The Top 1% Donate 0.8%

One of the main arguments against a wealth tax is that the stupendously rich already give so much of their wealth to charity. Especially the billionaires themselves, when they appear on the mainstream platforms paid for and funded by themselves, are keen to point out that they wouldn't be able to be so damn charitable if their hard earned wealth were to be taxed.

The amazing thing to me is that so much people still fall for this BS, when the truth is so easy to see: they give as little as possible, just enough to paint themselves favorably in the eyes of the middle class and poor, while standing on their necks. The subtitle of the Vox article I want to highlight today reads: "Jeff Bezos gave an estimated 0.1 percent of his wealth in 2018." This is America's richest person, who had to be pressured into paying his employees a 15 dollar per hour wage and who bought one of the nation's biggest news-outlets, The Washington Post, like you and I buy peanut-butter at the supermarket, stifling any scrutiny of his company's dealings. A billionaire colleague of his, Bloomberg, owns a news agency company baring his own name, Bloomberg News, as well as the Bloomberg Television network, and is now buying his way into the presidential primary elections by spending 100 million dollars on ads in the three weeks he has been running. These "gentlemen" are a literal rot in the democracy, and Bloomberg's bid for the presidential nomination may be the most dire indication of the class war that has almost reached a boiling point; watch the video at the end.

Important to realize is that for the past decades, this has been true: Politicians listen to rich people, not you. I's go even further, especially now that Trump is the POTUS, and say that the government ARE the rich people. And the government say we can't tax their wealth, because they would stop giving to charity and, even scarier still, they would leave the country and set up business elsewhere. Well, cry me a river over their departure; good riddance is what I would say. Taxing them would pay for medicare for all; do you know how much talented, smart and entrepreneurial individuals don't dare take the step of leaving their job and start a business of their own, just because they would lose their job's healthcare? I don't, but I do know that healthcare is one of the most pressing reasons for people to hold on to an otherwise worthless job. Some will even defend their partly employer-funded healthcare program... But that's overlooking the amount of power the employer has: when people decided to strike at General Motors, within the first few days their healthcare program was stopped. So don't adore your boss over the power he or she wields over you and make healthcare universal: when everyone has it, it's a noose on no one's neck.

Back to the stupendously rich: a proposal to tax their wealth by even the tiniest percentages, they literally start crying on TV. When Bloomberg is asked about the criticism that he's single handedly buys his way into the election, the billionaire's disingenuity comes floating to the surface; he turns the question around and asks why it's okay for a candidate like Bernie Sanders to ask money from millions middle-class people, and not for a man who's earned his OWN money to use some of it to do good for the American people. Of course he casually throws in that he spends much of his billions on healthcare issues, arts, homelessness, the charities HE believes in... Painting Bernie as a beggar and himself as the proverbial self-made man, a narrative that apparently still has so many people fooled, he completely overlooks the democracy; to have 4 million individual middle class donors means that you represent a large part of that middle-class, to pay for your own campaign means that you represent yourself. It means that you're murdering democracy itself. The voters who gave him support in the polls are letting him get away with it, and are the same, I suspect, who still fall for the billionaires' crocodile tears, and their worthless philanthropic endeavors.

Here’s how much America’s billionaires give to charity: the top 20 richest Americans gave an average of 0.8% of their wealth to charities that actually reached the beneficiaries, as donations to foundations that aren't yet payed out and some other roundabout ways of donating aren't counted. The list isn't perfect by any means and a lot can be argued about it, so I invite you to follow the link and read the entire article, but the conclusion can't be avoided:

So the table has less than perfect information. But even given some errors in one direction or another, the conclusion is hard to dispute: Most billionaires are giving a pathetically small fraction of their wealth away.
_{source: Vox}

That average of 8% is bloated a lot by two billionaires, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who donated 2.6% and 3.9% respectively; without those two, the average becomes an even more measly 0.1%... Is it moral to allow the existence of such stupendous wealth? Not in a society that holds "democracy" as one of its founding principles, if you ask me.

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