Billionaires
Don’t know any, have never shaken hands with one, and don’t expect I ever will.
Two billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have been on the world stage recently flaunting their wealth as they wage a public “dollar war” to see which one will be the “richest man on earth.”
While these two physically unattractive dingbats flaunt their naked wealth in public, one in 6 Americans live in poverty—many of whom do not know where they will sleep tonight while others know that a $300 emergency could move them from a cheap motel room to a tent under an interstate overpass.
There are 11.5 million children living in poverty in the U.S. while Bezos and pals take Clem Kadidlehopper billion dollar rocket ship journeys to the outer edges of space just so they can look down on an impoverished, dying planet while Musk goes hunting for more riches in the tech friendly Austin, Texas capital where he can wear cowboy boots, a white cowboy hat and yodel to the moon at night.
If by now you have the impression I do not like billionaires, you’re right. Let me explain.
In 2020, Bezos’s tax rate was 0.98 percent. Translated, that means he paid $983 million on an income of $99 billion that year. Musk got an even better deal from the IRS. Between 2015 and 2017, he paid just $70,000 in taxes and paid not one dime in 2018, despite having a net worth at the time of $152 billion.
In June of this year ProPublica identified Bezos and Musk, along with 23 other “richest Americans” (billionaires) who paid little if any taxes under the last administration.
Filing jointly, my wife and I paid more than $7,000 each year after the heralded “Trump tax cut”—roughly $2,000 more each year than we paid during the Obama presidency, according to H&R Block.
Fifteen of the nation’s 258 richest corporations did not pay a penny in taxes during the eight years between 2008 and 2015 while another 50 paid taxes at a rate of 10 percent of their income during that same period.
What kind of government permits a system where a working man pays $7,000 a year in taxes while 15 of the nation’s richest corporations, including General Electric, do not pay a single penny in taxes? My tax bracket in 2020 was 22 percent while Amazon’s (the richest company in America) tax bracket was 9.4 percent.
Why should I really give a fuck that 90-year-old William Shatner went to Space on a Bezos rocket, and got all teary eyed about it, while 13 million children were hungry in America that same day—some of whom were lucky if they got a peanut butter n’ jelly sandwich that day?
It’s idiotic that the nation’s news outlets were fixated for hours about Shatner and Bezos in a west Texas desert hugging and crying because the old Star Trek icon got to really see the blackness of space.
“Beam me up from this stupid shit, Scotty – please.”
All these super rich mother..kers, who place profit before people, are the reason why man must now try to establish human colonies on the Moon and Mars so they can plunder the rest of the solar system.