{"id":118947,"date":"2021-04-13T07:40:23","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T07:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=185535"},"modified":"2021-04-13T07:40:23","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T07:40:23","slug":"the-trillion-dollar-suv-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/04\/13\/the-trillion-dollar-suv-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trillion Dollar SUV"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

The Expedition, an SUV that can seat eight passengers, rates as the biggest SUV Ford makes. So how much can an Expedition be worth? That all depends. If the eight passengers sitting in an Expedition happen to be the eight wealthiest Americans, the net worth of that Expedition and everyone in it would be over $1 trillion. To be more precise: $1.023 trillion dollars, plus the value of the vehicle.<\/p>\n

Let me spell that out for you: $1,002,300,000,000. At Wall Street\u2019s market closed Friday, according to the billionaire trackers at Forbes<\/em>, America\u2019s eight richest individuals held over $1 trillion for the first time ever.<\/p>\n

Six of the eight \u2014 Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison \u2014 each now sit on a personal fortune worth $100 billion or more. But don\u2019t feel bad for the other two, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both of Google. With wealth of $98.6 billion and $95.6 billion respectively, they\u2019re both sitting just a rounding error away from \u201ccenti-billionaire\u201d status.<\/p>\n

Think about that. A group of white guys so small they could all fit into an SUV now controls a trillion dollars of the nation\u2019s wealth. Need some perspective? One trillion dollars equals the collective wealth of a million<\/em> millionaires. We have states in this nation where the entire population holds significantly less than $1 trillion in wealth.<\/p>\n

Eight white guys, $1 trillion. Just seven years ago I was ringing the alarm that just 51 billionaires<\/a> held personal fortunes worth a combined $1 trillion. But make no mistake. Wealth concentration in America was indeed running out of control seven years ago. That our distribution of wealth back in 2014 now looks mild compared to the present level should absolutely terrify us.<\/p>\n

Our current obscene concentration of wealth should also be all the proof we need that our tax system has totally broken down. For decades now, we\u2019ve taxed work<\/em> more and more and wealth<\/em> less and less. We\u2019re reaping today what we\u2019ve been sowing.<\/p>\n

Eight white guys controlling a trillion dollars won\u2019t work, especially with tens of millions of us reeling from a pandemic. But we can reverse the trends of the last four decades. We can require the ultra-rich to start paying their fair tax share. Or we can submit to oligarchic rule.<\/p>\n

And if we do submit, I\u2019ll be rewriting this column a few years from now \u2014 with a Ferrari two-seater in the lead.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Expedition, an SUV that can seat eight passengers, rates as the biggest SUV Ford makes. So how much can an Expedition be worth? That all depends. If\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2373,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118948,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118947\/revisions\/118948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}