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Famous astronomer, Carl Sagan, became known for his use of the phrase “billions and billions” to emphasize the enormity of the cosmos and the endless number of stars and galaxies within it, when a skit on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, parodied his use of that term. In fact, millions, no less billions, or even trillions are all numerical ranges hard to fathom in relation to our everyday human lives.
But today, we are faced with multiple societal and planetary crises, each of which involve TRILLIONS of dollars, plastic micro-particles, atmospheric disturbances, and many other complex interactions of elements of Earth System disruptions, which together require radical human intervention if there is to be some viable human progress in our increasingly ambiguous future—the Anthropocene.
How Much is a Trillion, and What Are a Trillion Dollars Really Worth?
Just for a spatial reference, a stack of a trillion one-dollar bills would reach 67,866 miles into space. Laid end to end, they would stretch 96,906,656 miles—further than the distance of the earth to the sun.
With some multi-billionaires approaching a trillion dollars in personal wealth, we may want to ask a simple question. What will a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000-) buy? Well, let’s see. How many modest American single family homes costing $500,000- (if you can find one that cheap) could a trillion dollars buy? Two million homes, which would house that many families. We do have a long-standing housing shortage.
At four persons per family, a trillion dollars could mean eight million more persons with a roof over their head. According to a RAND Corporation report on the shift of income from the bottom ninety percent of the population to the very top of the income hierarchy from 1975 to 2018, over 47 trillion dollars were removed from the income streams of most Americans during that period. The vast majority of new income went to the wealthiest 1%, mostly to the top 0.1% of the population.
“From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.”
By “counterfactual” the researchers refer to the hypothetical condition where the distribution of income would have kept the same proportions going to different classes as in 1975, instead of being increasingly skewed toward the very top of the income hierarchy. But the ‘factual’ here is that the ultra-rich have manipulated the income tax system—through political donations (made limitless via the Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court) and lobbying Congress—so that much of their income is now defined as “non-taxable.”
The population of the U.S. today is estimated to be about 348 million. A trillion dollars would house eight million more people. Well, 47 x 8,000,000 = 376,000,000. That 47 trillion dollars could have housed 376 million people, more than the entire U.S. population of about 348 million.
Instead of that or many other useful purposes, this extreme wealth is stored in secret off-shore accounts, is invested in multiple mansions per billionaire, and in super yachts like that of Jeff Bezos, with its auxiliary ship on which to land his girlfriend’s helicopter; not to mention their wedding in Venice, Italy, at the cost of somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million. Much of it was also used to buy up much of the nation’s single family housing, distressed because of the COVID caused economic downturn, which they then rented out at much higher rates than previous market rental costs. More concentration of wealth and income simply because of the financial power of the super-rich, their hedge funds, and corporations, and the failure of the nation to have an economic policy framework that would work in the national interest.
Of course, a small fraction of that $47 trillion would be plenty to eliminate the U.S. housing shortage. Also, over the nearly half century since 1975, the population grew from about 216 million to about 348 million, so during those years, those confiscated trillions could have provided many benefits for a larger proportion of the population. Instead, wages were suppressed and costs of living rose.
About 14 million children need daycare in the U.S. today. Many parents cannot afford it; about half pay more than they can afford, and among the working poor, about three-quarters have to cut back on something crucial to their wellbeing or not work, because to work and pay childcare at the low wages they can garner, the costs are higher than the income.
The annual cost per child averages around $13,000-. So, the total cost for childcare in the U.S. would be about $182,000,000- per year, if all children who need childcare so their parent can go to work and know that they are safe and cared for in their absence, would get it. So, dividing the total cost of childcare by that $47 trillion could pay for about 258 years of childcare for every American child, assuming the current total need each year remained the same.
So, in terms of the potential uses of the $47 trillion or so siphoned out of the American economy over the past half century, it could go a very long way to serving the needs of Americans for a very long time. We could make similar rough calculations for any number of other uses and the huge size of just one trillion dollars, no less forty seven, would equally impress us with what could be accomplished with so much money.
Instead, trillions of dollars extracted from the economy is wasted on the egos of tech-bro, financial, and hedge-fund multi-billionaires in their mutual quest to win an endless juvenile monetary pissing contest. What, exactly is our economy for? And, if our economy is actually ours, then why is it not designed to serve the needs and wellbeing of all of us?
Trillions of Dollars of Economic Wellbeing Lost
J.L Bernstein is an “ex-Wall Street trader” who both trades the market and writes about it in his newsletter, “Pivot and Flow.” He gives readers a quick summary of market conditions and trends, and, of course, more depth and value to his paid subscribers (I assume). I look at his unpaid version occasionally—having recently been put on his email list somehow—because market conditions and trends are so critically important for all of us, really, whether we are involved in the stock market ourselves or not. And, where the market is concerned, multiple opinions can help give us a more realistic perspective. But I was a bit taken aback by an email he broadcast last Sunday, which was not one of his typical notices of his weekly free newsletter, but instead a poignant story titled, “Forty-two days to pay for dinner.”
