What Good Do Billionaires Do?
Can they ever do enough?
A friend of mine reposted a meme asking what Elon Musk is doing with his great wealth. There were a number of questions. Are you feeding the poor? Are you creating housing for the poor? Etc. Etc.
Of course, it was reposted by someone who has done nothing to employ anybody. By contrast, Musk has multiple companies. Tesla has 12,800 employees. SpaceX has 13,000 employees. The Boring Company has fewer than 200 employees. Neuralink has about 300 employees. X, formerly Twitter has about 1300 employees. xAI has 12 employees.
Why did I list his companies and employees? To point out that every employee that he hired is one less person looking for a job. For every employee, Musk’s companies pay half of that employee’s contributions to both social security and Medicare. Those employees will have retirement and medical care thanks to Musk.
What more could he do?
Certainly, the billionaires of the U.S. could do more. How much more? The top 400 richest Americans are worth $5.4 trillion. To put that in perspective, the U.S. deficit (how much the federal government spends minus how much revenue it takes in) was $1.83 trillion in 2024. If we could manage to strip the top 400 billionaires of all of their wealth and give it to the U.S. treasury, it would be gone in 3 years.
A wealth tax cannot solve our problems.
We must grow out of our problems. People must have employment. They must be able to pay for a decent living. We cannot afford to support the world’s population. We cannot even support ourselves.
For over 30 years, I lived in Bellingham, WA. The city is now doing a second cleanup of a homeless area. The first cleanup was thousands of tons of trash and human waste. I have driven by the current effort. It has police presence. At least one excavator and dump trucks are on site.
What can be done? The homeless are not homeless because billionaires have billions. As we saw, if the federal government took all of the billionaires’ money, the homeless would still be homeless. Why?
Drug addiction seems to be part of the problem. Mental health problems are another part of the problem. Lack of proper training is part of the problem. Lack of affordable housing is part of the problem. Face it, lack of motivation is also part of the problem.
There may be other factors. I’m not saying that is everything. We must look for the causes of the problems. We must address the causes of the problems. Then we must monitor the outcomes (fewer homeless) to determine if our solutions are working.
That is one of the ideas behind the Goldilocks Revolution. Government must prioritize spending and monitor results. I encourage you to download the free eBook. I’ve talked with Rick Raddatz and am helping with the organization. I believe it just makes sense.