What do you think the billionaires' billions are doing? Sitting in a bank account? I think the majority of their wealth is invested, i.e. it is funding industry, which is a good thing. If we assume for illustration that billionaires will spend $1B on things like private jets and invest the rest, then if we have $1T divided among 10 billionaires, we'll have $10B spent on jets and $990B invested, while if we have $1T divided among 1000 billionaires, we'll have $1T spent on jets and $0 invested. Given that, at least for the concern of "how it's being spent", it's actually best to have the megawealth concentrated among a relative few.
Invested money is usually in things like the stock market, which doesn't directly support a company (buying a share of AMZN doesn't put money in Amazon's pocket, although it does, amusingly, make Bezos wealthier on paper). Angel investing might actually be better here from a velocity perspective, I don't actually know for sure.
Yes. Maybe not their own savings account, but in some organizations' bank accounts.
Money in the hands of the low to middle class is spent far more efficiently. [1]
[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2011/12...
And if we split Jeff Bezos into 1000 individuals, each of which had about $200 million, and each of which spent half of it on mansions and yachts and invested the rest... would that be an improvement?
Thanks to $AMZN going up. There's no way he can spend that much per year for prolonged periods of time.
This is a misrepresentation though. There isn't anything inherently wrong with people having or making different amounts of money. The complaint, as I see it usually, is that the degree of inequality is unacceptable. That is, millionares aren't inherently unethical, heck people who make millions annually aren't inherently unethical. But people who make billions a week, might be.
That is, I can comfortably and easily donate enough each year to support a few working families. Bezos could match the Child Poverty Tax Credit to every child in poverty in the US each year and still turn a profit.
(For the math here, its ~$3000 * 11 million children, which comes out to ~35 billion, or half his income this year). And remember: he could do that every year and his wealth would increase.
The key issue is that personal wealth, after a point is wasted. Creation of vast personal wealth doesn't really serve society, so why should society encourage it? That, again, doesn't mean that no one should have any personal wealth, just that the ROI, after a point, should lessen.
How much do you really care after your second billion anyway?