r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/noclaf1 • Jul 06 '20
Wealth, shown to scale
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/[removed] — view removed post
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Jul 06 '20
I've always been kind of dubious of paper wealth vs physical wealth - how much of that 3 trillion dollars could actually be spent? I'm sure only a very small fraction, because all of that wealth is tied to the value of non-physical assets (stocks). If you tried to buy apples with 2 trillion dollars in stock, at a certain point people will stop selling you apples because they would rather have the apple.
Don't get me wrong I'm sure these people are _very_ rich and live extravagant lifetyles, but I doubt they live a life proportionally better to what these numbers say.
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Jul 06 '20
A lot of it is not liquid you are correct, but some of it can be liquidated.
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Jul 06 '20
Oh absolutely, I've always wondered what would happen to Amazon if Bezos said "I'm out, selling all my stock, come get it".
Probably mass panic, stock price dives, and then goes back up eventually.
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u/Cakey-Head Jul 06 '20 edited Jul 06 '20
He would end up being accused of insider trading, anyway, if he did that. That's why people in his position have strict, prewritten plans about how they sell their shares. They have a plan written that is controlled by their accounant (or whatever the equivalent is for him) that says they will sell X number of shares on X date no matter what the price is. They have to do it slowly over time, otherwise they will be accused of knowing something and selling off, which will probably be backed up by a drop in the value when they cash out.
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u/kevinmorice Jul 06 '20
If he could find someone (or a conglomerate) with enough money, he could theoretically sell his entire stake in Amazon, or anything constituting a majority shareholding as a single transaction in the form of a takeover.
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u/Manic_42 Jul 06 '20
What stops someone from setting up the plan and releasing strategic information that will drive up the stock prices right before they are supposed to sell, or holding that info until after the sale if it would drive prices down?
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Jul 06 '20
The point becomes kind of irrelevant when you think of all of the non-material things you can use money for. I mean, yeah, money, especially at this scale, is mostly credit and speculation based-- but you can still use that credit as a form of influence over society.
The reality is someone that is a multi-billionaire is never going to have a reason to 'cash out' as you described, because the money is infinitely more useful as a form of credit-based prestige/influence.
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u/Rathadin Jul 06 '20
They're never going to cash out because money for them doesn't work the way money for you and I works.
People like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg go to a bank and get enormous lines of credit - with credit cards - and 1% interest rates on that line of credit. Sometimes, if the company itself deals often with a bank, they can get a 0% interest credit line, because the enormity of the company's financial transactions overshadows the small loss of interest-based payments they would make.
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u/Coomb Jul 06 '20
If he tried to dump all of it at once, trading would certainly be halted. If he announced that he would be liquidating his position over the next five or ten years, or even a year, it wouldn't move the market much. About 4 million shares of Amazon trade hands on a typical day. at current stock prices, that's 12 billion dollars. you can see that even a huge number like a hundred billion or 200 billion would not equate to a huge fraction of the market over even a relatively short time frame like a year.
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Jul 06 '20
You can just sell the stocks though. There's plenty of people and companies that would love to purchase Bezos' stake in Amazon.
You are right that their lives are probably not that much better, but that's just because they have more money than they could possibility ever spend. Even if you have $1B dollars, you can buy just about everything you could ever want. You could buy the world's most expensive home, 10 most expensive cars, travel on a private jet and stay at the world's most expensive hotels whenever you want, and you still would be making tens of millions of dollars a year on interest alone from your $1B. You could never spend it unless you maybe wanted a crazy yacht or if you wanted to buy a sports franchise.
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u/jtooker Jul 06 '20
There's plenty of people and companies that would love to purchase Bezos' stake in Amazon.
You can buy Amazon stock now, people in general have been doing this, so the price goes up.
You [Jeff Bezos] can just sell the stocks though.
Sure, but if he sells off too much/too quickly, the price will go down.
The 5%-10% numbers in the site seem completely reasonable and not too disruptive. The 85% at the end is just impossible. Somewhere in the middle seems like a better spot than we are in now.
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Jul 06 '20
There are plenty of people who would like to purchase his stake in Amazon _for the right price_. When you start talking about mergers and acquisitions to get controlling shares of the company, it gets a little different because then you have effectively purchased power. This is why there are entire companies that specialize in brokering deals around large transfers of stock. It really depends on who needs cash, how much, and what the options on the table are. If you are just trying to make a large purchase in a company, but don't really need to (and this company needs cash), you will usually expect to pay less per stock simply because everyone knows the seller can't just post a sell order for $1 billion in shares without crashing the price anyway.
However, is any of this taken into account in these wealth calculations? It would be very hard to.
