Income inequality

1 Trillionaire and 8 Billion Homeless People

Do you remember when millionaires were rich?

When I was a kid, a millionaire was somebody who lived in a mansion and had a butler. Most millionaires now don’t even consider themselves rich.

If a million bucks fell into my lap, I wouldn’t sneeze at it, but I also wouldn’t think that was my cue to move to Beverly Hills — you’d be lucky to find a house for that now.

Billionaires are still rich — for now.

At some point, if current trends continue, one of our mentally ill billionaires is going to cross the line into trillionaire territory and the rest of us will be poor and mostly homeless.

Let’s review. Before we developed private ownership of land and money, human society was pretty egalitarian.

If you needed a new place to live, you looked around, said to yourself, “That looks like a pretty good spot right there,” and you built a hut or yurt or what have you. Maybe you’d have to devote a week of hard labor to constructing it, but then you were done. You had a home of your own.

Then we invented civilization, private ownership of land and winner-take-all economic systems.

So now, a lot of us are well into middle age before we own the land we live on. A common experience involves devoting around 50 hours per month for 30 years to earn the privilege of owning a small lot with a house on it. Of course, even after you finish paying for it, you’ll still have to keep paying property taxes on it forever and ever.

A lot of people never manage to swing it, so they’ll devote the labor of a week or two per month for their entire lives to rent a place.

We’ve made it very challenging to obtain a little patch of grass with a house on it.

The gulf between the rich and the poor just keeps widening. At this point, the rich people and the poor people can barely make each other out in the distance.

Perhaps my children will see this system reach its natural conclusion: One trillionaire who holds all the world’s wealth and 8 billion homeless people who own nothing.

If that happened, probably about 4 billion people would strongly defend the trillionaire: “It’s his money! He earned it. He can do whatever he wants with it.”

Everything costs more now.

I’ve seen tremendous changes in my half-century on this planet. When I was a young child, nobody in my small town paid for water or sewer. People commonly had big gardens and canned some of their food. Hunting was common. So was having a few chickens.

Working parents would pay a pittance to a teenager to watch their children after school. My older cousins watched my little sister and me for years. During the summer, a neighbor or relative watched your kids for little or nothing. I did not know a single family who used a daycare center in those days.

There are so many “new” expenses now. Your cellphone cost is substantially more than a landline. You need internet access. You have to pay for your water and sewer. Daycare is so expensive that even millionaires notice the cost.

Babies are a luxury now.

Sorry, working-class and middle-class people. You cannot afford to have children. Like certain handbags, they are now a luxury accessory for the wealthy to carry around.

“Ooh, you have a baby? Wow. That’s so impressive. I didn’t even know you were rich!”

The simple life is over.

The middle class barely exists. There are rich people and there are poor people, and you’ll probably be whatever your parents were. You will have to hustle your ass off if you want to be rich, and even then, you should know your chances are not good.

It doesn’t have to be this way, actually.

We could have a healthy middle class in the U.S. again anytime we wanted.

All the things we started doing in the 1980s — things like busting unions, paying CEOs obscene wages, lowering income taxes for the rich, ruling in favor of Citizens United, making college unaffordable to people of modest means and plenty of other ill-advised changes — none of those things are natural. None of them happened by accident.

Those things were choices.

They were bad choices. Evil, even. All of them involved deliberate decisions to funnel money and privileges toward the wealthy and away from the poor and middle class. They are why income inequality is bad and keeps getting worse.

I imagine the wealthy were shocked, at first, to learn what easy marks we are.

What if you picked someone’s pocket and they didn’t notice, so you dared to take their watch and then their wedding rings? What if they just stood there as you then removed all their jewelry?

“I guess these guys are just gonna stand here and let us rob them blind,” the wealthy thought as they stripped the poor and middle classes of everything they had.

It was easy, as long as you distracted them with worries about what Black people or gay people or trans people or immigrants might be up to. They’d never notice as you rummaged through their pockets again and again, checking to see if they had any loose change you’d missed the first few times.

The best part — from the point of view of the wealthy — is that almost nobody even blames them for what they’ve done. In fact, their victims largely admire them.

“That fox is so damned smart,” the chickens sigh. “No wonder he was put in charge of the hen house.”

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I’m a writer in central Illinois. Find me on Substack, Mastodon, Twitter or LinkedIn.