Bill Gates—How Admired Should He Be?
This question is easy enough to answer BUT it leads to many questions about how Government lets the wealthy handle their earned fortunes—even if they were not earned at all.
Let’s start with the extent of his wealth. The four richest Americans, of which Bill Gates is one, own as much wealth as the bottom 40%. There are 230 countries in the world. The wealth of Bill gates is greater than the total annual national incomes of the 54 poorest countries.
Now lets consider what Bill Gates does with this huge amount of wealth. He heads up the largest private charitable foundation and he is not required to do any such thing, nor should he be required. So Bill Gates may well be deserving the title of the most admirable multi billionaire in existence. There is no way I would argue otherwise myself.
But here is the problem. No country can allow 4 people to own more of the nation’s wealth than the 40% of the people at the bottom. It is not like this is the first time so much wealth has accumulated at the top of a society. But in every case where it did, that country imploded and once the implosion started the ‘have nots’, with nothing to lose, destroyed the wealthiest who had so much to protect. In short, such ‘empires’ found the foreign costs to maintain their empire too great, and the vast wealth inequality at home unable to be sustained. The collapse was invariably not very pretty since once chaos reigns in the streets, thugs take turns controlling the various communities, much like in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
The War on Poverty, plus the Police and Political the War on Drugs, added to masses of people in our country to be unemployed, or employed with non livable wages, or inadequate health care, or inadequate pensions, or inadequate vacation times, etc. This can only be corrected if the bottom 40% of our citizens can find decent jobs at decent wages, have good schools with good teachers, good health care (especially for children), have adequate pensions, and safe environments in which to live. Where do these 40% at the bottom live in this country? They live in the urban, rural, and now suburban ghettoes which have grown exponentially in the last 50 years—in size, in unemployment, in lack of personal safety, etc. until we have way to many people living in hell holes.
Many take the view that it is all their fault and they have the responsibility to right their own communities. Apparently the notion is that a child born in such environments, or was raised in such environments, simply made poor choices. They picked the wrong parents, the wrong neighborhood to be raised, the wrong schools to attend, the wrong medical choices, the wrong neighborhood friends, and so it goes, an endless parade of poor choices. I, on the other hand, made a series of good choices and achieved some moderate successes the old fashioned way—“I earned them”. Yeah, sure.
Once all the bullshit is eliminated we are left with the obvious. Every government, of every nation, is responsible for ALL the communities within its borders. The ridiculous notion that less government is good government is simply self-serving propaganda promoted by the affluent to justify all the government policies which enable the wealthy to become even more wealthy with absolutely no restrictions. “In the United States, the compensation of company executives is distinguished by the forms it takes and its dramatic rise over the past three decades and wide-ranging criticism leveled against it. In the past three decades in America executive compensation or pay has risen dramatically beyond what can be explained by changes in firm size, performance, and industry classification. It is the highest in the world in both absolute terms and relative to median salary in the US.”
“Although economic growth in the United States continues to be as strong as in many other countries, or stronger, a small percentage of American households is fully benefiting from it. Median income in Canada pulled into a tie with median United States income in 2010 and has most likely surpassed it since then. Median incomes in Western European countries still trail those in the United States, but the gap in several — including Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden — is much smaller than it was a decade ago.
In European countries hit hardest by recent financial crises, such as Greece and Portugal, incomes have of course fallen sharply in recent years. The income data were compiled by LIS, a group that maintains the Luxembourg Income Study Database. The numbers were analyzed by researchers at LIS and by The Upshot, a New York Times website covering policy and politics, and reviewed by outside academic economists.
The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.” For this trend, established now for 50 years, to be halted and a more balanced distribution of wealth achieved, this nation—along with many other nations, needs to find the means to enable all their communities to be well employed, well paid, health needs met, pension needs met, vacation days sufficient, good schools, good teachers, and safe environments for children/adults.
