The Difference Between You and a Rich Person

You probably have an idea of where you stand between the richest and the poorest. 

Here are some of the extremes:

The C.E.O. of Palantir, a data mining company that gets half of it's revenue from government contracts, earned $1.1 billion ($1,100.000,000) last year and was the highest paid executive of a publicly traded company.

If you were paid the U.S. minimum legal wage of $7.25/hr. (which hasn't changed since 2009), you would have to work 137.931,034.5 consecutive hours (15,749 years) to make that much... if you could live that long. Even Methuselah, who lived to celebrate his 969th birthday says the bible, would just make chump change.

But thankfully, most of us--but not all--are making more than minimum.

Even if you were pulling down $100/hr. 24/7, you would have to work100 non-stop years to make that much. Oh, not that $100/hr. is shabby. In a regular 40 hour work week you would be making $208,000 annually... certainly comfortable perhaps but not rich by current standards.

Here's an incredibly beautiful example of how hard it is to be rich when you are trying to give it all away. It's called "win-win."

MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos's ex and one of the richest women in the world, made a pledge to give all of her fortune away. Despite her great effort, she is finding that harder to do than you could imagine.

She just announced a new round of grants that give $2.74 billion directly to non-profits for benevolent uses. This is her third such donation since her 2019 divorce that awarded her billions in Amazon stock, which keeps growing beyond her generosity. She has already donated $8 billion before but she keeps getting richer. 

Ah, the curse of the rich. Those who have no need keep growing richer just by breathing. And, latest revelations show, they pay less tax proportionally than you do and some pay no tax at all. Try to tell the I.R.S. that and see how far you get before being thrown into jail.

 But thank you, MS Scott for the continuing effort.  

And that's why we often feel those ultra rich are so above us in more ways than one.

When the Mexico City Metro disaster ,which claimed 26 lives and horribly altered so many more, was blamed on construction flaws and political pressure, Mexico's President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador explained, "The humble and hard working people understand that, unfortunately, these things happen"...  but not to him.

See what I mean? Being that rich is unfathomable in so many ways. If you found a ten dollars bill, you'd feel lucky. If you were that rich, you might see hundreds of ten-dollar bills on the street as just litter, and to them, you'd be right.

But here's the harder to understand: Our Founding Fathers promised in The Declaration of Independence "... that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." 

That is backed by 27 amendments to date--from freedom of speech to rights to vote--and also  the right to own more guns per capita than any other country in the world... another inalienable right. Seems some inalienable rights are easier to handle than others.

We are a capitalist country built for many to make money. There is no sin in that. Many of the moneyed are generous thinkers and doers. But we don't do that well for those at the bottoms side of the system, unable for so many reasons to put food on the table for family and children, to be able to receive needed health care, to have a roof over their heads, to have the basic footing to pull themselves up. Money makes money automatically. Lack of money makes poverty, automatically. 

Trump's tax act in 2017 literally made billions for the top, just a pittance for the middle and almost non existent for the bottom. So why today, for infrastructure and health care, food on the table and opportunity for those unable to grasp it themselves, can't we take a lesser sum back and make sure everyone has some proportional tax to pay? That just makes common sense. See more here.

Life is not fair. We, as Americans, could... should do better to balance the scale. Where the top 10 wealthiest are richer than the all of bottom half of us combined, there is room. It's an attitude problem.