Extreme Wealth [View all]

I have been a math instructor at various colleges for over 30 years. In that time, I have observed students who don't know when their answer makes sense when they are working with interest formulas. For example, if a deposit of $10,000 is made at 4% compounded daily for 4 years, the amount after that time is $11,735.01. I have had students give me answers of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, without realizing that their answer makes no sense.

In that same vein, people don't understand how marginal tax rates work, and the media does little to help. When Democrats campaign on raising the top rate back to where it was under Obama or even higher, people think that once you hit that highest tax bracket, ALL of your income is subject to the higher rate. That's not how it works.

I say all that to highlight that people really don't comprehend the vast amounts of wealth that are hoarded by the top .01%. We always lump "millionaires and billionaires" together, so people don't realize that there is a huge difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars. Most of us really have no comprehension of how huge a billion dollars is, and that people like Musk, Bezos, Gates, et al, have multiple billions of dollars.

My favorite story about this: one of my long-term adjunct instructors was an old retired codger named Sam. He used to tell his classes this: if you could go back in time to the year 1 AD and give someone a billion dollars, if they spent $1,000 a day since then, they would, in 2023, have enough left to keep doing that for another 700 years.

No wonder the vastly wealthy try to keep us fighting with each other instead of coming after them! I can't imagine having the wealth of Musk, at over 200 billion dollars. It is literally beyond comprehension.