Conservatives insist we quit throwing money at the problem. Nothing changes when we do. Well, the truth appears to be that we do have to throw money around BUT by altering how we spend the money, and from whom we get the money to spend. The problem is that the very wealthy are pretty much in control of all three branches of government. Even when a President wants to curtail this control it becomes virtually impossible to do so. Politics today lacks any intellectual discourse at all. Obama tried his best to steer it in that direction but the wealthy simply scoffed, let him babble away, and made sure none of that babble ever got any traction. Politics today is pure brainwashing and done via polished brain washing techniques. The election process today (2 years in the case of Presidential elections) is so long that name calling and lies, repeated long enough, take their toll. Many talented and good potential candidates would never subject themselves to this sort of process. Look at the kind of candidates who participated in the Republican primaries and how the debates went. It was pure name calling, put downs, and about as honest a debate as a used car salesman trying to sell a car. Nothing good comes out of such debates and nothing good did.
Democracy is failing—and why is the subject for another day. But for this musing let’s just look at exactly what would need to be done to help the bottom 90 percent of our citizens. We first must rethink our penchant for using the terms capitalism and socialism in pure forms. We are killing ourselves with the notion that capitalism is good and socialism is bad as abstract concepts. Certain forms of either are bad.
We need start wlth the obvious. For the wealthy to get even more of our national wealth it can’t come from the poor as they have nothing left to give. 43% of American adults don’t even make enough to qualify to pay federal income tax. The growth of middle class income has been stagnant for decades now. Trump has a brilliant source of money to make the wealthy even more wealthy. We will cut their taxes by borrowing the money to replace the government loss of tax income. This is the same way we have paid for all the nations we have invaded the last 50 years. Maybe we shouldn’t borrow the money, just print out the cash and hand it to them.
In a general sense the only way to correct our current sick distribution of our nation’s wealth is to try something novel—like direct our attention to those most in need of help; the bottom 40% of our economic stratus. The purpose of machines and computers is to make life easier with less physical human labor. When the work needed can be done quicker via modern machines and computers, then there is no need anymore for long work weeks. Many people in the distant past had to work 60 or 70 hrs a wk, including sometime children just to survive. Some people today still have to do that since the minimum wage has not kept up with cost of living.
For some unknown reason when the normal work week fell to 50 and then 40 it stopped at forty. So we need change the normal work week to 30 hours and make it illegal for anyone to work two full time jobs and limit overtime. At the same time we need make the minimum wage a living wage and have it rise automatically with the cost of living. At the same time we need ban the sale of any products made abroad which are made via slave labor. An equivalent salary to our own living wage minimum salary would have to be paid to foreign workers before their product could be sold in the U.S. All this will generate jobs for everyone in this country and generate more taxes coming into our government. It will enable everyone to make enough money to live on and pay taxes to boot. The government will guarantee every adult and teenager (part time) a job at the level of their skills. Anyone who refuses to work at the level of their skills will be denied any welfare. If someone wants more money via their job they will have to improve their skills. Even though we would then have more taxes coming in and less welfare, we will need even more money to change the nature of our huge national urban, suburban, and rural ghettos.
This additional money will come two ways: First we alter our government expenditures. We don’t need all these foreign bases. All it has ever gotten us recently is endless invasions and no victories. Maybe Grenada and the Balkan Wars are the exception. Starting with Vietnam, and even Korea, we have never attained our purported goal to save other nations from themselves—not in the middle East, not in South America, not in Africa, not in Asia, not anywhere. All our military expenditures should have one goal—to make sure no other nation would even think of invading us. We have killed, injured, or displaced millions of people around the world directly due to our military invasions. We have more really angry enemies abroad than any other country in the world as a consequence of our many and endless invasions. We should start being as disinterested in the politics of other nations as George Washington encouraged or Switzerland demonstrates. As far as purchasing natural resources like oil or gas or certain metals etc, as long as we can buy at market prices that is fine. Otherwise we will militarily take it forcibly. Everyone likes American money. And this way it comes minus all the prerequisites attached. There is now only one—market price. This would cut the military budget like maybe in half. Whatever the number it is large.
