How Much is Too Much

There are 813 billionaires in the United States. Just a reminder, if you started work at the age of 15 and worked until the age of 75 you will have worked for 60 years. And if your salary at age 15 was $250,000 (that's not a typo) and you earned $250,000 every year, you would have earned $15,000,000 ($15 million) over the course of your working career. To become a billionaire in 60 years you would need to earn roughly $16.6 million dollars per year. I don't know any job for a teenager that starts out at $16.6 million and I'm guessing you don't either.

A billion dollars is a lot of money; an incomprehensible amount of money, as I've argued earlier. To compound the matter, only 23 of the 813 billionaires are worth exactly 1 billion dollars. The other 790 are worth $1.1 billion or more. The difference between $1 billion and $1.1 billion is $100 million and $100,000,000 is a lot of money.

Not all of this money is in cash, of course. This is a valuation of assests. A person with $1.1 billion can't pay cash for a $1 billion house, for example, without liquidating stocks or equity. I use the example of someone with $1.1 billion rather than $1 billion because someone with only $1 billion would be broke after purchasing the house. Fortunately, the most expensive house in the United States is only $250 million.

For the sake of argument, let's say that the limit of wealth per person is $500 million (a.k.a. 1/2 a billion dollars, a.k.a. $500,000,000). It is hard to imagine that someone would have difficulty making ends meet with $500 million. If a cap was set to $500 million per person and the surplus collected for the communal good, then there would be over $4.3 trillion dollars available for schools, roads, airports, higher wages, etc.¹

The ultimate question is "How much is too much?" Moreover, who gets to decide? There is clearly a reluctance on the part of governments, markets, and organized citizens to make that decision. Perhaps it violates our sense of free market economy. Or maybe we fear regressing into a violent mob, storming mansions and demanding restitution. Or is it too paternalistic? But some people are making that decision. Some people are looking around and asking "How much is too much?" And not only are those people asking that question, they are also making decisions. Jeff Bezos ($194 billon) is making that decision by keeping some Amazon wages low. Elon Musk ($195 billion) is making that decision by paying hourly employees at Tesla an average of $26.48 or roughly $52,960 per year. Jamie Dimon ($2.1 billion) is making that decision by paying a starting wage at JP Morgan Bank so low that in Southern California it causes the employee to run a budget shortfall. While many of use may be skittish about forcing the ultra rich to a wealth cap (e.g. $500,000,000), some ultra rich appear to have no such qualms about forcing a wealth cap on the working poor.

For my readers who attend a Catholic liturgy regularly, when was the last time you heard the homilist preach about the ultra rich and the deadly sin of greed?

1. The data I used is not the most recent Forbes list as the Forbes list is not downloadable.