Tax The Rich
Why are Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and other billionaires so rich? Even though I've written about this countless times, I still feel like most people don't ask this question, or come up with a totally wrong answer if they do.
source: YouTube
So why are these billionaires so rich that they could single handedly solve some of the world's biggest problems? You see, that's another thing most people don't think about: Jeff Bezos could, if he wanted, solve America's homelessness problem, he could pay for the universal healthcare of all Americans and eradicate hunger, and still have more than half his current wealth. This one man has an obscene amount of wealth and power, which he chooses not to use for the greater good. It's a choice that probably won't even ever come to his mind, but one he could make. He'll never make that choice though, not voluntarily anyway. And that's where taxes come in.
A lot of people still believe Bezos and his peers are so rich because they're exceptional in some way, and that they do things that make life better for all of us. But are they? And do they? Musk never invented anything in his whole life, Gates didn't make MS Dos or Windows, Steve Jobs made gadgets full of publicly funded technologies and Bezos made a... wait for it... website. If we just take some time to take a look at what these "exceptional" men created, we'd be crazy to use that as a justification for their obscene wealth. They're not special. We made them special by buying their creations in great numbers, and by admiring them for becoming as rich and powerful as they are. Sure, Bezos' Amazon is super convenient; if we want something, it's but a few clicks away and it'll be delivered at our doorstep in a day or two. That's great. But the concept of an online supermarket isn't Bezos' idea; he's just the one left standing after a fierce process of competition and elimination. Remember Pets.com? That was one of thousands of online stores that didn't make it. Their slogan was: Pets.com, because pets can't drive. Its demise was caused by mismanagement and the dot-com bubble; its creators just weren't business-savvy enough.
Bezos doesn't package and deliver the orders personally, he doesn't even maintain the website anymore. No, he has thousands of employees doing that for him. And that's the one and single clue to the origin of this man's obscene wealth: he gets the lion's share of all the wealth that's created by all these workers. No single human being is capable of creating the amount of wealth Bezos and his peers have. They don't work billions of times harder and they're not billions of times smarter than you or me. And let's not forget the millions of customers who use his website; he needs them as well to become a billionaire. Jeff Bozos, on his own, isn't worth that much, that's just a fact. He needed a country full of people to become rich, and a world full of people to become insanely rich. And taxes, my dear friends, is just an acknowledgement of those facts. It's the mechanism through which Bezos is forced to give some back to the community to which he owes his riches.
But Amazon and other multinational behemoths do the opposite, backed by the governments they've bought; they flee the country that made possible their road to fortune and glory, in order to explicitly not pay anything back. Tax-evasion is an art they've perfected, and tax-cuts is a service they pay for through lobbying. It's the people who come up with the wrong answer to the question posed at the start of this post, who believe that taxing Amazon and Bezos is an act of theft. They actually believe Bezos is special, better, more deserving than the rest of us, that he has a right to every penny of his more than 150 billion dollars. Amazon uses the roads exponentially more than any single citizen, uses more power, creates more pollution, and we could go on. Still so many people believe it's okay that Amazon's and Bezos' tax-rates are way lower than yours or mine. Warren Buffet famously said that his secretary pays a higher tax-rate than he does. I hope you agree that this is just wrong. But even if you don't, please watch the below linked video; it gives some insight into what problems could be solved by taxing the mega-rich just a little bit more...
What if We Actually Taxed the Rich? | Robert Reich
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