When I was younger, I thought I would be a billionaire by the end of my life. Of course, I didn’t really understand how money worked, or what a billion means. Recently, I came across a tweet that showed some bar graphs of comparisons between costs, income, and net worth.
This made me think about how long it would actually take the average American to reach a billion dollars. The average full-time worker salary in 2018 was $46,800. Assuming that they paid nothing and had no taxes taken out, it would take more than 21,000 years to reach a total of 1 billion dollars. To reach Jeff Bezos’s net worth ($130 billion), it would take 2.8 million years of work. Modern humans have only existed on Earth for 200,000 years in comparison.
Bezos’s company Amazon’s lowest-paid workers receive a minimum wage of $15/hour ($31,200 a year). It would take one of his employees 4.15 million years to earn just as much as he does.
Bezos could buy 26 billion iced coffees, or go to 2,600,000 years of college, or buy 355,200,961 Elkay EZS8L Wall Mount Non-Filtered ADA Coolers (our school's water fountains). This not only puts into perspective the gigantic income gap between the top 1% and middle class but also issues with minimal tax cuts on the rich and the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hour) that has not changed since 2009. Should billionaires be required to donate more money to the underprivileged? Should they have more of a responsibility in society? What would you do with a billion dollars?
Sources:
In my opinion, billionaires should be in no way required to donate money. Sure, it is definitely the right thing to do when you have more money than you will ever need, but there is no reason people should be forced to give away money they worked hard to get. I'm definitely happy though that people such as Bill Gates are giving away so much of their fortunes ($90 billion) to help others.
ReplyDeleteSources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-reveals-why-hes-giving-away-his-90-billion-fortune-2018-2
I think billionaires don't need to be required to donate money to the underprivileged. But I think most of the billionaires should have responsibility to help the society because what they want is keep being wealthy, however, this is base on stabilize society. Except, some of munitions merchant(they want war). Else, they will want to help to stabilize the society so they could make even more money.
ReplyDelete