Should anyone really be a billionaire?
The old me would have said, yes—of course! I used to think that a person can just rightfully earn billions of dollars. What I never really thought of until recent years is HOW someone can earn billions of dollars. For me, a billion dollars may as well be trillions or quadrillions or more—it seems that unreachable for me in this lifetime.
What made me change my mind about people “earning” billions of dollars? I will go into more details, but the simple answer is that a person cannot become a billionaire without exploiting someone else’s work, effort, and life.
If you are at the point where you are about to click off of this page, stay with me for a few more minutes.
Think about the billionaires you know of—you may be thinking of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. Many may say that these people are true innovators and that they deserve all of the money they have acquired. Maybe. There is one crucial fact that I cannot get past. There is no way any of these companies and investments in companies would even be successful without the work (both knowledge based and physical) of other people doing their jobs at their companies.
Many argue that these people have taken their own risks to get to where they are and are now reaping the rewards of that. I cannot speak for every billionaire out there, but when you do some basic research you find that many had an advantage from the start (i.e. Jeff Bezos received an estimated $300,000 [equivalent to $643,000] from his parents to start Amazon around 1994). I am not sure of the specific circumstances of each person reading this, but for me, I never had an opportunity to be given a large sum money to start a business in the dot com era. For one, my parents would not have had that amount to lend me, and also, I was in grade school.
Oh wait, I am lying, I was manipulated into borrowing a large sum of money from the US Government to pay for my expensive university that would end up being practically useless business degree. I will be writing another blog about the student loan crisis later. (When I do, I will post a link here.)
So, if billionaires have always had the advantage to get ahead, why won’t they share their resources more effectively with the people that continue to make them rich? According to ZipRecruiter, the average Amazon employee makes about $74,000 a year. In an economy that is changing rapidly where the basic necessities are more expensive than ever before in history, this is just not enough money for one person to have a comfortable life (I am not even talking about a lavish lifestyle). According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary of a single filer is about $57,200 (before taxes and social security contributions). It seems at first glance that Amazon employees may be ahead of the average American income, but according to a Smart Asset analysis, a comfortable living wage would need to be approximately $96,500 for a single person living in a city in the United States to be able to afford their taxes, healthcare, living expenses, savings, and everything else that comes up in life.
Because so many Amazon employees receive federal benefits, it really makes you ask the question: Why do so many full-time employees need food stamps when they are working for the largest corporations?
According a 2020 survey of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, just Amazon alone has 4,154 people on Medicaid in the states of Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island. In addition, there are 4,218 Amazon employees (many are probably the same people) that required SNAP (food stamps) benefits in the states of Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington. These benefits are being paid by taxpayers like you and me—not the billionaires or their corporations.
Amazon doesn’t have to be a terrible company—it can be a decent company that helps people accomplish their goals for the greater good. The company leaders need to stop being so greedy and start paying higher wages to the people making it all happen. It is really the frontline workers (such as warehouse distributors, delivery drivers, and factory workers) that allow Amazon to be so successful—they deserve to be paid a decent living wage at all levels of the company.
Note: I am using Amazon KDP to publish coloring books to help support my blog—I have a lot of mixed feelings about this, but I hope that with the awareness of my blog, we can demand change in the long run. This does make me a bit of a hypocrite, but I am just trying to survive like everyone else.
Another major point to make in all of this is that Amazon is not the only corporation and Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire doing this—this is an epidemic of worker exploitation that is happening on a wide scale across the United States (and worldwide). We really need to demand that the people who own these massive companies and get rich off of all of our work (that we put into our 40+ hours a week) be held accountable for paying us what we deserve before they make their next billion dollars. We are all on this Earth together. Most people really do contribute what they can to the workplace and society (some more and some less—probably due to lack of motivation because sometimes it feels like we are all working into our graves for nothing). So why is it that the resources (money) to make all of our lives better are being hoarded by a few people who had some lucky breaks? Why can’t billionaires be held to a living standard that anyone working for them or the companies they are invested in be treated to a fair living wage or pay the price to supplement all of these government programs that the taxpayers keep having to pay for?
It’s a challenging topic—yes. Do I have the answer? No. Unfortunately, with that amount of money, they develop so much power and influence over anything that they want so they don’t ever have to be forced to do anything they don’t want to do. Sure, we can all just stop working—stop the economy in its tracks—stop investing our own money—stop buying things. It is much easier to say that than to do that in a world where we are basically forced to work away our lives and have little resources to find the little bit of security or happiness we are trying to find. It would have to be done on a global scale that I just don’t think the majority of the people are ready to do. It’s almost like we don’t all trust each other enough to go through with it. I feel the same way, and I want the courage to do it, too.
For now, I will keep posting on my website for as long as I can maintain the website and try to encourage others to at least see a new prospective of why life has gotten so hard. I may not have it all of the way correct (or even a little bit correct), but I think it’s important to share different views with each other to try to come up with a solution that works for the majority of the population and not just the 1%.
For a better tomorrow. ♡
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