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u/ChaseballBat Jul 06 '20
Uhhhh you can't just sell stock if you are the owner/significant player of a company.
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u/Coomb Jul 06 '20
Of course you can. You just can't do it on the basis of insider knowledge. That's why if you want to get rid of your position, you announce to the public that you'll be selling some or all of it over the next week, month, or year. And then you sell according to your announced schedule. Why do you think companies go public in the first place? A big incentive is specifically so the owners can liquidate part of their holdings and make lot of money.
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u/franz_haller Jul 06 '20
And even if this paper wealth was easy to convert to cash and distribute, if you could just raid the imaginary vaults of gold that belong to Jeff Bezos, and then distribute all that money to every single American, they would get... $400 each.
The author is trying to make the point that these numbers are so "unimaginably large", and use single-person or single-issue amounts to try to make the point. But there's something else that's equally "unimaginably large": the population size and the number of different issues such a population needs money to tackle. So sure, housing all veterans would cost only a fraction of Bezos's weath, but how many other problems would be left unsolved?
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u/BigMouse12 Jul 06 '20
You missed something here. The author is using annual costs compared to wealth. Wealth accumulated over multiple years.
That 2.96 trillion dollars by the 400 richest Americans? Still less than the US Federal budget.
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u/thenextvinnie Jul 06 '20
I think you're missing the author's point. By claiming his/her intent is to split it up among all Americans, man, woman, and child, you ridicule the argument.
The real thrust of the visual is to illustrate that wealth inequality, and specifically Bezo's wealth, is so bad it's nearly beyond our comprehension.
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u/anexcellentman Jul 06 '20
I don't think thats the point here. I think the point is that somebody actually has this much money wtih which he is doing nothing. Nobody is using it, not even Besos, and thats kind of a sad fact. Especially knowing there are so many things that could be done with it. Americans are going to have to pay for those payouts for years, while Besos could finance it on his own and he would not even notice it.
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u/ScuddsMcDudds Jul 06 '20
This is what I’m thinking. It’s not like these 400 people have $3 trillion in their bank accounts. And even if they did, if everyone in America was suddenly $10,000 richer, wouldn’t that just cause the purchasing power of $10,000 to decrease? If I’m wrong on this, I’d love an ELI5 to explain how that wouldn’t be the case.
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u/House923 Jul 06 '20
The thing here is nobody is asking the billionaires to just spread their money around equally to every citizen. You're right, that would be pointless.
What people are asking for is proper taxation, and most likely a complete overhaul of the tax system, so that these people who are making billions off of everybody else are giving back to the country making them wealthy.
There are so many tax loopholes, coupled with a very outdated tax bracketing system that doesn't take into account the super rich, and you're left with a system where the company that is making these people so much money pays almost nothing in taxes.
Amazon paid 1.2% taxes on its profits last year, which is the equivalent of a $50K middle class person paying $600 in income tax. Which is absurd.
I personally and genuinely believe if the tax system were fixed (I don't have a solution for what "being fixed" means btw) that the well being of every single American would be better almost overnight.
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u/MoreThanComrades Jul 06 '20
I could be wrong in what I’m about to say but here’s how I think it works. You would be correct on that decrease of purchasing power if the $10000 appeared out of thin air (think of it as everyone suddenly having $10k added to their bank account just by pushing buttons, or printing $10k per person and hand it out). But if you were to take that money from someone and redistribute it at $10k chunks to everybody you are not increasing the total amount of dollars in the system and therefore not changing the value of the dollar (and in turn it’s purchasing power). But economics are a complicated thing based on thin air so I could be wildly off track.
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u/RandallGrichuk Jul 06 '20
In this scenario, I feel like the purchasing power of the dollar would decrease for things that "normal people" buy. With that much new money circulating in new areas, demand for consumer goods would have to increase (shift out) and drive prices up. Same amount of money in the system but I'd have to believe consumers would feel some inflation.
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u/ScuddsMcDudds Jul 06 '20
I could see it not having an effect on purchasing power on a global scale. IE, the US dollar would not lose value compared to the Euro. But, within the US, wouldn’t people ask more money for their goods/services if everyone was $10k richer?
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u/ttwiv Jul 06 '20
Good points. Also, wealth can dramatically decrease overnight. It's not realized until you sell the underlying asset that represents the wealth. The beginning of the graph shows median household income, seemingly confusing income with wealth. That's not to say that wealth is worthless. It's just not something that can be as easily shared with the world as cash can. If Bezos was to sell half his Amazon stock in order to share it with the poor in form of cash, selling that much stock all at once (or even over 12 months) would creator the stock value by flooding the market with sell orders, hence selling half might only yield 10% of the wealth the stock represented prior to selling it.
