I'm finding it harder and harder to understand people's need to be rich or even wealthy. People's need for extravagance. People's selfishness. Besides your retirement account, why does anyone need millions of dollars? Why does anyone need tens of thousands of dollars? It's one thing if they are giving it away. But, why hoard it? Wealth inequality is a serious thing. If you are hoarding that much money, in my eyes, you don't care about the rest of humanity. You consider yourself, your family, more important than everyone else. Everyone else can suffer and struggle while you sit on your large piles of money.
Okay, sure I admit I'm the most important person in my life. However, objectively I don't consider myself more important than anyone else. Now that I'm making a decent amount of money. I'm able to save for retirement. I've begun investing. I should be able to retire at a decent age and live comfortably for the rest of my life. This is a totally normal thing, right? Yet, I feel strange. I used to enjoy watching my bank account grow. I imagine this feeling for folks like Warren Buffet never stopped. Now, I feel odd. Why is it that I get to be well-off when so many others are struggling financially? I know for a fact it's not only a matter of effort. Much of it has to do with luck. Sure, I worked hard to get where I am today. But, I've also been lucky.
Luck has more do with it than most people think. A lot has to do with where you were born and who you were born to. Children do not start off life on equal footing. Sadly today your footing depends on other factors as well including your race and sex. I am a white male. This gave me an unfair boost. It certainly shouldn't have, but it did. It's commonly referred to as, 'white privilege'. I can see it in my workplace. I understand it. It exists and I wish it didn't.
I'm somewhere in the middle of the graph below. I barely even register (very thin section of green). I work as at an engineering company and make a decent salary. Despite this, I'm doing just fine overall. But, look closer toward the left end of the graph. Those people are just getting by and some are even in the negative (see the red area of graph). Those people are making starvation wages. Those people are in serious debt. Look at the area of the red part of the graph. It seems relatively small, right? Well, it is, relative to the whole area of the graph. But, that small chunk represents millions of people in serious debt of thousands upon thousands of dollars. Many have no hope of ever getting out of that debt.
Now take that red area of the graph and compare it with the tip of the right side of the graph. It's a tiny fraction of the green peak. You could remove that tiny section of the green tip and equalize the red section without affecting the quality of life of the rich folks it was removed from. They'd still be outrageously rich, yet all the people who were struggling are now magically out of debt and would likely have a much better chance at a happy life (if they weren't already happy). How skewed this graph is makes me sick. I find it incredibly disturbing how greedy people are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
The concept of needing money to make money is not hard to grasp if you understand the ideas of investing, but the implications are very unfair. We have this thing called the stock market. The more money you have to invest in this market, the more you potentially make. Large causes of such wealth inequality as seen in the graph is unchecked capitalism and this odd concept of making money off the money you already have. The sad conclusion: the rich just keep getting richer.
List of the world's richest people:
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
Here's a quote from Wikipedia:
"Just prior to President Obama's 2014 State of the Union Address, media[8] reported that the top wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation's wealth; the bottom 80% own 7%"
Useful / Related Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DANUXO-GQwU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
Common Dreams Article:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/27/no-were-not-all-together-how-super-rich-are-cheating-america?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1p1zTQwK1apo8RMcHqnnypdu8JhfPFKu8LOo14WVtqGNnf5G0gIfztqDY
Warren Buffett on wealth and billionaires:
https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-wealth-gap-inequality-solutions-2020-4
Jacobin opinion article:
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/billionaires-coronvirus-pandemic-profiteers-taxes
Sample calculations:
$ needed in retirement: $50,000 per year for 85-60 = 25 years = 1,250,000. 1.25 Million Dollars.
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