Amanda

While we pick up the tab, the billionaire Walton family collects the profits generated by their poverty wages, meaning that your money is directly subsidizing the Walton family fortune, which is now at $430 billion.

Taxpayers are effectively writing a check to the Walton family for roughly $3 billion every year since they own half of Walmart.

by subsidizing low wages through public benefits.

Billionaires are not bootstrappers who pulled themselves up.

They are in fact an invention of specific policies that created them, specific laws that didn't exist until the 1980s that allow hoarded wealth to scale limitless while denying workers the fruits of their productivity.

A line from E.L.

Doctorow's Ragtime goes, how can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few?

The answer is by being persuaded to identify with them.

We have been persuaded that billionaires are not unethical hoarders, but aspirational heroes, and that we too could be that wealthy if only we were clever enough and hardworking enough with a little luck.

Hoping to be winners like them, we are children standing before a carnival game that the owners have already ensured is unwinnable.

We keep trying, we keep losing, while the carnival owners chuckle, pocket our tickets, and assure us we'll get them next time.

The problem with idolizing billionaires is that we aspire to wealth we will never come close to touching.

instead of changing the system that protects only the hoarders and hurts the vast majority of us.

The vast majority of us who are the people we should be identifying with.

Because if we stop fighting with each other for this billionaire scraps for a hot minute, we could unite to create a more just, stable society where folks have enough, where people can even get rich, but where one dinner party's worth of people cannot ensure the economy, the media, and the government work exclusively for them.

Now, there is extreme wealth, which I suppose one could argue is not inherently unethical.

But what we have today is extreme wealth and extreme wealth inequality.

Extreme wealth by a few in a nation where the majority of hardworking people are not even able to get by.

So who is subsidizing billionaires?

In order to reach the low end of Bezos' wealth, the average worker would need to work for 4 million years.