“Mayor Bloomberg, should you exist?” asked political reporter Chuck Todd.
“I can’t speak for all billionaires,” Michael Bloomberg replied. “All I know is, I’ve been very lucky, made a lot of money and I’m giving it away to make this country better.”
Freelance journalist Edgar Allen Beem lives in Brunswick. The Universal Notebook is his personal, weekly look at the world around him.
Billionaires justify their existences by giving their billions away. That seems to be the prevailing ethic among the very rich. Think Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Harold Alfond.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, however, doesn’t buy the argument to selfless philanthropy, calling Bloomberg’s billions an example of “grotesque and immoral distribution of wealth.”
“Mike Bloomberg,” said Sanders at the Las Vegas Democratic debate, “owns more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans. That’s wrong. That’s immoral.”
Now that he has dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary, Bloomberg will presumably be giving away a lot of his money to make America better, first by defeating Sanders and then Donald Trump.
America has a love-hate relationship with wealth. Wealth, however, is relative.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, has a net worth of something like $114 billion. Media Mike Bloomberg is worth about half that. Trump, who has no shame and does not assuage his guilt by giving his wealth away, has a reported net worth of only $3 billion.
Sanders, by comparison, is a relative pauper with a reported net worth of a mere $2 million. Not bad for a Democratic socialist. Or is it? Sanders is part of the top 1% of Americans that he constantly warns us about.
The 2020 election is being billed as a Battle for the Soul of America, pitting the heartless bigots, bosses and billionaires of the right against the socialist poor, pluralists and plebeians of the left. Neither millionaire Sanders nor billionaire Bloomberg is really a Democrat, of course, so perhaps it is well that Middle Class Joe Biden, with a net worth of some $9 million, has risen from the ashes to moderate the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.
Before we get too high and mighty about the inequitable distribution of wealth, however, it should be noted that 9 out of 10 Americans live above the global middle-income standard. We all live grotesque and immoral lives, Bernie.
It’s hard to make a bundle without exploiting someone (employees, taxpayers, consumers) or something (natural resources), so paying hefty taxes and giving generously to charities is the least the wealthy can do.
Sharing the wealth can also take a more direct approach. When publisher Peter Cox sold Maine Times, for instance, he gave many of his employees, myself included, a significant share of the proceeds, acknowledging what the wealthy rarely do: that he did not create his wealth all by himself.
Our social and economic systems are, as Sanders never tires of reminding us, rigged in favor of the rich. Monetary policy, tax structure, banking regulations, minimum wage laws, de-unionization and campaign finance laws all favor the wealthy.
As we seek to address the issue of wealth in this presidential election, a recent Pew Research poll has found that Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to believe economic inequality is a problem. Not surprisingly, lower-income Republicans are more likely than upper-income Republicans to be concerned about economic inequality. What is surprising is that the opposite is true of Democrats. Wealthy Democrats are more concerned about economic injustice than poor ones. That explains Trump as well as Sanders and Biden.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
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