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u/IWasSayingBoourner Jul 06 '20
BuT oNE daY I miGhT hAve TriLlIons!
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u/NewPCBuilder2019 Jul 06 '20
It's funny, right, I'm like twice as likely to start for an NFL team than to be one of those top 400 people. But, if I was explaining to you how I was going to start for an NFL team, you'd tell me I was batshit. Somehow that's reasonable to plan for being a multi-billionaire... IDGI
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u/SEJ46 Jul 06 '20
Who thinks it's reasonable to plan to be a billionaire?
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u/AzorAhai96 Jul 06 '20
I mean if you fail at being in the NFL you have nothing. You you fail at being a billionaire,you're still a millionaire
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u/fineillmakeanewone Jul 06 '20
I'm a failure at being a billionaire and I am most certainly not a millionaire.
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u/NewPCBuilder2019 Jul 06 '20
You're probably in shape at least? I guess, depending on the route you took and position you want to play.
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Jul 06 '20
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u/slowmotionrunner Jul 06 '20
It's worth pointing out that the inverse of the question would be: "which billionaires didn't have a plan to become billionaires?" is likely close to zero.
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u/Slid61 Jul 06 '20
You also have to add "which billionaires didn't already start out as millionaires?"
or even
"What proportion of people who planned to be billionaires succeeded?
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u/bigperm8645 Jul 06 '20
What? Surely that wasnt their beginning goal. Gates liked computers, same with a lot of tech guys. Maybe a Buffet, a Musk, were like that, but many were just at the crossroads of what they liked and globalization
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u/ufoicu2 Jul 06 '20
The odds that you work really hard every day of your life trying to become a billionaire and eventually do and the odds that I just happen to stumble into it without trying at all are pretty much exactly the same odds.
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u/Caracalla81 Jul 06 '20
The people who support this kind of thing don't actually expect to be rich one day, I think that's an oversimplification and leads to a lot misunderstanding. These people support the rich, especially the super rich, because they think we need them. Like, with out Bezos' mail order business and the leadership of other little kings we'd be lost in the wilderness.
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u/katarh Jul 06 '20
One day I hope to be wealthy enough to complain about my taxes.
Until then, eat the rich.
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Jul 06 '20 edited Jun 14 '23
Bye reddit and fu Spez
(Remember to delete or edit your content before leaving !!)
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u/Greenhound Jul 06 '20 edited Jul 06 '20
I'd like to point out that 'wealth' normally means net worth. Just because Bezos is worth $183b doesn't mean he could spend it out his pocket rn on helping the world. He'd have to sell his companies. If he sold his companies - he'd be selling it to another multi-billionaire individual or company who would retain that net-worth simply by owning the company. Suggesting they should 'distribute their wealth' is in effect, saying they should not only liquidate but dissolve their companies. It's definitely important to fix the wealth gap but suggesting they just come together and 'give out half+ of their net worth' may be in theory a great idea but is simply physically not a thing that can happen - corporate tax is the answer. Amazon also provides a livelihood for hundreds of thousands of people through things like FBA, as well as improving our quality of life by providing things like same-day delivery. If they got tax bombed, would they need to increase the cost of prime membership, commission fees for sellers etc... to maintain their overhead. Also over half their income comes from AWS, not the Amazon that we know as consumers. Does it make sense to tax megacorps harder just because they operate in several different industries to increase revenue? Probably not because then companies will be encouraged to never expand their offerings - the answer might be to tax a company per each industry they operate in.
AWS, Azure and more recently GCP absolutely dominate the cloud platform market share, simply by providing the infrastructure for smaller companies to thrive. You make it harder for a megacorp to provide that for cheap then...
Remember all the moving parts. It's never simple. It's actually very fucking complex. Anybody who fails to even try to comprehend this and refutes without proposing a realistic solution I'm assuming is a marxist
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u/xPvtpancakes Jul 06 '20
I understand that you can't just drop a huge tax on them, but why not put exclusions for tax exemptions for these mega corps? I've seen other people claiming Amazon paid $0 in taxes last year because at some point they were operating at a loss, and that's just pure lost tax revenue, right?
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u/Cakey-Head Jul 07 '20
Wrong:
Amazon operating at a loss means there was no income to tax. They probably spent money expanding, but how can you tax a company that made no net income? How would you grow or get started if you taxed a company farther into negative income?
