I Wish This Was A Joke

[Mister Agenda]

You seem to be changing the subject. But if you divide 77 billion by 300 million, it's over $250 apiece. It won't make anyone rich or change their lives much, but it's far more than a square of toilet paper.

And you wouldn't be dividing it by 300 million. I wouldn't even give any of it to Americans, personally, but if I were, I would give it to the bottom .01% (about 300,000 people), and that's about a quarter of a million each, life-changing and life-securing money. Enough to ensure good health care, good education, and a secure retirement.

I wouldn't do Bill Gates like that, but let's stop pretending the wealth of the richest man in the world is insignificant in the larger scheme of things. One man could lift 300,000 Americans from the depths of poverty (by American standards) to the middle class, and almost guarantee the same for their children, in the form of a trust fund for their healthcare, education, home purchase subsidy, and retirement, maybe even a minimum income. A quarter million would change my life, and I'm already middle class (though I've been in the bottom .01%).

Me changing the subject?

I thought we were talking about dividing up the resources Bill Gates uses....not his money. You asked, "So you're saying most of the resources at their disposal are of no practical use to them, while millions starve for want of them?".

Bill Gates doesn't have Wharehouses full of stuff that he can buy. The only resources that are exclusively at his disposal are the ones he already owns.....like his house and toilet paper. Those other resources....well they are at the disposal of everyone else too. They are already in the market....making people other than Bill Gates better off.

Sometimes you seem deliberately obtuse. If you want to talk in terms of stuff, Bill Gates has a lot of stuff in the form of assets and currrency of which he can't make direct use. Let him keep his houses and cars and toilet paper; and what's left would still be enough to lift a few hundred thousand Americans out of poverty.

If you took Bill Gates money and divided it up, people would just bid up the prices of things already in the market that Bill Gates wasn't using anyways.

The money has already been printed, so it's not increasing the money supply. It's only .01% of the population, so it's not drastically affecting the market for stuff. And it's in the form of a trust fund that doesn't put all that money out in one year, but over a lifetime, helping with the big expenses that very poor people usually can't meet but that middle class people can take for granted: good health insurance, a college education or trade school, home ownership, and some cash flow in tough times. Stuff middle class people usually get a lot of help with from their parents. Stuff that the .01% will now be able to pass on to their kids.

Gates seems to be determined to do something similar on his own, and I admire him for that. And of course, it's not all on him. A 1% tax his net worth and on net worth of the rest of the top .01% (about 300,000 Americans) could accomplish the same thing in less than a generation. The top ten richest Americans have about 485 billion between them, 1% of that would be about 4.85 billion, divided by the 300,000 poorest people, that's about $16,000 apiece, save it up for 15 years and you've got your quarter million for the 300,000 poorest people, and you can do it again in 15 years for the next poorest 300,000 people. With the other 299,990 in the top .01%, it will probably go considerably faster than that. And maybe a .1% tax on the rest of the 1%, there are about 3 million of them, and we don't want to burden them unduly since they're so much poorer than the .01%. That's 3 million of the US's nearly 10 million millionaires.

This isn't an actual proposal, I'm not economist enough to be floating serious plans, I'm just showing what is possible. If I were being serious, for starters, I would have used the 300,000 poorest households instead of people in my example, The average size of an American house hold is 2.54 people, so benefiting the poorest 300,000 households would, conservitively estimating, benefit 762,000 people.

All I'm saying is, it's not chicken feed. And it won't go up in smoke unless it's just handed out willy-nilly. There's all kinds of complications to take into account that I haven't. For instance, that's a lot of home buying, which means a lot of home building. It's a lot of educating, which means a lot of jobs for educators. Since the poor won't be forced to use the money for houses or education, they can always choose to put it aside for retirement, so even if .01% of American households caused a lot of inflation because they're buying housing and education, they can afford to be choosy about how much they're willing to pay. What they don't spend they can invest, just like a 401 K, and it could be theirs when they retire.