Thursday, May 10, 2018

Rich v. Poor

Just in time for the Davos gathering last January the charity organization Oxfam International noted:
The world now has 2,043 billionaires, after a new one emerged every two days in the past year, the nonprofit organization said in a report published Monday. The group of mostly men saw its wealth surge by $762 billion, which is enough money to end extreme poverty seven times over, according to Oxfam.

Rebekah Entrango of Think Progress reports that Seattle is proposing a tax that would help the city’s homeless. That prompted Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos to put a new downtown building and 7,000 jobs on hold.

And that prompted Matthew Chapman to tweet:
By my calculations, as of 2018, Jeff Bezos has enough money to literally buy EVERY SINGLE HOMELESS PERSON IN AMERICA a new house at median market price, and STILL have $19.2 billion left over.

Bezos' net worth as of 2018: $130 billion.
# homeless in America as of 2017: 554,000.
Median market price of a house in America as of 2017: $200,000.
Bezos could end homelessness with his personal fortune and have enough left to still be in the top 25 richest men in the world.

Entralgo adds that Amazon’s growth in the city is one cause of housing prices skyrocketing. That’s one reason why many are homeless. Another is Amazon’s warehouse workers are paid measly wages.

Mr. Bezos, a fortune of $20 billion isn’t enough? I’ll probably say this many more times: It’s not about the rich getting a lot of money. It’s about the rich keeping the money out of the hands of the poor.

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