Guy named Mike
Dr. Bradley J. SommerWhen we talk about how billionaires shouldn’t exist I don’t think people really understand the massive difference in scale between a million and a billion. One million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. It’s an unfathomable amount of money that no one should have. Even uber-rich mega millionaires - hundreds of millions - really shouldn’t exist. We need to tax the rich; they’re the real free loaders. They’re the drains on the economy. They’re the ones dragging society down.
People in the replies trying to explain history and economics to me like GTFOOH kids 😂
Mike Taylor 🦕@drhistorybrad I have often wondered how much damage has been done by the words "million" and "billion" sounding the same. No-one even confuses (say) a 10 thousand pound purchase with a 10 million pound one. But we easily confuse 10 million with 10 billion.
Nina Kalinina@mike @drhistorybrad hm, would "mega"/"giga" help? Because every kid knows the difference between 10 megabytes and 10 gigabytes nowadays
@nina_kali_nina @drhistorybrad It would have been better, wouldn't it? But even then I had to admit (to my shame, having grown up with the 5 Kb of a VIC-20) I sometimes slip in my mind between Mb and Gb.
MysticalWolf@drhistorybrad And they always will be. History shows it.
Badwolf303@drhistorybrad We should tax the rich but we were taxing the rich & they spent the last 70+ years undoing that by buying politicians & establishing news organizations to push their desires. #democrats are being kneecapped at the local & state level. #billionaires
BigTheDave@drhistorybrad Recently I've taken to describing it as three tiers of wealth.
- Those that have to convince the bank to give them a loan (Most of us)
- Those that don't have to convince the bank to give them a loan (Millionaires)
- Those whose 'Net Worth' is so high that they use loans as pocket money (Ultra Rich)
Shaun (he/ him)@drhistorybrad @jon_harbert I reference this excellent visualization every time I have to tell someone how ludicrous billionaires are
Alfonso Urdaneta@ShmosKnows @drhistorybrad @jon_harbert
This was an amazing visualization, thank you for sharing it.
Blippy the Wonder Slug (MOVED)
Rob Striker@drhistorybrad .when Bezos bought/ saved the Washington Post or when Gates tried to get them all to donate thier fortune, u think they might be a force for good. But all you need to see is how Musk not only destroyed twitter, but tried to anoint Desantis as the republican candidate to see how dangerous these people are. All of them.
Josh Collinsworth@drhistorybrad A couple other comparisons I've found useful:
If you stood on top of a stack of a million $1 bills, you'd be about a football field off the ground. If you stood on a stack of a billion $1 bills, you'd be in space.
If I gave you $100,000 a year, you'd need a decade to become a millionaire. But you'd need significantly more than the length of all of recorded human history to become a billionaire.
John Meadows@drhistorybrad The 1% have done a splendid job getting the poor and the middle class to attack each other.
GATEKEEPER@drhistorybrad
If you make and save $1M a year , In 1000 years you'll become a Billionaire and an asshole at the same time.
If you make and save $1M a year , In 1000 years you'll become a Billionaire and an asshole at the same time.
RealBillyG@drhistorybrad oh we get it. It’s just that they’ve already used their collective unfathomable wealth to rig the system so that they will never get taxed appropriately, and never suffer any real consequences at all.
Jeff Shaffer CBET, ret@drhistorybrad Another way to get a sense of the enormity of it is in minutes. A million minutes ago it was 2022, but a billion minutes ago it was the year 108. Or, as has been posted recently, eating one billionaire would do more to stop worsening climate change than driving an electric car and going vegan!
VHaschThe amount of currency on the planet is finite. The amount of interest and profit possible in capitalism is not.
Even with crypto, there is a dead end somewhere up ahead.
geoma 
@drhistorybrad just for clarification, we are talking about billions as in a thousand millions, right? (And not a million millions)
Tanya Kant@drhistorybrad This is my favourite visualisation to try and get my/ my students' heads around extreme (obscene?) wealth https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?v=3
Lotneuv@drhistorybrad How property would be taxed then? Their billions are not income as clearly billionaires are not getting those billions - they own stuff others would pay billions for. They seem to be able to leverage those billions quite effecyively though. Any good pointers to look into?
Jo Lindsay Walton@drhistorybrad Scrooge McDuck has a song about it https://youtu.be/p9d8l-Gkweg?t=434
Cartoon - Scrooge McDuck and Money (Walt Disney, 1967) [remastered version]
Riley S. Faelan@drhistorybrad: Specifically, the black holes of the economy.
Ariaflame@drhistorybrad Which billion? The thousand million or the million million?
Lillian Violet@drhistorybrad
I'd like to posit we shouldn't "tax the rich" since that's already falling for right wing framing (good article about that here: https://jamesarobichaux.substack.com/p/the-collection-plate-narrative-of). We should be talking about the systems that give rise to these power structures and how to dismantle and prevent them, it's really not an issue of excess, it's an issue of the system being unequal by design. Death to billionaires is what I say.
I'd like to posit we shouldn't "tax the rich" since that's already falling for right wing framing (good article about that here: https://jamesarobichaux.substack.com/p/the-collection-plate-narrative-of). We should be talking about the systems that give rise to these power structures and how to dismantle and prevent them, it's really not an issue of excess, it's an issue of the system being unequal by design. Death to billionaires is what I say.
Merovius@drhistorybrad One way I contextualize the difference between a Billionaire and a Millionaire:
A Millionaire (depending on their age) probably can't retire just yet, if they want to live even somewhat comfortably.
