Okay, with all the recent marches on Wall Street and all over the cities of the world, (which I think are really great, btw), I thought it was about time somebody came up with the plan that all the MWS detractors are criticizing them for not having. So here goes...
I read an article lately written by one such detractor stating that one of the things that led to the marches and the anger worldwide is lack of financial and fiscal education. It's a very good point! How many of us can honestly say we have a firm mental grasp of the numbers thrown around by governments nowadays when talking about taxes, federal budgets, Paris Hilton's champagne bill, election price tags, deficits, bank bail-outs, Warren Buffet pocket change, military expenses etc. etc.? Do any of us even know what a million is when it comes to dollars? Or when it comes to anything really. If there were a jar with a million jelly beans in it how big would it be? And would the ones at the bottom just be crushed so badly you wouldn't be able to count them anyway? I bet the stuff on the bottom would taste like the black ones. They're my favourite anyway so that'd be okay. I digress.
This is one of the beauties of being a politician. It makes us all easier to lie to. We just can't wrap our heads around a million bucks because we've never come close to having it. We'll never GET it cuz we'll never get it. A BILLION? Forget it!
Ever seen that movie "The Social Network"? There's a scene where the Napster dude, (played by Justin Timberlake), says, "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars." The audience goes silent. The main character, Mark Zuckerberg, who, let's remember, wanted to avoid the money, goes silent and gets this far off look in his eye. The seeds of money lust were planted. Money played a very small role in his life. In fact he had said earlier in the movie, and I'm guessing in real life, that the second facebook becomes about the money it's no longer cool. Sean Parker almost contradicted that verbatim but with that mysterious word, "billion" in there and the greed-enabling culture Zuckerberg grew up in, it worked! Blinded by the billion. I think that happens to a lot of folks.
Now people can make a billion in a year. George Soros made 2 billion in one day. I'm sure I read that Bill Gates made 48 billion in a year. I used the magazine article as an ESL lesson for years before I lost it. Now I suppose the Forbes 500 have learned: It's not very good to let the rest of the world know how much you are making. It could lead to unrest and possibly marching in the streets. Incidentally, Gates is reportedly worth something like 56 billion bucks now. I'm pretty sure he's made more than 6 bil. since I read that article and he's not giving THAT much to charity.
The corporations, rich, banks and the governments they run are inflating the numbers they bombard us with regarding government and business expenses and they are massively DEflating the numbers that accidentally on purpose leak out that are supposed to represent their earnings. That's what I believe anyways. But let's work with these flawed numbers and see what we come up with, shall we?
First of all a billion. In an average work year allowing for 8 hours a day, a 5-day week and a 2-week vacation you would work 2000 hours. If your salary were exactly a billion dollars you would be """"EARNING"""" half a million dollars an hour. But that number is still too big for our brains - that's $8333.00 a MINUTE! $139.00 every SECOND for crying out loud! In one second you are making more money than most of the world earns in a day. This is why the word "earning" above is surounded Custer-like, by quotation marks. I didn't think just one set would suffice. If I were saying this out loud I don't think the finger quotes would do the mega-sarcasm justice either. I think if I could somehow bend a couple of football goalposts and use them to make my air quotes it still wouldn't be sarcastic enough when talking about someone "earning" a billion a year. Come ON! NObody is worth that!
If you could think of the person who deserves the highest pay in the world who would it be? A soldier fighting on the front lines? A firefighter saving cute orphan children from a blaze? The janitor who cleans the frat house toilets? If I had a girl who was a dead ringer for Jessica Alba, naked, pleasuring me now while feeding me pizza and expensive Chianti AND playing bagpipes for "It's a Long Way to the Top" with the real LIVE AC DC backing her up even SHE's not close to 139 bucks a second! Just that one song would come to a total of $43,924.00. No way I'd have the money, (or the prowess), to ask for "Downpayment Blues" as an encore!
But what are these folks who make a billion a year actually doing? Well if you look at what Vancouver's own Kevin Ham does in a day you'd laugh your arse all the way to the bank. He buys internet domains. Somebody says the domain name, he air-types it, then lays down a few hundred grand for it. I'm not making this up. Guys like David Tepper just move imaginary money from place to place. There are filthy rich people known as corporate hawks or international speculators who essentially buy pieces of COUNTRIES and hope that they default on their debts, which adds to destabilization and usually the selling off of the country's resources at bargain basement prices.
A lot of the jobs people do for their billion dollar annual paychecks are so simple any of us could do them IF we had the start-up capital, they're not back-breaking or stressful, or they're just completely immoral. You just can't convince me anyone earns a billion a year.
