Our Billionaire Hoarders Need Help — Not Handouts
Why we will never cure financial addicts by throwing more money at their disease
The old proverb to walk a mile in another man’s shoes remains true, even when those shoes are designed by Salvatore Ferragamo. That’s why I recently tried to imagine the emotional torment of being a billionaire. And not a multi-billionaire mind you — just a single, barely-legal, billionaire in an honest attempt to experience (and thus empathize) with the unimaginable suffering that comes from hoarding so much yet still needing more.
Only let’s first assess the hoarding of our ten richest men. Perhaps no one has suffered more during the pandemic than these men who have lived through the doubling of their net worth from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. While the desire to alleviate their pain with additional tax cuts obviously comes from the best place within us, the cold, hard truth is that we will never truly help them until we make they understand that having more will never bring them true happiness.
Now, onto my descent into the pit of financial addiction.
While I actually enjoyed the initial stage of billionaire empathy, I realized rather quickly that I’d need one of those David Copperfield-like accountants who can make income disappear. That guy would first make me buy a taxpayer-subsidized professional sports team. Then he’d have me borrow against stock holdings (while deducting the interest) creating enough write-offs to shrink my “income” to the point where I’d receive a stimulus check — as eighteen billionaires did in 2020. I began to sweat once I pictured having to whitewash my relentless greed with surface philanthropy while further doing my part to maintain enough structural racism to keep you poor, huddled masses divided in hatred against one another — instead of uniting in common purpose against us billionaire hoarders. (There’s only 2,700 of us in the world, after all.) After fully imagining myself as a beneficiary of our broken, two-party system that first perpetuates an economy rigged in my favor, I began to feel a suffocating weight — as though those nine zeros had become boulders crushing my chest.
I couldn’t take it.
(And bear in mind that I was just imaginarily hoarding a single, measly billion — Jeff Bezos is hoarding 132 of them.)
Wanting to remain in the exercise, however, I imagined donating 90% to charity. But first I had a fiduciary responsibility to myself to make sure that I could still scrape by on a hundred mil. I figured that if I lived to be 100, I could blow through two million bucks a year (quite aside from accrued interest or dividends) which means that hundred-millionaire me could drop $5,479 a day.
I could totally picture doing this.
I imagined hiring Eric Ripert to cook dinner at my birthday party before then having Faster Pussycat perform their entire Wake Me When It’s Over LP. In fact, being a hundred-millionaire felt PERFECT, whereas billionaire me simply could not tolerate having to blow through fifty-five grand a day. And yes I WOULD have to spend that — otherwise, how would I live with the horrendous knowledge that I was hoarding such vast sums while all of you poor, huddled masses yearned to breathe free just because you can’t afford the copay for your asthma inhaler? This reminded me that TV miniseries where Mark Harmon played serial killer Ted Bundy; after observing Bundy’s missteps I thought that I could have been a WAY more effective serial killer — but then I remembered that I’m just not a homicidal maniac. Similarly, I could never be a billionaire because I’m just not a psychopath, let alone a hoarder who —
I’m sorry, what’s that?
Yes, every billionaire is necessarily a hoarder. (Unlike more traditional hoarders, however, it’s US who live in their mess.) It’s simply not possible to be a billionaire without possessing a scarcity mentality of the highest order. Remember it’s their disease that allows them to hoard obscene reserves while knowing that 1 in 6 American children are hungry. You and I could NEVER be billionaires because we’d just race off on some wild, reckless impulse to feed those starving kids.
It turns out, however, that any single, broke-ass billionaire would be limited on that front. Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, calculated the cost of ending hunger in the United States at $25 billion. But Jeff Bezos — with his net worth of $132 billion — could single-handedly end hunger in the United States. He’d never miss that money and would immediately lose his predatory reputation, transforming himself from Dr. Evil to a genuinely loved and admired man who still bears a considerable resemblance to Dr. Evil.
So why doesn’t he?
Well, it’s kind of like that fable about the scorpion asking the frog to carry him across the river — you just don’t get that the frog and the scorpion are both going to die because the aquifer beneath that river has already been contaminated by fracking.
While that was as far as I could take that exercise, I felt privileged to glimpse how billionaires are drowning in their Fortunes of Pain (which would be a great title for an album by Faster Pussycat) walled off not just from the suffering of others, but from their own, feeling nothing save their pseudo-emotions scraping against the sides of the addict’s bottomless pit.
How long will we keep torturing these men by enabling their nonpayment of federal income tax?
I recognize that “tough love” makes some people uncomfortable. Perhaps it would be painful to watch Jeff suffer through the separation anxiety of surrendering 3% of his wealth under Elizabeth Warren’s plan. But let’s remember that we are only hurting Jeff with our ongoing refusal to tax him progressively — or even just as much as you and I were taxed federally last year.
It’s like that other, old proverb: Tax a billionaire once and several million starving people will eat for a day; teach a billionaire that hoarding will never result in true happiness, and 12 million Americans (who work full-time but still live in poverty) might actually live with dignity.
Also, if I were just a hundred millionaire, I’d give away 90% of that, too. But first I’d have a fiduciary responsibility to myself to make sure that I could still scrape by on ten mil. I really think I could do it.
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