Here's an interesting thought: suppose that you make $100,000 dollars every single year. For the sake of argument, let's say that none of it is taxed and you get to take home all of that money, and you never have to spend any of it. How long would it take you to become a millionaire? It would only take you ten years to become a millionaire. Okay, but let's up the ante a little bit: how long would it take to become a billionaire if you made that same 100k every year? The answer: a ridiculously long time. It would take you 10,000 years to make a billion dollars on that income. That's longer than human civilization as we know it has existed.
It's often difficult for people to fully grasp just how much money a billion dollars is.
It is, quite literally, more money than you could ever need, and possibly more money than you could ever know what to do with. But that's only one billion dollars — the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, has an estimated net worth of over 148 billion dollars. To put that into perspective, if we were to continue the previous 100k a year thought experiment, it would take you 1.48 million years to accrue that kind of wealth. That's more than five times as long as humans have even existed! On top of this, there are a total of 2,153 billionaires in the world today, worth a combined 8.7 TRILLION dollars. That's 87 million years of making 100k a year.
You'd have to be alive during the time of the dinosaurs to make that kind of money.
This begs the question: is having that kind of money immoral? I personally believe so. Imagine having that much money just sitting there and gathering dust in a vault somewhere while millions of people around the world are forced to live their lives without food, water, housing, and proper sanitation. To have that kind of money and not help anyone with it is exceptionally immoral. Of course, this is why charities exist, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These charities are wonderful, but people living in poverty and squalor shouldn't have to hope that some rich guy decides out of the goodness of their heart to help them. The kindness of strangers shouldn't be the difference between life and death. Taxing this wealth is a much more efficient and regular way of making sure that those who need help actually get it, instead of hoping that some rich dude decides to be a nice person.
But Eric, don't rich people help us by giving us Amazon and Microsoft and stuff like that? Yes, they do, and those things are great, but it's still no excuse to have that much money. When you can run large multinational corporations like Microsoft and Amazon and still make billions of dollars in PROFIT, then it proves that you don't need that much money to run that company, and it just becomes excess that sits around benefitting nobody.
Taxes on the wealthy, especially billionaires, of 70 percent or higher are moral to me. They put money that otherwise would have never been used back into the economy and help those who need that money more while still allowing people like Jeff Bezos to run their companies while having to deal with the inconvenience of being slightly less obscenely wealthy.
