THE TRILLION DOLLAR SUV
April 18, 2021 – 5:54 am
HOW TO DONATE
Our costs will always be there. So readers who can donate towards the cost of the site, please open a Skrill account. Readers who wish to contribute to BigO will now have to use Skrill (click here). We are no longer able to use PayPal to receive donations. Register an account at Skrill. To make a payment, use this e-mail address as recipient’s e-mail address in Skrill: mail2[at]bigomagazine.com. Looking forward to hearing from you.
+ + + + +
JUST TO LET YOU KNOW
To reduce spamming, the BigO website is going through Cloudflare. What it does is scan your browser to ensure the visitor is not a spam. Do not be alarmed as this usually takes only a few seconds. Email us if you still have difficulty accessing the BigO site; or playing or downloading the tracks. If you know a better way of reducing spam, do let us know.
+ + + + +
“Power, style and plenty of space for passengers and cargo give the 2020 Ford Expedition its swagger and imposing presence on the road.” And when you put eight billionaires in it, it’s even more impressive. By Bob Lord.
The Expedition, an SUV that can seat eight passengers, rates as the biggest SUV Ford makes. So how much can an Expedition be worth? That all depends. If the eight passengers sitting in an Expedition happen to be the eight wealthiest Americans, the net worth of that Expedition and everyone in it would be over $1 trillion. To be more precise: $1.023 trillion dollars, plus the value of the vehicle.
Let me spell that out for you: $1,002,300,000,000. At Wall Street’s market closed Friday, according to the billionaire trackers at Forbes, America’s eight richest individuals held over $1 trillion for the first time ever.
Six of the eight - Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison - each now sit on a personal fortune worth $100 billion or more. But don’t feel bad for the other two, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both of Google. With wealth of $98.6 billion and $95.6 billion respectively, they’re both sitting just a rounding error away from “centi-billionaire” status.
Think about that. A group of white guys so small they could all fit into an SUV now controls a trillion dollars of the nation’s wealth. Need some perspective? One trillion dollars equals the collective wealth of a million millionaires. We have states in this nation where the entire population holds significantly less than $1 trillion in wealth.
Think about that. A group of white guys so small they could all fit into an SUV now controls a trillion dollars of the nation’s wealth. Need some perspective? One trillion dollars equals the collective wealth of a million millionaires.
Eight white guys, $1 trillion. Just seven years ago I was ringing the alarm that just 51 billionaires held personal fortunes worth a combined $1 trillion. But make no mistake. Wealth concentration in America was indeed running out of control seven years ago. That our distribution of wealth back in 2014 now looks mild compared to the present level should absolutely terrify us.
Our current obscene concentration of wealth should also be all the proof we need that our tax system has totally broken down. For decades now, we’ve taxed work more and more and wealth less and less. We’re reaping today what we’ve been sowing.
Eight white guys controlling a trillion dollars won’t work, especially with tens of millions of us reeling from a pandemic. But we can reverse the trends of the last four decades. We can require the ultra-rich to start paying their fair tax share. Or we can submit to oligarchic rule.
And if we do submit, I’ll be rewriting this column a few years from now - with a Ferrari two-seater in the lead.
Note: Bob Lord is a veteran tax lawyer who practices and blogs in Phoenix, Arizona. He’s an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.
+ + + + +
