It's seems governments have a budgeting problem, not a funding problem.
You can point out objective things like that contemporary billionaires are nothing like super-rich monarchy or noblemen in the past, who literally didn't have to work one day of their lives and could dispose of people around them as they pleased, quite literally. There was no me too, no rape allegations, they just did whatever they pleased with minimal consequences.
You can point out all that, but it's irrelevant. Many humans just don't tolerate "rich entitled jerks who show off". Other humans don't tolerate other kind behaviours; humanity is clearly not a uniform bunch.
Even if we stole 10B from Bezos and gave it out equally to every US citizen... Its ~$30. Is this life changing for anybody in the US? If so what percent. Most beggars on the street clear more than $30 a day, some make $30 a hour!
So yeah, common core has failed us, and the inability to understand numbers is a problem.
I do this nearly every time somebody is upset somebody else has money. One time it was some Walmart executive. They got some multi million dollar bonus. I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.
Edit:
But yet we have folks still going around on twitter saying he could give everybody a million (some even a billion) and still have money left over.
I mean, obviously it's gonna look small if we fixate on Bezos specifically. If we "stole" a flat $1B from every American billionaire and paid it out equally to every US citizen, that stimulus jumps up to $1,996.70. If we "stole" all the money from every billionaire, that'd jump up further to $12,569.61.
We can go further. The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion. If we "stole" all of that, the resulting stimulus would be a comfy $102,842.28.
> I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.
$122.58/year could very well make a considerable difference to someone barely scraping by. And again, you're fixating on one Walmart executive; what about the other executives who likely received similar bonuses? VPs? Middle managers?
Humanity is not normal, but it is normally distributed!
I know that's a tall order, but I think governments should be accountable to how they've invested their citizen's money and how those investments are doing.
Also should be pointed out many countries greatly expanded their deficit as part of Covid measures.
I'm not even saying Bezos is appropriately taxed. I don't really care how high his tax bill is, but my main point is that the existence of world hunger and poverty isn't his fault even though many people online blame him for it, and secondly, taxing him at 100% wouldn't seem to solve the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governm...
Raising the deficit and inflating the currency for blind and reckless cash give-aways (imo), only makes it worse and all the more reprehensible and should have everyone questioning why we're not overthrowing the existing parties by rallying around new ones and collectively agreeing to stop voting Dem or Rep altogether. Because if we traced the government (tax) money spent over the past year to where it is now, I bet we'd see it directly widening the wealth gap no matter the party or rhetoric used while misappropriating it.
Anyway, I think the real solutions (to hunger, education, healthcare, &c) would involve breaking down the issues causing the inequality and really working to solve them one by one in good faith with a common vision. Small groups of people can achieve this. It's unfortunate that the idea of that happening on the scale we're discussing is laughably absurd.
