Billionaires Suck

In which I make a return to blogging, and hoo boy, is this one a doozy…

If this blog post had a theme song, it would be Moving Pictures’ 1982 single, “What About Me”. Actually, why not? This post’s theme song is Moving Pictures’ 1982 single, “What About Me”. Go check it out on Youtube, it’s a cracker of a song.

For some reason I’ve had the song going through my head today, and the fact that it seems just as appropriate over 40 years later is nothing short of abhorrent. I don’t know why it popped into my head today, but I suspect the events of the past few days have had something to do with it. It started with the news that Moreton City Council have started issuing infringement notices to homeless people for “storing goods on public land”. The goods being stored? That would be the worldly possessions of people who have nowhere to live, and nowhere store them, what with being homeless and all. This isn’t the first time that Moreton Shitty City Council have kicked people while they were down, you only have to look back to a few days before Christmas in 2024 when they banned homeless people from having pets or sleeping in vans.

Then, as I was out and about this weekend, I saw multiple homeless people wheeling all their possessions in shopping trolleys. And the shopping trolleys weren’t even full. Imagine being in the situation where everything you own won’t even fill a shopping trolley. One line of “What About Me” resonated with me:

“So take a step back and see the little people
They may be young but they’re the ones
That make the big people big”

It reminded me of the Australian Tax Offices (ATO) most recent tax transparency report, that found over 30% of businesses in Australia paid no tax. Specifically, of the 3985 entities that reported, 1235 paid no tax. The Guardian reported on the revenue and taxable income of 10 major businesses in Australia that paid no tax.

The numbers in that report are eyewatering. Take, for example, Qantas Airways. Of the 10 companies in The Guardian’s report, they had the largest total income, of over 19 billion dollars, yet somehow managed to only have a taxable income of 402 million dollars. That’s barely 2% of their total income. Not that it really matters, because they still didn’t pay tax. It blows my mind that I paid more tax than a company with a 19-billion-dollar income.

Looking further into these numbers, it gets worse. Qantas were one of the better companies when it comes to “taxable income”, having the 4^th highest taxable income of the 10 companies. The lowest taxable income was reported by Virgin Australia, who reported $522,661 taxable income on a total income of over 5 billion dollars. That’s 0.01% of their total income.

But what does this have to do with homelessness? A 2019 report found that Australia had the second lowest unemployment benefits in the developed world, and dropped to the lowest when housing was factored in. Australian unemployment benefits for the longest time remained essentially unchanged. Having been in the unhappy position of requiring unemployment benefits several times over the years, it still surprises me that I received a payment that was only a few dollars more a fortnight in 2019 ($509 a fortnight) than what I did when I first received it back in 1997 (I don’t have exact numbers, but it was around $490-ish). Which is why it’s good to see that the rate has finally been increased to between $778 and $833 as of September 2024.

Still, if you asked an “average” Australian about their feelings for unemployment payments, you’d probably get a significant number complain about dole bludgers. Which isn’t that much of an argument really. I’ve had discussions with people who complained that people on unemployment benefits won’t even try to get a job. I even had this conversation with an employee of a charitable organisation, which surprised me.

The truth is, currently (or at least as current as November 2024) the unemployment rate in Australia is 3.9%. That’s over a million people out of work. At the same time, there were 344,000 job vacancies. So, the argument that people on unemployment benefits aren’t trying if they can’t get a job is utter bullshit. There are literally 3 times as many people without jobs as there are jobs vacant.

Mind you, for someone in the upper levels of wealth, this is a handy thing to encourage. While the people with almost enough money are angry at the people with barely any money nobody is going to be thinking about the people with altogether too much money. It just makes sense for the ultra-rich to let this happen.

Speaking of the ultra-rich, just how much money do they really have? According to a report by Union Bank Switzerland (UBS), 47.5% of the world’s wealth is controlled by only 1.5% of people. At the other end of the scale 39.5% of people are sharing 0.5% of the world’s wealth.

Another interesting statistic from that website concerns the number of billionaires in various countries. Ten countries are listed, along with the change in number of billionaires. It’s an interesting graph, but something I found more interesting was the actual number of billionaires in each country, something not immediately visible in the data. I’ve put it here for clarity:

Country	Number of Billionaires
USA	835
China	427
India	185
Germany	117
Switzerland	85
United Kingdom	82
Hong Kong	74
Italy	62
Brazil	60
Taiwan	47

That’s nearly 2000 people who are worth a billion dollars. I’d be interested to know how many of them are obscenely rich like Jeff Bezos who is worth roughly 185 billion dollars.

What’s worse is that people really aren’t that good at visualising just how much a billion is, which can lead to underestimating just how much of a problem such extreme wealth is. As a public service, here’s a website to get a good visual representation of just how stonkingly big 1 billion is. Or, if you prefer numbers, think of it this way:
1 million seconds is 11 days, 13 hours, 40 minutes and 48 seconds, let’s call it 11.5 days. One billion seconds, on the other hand, is 31.7 years. Big difference between 11 days and 31 years.

Another way to think about this level of wealth is the following thought exercise:
Let’s imagine we’re the Pharoah Khufu, who had the Great Pyramid of Giza built around 2600 BCE. Now, for the sake of the exercise, let’s assume Khufu is immortal, and is such a great guy he decides to pay himself $100,000 a day (I’m ignoring leap years for ease of calculations, they won’t have that much of an effect, trust me*). So, you get to the year 2025, and, assuming you’ve not spent anything, you now have 168 billion dollars ($168,812,500,000). You’re still not as wealthy as Jeff fucking Bezos.
* For shits and giggles I decided to see what the difference would be if you accounted for leap years: Adding the income for 1121 leap days you get $168,924,600,000, which isn’t even another billion dollars.

I had another thought about this. If Jeff Bezos spent 1 million dollars a day, every day, for the rest of his life, how long would it take him to go broke? The answer to that one is over 500 years. To be exact, 506 years and 292 days.

Anyway, now that we’ve had some fun blowing our minds with just how much of an obscene amount of money is held by so few people, let’s get back to the point of this post. More than 1200 companies in Australia paid no tax, yet people who have no money are the cause of all our problems. Or at least that’s what we’re led to believe.

I crunched some numbers. If we paid every unemployed person the full Job Seeker payment amount of $833 per fortnight, it would cost about 22 billion dollars. If each of the 10 companies in the Guardian report paid the 15% tax rate that the ATO would like to see as a minimum, then we’d have about 225 million dollars to spend to do that.

But don’t forget, most of these companies reduced their taxable income to less than 1% of their income. If we tax just those 10 companies at 15% of their total income, then we have 37% of what we’d need to give all unemployed people the full Job Seeker payment. Imagine how much money we’d have if we applied the same logic to the other 1225 companies that paid no tax.

At the end of the day, what it boils down to is that anyone not in the top 1.5% of wealth needs to stop fighting with each other, and go for the real problem, which is the 1.5% of people who hold nearly half of the world’s wealth. Or, to put it bluntly, tax the fucking rich. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.