When our wants vastly exceed our needs

If your net worth was between $420 and $480 billion, and you earned $1.6 million every hour of every day, imagine what you could do with such enormous wealth. Instead of flying rockets to Mars or building a tunnel to England, you could completely erase homelessness in this country, feed every hungry child, vastly advance research to eradicate childhood cancer and other diseases, build shelters to house every discarded pet, pay teachers a substantial wage supplement which would improve the quality of education, subsidize the salaries of underpaid first responders and help create better health care alternatives for all Americans.

And there are other opportunities far too numerous to mention.

The thought of someone being worth $480,000,000,000 is staggering. Check this out: If I had earned my top salary every year that I worked, instead of building up to it over time, my lifetime earnings over 50 years would have totaled what Elon Musk makes in 3.2 hours. And I only earned that "top" salary one year out of 50. Leading up to that, I had years in which I earned $4,400, $8,000, $12,500 and $24,000. Compare those annual salaries to the $26,667 that Musk earns every minute. As I said, it’s staggering.

But there’s more. Looking beyond the billionaire oligarchs now running this country, there is so much money being thrown around on professional sports, entertainment, luxury cars, designer clothes, guns, hobbies, recreation and donations to megachurches  – the list goes on – that it’s hard to explain how any child could go to bed hungry every night, yet 1 in every 5 children do just that.

Here’s one example: Did you ever watch the credits at the end of a movie? Why does it take so many people to produce two hours of film? The average seems to be in the neighborhood of 700 but could be as many as 4,000 or more for a blockbuster with special effects.

I once watched an hour-long documentary where two people sat in chairs and talked. The closing credits went on for several minutes and had to include at least 300 people. To film two people sitting in chairs. Talking. I could have done it with a couple of stage lights and an iPhone.    

And then there are the salaries. Established actors on popular TV shows can earn between $100,000 to $1 million per episode. Movie actors like Keanu Reeves ($30 million), Johnny Depp ($35 million), Robert Downey Jr. and Will Smith ($40 million) also do quite nicely, thank you very much.

At the same time, I watch a lot of older movies on Turner Classics that are just as good if not better than current offerings, but were made by 30 people and little to no budget. Humphrey Bogart earned an average of $750 a week for his work in movies while Barbara Stanwyck earned around $100,000 – for an entire year. I contend that movies aren’t getting better, just more expensive.

And then there’s sports. Major League Baseball salaries in 2024 ranged from a high of $315 million (New York Mets) to a “low” of $62 million (Oakland A’s). Shohei Ohtani of the L.A. Dodgers was signed for $700 million, but deferred $680 million for 10 years.

The National Football League has a salary cap of $255 million per team, and there are 32 teams, so 255 million x 32 = $8.1 billion (give or take a couple of bucks). Most starting quarterbacks are in the $50-60 million range. The minimum salary for a first-year NFL player in 2024 was $795,000. The minimum increases to $870,000 in the second year and $940,000 in the third year. Seems like a liveable wage to me.

And then there’s basketball, hockey, tennis, golf – all of the other sports – plus college athletics with head coaches earning upwards of $13 million and players now eligible for thousands, tens of thousands or millions under the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) provision. Now that’s staggering as well.

So what’s my point?

My point is that there are millions, billions even trillions of dollars out there in the world for the myriad things that people want – and a willingness to spend every last dollar – but we somehow find it difficult to dig up any money whatsoever for the things that some people really need, such as food, shelter, clothing, health care, transportation, education and prescription drugs. Doesn’t it make you wonder why that is?

Why are people willing to spend hundreds of dollars on football tickets or concert tickets or the latest iPhone or this season’s fashions or (getting political now) gold boots or leather-bound Chinese Bibles or commemorative coins but unwilling to help fund a school lunch program in their home town?

Why can’t some of those billions of dollars be put to better use? I believe they can.

Now I know what you’re probably thinking, that what I’m proposing amounts to outright socialism. You know, equal distribution of wealth among all of the people. But that’s not the case at all. A socialist government would require that all wealth be pooled and handed out equally to every citizen. My suggestion is that owners of so much wealth have virtually unlimited opportunities to benefit society and to do so voluntarily while still maintaining much of their accumulated net worth.

My liberal mind can’t understand why a fabulously wealthy individual wouldn’t WANT to do good things for society instead of throwing away money to try and bring it down. Wouldn’t that benefit the rich guy to surround himself with good things and happy people while setting forth a legacy worth pursuing?

"Here lies Richie Rich. He had more money than Croesus but he helped a lot of people."

Why can’t a football player live a nice life on $795,000 a year? I know I could. Why can’t 200 people make a movie instead of 700? Is there some redundancy there? And why can’t voters understand that they can get what they want as well as what they need if they’d just stop voting against their own best interest?

Somewhere in the background I hear the voice of Gordon Gecko saying, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” but I think he is wrong. Greed is one of the seven deadly sins, and that can’t be good in any context, religion or belief.

You can call me naïve and probably I am, but I’ve lived 74 years with the belief that it’s easy to know the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, wise and foolish, intelligent and dumb. I can’t say I always did the good, right, wise and intelligent thing … but I’m pretty sure I knew what they were.