I just read an article in the Guardian (UK) regarding if we will possibly soon be seeing the world's first trillionaire. It focuses on the fact that the person whom Forbes magazine currently considers the world's wealthiest person, Jeff Bezos of Amazon worth 98 billion USD, increased his personal fortune five fold in a very short time. So they are expecting if he continues on this path he will be worth several hundred billion dollars in a few years. So eventually someone will top the trillion dollar mark.
Of course this is considering the US system were a trillion is 1,000 billion. That is a lot of money, more than the GNP of most countries in the world. And we are seeing more and more people becoming multi millionaires and billionaires every year. Why is this? Well the Guardian puts the following as some of the reasons:
Reduction in taxation
Reduction in the power of unions
Reductions in minimum wage
Privatization of public assets
I would add a few others:
Moving production to countries where wages are extremely low and taxing is very lax, including bribing of authorities to not pay it.
Even in these low wage countries, pay is according to piece work or hourly, which let's the producer get away without having to pay any social benefits to workers.
Putting their money in tax havens to avoid paying taxes.
Of course, I know many here who are libertarians or pseudo anarchists will argue that no taxes is good, the problem is, no taxes or very low taxes are only for the very rich, regular folks still get to pay what is expected of them. For example here in Honduras after we started following neo liberal policies, we now have the second highest amount of millionaires in Central America despite being the poorest country, mainly because the middle class nearly disappeared as a good portion of it was union members who had quite good salaries, after unions were practically destroyed these guys joined the ranks of the poor. This led to the big companies being able to save money and increase their profits, but the idea was the trickle down theory, this wealth was supposed to eventually trickle down and every body would have a piece of the cake, it didn't happen.
Anyway, yes, rich people create jobs, but is it fair or wise to have so much money in the hands of so few people? That is what is up for debate. See you can only spend so much money anything beyond that, if it were used to create good paying jobs for people would be OK, but mostly it isn't. Here I know the richest people, who by the way apart from controlling everything here, are also related by blood or marriage between them, so the money stays there, like elsewhere get to pay no taxes and nearly all of them are partners in the same businesses.
I really don't even have a clue as to what a person with a trillion dollars can do, what I know is they can't possibly spend it, so this money will just lie there making more money for its owner via stocks, shares or any other asset he owns. Yes,I would like to have an income that would free me from economic worries, but I also don't think I need one billion dollars for that.
So, well we shall see who the first one to get to a trillion dollars will be, maybe someone who invests in crypto?
