Let's Do Some Math... ;-)

Hey Everyone! :-)

Okay, I have a thought experiment I'd like to propose to everyone. I keep hearing comparisons between Bernie and Bloomberg because Bernie wrote a best-selling book and made a couple of million dollars and some people -- disingenuously, I believe -- like to compare that to Bloomberg's billions. So, I'd like to draw an analogy that, I hope, will help people understand how absurd that comparison really is.

First off, a million dollars is an awful lot of money. When you consider that fully half of working Americans earn less than $30,000 per year, a million dollars is more than a lot of people will earn in a lifetime. At $30,000 per year, if you had to pay no taxes and had no living expenses and could save every single penny of that, it would still take you more than 33 years to save a million dollars. That's a LOT of money.

Now, let's consider what that means in the context of a billion dollars. A billion is not a hundred million. A billion is a thousand million. So someone who has a billion dollars has a thousand times as much as someone who has a million dollars. But that's really hard to conceptualize, so let's put it in terms we're more used to dealing with.

A billion is to a million what $1,000 is to $1. A thousand dollars is a lot of money. It's more than many people who work fulltime jobs earn in a week. But it goes beyond that. Because it's not just having $1,000 compared to $1; it's that almost everyone in the entire country only has $1. So, the entire economy is based around people having only $1.

What does that mean? Well, let's think about it. If everyone only earned $1 per week, which we already talked about most people earning far less than that when scaled up to the actual numbers but for the sake of simple math let's just use that for an example, then people would earn, on average, about $4 per month. Out of that would have to come rent or a mortgage, so we can say those would probably run somewhere around $1 per month if we keep it on the low side and not anywhere near a big city. That leaves people with $3 per month. Well, you've got to buy groceries, so say that would be around $0.30 to $0.50 per month, depending on the size of your family. Then there's electric/water/phone/internet/etc. So, say another $0.50 per month if we say that utility costs are fairly low where our fictional family is living. That brings us up to around $2, if you say someone has a couple of kids they have to feed, with about $2 left. You've got transportation expenses, say around $0.20 when you include gas, insurance, maintenance, tolls, etc. That leaves us with about $1.80. Then there are clothes and shoes for the family, so say about $0.60 per month. So, we're down to $1.20. And we'll say maybe $0.80 per month for entertainment expenses and incidentals for the family. Which leaves us with about $0.40 for the month that can be tucked away for emergencies.

So, now that we've established about what things might cost at that scale, consider what $1,000 could buy. That's pretty mind-boggling, isn't it? At that scale, someone with $1,000 could buy a regular person's life 250 times over. And, just to completely blow your mind, remember this important fact: Our comparison between $1,000 and $1 was equivalent to the comparison between a billion dollars and a million dollars! Now, think about how that would have to be scaled down to compare to a regular person's salary. $30,000 is only 3% of a million dollars. $30,000 is 0.003% of a billion dollars. Now does it become more clear the type of difference we're talking about? Instead of comparing dollars to a thousand dollars, we'd be comparing fractions of a cent.

Now, back to millionaires versus billionaires. There's no question that being a millionaire means you don't have to concern yourself with the same sort of financial worries that someone earning an average salary does. And if you surround yourself with people who have as much money as you, then you're inevitably going to lose touch with the sort concerns that most people deal with every day. I would argue that Bernie has not insulated himself from regular people in that way; that, on the contrary, he spends the majority of his time interacting with regular people from all walks of life and listening to them about what challenges they're dealing with. But, still, having a million dollars does mean that more empathy is required to truly connect with the people experiencing those problems themselves.

But having a billion dollars is a completely different scale. It not only makes it far more difficult to connect with regular people because that level of money means that one experiences the world as an entirely different reality from everyone else's reality. But it also makes it harder because the money, itself, acts as an insulator. Making it far more difficult for people with that kind of money to even interact with people who aren't also wealthy, to some extent. And that's where the kind of disconnect happens that allows a "let them eat cake" mentality to form.

But, again, this is meant as a thought experiment. The math isn't open to interpretation; it is what it is and those are the numbers. So, even if you don't agree with my analysis, just really think about those numbers and draw your own conclusions.

Peace!