too much money for some non-millionaires. Together, all those rich folks have about $26 trillion. That will fund the government for maybe 4 years, if we’re frugal. Okay, that takes us to about 2030. Then what?
We could ask the Cubans, who’ve had a socialist “workers’ paradise” for about 65 years. There are allegedly no millionaire Cubans, and everybody has free healthcare, apparently. They also have no money; the average Cuban household income is less than $3,000 per year.
Everybody who wants to be like Cuba, raise their hand.
A Strenuous Writer's Life 