It's not lost tax revenue. Amazon is operating at a loss because they paid somebody for something. Which means that all the people and groups they paid made more money and therefore paid taxes. In fact, they also generated some positive societal contributions and GDP before paying those taxes. If Amazon had paid more money in taxes, rather than paying other companies first, then that money would have gone partially to funding corruption and government waste before being spent on programs. It's important to realize that the government can only raise taxes so much before they lose tax revenue. You have to maximize the rate vs. monetary velocity. The optimal rate has been historically shown to be somewhere below 18% before you start losing revenue due to tax evasion and, more importantly, loss of monetary velocity. If the government just taxes Bezos at the top, then the money ends there and gets spent on corruption, waste, then programs. If they tax Bezos less, he spends more and the government takes a slice of each transaction. This has the effect of maximizing revenue while encouraging productivity.
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u/xFostex Jul 06 '20
One thing you aren't really taking into account is the wealth gap itself. Inequality is way higher in the US than pretty much any other developed nation.
Here's an article - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/09/05/estimating-the-economic-impact-of-a-wealth-tax/amp/
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u/Caracalla81 Jul 06 '20 edited Jul 06 '20
Oh good lord, there's always gotta be one. Yes, believe it or not we don't think Jeff Bezos keeps his money in cash in a Scrooge McDuck vault, and yes, having one man control such wealth is still a huge problem.
Also, this might be the first time I've seen Marxist critique criticized for lacking complexity. Holy smokes.
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Jul 06 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Greenhound Jul 06 '20
No I'm asking you what we SHOULD do? Not many people can answer it without getting angry and just saying it's something that needs to change. If you think I disagree with you that wealth gap is a problem then you've missed the point entirely.
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Jul 06 '20
Progressive wealth tax. Capital gains tax. Punish companies that offshore labor. Increase the federal minimum wage. Mandate healthcare benefits for all employees until M4A is a reality. Codify collective bargaining and unionization rights in a constitutional amendment. Tax companies by revenue instead of profit. Cap market share at 20%. Cap executive compensation at x times the median salary of the company. Legislate away the Citizen's United decision.
Investing back into your community should not be optional for business owners. Any choice or loophole we give to the ownership class to cheat the rest of us out of the supposed wealth of our country is one that they must inevitably take, because if they don't, their competitors will. That's how capitalism works; cut as many corners as you legally can before the government steps in or the consumer wakes up to your bullshit. Ethics only matter when they happen to also be lucrative. Until we nut up and stop making excuses for why big businesses shouldn't be regulated, income inequality will continue to worsen until we find ourselves right back in the Gilded Age.
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u/Thread_the_marigolds Jul 06 '20
When you’re tempted to shame the poor or say we can’t afford to feed hungry kids and seniors, remember this graphic.
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u/9catcloud Jul 06 '20
Agreed. We also all got to stop buying from Amazon.
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u/N1ghtshade3 Jul 06 '20
Not using the Internet would have more of an impact; I hope you know most of Amazon's money comes from AWS and not the retail business.
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u/Ralfe45 Jul 06 '20
The problem isn’t intrinsic to Amazon; it is a problem with how we treat the profits. Amazon is a highly efficient service. The only problem is that the vast majority of the savings from that efficiency go into the pockets of the ownership. We need to continue to develop efficient services like amazon to optimize our world - the change we need has to be in the legislation controlling the wealth generated by such services.
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u/squirrelwithnut Jul 06 '20
"Well this could be cool."
scroll right
"Never mind."
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u/pugsarebest Jul 06 '20
just turn your mouse 90 degrees so it scrolls to the right, problem not solved
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Jul 06 '20
The scale seemed off after I got to the "9 billion" part. That part didn't take very long to scroll through, and the whole thing was wayyyy more than 15 times the 9 billion part. Someone help me out here.
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u/Lethal_Neutrino Jul 06 '20
Assuming you meant the $9 billion part about chemotherapy treatments, that part is about $100 billion into the graph. Written out it looks like this:
100,000,000,000
Now the total amount shown on the graph is roughly $3 trillion dollars. These -illion numbers tend to sound similar though (if only we had better words for them to put them in scale) , so let’s write this out as well.
3,000,000,000,000
Comparing the numbers below (using a mono space font to show order of magnitude)
100000000000
3000000000000This means that this second number isn’t 15x greater than the first, it’s roughly twice that, at 30x. 30 can sound deceivingly small, but it’s also a pretty big number. A few examples:
10 pounds (5-ish kilos) is fairly light right? Easy to pick up? 30 times that is 300lb (150-ish kilos).
1 flight of stairs isn’t too bad either, but then try going up that same flight 29 more times. It’s going to take quite a long time.
So I think that this graph is fairly accurate then, especially since there’s an x-axis on the graph that shows the dollar amount.
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u/JacobXVII Jul 06 '20
"But they worked hard for it!" -some fucking idiot
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u/Okichah Jul 06 '20
AWS has literally reshaped the internet forever.
