BANKRUPTING BILL GATES

I notice that while Siberian tigers are almost extinct, billionaires are proliferating like pimples on a 13 year old. Do you think there might be a connection? According to Forbes Magazine there are now 946 billionaires in the world, and the good news is that once you’ve got your first billion its damn near impossible to lose it. Fewer than 17% of them got poorer last year and only 32 were reduced to the humiliating status of “multi-millionaire”.
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One billion is one thousand millions. One billion seconds ago it was 1959, one billion minutes ago Jesus Christ was alive and one billion hours ago it was the Stone Age. If you were paid one dollar an hour, 24 hours a day, you would be a billionaire in just…1,901 years. If you were paid one dollar per second you would qualify for the Forbes list in only 31 years, 259 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes and 40 seconds. If you spent nothing and made $1,000 a day you would be worth $1 billion in 2,740 years. And if you spent $3,000 a day you would be flat broke in only… one thousand years. That’s what a billion dollars is.
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Bill Gates, age 51, and henceforth known as ‘The Kid’, is worth $56 billion, just ahead of Warren Buffet, age 76, who is worth $53 billion. Carlos Helu of Mexico, age 67, is worth $49 billion, Ingvar Kamprad, who owns Ikea, is 80 years old and is worth $33 billion, and Lakshmi Mittal, age 56, who owns steel mills in Europe, is close behind with $32 billion. Those are the 5 riches people in the world. They are all white males.
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One billion dollars is the profit Exxon Mobil makes about every 9 days. One billion dollars is the profit Apple Computer makes every 180 days. One billion dollars is how much we spend every year to incarcerate Americans for marijuana use. And one billion dollars is how much the U.S. has accepted in foreign aide for Hurricane Katrina victims
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Charlene Carvalh-Heineken, who inherited 25% of the family beer business, is the richest woman in the world with a paltry $7.2 billion. The Koplowitz twins, Esther and Alicia, inherited daddy’s Spanish construction business, and are each worth between 5 and $6 billion, each. And farther down on the list of the richest women in the world is Oprah, worth $1.5 billion, and Harry Potter’s mommy, J.K. Rowling, who is worth just $1 billion.
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One dollar is 6” long and 2 ½ “wide. A one foot high stack of $1 bills are worth approximately $3,000. A stack about the size of a box of copier paper is worth about $72,000. A pile 5’ high, 10’ long by 6 ½ ‘ wide is worth about $9 million, which is about 4 times what the average collage graduate will earn in their life. And a stack of one billion dollars would be 74 and ½ miles high.
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The average American is worth $144,000. But the average Japanese is richer, with $181,000 net worth. More than a third of the wealth in America is owned by 1% of the population, while 40% of the U.S. population owns less than 1% of the wealth. And even with the Bush tax cuts the top 1% paid 34% of the total Federal personal income tax while the wealthiest 10% of Americans paid 66% of all personal taxes.
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Corporate taxes are different: last year Cisco Systems, which had $23 billion in sales and $2.7 billion in net income, paid nothing in federal income tax. The published corporate tax rate is 35%, but a study by Citizens for Tax Justice found that the 275 most profitable American corporations paid an actual tax rate of just 17.3%. And by the IRS’s own numbers corporate taxes paid fell from 4.8% of GDP in the 1950’s to 1.6% in 2004. If corporations paid the same tax rate they paid in the ‘50’s the treasury would now be richer by $380 billion each year.
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As it is, every 8 hours and 20 minutes the federal government spends another billion dollars. Oddly, under the “tax and spend” Democratic President Bill Clinton the national debt rose 4.3% a year, while under conservative Republican presidents (Reagan, Bush, and Bush) the debt rose 10.8% a year.
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Americans owe almost 9 trillion dollars, mostly to themselves, and the debt goes up another $2 billion every day, meaning that in less than a month we could bankrupt Bill Gates.
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