How the Billionaires Took Over

I know this thread will fade, but I hope a few people will take the time to read this rather long and extremely informative article. (Yes the political views of the publication are usually skewed, but it seems like a factual and well researched piece.) Some excepts from the beginning of the article:

"Dirksen was right that one billion is a far bigger number than we typically appreciate. Let’s say you wanted to count out loud to one million at a rate of one number per second, never taking any breaks. (I don’t recommend this.) There being 86,400 seconds in a day, you’d be done in 11 and a half days. A guy in Birmingham, Alabama, named Jeremy Harper did something like this in 2007, according to Guinness World Records, only he took breaks. Counting into a webcam every day, Harper got to one million in 89 days.

But Jeremy Harper will never count out loud to one billion. Nobody will, because instead of 11 and a half days, or even 89 of them, counting to a billion with no stopping to eat or sleep would take 31 years and eight months. If you worked at Harper’s pace, taking breaks every day, it would take more than 244 years, which is twice the longest human lifespan ever recorded. To own $1 billion is to possess more dollars than you’ll ever count. It’s to possess more dollars than any human being will ever count. And that’s just one billion. Forbes counts 15 Americans who possess hundreds of billions."...

"What do billionaires want? Money, obviously. The mansion, the yacht, the private plane, the butler, the personal chef, personal security. Last year, the writer Sylvie Tremblay added up these and other expenses for Yahoo Finance and calculated the billionaire lifestyle costs about $67 million per year. That’s a lot to you and me, but not to a billionaire, whose investments probably throw off at least that much per year. Even if you took $1 billion and put it in a savings account that paid 5 percent interest (I don’t recommend this), you’d get back $50 million in 12 months. In the real world, billionaire investments outperform the stock market. I mentioned already that you can’t count to one billion. You can’t spend $1 billion either. It’s not that easy to spend even $100 million. So billionaires get involved in politics."...

"The word “oligarchy” means literally “government by the few,” where “the few,” at least as far back as Aristotle, has been understood to mean “the rich.” Functionally, “oligarchy” usually carries the same meaning as “aristocracy,” only minus any quaint notion that an aristocracy will govern disinterestedly, placing the nation’s interests above its own. In those countries where wealth grows more concentrated among the few, as has occurred in the United States over the past half-century, governments incline toward oligarchy."

https://newrepublic.com/article/196176/trump-billionaires-america-wealth...