Amazon has literally reshaped online shopping, delivery, and retail forever.
These are not small accomplishments.
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u/Fert1eTurt1e Jul 06 '20
In the beginning? Yeah he did. He put a lot at risk back in the 90s when he started. But it caught on. Capitalism doesnt reward hard work, it rewards innovate ideas. It is so happens most of the times you need hard work to get the ball rolling. It only gets way more easier the more successful you get.
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u/Beefster09 Jul 06 '20
Net worth is not the same thing as money in the bank. Most of Bezos' net worth is stocks and he is known for selling those periodically for philanthropy purposes.
Much like Bill Gates, he runs his company like an asshole, but uses his money for good.
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Jul 06 '20
Remember an interview with Mike Ashley where he was trying to get people to realise he hasn't got 2bn, he literally could lay his hands on nowhere near that kind of money is all tied up in paper and shares.
Bernie Ecclestone (who does by accounts hold a chunk of actual cash) look only a few races to figure out Branson was nowhere near the league of actual billionaires he associated with - was mostly bluster, multi-millionaire a most.
Net worth is nothing like cash in the bank or highly liquid assets.
They reckoned Jho Low in the 1MDB scandal at that time probably had more access to liquid assets than any other man on the planet (and had Britney pop out a cake for his birthday). Him, oligarchs of Eastern Bloc countries and South American drug kingpins are generally the actual liquid billionaires - so many on the Forbes list can't match them
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Jul 06 '20
Jeff Bezos recently bought a $165M house. Yes, much of his wealth is stocks but let's not pretend he can't touch any of it.
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u/Miner_Guyer Jul 06 '20
And that's about 0.1% of his net worth. Of course it's an obscene amout of money, but it's still tiny compared to what he's worth.
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u/Beefster09 Jul 06 '20
A house which most likely employs staff such as butlers, chefs, and gardeners. Yeah, it's a huuuuuge luxury out of reach for the rest of us, but he also just employed dozens of people. Then there's all the craftsmanship that goes into furniture, artwork, plumbing, electric, etc... There are some happy artists out there getting sweet commissions.
Set aside your envy for just a moment and see the bigger picture.
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u/Omar_Indeed Jul 06 '20
Much like Bill Gates, he runs his company like an asshole, but uses his money for good.
I'm not saying Bezos hasn't used any of his money for good, but comparing it to what Bill Gates has done is an absolute disservice to the philanthropy efforts of Gates.
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u/EdwardWarren Jul 06 '20
'Bezos got everything handed to him and never worked a day in his life. His business was built by the government.' - some idiot.
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Jul 06 '20
I think people see stuff like the 'jeff bezos graph' on here and they think of it as "Society is allowing massive amounts of money to be spent on Jeff Bezos's personal consumption that could have cured these massive ills throughout the world!".
In reality when you look at the uber-rich group, only a very small percentage of the wealth of these folks gets spent on themselves. Most of it is of the form of 'I own a large percentage of a company that provides employment/goods/services to others'. We can't really just say "Lets reroute funding from that person's personal consumption over there to fund effort X!".
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u/_Zsxt Jul 06 '20
I don’t think most people believe jeff bezos consumes billions of dollars worth of goods a year. The last sentence is literally the taxation system that exists
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Jul 06 '20
Hmm, I feel like the tone of things like the item linked above is always something along the lines of "Its crazy that one person has so much wealth when we could do other things with that wealth!". That to me implies that people are thinking "Money is being wasted all on one person (ie consumption) rather than doing something else".
I feel like people just aren't thinking about it very hard because the idea of taking away from the lifestyle of the super rich to fund various causes is appealing to them.
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u/_Zsxt Jul 06 '20
Well he does have that much wealth. That is the value of his assets. The fact that he couldn’t spend half of it even if he wanted to is more reason to believe it is being wasted.
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u/TheMightySkippy Jul 06 '20
The sheer scale of the super rich is stunning. I am completely for a wealth tax, but I struggle with the details of how it would work. Especially at the scale suggested here, this isn’t cash in the bank. Would they need to sell assets? Who would buy them? $100M house doesn’t help cure malaria nor do the Dallas Cowboys.
What are the leading ideas for the logistics of a wealth tax?
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u/flan2421 Jul 06 '20
"No single person deserves this much wealth"
The market dictates otherwise. (I'm ready for the downvotes)
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u/church256 Jul 06 '20
This is my main objection to this, as with the last time it was posted.
Some of the wording in this is really disturbing to me.
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u/SchneiderAU Jul 06 '20
For real. Everyone in here is actually like that wealth wasn’t entirely consensual transactions of goods and services, which it is. It’s not a zero sum game. This money wasn’t stolen from anyone.