SO... here's what we're gonna do: There are, (reportedly), 1210 people in the world who have the equivalent of a billion American dollars according to a March 2011 Forbes Magazine article. Between them they have 4.5 trillion, that's $4,500,000,000,000.00! I know, THAT means even LESS than nothing to me too! But that averages out to 3.72 billion each. Some of these people are evil, or have such bad cases of billion blindness to believe they not only EARN their money but that they MUST earn more every year. The rest of them like Gates who says he will leave his fortune to charity, Soros who gave 8 bill. to charity since '79, and I recently read about the heiress of the Tupperware fortune secretly giving to all kinds of charities. These are fairly normal, yet rich people who have made more than enough and it's time to let someone else play. Forced retirement for all of them, (some are damned lucky they won't be thrown in jail), and they will be made international heroes by their mandatory donation to Super Dave's Save the Earth Fund of a billion U$ each.
As of Oct. 2011 there were reported to be 6.97 billion people on earth, 4.4 billion of whom are between the ages of 15 and 64. So I'm just spitballing here but I'm guessing that between the ages of 19 and 60 there'd be less than 4 bill. Through the generous donations from the world's 1210 billionaires every one of the people on Earth between 19 and 60 could be given over $1125.00 U.S. Now that doesn't mean a whole lot to a person like me here in Canada but the changes made in each country would be more revolutionary in direct proportion to how poor the country is. Let's take The Sudan as an example. I like that example because I dig countries with "The" before their names. According to this article, it would cost a person about 843 SDG, (Sudanese Pounds), to start a business. That's $315.50. He/she's gonna have lots left over for supplies, employees, overhead, you name it. $1125 bucks could change the third world so much that it might even be safe to say it was eliminated!
But wait, there's more. I don't know why but I couldn't find up-to-date stats on millionaires in the world. However, a 2010 study by Boston Consulting Group figured that there were 12.5 million millionaires in the world. (The equivalent of a million U$ dollars). If they all had exactly one million dollars, which, don't be silly, they DON'T, that would be another 5.2 trillion dollars. I know, I know, the billionaires are included in there. Well those 1210 people don't even amount to a percent so it doesn't affect the stats at all. What we do is we give these people, the luckiest people on the face of the Earth, the privelege of contributing half a million dollars each to Super Dave's Save the Earth Fund. That's another $650.00 to everybody on the planet who isn't too old or young to need some dough. So we're now up to $1875.00 U$ each! Don't feel sorry for the millionaires. Who do you think will be taking over the vacated posts of the billionaires? And with a newly created, oh I would guess 2 BILLION consumers worldwide, they'd have to be morons to lose money no matter what they did.
The weakness in my plan is admittedly logistics. How do I get money to 4 billion individuals? Furthermore, certain people like recidivist criminals, drug addicts, people with terminal diseases and plain old lazy assed sluggards won't qualify for Super Dave benefits. So how will I know who's who? Simplicity itself! They'll have to pay for their money by filling out some forms and donating blood. That way their blood can be tested, their backgrounds checked and the blood banks of the world would be overflowing! Not to mention the new varieties of viruses we might detect and eliminate, (possibly Billion Blindness ITSELF!), or antibodies we might discover and use to heal people!
After disqualifying some people, and allowing for larger donations from the GOOD rich people of the world, I'm going to say we could give 3000 bucks to everyone. Imagine every citizen in your country getting a lump sum of 3 grand. What would that do to consumer confidence? What if it was given out December 1st so you'd have time to go Christmas shopping with it? So many people would buy so many things and the money would almost ALL go straight into the pockets of those nice millionaire contributors. Their money would return to them probably a million fold! Then they would become BILLIONAIRES at which point they'd be forced into massive contributions and retirement and their places would be filled with the huge number of newly created millionaires and we could start all over again! Perpetual world enrichment. Perfect, right?
I can only see one problem. Kryptonite! The fact that it wouldn't take too long before everybody was not just not starving, but very comfortable. Then very happy. Then very wealthy. Then very rich. When that happens who the hell will work? Aye, there's the rub! Who will put little umbrellas in the marguerita of the hot babe sitting beside me in my golf cart in Thailand? What hot babe will be poor and desperate enough to golf with me? Who will sell that marguerita to us? Who will cut the greens? Do you suppose this might have something to do with why the 3rd world is KEPT the 3rd world? Did the filthy rich think of this already and plan to maintain poverty so that there would always be someone desperate enough in some country to MAKE those little umbrellas for a buck a day? To sew footballs in sweatshops? To dance half naked for and date ugly old guys with big bulges in their jeans where their wallets are?
GAAARRGGGHHH! Feeling weak. Ex-ray vision failing. Ability to use articles and verb "to be" getting difficult. So cold. Humidity a bit high. Vision failing... faaiiliinggg...
Oh well I took a stab at it anyway.
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