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Thursday, January 23, 2014

Fantastic news about wealth inequality!



Isn't this wonderful? The 85 richest people in the world have as much money as the 3,500,000,000 poorest people - half the planet!

What an incentive, huh? Just think if you could become one of those 85 people! Let's see, with 7 billion people on the planet (rounded down), your odds would be worse than 1 in 82 million.

The odds are 240 times better that you'll die from exploding fireworks, a thousand times better that you'll be killed by lightning, a million times better than you'll die in an auto accident. I'm not going to guarantee those exact figures, but you get the point.

Of course, many of those 85 people were born rich. They probably didn't inherit all of their wealth, but they started off with advantages most people could only dream of.

And even people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett didn't start out dirt poor. They didn't start out hungry, with terrible schools and zero prospects. They didn't start out in an America with wealth and income inequality as bad as it is today.


And if you do make it, what about all those other 3,499,999,999 people? Do you care nothing about anyone else? I'd rather that everyone was doing reasonably well, instead of 85 people lording it over billions of peons - even if I were one of those 85 people.

Remember the America where our goal was a strong middle class, instead of a handful of aristocrats and a horde of serfs? Am I showing my age? Yeah, that almost seems quaint these days, doesn't it? Helping the rich become even richer seems to have become the default.

The loon in this video, incidentally, is Kevin O'Leary, and no, he's not on Fox. Oddly enough, he's in Canada. I guess they've got their crazy people there, too, huh?

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