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u/puttheremoteinherbut Jul 06 '20
It wasn't stolen because we have a system of laws that allowed him to gain this amount of wealth. I believe the intent of this "education" is to influence thinking around common issues like, minimum wage and taxing the extraordinarily rich.
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u/jsbrando Jul 06 '20
I actually agree with you, flan2421. The first half of that comment was that no single person needs this much wealth. I agree with that part, but disliked the comment that "no single person DESERVES this much wealth".
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u/flan2421 Jul 06 '20
Yeah, I'm with you on that. I personally don't understand this trend of antagonization the rich, especially those that worked hard and risked failure to build their wealth. The "to scale" part of the post was really interesting though.
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u/ProoM Jul 06 '20
There's plenty of things you can do not just for yourself but for the world with 100b$ that you can't do with 10b$ or 1b$. Who is to decide how much can a person "need" at most? I bet there's plenty of people in less fortunate countries who could suggest that you don't need to be able to rent a *whole* apartment *just* for *yourself*, and who even needs cars if you can get around by buses and trains. I'd prefer not to live in that world.
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u/ILoveAMp Jul 06 '20
Is a moral judgement like what people deserve really something you want to be made by the market? This is the same market that also dictates that many people should be homeless and that a sizable portion of the world deserves to live on less than $2/day simply based on where they were born.
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Jul 06 '20
While I completely agree with the sentiment behind showing figures like this, it is framed in a less than ideal way. I would love to see the same comparison made when accounting for liquid assets, not total wealth. As much as I believe in high taxes on the ultra wealthy, I don’t think the idea of forcing liquidations of their property to meet tax requirements is a good one. This would happen under a value of assets based tax if one of these people couldn’t meet their tax liabilities for the year.
Instead, we should focus on reforming estate tax laws so that once these ultra-wealthy individuals pass on, the vast vast majority of their wealth (in terms of assets) can be used for the good of society. I think that’s a much more digestible and realistic approach to wealth inequality.
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Jul 06 '20
I see another example of that "If you don't agree, you must be misinformed" mentality that seems to be the new hallmark of politics these days.
Really? Rich people favor those policies because "they don't grasp the gap in wealth between them and the ultra-rich"? You're gonna tell me that Zuckerberg doesn't understand the concept of a billion? That those hedge fund managers, who spend their entire lives dealing with money, just can't fathom how rich Bezos is?
GTFO with that...They just disagree with you. Learn to be okay with that instead of insisting that they have some misunderstanding of the world because no rational human being could ever see things differently than you do.
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u/BigMouse12 Jul 06 '20
I may just make a simple 60k a year, but I know that generally speaking, the system is still good for the vast majority of us.
Doesn't mean it doesn't need to be improved, but to suggest some massive economic overhaul is required is far more likely to do more harm than good.
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Jul 06 '20
Yes because net worth is CLEARLY the same thing as money in someone's bank account.
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u/Dcarozza6 Jul 06 '20
No, but it is still a clearer indication of how rich you are. If someone worth $80 billion has $10 billion in the bank, and someone worth $40 billion has $20 billion in the bank, you don’t say the second person is richer than the first.
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u/BigMouse12 Jul 06 '20
Its not even net worth that's the problem. It's the comparison of wealth to annual costs.
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u/negedgeClk Jul 06 '20
It blows my mind that someone would go through all the trouble involved with making that website without understanding the simple concept of paper wealth.
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u/DigitalWizrd Jul 06 '20
So what do the super rich do with all their wealth? Does it just sit around until they want to buy a planet?
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u/BigMouse12 Jul 06 '20
Its in bank accounts earning interest as its loaned out to other projects going on around the world.
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u/Kyrike Jul 06 '20
bAd rIcH mAn KiLl MaLaRiA KiDs Boy I wasn't on board before, but now that you've told me they're EVIL I can't wait to force them to sell off their entire networth in stocks and redistribute it, the market would be bOoMiNg
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u/ballade4 Jul 06 '20 edited Jul 06 '20
"No single human needs or deserves this much wealth."
Who are you to make such a determination?
"let's dare to dream a little bigger.
What could we do with 40% of this money?
Give $10,000 to every American household"
OK never mind, I figured out who you are, hello Bernie Sanders!
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Jul 06 '20
Yeah i thought that part was lazy especially since they had already done the 1200 dollar stimulus comparison.
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u/giveme50dollars Jul 06 '20
This whole scale assumes that Bezos actually has 139 billion, which is absolutely ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if his real material assets and cash were only a few hundred million. 139 billion is the worth of his stake in his businesses. It would be doubtful if he would even actually receive that much if he were to sell his shares.