Next we need implement the good old American principle that income should be earned income, not welfare from others. Capitalism will be retained since competition is good and drives progress. But it will be a regulated capitalism which makes every effort to keep the playing fields level and puts limits on wealth accumulation. This would not mean limits on personal acquisition of more wealth, but it would be a return to Teddy Roosevelt era taxation in which the maximum tax rate is 90% on the very wealthy, and estate taxes that return most of the gained wealth to the society from which it was derived. Inheriting unearned wealth would be mostly eliminated. That is, simply put, unearned wealth. In an ethical world, or even according to the prophets of most major religions, all children are equal in the eyes of God, and not some entitled to huge wealth advantages via genetic ties. Once an adult all young adults should be expected to generate their own earned wealth, not live off inherited wealth.
At this point we have huge amounts of government money available via taxes, far less welfare costs, and genuine graduated taxation. No more loopholes. Cut all the Trumps of the world off at the knees with all these loopholes. We earn this much money, we pay this much in taxes. Period. We are no in position to create equal talent for all children. But,the same amount of money will be spent to educate all children, and the property taxes will not be the source of money to support schools. The federal government will raise the money distribute it to states and local school boards can decide how to spend the money allocated to them per pupil. All citizens will receive good health care just as all children will have good schools and good teachers. All citizens will now be employed at the level of their skills with the lowest paid jobs at living wage minimum wages. All workers will have pensions dependent on the level of their skills and all workers will have at least 6 weeks vacation/leave time.
When Teddy Roosevelt implemented the 90% tax rate for the rich and returned estate monies to the government, the rich did not become poor at all. Look, ten percent of what Bill Gates or Donald Trump makes per year is enough money anyone would possibly need. For just about everything in life there is a point where enough is enough. It is the function on government to enforce this. Survival of the society demands this.
Increasingly aware of the need not to let a musing go too long, let me end here, which is really nothing than a good start and interject some depressing reality here. Even if one nation did all of the above, the biggest threats to human welfare comes from global issues. Climate change is one. Human overpopulation is another. A global economy with no global minimum wages is another. Economic global interdependency with no global regulations or limits is insufficient. There is little evidence, if any, that there is about to be any global policies regarding climate change (serious enough or soon enough) population controls, or economic regulations and limits. I suppose critical problems threatening all kinds of species has occurred numerous times in evolutionary history. The process makes corrections, which sometimes take hundreds of thousands of years, but evolutionary progress proceeds, not on human time or via any real human control, but on evolutionary time. The process is amazing, but the needs of any species or individual members of any species, is irrelevant. The evolutionary process is obviously not in place to preserve any particular species. 98% of species that ever existed no longer exist. We all just got a chance, by chance, to exist for a minuscule period of evolutionary time. Not what we want for our ego, but if ever enough humans live via the ethics of the Golden Rule, then, and only then, will the maximum number of humans attain the maximum degree of contentment. We can help ourselves, under the laws of evolution, but only via he Golden Rule. God, in this sense, gave us the means to maximize human content, but He/She/It does not intervene on behalf of anyone’s prayers to do so. Yes that’s opinion based on some evidence not fact.
Bill Gates is respected by just about everyone of every political stripe for, on his own, doing so much to help the less fortunate/talented/whatever. This is optional for Bill Gates and that it is why it is so praiseworthy. On the other hand all governments of any stripe and political bent are obligated to ensure all their communities under their jurisdiction are aided to prosper. Governments have an obligation, not a choice. Governments have obligations to all citizens of all stripes. It then follows that no form of government can afford to let the very wealthy own too much of it’s country’s wealth.
Government not only has this as an ethical obligation but for any society to last very long with such extreme distributions of its wealth is genocidal to that society. If we, as citizens of the United States do not take steps to prevent it, we too will end up like Iraq, Afghanistan, many third world countries in South America, Africa, the far East, and so on. We are rapidly heading into this kind of cultural mentality. It is not uniformed armies fighting on a battlefield that are the modern means of warfare—it is terrorism and street riots, with bullies alternating temporary controls over neighborhoods. Scary, isn’t it? Well, we are all dead in the long run and for those in my age bracket, it is the short run, one way or another. Even hermit hood is not going to stop Father Time from knocking on my door. But until he does, I choose to have a quiet peaceful mellow life sustained by gratitude for my past years. Fortunately, it is easier to forget any bad times than the good times.
