Bernie Has Thrown Down the Gauntlet to the Billionaires
Bernie Sanders says billionaires shouldn’t exist — and his unprecedented plan for a wealth tax on the superrich will go a long way toward making that happen.
Members of the Walton family (L-R) Rob, Alice, and Jim speak during the annual Walmart shareholders meeting event on June 1, 2018 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.Rick T. Wilking / Getty
The scale of wealth inequality in America is so vast it can sometimes be difficult to comprehend.
Three billionaires control more wealth than the 160 million poorest combined and the richest member of this tiny, gilded club — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — acquires more money every sixty seconds than a typical household does in eighteen months.
Given what the average person lives on, fathoming a billion dollars — let alone the more than $100 billion reportedly held by Bezos as of 2018 — proves a mind-bending task: visualized as a stack of $100 dollar bills, $1 million is already a shopping cart’s worth of money. A billion dollars, on the other hand, could quite literally fill an entire room. Alternatively, imagine saving $50,000 every year: even at this rate, it would still take twenty years to save $1 million and you’d be long dead before ever reaching $10 million — which would take another 180 years. A billion dollars, on the other hand, would take ten times that length: requiring $50,000 in savings every single year for a full 20,000 years — considerably more time than has passed since the end of the last Ice Age.
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