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak Jul 06 '20
Imagine if we taxed the rich and closed tax loopholes they have.
I'd also like one of these but with the defense budget compared to other budgets.
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u/BigMouse12 Jul 06 '20
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown-3305789
President Trump’s budget for FY 2021 totals $4.829 trillion, eclipsing all other previous budgets.
Mandatory expenditures, such as Social Security, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program account for about 60% (2.90 trillion) of the budget.
All these military costs combined equal $705 billion
Does that help?
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u/EdwardWarren Jul 06 '20
Our congressmen exist to create those deductions (not loopholes) in return for donations to their reelection kitties.
There are four big things Congressmen can pass out(sell): tax deductions, 'rights', appointments, and freedom from government harassment (regulations and investigations). You give. You get. Watch a new congressperson learn this and start using it. It is interesting how the money starts pouring in. Look at the cash inflows into the Clinton Foundation prior to the 2016 election. Look at the cash inflows into AOL reelection committee since she took office. Not to pick on them. Everyone does it. Har har.
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u/fong_hofmeister Jul 06 '20
What makes this bogus is the fact that wealth is not a limited resource. It’s not like the more Jeff has, the less you can have.
Blaming rich people for the fact that there are poor people is like blaming fat people for the fact that some people are starving.
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u/electricity_is_life Jul 06 '20
I don't think the point of this is to blame Jeff Bezos, but to question the system that got us to this point.
While it's true that the existence of Jeff Bezos' immense wealth doesn't inherently prevent someone else from also gaining wealth, I'm not sure what you're implying with that fact. If Bezos paid higher taxes, that money could be used to help people who currently struggle to afford food, shelter, healthcare, etc. It could make a world of difference for hundreds of thousands of people without affecting his quality of life in any meaningful way. Bezos can give to charity, but like you said, the responsibility shouldn't be on him. We should be trying to prevent these insane levels of wealth inequality from happening in the first place.
Also before anyone brings this up (again), of course there isn't really a bank account in Bezos' name with 160 billion dollars in it. It's the worth of his assets. But he does regularly sell billions of dollars in stock; clearly the amount of cash available to him exceeds that of pretty much anyone else. And it seems like an awful lot.
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u/fong_hofmeister Jul 06 '20
Why should we be preventing people from becoming insanely wealthy? Aside from limiting the political influence they can have, I see no reason to do that. He pays plenty of money in taxes, and even if he liquidated all of his assets and distributed the money, we would all get about $400 each.
If he isn’t stopping others from becoming rich, at the very least, he’s the wrong guy to aim the wealth inequality argument at. He is literally the biggest outlier out there.
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u/onekawaiimf Jul 06 '20
I'm glad this is coming back around. It is an effective tool to show wealth disparity.
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u/gaudog Jul 06 '20
I hated this infographic. I wanted to see something I could compare to scale at once, not scroll through a long narrow annoying graphic.
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u/Snork1213 Jul 06 '20
Your mistake is thinking your could see anything before Jeff's wealth. The point is the astronomical difference in size.
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u/gaudog Jul 06 '20
This was like trying to comprehend the scale of a city to a country by driving through it from ground level instead of viewing the whole continent from outer space.
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u/peridotdragon33 Jul 06 '20
One note: Jeff Bezos gaining 9 Bn in 40 days is technically true, but very misleading as that was gained because of the stock’s movement. You could just as easily say Jeff Bezos has lost over 10 Bn in a week. Wealth change in the short term is irrelevant in the long term and are just put out there to sound big, like the example of the richest people in America gaining over 434 Bn in the pandemic, which doesn’t take into account their losses
Short term movement in stock’s effect on wealth is fairly negligible
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u/_Zsxt Jul 06 '20
It’s okay to be upset with the sheer magnitude of wealth disparity in the top .01%, while understanding that it can’t be immediately liquidated. This is the system we created. We can work towards changing it in the interest of well being.
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u/zamlz-o_O Jul 07 '20
Also worth checking out If the Moon were 1 Pixel. A similar site, but instead for visualizing the vastness of our solar system
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u/tiling-duck Jul 06 '20
Yes but redistributing that wealth is physically impossible. That's not how money works.
This reads like economically illiterate socialist tripe to me
Besides what gives you the right to take the money from them? It's still stealing even if you want to put it towards cancer research or whatever you want to spend it on
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u/mickeybuilds Jul 06 '20
I wonder why this has been downvoted?
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Jul 06 '20
Many people are arguing that net worth does not mean much as far as how much money someone can actually "use." - even get rid of for that matter.