A Billionaire can retire with a wealthy lifestyle and still have a Billion Dollars (or Euros) left. Like, a wealthy rest of their life is literally a rounding error.
@drhistorybrad I mean, this is ignoring capital gains for context. In reality, a Millionaire can probably retire on their capital gains, if they invest somewhat wisely.
👩🦯The Blind Fraggle@drhistorybrad I tell myself this, and I hope I'm right. When people talk about the rich being evil, they don't mean that they don't want people to be comfortable or happy. Sure, have a big house if that's what you want, eat nice food, wear nice clothing. Do what makes you happy as long as you're not willfully abusing the planet or other people. Just don't hoard more money than you could ever spend in a lifetime, and give back your fair share.
At least, I hope that's what people are saying.
At least, I hope that's what people are saying.
sezduck
MsMerope
Erlend Sogge Heggen@drhistorybrad I like to say:
The difference between a million and a billion dollars is roughly one billion dollars.
Reay@drhistorybrad @falcennial I’ve been saying this for a while. And think of all the good that money could do *and not affect their lifestyles at all.*
Over Covid lockdowns I crunched some numbers and I believe it was $200K — a life-changing amount to many, whatever the exact number was — that Bezos could personal give to every employee of every company he owns, and he’d still be a billionaire. And counting, of course. (I now realize I didn’t include Blue Origin among those companies, but by all means, anyone who’d care to update the numbers, please do. My overall point would remain that sharing the wealth would still be entirely possible even while staying wealthy.)
But instead, the dragons horde their wealth, doing no good for anyone including themselves. You can only own so many properties and boats and only wear so many priceless outfits and items of jewelry. Only drive so many cars at once. Only own so may islands. And yet they keep more than they or their families could ever spend.
Not just billions, but tens of billions.
Not just tens but hundreds of billions.
How much is enough?
IS IT EVER enough?
We recently heard that food banks here in Toronto, Canada are thinking of limiting their use to once a month per family because of how strained their supplies are. Imagine how much food the effective pocket change of a billionaire would do for places like that. The latest article I saw on that suggested Bezos makes over $11,000 *per second* from Amazon alone.
Imagine what that one second worth of income could do for a food bank, even per month.
But nope.
It’s so gross.
millennial fulcrum@reay @drhistorybrad well said!
they aint dragons, they're packrats. in the human world that level of greed is a behavioural disorder that endangers themselves (by creating legitimate homicide motives) and others (by impoverishing people to harm and death).
they need to be sectioned and treated for their harmful behaviour disorder. before somebody corrects their behaviour out of necessity.
@falcennial @drhistorybrad Behavioural disorder puts it well.
Like, listen, like probably most middle-class people, my wife and I have helped out charities when we can. But that’s not a lot and not often, because too much of course puts us in a financially tight spot.
But if you have no financial tight spots, ever, why wouldn’t you do as much good as you can with what you’ve got?
Fund those community projects and food programs and well digging and library building and new hospital wings and sponsorships and scholarships… why the hell wouldn’t you?
Why isn’t there a race to see who goes down in the history books at the most magnanimous, socially benefitting person ever? You’d get to do that AND STILL be a multi-billionaire? It’s weird to me to not even have that on their radar, let alone act on it.
I’ve got a good imagination, but can’t fathom people who have billions (let alone tens or hundreds of billions) of dollars — and more on the way — and know how much pain and suffering you could single-handedly ease, and yet not do it because that would mean you have a smaller number before those nine+ zeros in your bank account.
So weird.
PatternChaserThis is where the money went, the reason why the rest of us are so skint:
In 2024, "UK billionaires’ wealth increased by £35m ($44m) a day to £182bn ($231bn) – enough to cover city of Manchester in £10 notes almost 1.5 times over"
Neil Moffatt@drhistorybrad It is deeply insane. And chillingly evil for the majority.
Capitalism rewards luck and effect via multiplication - if the daughter of a submissions assessor had not taken a copy of Harry Potter home to read and tell daddy it was good she may not have published. I believe 6 turned her down.
She NEVER earned her billions. That was the product of replication and distribution - others working and she creams off effort from all.
Michael Bacon@drhistorybrad This is one of my problems with Pritzker as a candidate for anything. Anyone who's a billionaire and wants to be respected for anything they don't pay for, start by becoming not-a-billionaire.
Get your personal wealth down to $950 million and keep it there. That's an obscene amount of money for anyone to have but it's a decent ceiling.
Just get rid of that money, it's bad for you and it's bad for the world for you to have it.
Eric LawtonI was surprised to find that my dad, who used trigonometry daily in his trade, had just assumed that a billion was ten million. Mostly because he thought it would be ridiculous to have billionaires if it really was a thousand million.
At the end of that two day conversation, he reversed his approval of Thatcher and even the Conservative Party, and voted Labour at the next election.
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦@EricLawton @drhistorybrad a REAL billion is a million millions. the USA gringolarchy created the lie of the 1,000 millions to inflate their worth. the EU doesn’t recorgnize the USA billion. they go by the original French number.
I grew up in England with the "old" billions, but had to adopt US "billions" when I accidentally moved to Canada.
@EricLawton @drhistorybrad totally sucks, doesn't it? UK used the old billions well into the 1970s if not 1980s, didntchall? the change is relatively recent.
@EricLawton @drhistorybrad i think so, yes
Gabe@drhistorybrad my preferred comparison: if I save ten thousand Euros a month, then in 100 years I will have 12 million Euros. That is a long way from a billion.
The monthly figure is relatably ridiculous to everyone.