Beaucoups of Moolah

Welcome to our very own Gilded Age.

Pirahã people on the Maici River in Amazonas, Brazil. Photo courtesy of Tony Muricy.

I want to talk about money.

I’m lousy with money and that’s not slang for having an abundance. I don’t understand money and I have a dozen relatives who will readily concur.

I’m not good with numbers either, but according to the scholars who study such things, I’m in good company there.

I would fit right into the Piraha tribe in South America. They have no words in their language for any number beyond two. They don’t have a word for one hundred, one thousand, a million, a billion or a trillion. They’re lucky in that regard.

I happen to know there are over 8 billion humans on the planet and, even though my conception of large numbers is just as awful as most everyone else’s, I know 8 billion is probably a few billion too many mouths to feed.

I learned recently there are over 250 billionaires living in New York City. In my estimation that is 250 too many. I also know America’s oligarchs are racing to be the first trillionaire. I think that will happen far sooner than anyone imagines — if it hasn’t happened already.

With all due respect to everyone making beaucoups of moolah, no one, absolutely no one, needs a million, or more, dollars annually. I’m being generous because I have no clue what it takes to live or get by in cities like New York or Miami. Surely less than a million annually — but I’ll play it safe because “Hoorah! America! Fuck yeah!”.

Brock Purdy, 20-something quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, reportedly receives $950,000 per season. In other words, he earns 19 years of the median salary of the average American in one pain-filled football season. His colleague on the Cincinnati Bengals, Joe Burrow, also a 20-something quarterback, will be paid $50 million for his injury-shortened season. Or, in other words, Joe Burrow, who I know only played 50% of his games this season because I picked him for my fantasy football team, is set to earn 950 years of the median salary of the average American.

These are all approximations because I like to approximate shit like this.

I just read this morning that the ketamine spa cottage industry which is prepped for takeoff this year is valued at $450 billion. We’re only talking one single pharmaceutical drug, the one that allegedly killed Matthew Perry, 50-something former Friends television actor who I am certain died a billionaire. One drug. One drug amongst a kazillion other drugs. Valued at $450 billion. Like the Pirahas I’m incapable of calculating what a number like that means. I don’t have the capacity to compare it to anything I’m familiar.

A little further down this column though, I’m going to give it a try.

Joe Burrow and Brock Purdy are just two of the dozens of quarterbacks in the NFL. They are just two members of two teams which are comprised of more than 50 decently paid athletes. The NFL has 32 teams of handsomely paid athletes. And then there are all the other sports — basketball, soccer, hockey, baseball, cricket, golf.

Here is Forbe’s list of the World’s highest paid athletes.

In 2023, $4.3 billion dollars was — legally — bet on just one football game — the Super Bowl. I’m old enough to remember when you could only — legally — gamble in Las Vegas. Then they built Atlantic City, Then someone came up with the idea of “offshore” casinos in the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi. Then Native Americans decided to use their sovereignty to get in on the gambling addictions of Americans.

Now?

Now sports betting is part and parcel of every aspect of sports. The overs and unders and the odds are discussed by sports commentators as nonchalantly as they would discuss a player’s prowess at putting. But I don’t want to get bogged down talking about the beaucoups of moolah in sports.

Heard of Big Cardboard? It’s an $83 billion dollar industry. It dwarfs all of those aforementioned sports. America’s — guesstimated — nominal Gross Domestic Product in 2022 was $27 trillion.

Let’s try to imagine all of these numbers in more digestible terminology.

For instance, one million seconds is the equivalent of 11 days.

One billion seconds translates to 32 years.

One trillion?

Easy. 32 thousand years. Because a trillion is a thousand billions.

Here are the comparisons I prefer:

• If you earn $45,000 a year, it would take 22 years to amass a fortune of 1 million dollars.

• If you earn $45,000 a year, it would take 22,000 years to amass a fortune of one billion dollars.

(Actually, if you think about it, the truth of the matter is that with an annual income of $45,000 — which is the approximate mean income in America — you will NEVER, EVER reach a billion dollars. Let alone a million.)

The site I was looking at — Thought.co — didn’t even bother to calculate for a trillion. The number is too ridiculous.

Image from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

I think we need to come to grips with how to think about and visualize these numbers. I don’t begrudge people making money hand over fist. But there was a time in America when the rich were plenty rich but so was the largesse of the Commons. (Just as there was another time, which I alluded to in the secondary title, where America pampered the wealthy and took advantage of, or ignored, the poor. Our previous Gilded Age. Think Rothschilds, Vanderbilts and Gettys.) I also don’t want to argue whether Americans are better off than the olden days, or even a few decades ago, because, in many, many instances the answer is clearly — Yes.

In my opinion, personal wealth is insufficient for a well-functioning society. We need to consider our surroundings. Our neighbors. Our region. And outward.

Your personal wealth will mean little if the electrical grid fails. The money the morbidly wealthy hoard will do very little toward shoring up the infrastructure, bolstering programs for those in poverty or subsidizing those acts, products or services we require for a vital, vibrant society. When we, as a people, do subsidize private enterprises — I’m thinking about EVs, the internet, university research into things like nanotechnology, etc. — we need to bake into the transaction the ability of the nation at large being able to share in the success of that enterprise. Single individuals should not enjoy the fruits of society, become fabulously wealthy and not expect to share their obscene good fortune.

All of this to say in my roundabout, a bit nonsensical way that money is not the root of all evil but the misuse and misappropriation of it is. Additionally, we hear about these enormous numbers and figures being bandied about but we have no sense of how to understand them other than a vast majority of us will never see that many zeroes behind the first number in our bank account.

My other non-linear point is…well, allow me to have Morris Pearl of Patriotic Millionaires in his words express what I believe as well:

I’m not any more altruistic than the next guy. I’m just greedy for a different kind of country. I want to be a rich man in a rich country.

Pearl, and other members of the Patriotic Millionaires, don’t want another 1929 stock market crash, Dust Bowl, Depression or best-selling novels with titles like The Grapes of Wrath. (As far as I’m concerned, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is an equally likely scenario for our current century. The America we’re introduced to in The Road makes the Dust Bowl and the Depression seem like a walk in the park.) The Gilded Age of the 19th and 20th century ended ugly. And it included a World War.

Image from patrioticmillionaires.org

We don’t need more taxes.

We need those who can afford their taxes, but come up with armies of accountants, and myriads of ways, to avoid being taxed, to pay a hefty amount of taxes for the good of the Commons.

Because that is the only way to truly make America great.

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If you’ve forgotten The Tragedy of the Commons, here is a brief refresher.

Happy Holidays to all! Dana and I spent our December evenings, on the run up to Christmas, watching an eclectic mix of holiday movies. We concluded with — in this order — Die Hard, Love Actually and Love Hard — which was perfect since Love Hard is a Christmas rom-com about two people who disagree about which of the two aforementioned movies was their FAVORITE Christmas movie. Of course, there’s more to it than that but their little disagreement was where the movie title originated.

However, among the various movies we watched was a documentary detailing this ludicrous situation in north Idaho where a conservative, Fox News-watching Clark Griswold tried ramming his celebration of Christmas down his neighbors’ throats. You’ll shake your head at the mental gymnastics on display and gain a little insight to the whole ‘War on Christmas’ thing. Bon appétit!