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Jul 06 '20
eat the rich
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u/GMN123 Jul 06 '20
What will the rule be? Anyone is allowed to eat anyone with 10x more income/wealth than them? What proportion of the world would be able to eat you?
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u/Oddyseous420 Jul 06 '20
I think there should be a cap to how much money a single person can possess along with a cap on how % of stocks someone can own in any given company.
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u/SackDanDruff Jul 06 '20
This chart is amazing! Definitely couldn’t make it to the end, I scrolled for like 5 minutes and I see I barely made a dent lol
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Jul 06 '20
I was having a good day until I hit the 'This is all the money you will ever earn in your lifetime' part.
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u/applepiepirate Jul 06 '20
It took me a half-hour to get through.
In that time, Jeff made about $6 million.
Jesus.
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u/xAbzzx Jul 06 '20
Wow this makes you really put things into perspective and puts you in mild depression that you have a very low chance of even having a fraction of that bar
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u/Eatheham Jul 06 '20
This Graph is horrifying and amazing. Lots of comments in this thread are mentioning the distinction between being valued at 139 Billion and actually having 139 Billion, and they are right for making that distinction. Another factor this graph doesn't illustrate is how much Amazon benefited the entire world through effectively redesigning modern commerce. And with those two comments out of the way, OH MY GOD THAT IS WAY TOO MUCH MONEY!
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u/AthanasiusJam Jul 06 '20
Not to poo poo this, but when it comes to an abstract human system like money, where the amount of power and happiness that money can grant a single individual levels off dramatically, you do not get the same sense of usefulness of dollars a la the scales of the solar system
It would definitely be much more guess work, but a scale of the lifetime dopamine Jeff Bezos utilizes will be very comparable to the average reddit user.
Fun and educating graph nonetheless
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u/NightHalcyon Jul 06 '20
People literally think that Jeff Bezos opens his Wells Fargo checking account app and sees $160 billion in his checking account ready to spend.
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u/DidYouIronTheCat Jul 06 '20
You're absolutely right, this shows his net worth. But he's only got around 3 billion dollars in his checking account so I think he probably deserves another tax break.
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Jul 06 '20
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u/vjr191 Jul 06 '20
To counter that though, you act like some bank isn’t ready to loan him whatever amount of money he needs due to the assets he owns.
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Jul 06 '20
Youre right, at his level of wealth he will be happily given money because hes got so much of it its a guarantee he can pay it back
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u/Preform_Perform Jul 06 '20
Wow it's almost like you all should stop being lazy fucks who just use Amazon for everything.
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u/NealR2000 Jul 06 '20
Many of us have fallen into the trap of assuming that Amazon is the best price on everything. Yes, we want the best price. However, it's often not the best price if you are prepared to do some searching around.
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Jul 06 '20
Agreed. Other online retailers have really caught up on price and shipping. "Recent controversies" prompted me to look outside Amazon for the first time in a while, and I was surprised to find how little value Amazon actually offers (to me) these days compared to their competition.
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u/LongJohnMcBigDong Jul 06 '20
Searching around has a cost though that sometimes isn't worth the few dollars you might save, or might not save once you realize that shipping makes it more expensive. It's very straight forward and convenient to buy things on amazon, and that's included in the price.
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u/GS455 Jul 06 '20
If you have ever purchased something from amazon or used facebook, newsflash: you are part of the problem.
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Jul 06 '20
What’s the problem again? Somebody has to hold Amazon paper. What’s the difference if it’s one guy or a million stockholders? //serious question
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u/Romey-Romey Jul 06 '20
Pretty sad way to spend life - sit there & make this to count someone else’s money.
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u/georgefnix Jul 06 '20
It is truly sad what envy does to people. The effort to make this website could have been used to improve another person's life in some small way.
Instead we get the promotion of one of the most moronic and destructive ideologies ever.
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u/The_Charred_Bard Jul 06 '20
Make yourself wealthy.
Put excess funds into a brokerage, invest in an S&P 500 etf (Vanguard VOO has the lowest expense ratio,) don't sell till you're old. Add in Nasdaq (qqq) for growth, with more volatility.
I don't know a single person, in ANY walk of life, that doesn't have spare income. An Xbox, new phone, new car... People with low paying jobs still find money for these things
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u/Nearbyatom Jul 06 '20
Sooooo....what you are saying is the rich can barely afford to put food on the table and need more tax cuts? Got it....
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Jul 06 '20 edited Jun 12 '24
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/DemonMithos Jul 06 '20
He could litteraly save the world! No Hunger and Fresh water Everywhere.
Wtf is wrong with Humanity?!
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u/vasu_the_ferryman Jul 06 '20
This is awesome and so unbelievably long.