Bernstein tells of a mother who has not enough money to pay Chipotle for a burrito for her son after having paid this month’s rent. But Chipotle has a program that allows any customer to pay for a meal on interest-free installments, called “Pay in 4.” She struggles, but wants her son to be able to taste the meal his friends say they enjoy. So she goes ahead and pays $8.50 per month for four months to pay for her son’s burrito meal. $34-, really?
In the American culture of extreme individualism, too many tend to blame the victim of an extremely unfair system rigged to direct almost all of the rewards of the system to the capital accumulation of the ultra-wealthy, at the expense of almost everyone else. Despite the fact that the wages of so many Americans are suppressed below what is needed for mere subsistence, and the human struggle that results from their immiseration, most Republicans would view this mother’s behavior as financially irresponsible. Compassion is in short supply in the Congress; so are solutions.
Read this simple tale of personal economic tragedy and test your compassion for the people who Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, derides for their not earning enough money to pay the rent and provide food for their children. He asserts their need to “take responsibility.” In a debate over government nutrition programs for the poor, Johnson tried to claim biblical justification for his resistance to helping the poor, then foolishly challenged Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s Christian faith in a debate over food stamps and other aid programs. Crockett’s response left him in a rare state: speechless. He called a recess. Rep. Jasmine Crockett is the real deal, articulate, knowledgeable, compassionate and completely composed, unlike the speaker.
As Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrated in her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, the working poor work very hard trying to exercise their responsibility as earners for their families, or just for their own food and rent, while facing wage theft as well as suffering unconscionably low wages. Some cannot sustain the struggle and become homeless.
The widespread American struggle to pay the rent to avoid eviction, provide food for the family, and keep the lights on, is a consequence of the trillions and trillions of dollars that have been re-distributed up the American hierarchy of plutocracy, which has driven so many into homelessness and despair. That is why what was a smattering of homeless alcoholics on ‘skid row’ in downtown L.A. in my youth has grown to many encampments of homeless people of all kinds located all over the metro area.
Mike Johnson represents the special interests of the ultra-wealthy in opposition to the needs of all for basic economic wellbeing, in a system that precludes economic independence for anyone without a large fortune. “Follow the money.” If we look back over the last several decades, we see that since the 1970s, the massive re-distribution of income and wealth that the RAND Corporation researchers documented, is at the core of the ‘immiseration’ of the majority of the American population today. All the best historical analyses demonstrate that this system-destabilizing trend cannot continue without causing growing chaos and, much sooner than most imagine, even societal collapse.
Of Wealth and Human Wellbeing
The RAND Corporation report, has shown empirically what many have felt viscerally, now documented in the data the report explains, that is, the massive re-distribution of wealth and income up the economic hierarchy to the top since the 1970s. I remember as a young adult, politicians like Nixon, Reagan, and other ‘conservatives’ railing against the irresponsibility of “welfare queens” and lazy (Black) youth who would not work—in jobs most of which did not exist, at least for them. Even back in the 1970s, there were more people in the workforce than there were jobs to fill. As one sociologist put it, that resulted in a “residual population,” that is, a population the members of which had lost the economic game of musical chairs. There was no place for them. It is just a lot worse now.
That was then, but now, with the widespread automation of factories and offices, electronic replacement of human communication via feeble voice recognition and embryonic AI ‘responses’ to our attempts to access institutional and corporate information, the outsourcing of labor, and now the development of AI driven robots to do even the unskilled labor that we had thought would be exempt from automation, we are more isolated and vulnerable than ever.
You remember, I’m sure, during the COVID economic collapse, the people who held low-paid jobs that filled critical needs, were suddenly called “essential workers.” People suddenly realized that farm workers, warehouse workers, food processors, and many others with menial yet important jobs, were far more valuable than their meager wages implied, since their manual labor produced and moved the goods and services that the more comfortable majority came to expect as almost a fact of nature.
Clearly, an equitable economy grounded in the wellbeing of all people, not the accumulation of “billions and billions,” oh, actually trillions and trillions of dollars in the coffers of a few old white men and their hedge funds, will require a new re-distribution of income and wealth. But it will also require a restructuring of the economy so that it no longer drifts toward extreme plutocracy without a rudder to keep it on course toward overall wellbeing. That is the kind of economy that will be capable of dealing with the existential threat of the imminent destabilization of the Earth’s ecosystems—upon which we rely for our survival—because its priorities will be life, not mere money.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 