Who Needs To Be A Billionaire?

I keep thinking about what I’m going to do with that billion dollars once I win Pepsi’s Billion Dollar Sweepstakes. First, of course, I’ll pay off my gigantic $25,000 credit card bill. And after that, I suppose I’ll give a lot of it away.

That’s right. I plan to just give a lot of it away. Give wonderful, life-enhancing chunks to all my friends. Donate sizeable sums to my favorite charities, environmental organizations and political action groups. The truth is, I really don’t need a billion dollars. I’d rather have the money go towards doing good things for other people. (And by the way, here’s a link to Cat Whisperings, another blogger who feels the same way.)

Let me say that again: I don’t need a billion dollars. Even more important: NOBODY needs a billion dollars. Nobody. There is not a single person on this planet who needs a billion dollars to live on.

The BillionSweeps website asks you the question: How long would it take you to spend one billion dollars? It then provides the answer: If you spent $1000 every day, it would take you 2700 years to go broke.

Stupid answer, since even with a billion dollars to buy the best medical care, no one is going to live for 2700 years. A more instructive scenario is this: If someone wadded a billion dollars into your tiny little fist at birth and you lived for 75 years, how much money would you have each day? The answer is $36,500. Every single day of your life.

Of course, that’s assuming you just kept the billion piled under your mattress. Say you invested that billion with a very modest annual rate of return of 5%. How much interest could you earn each year? Fifty million dollars. That’s right. You would have fifty million dollars to live on each and every year, and the original billion would remain available for your friends to use to throw one hell of a wake after you died.

Hey, wait a minute.

Someone who has a billion dollars has $36,500 per day at their disposal over the course of a 75 year lifespan. That’s obscene, but after all, there are only 222 people worth one billion or more in the United States, according to the Forbes Magazine annual list of the world's wealthiest people.

There are, however, a lot more people who have annual incomes of at least fifty million dollars. And guess what? If you make 50 million bucks per year, that gives you $136,986 to spend per day, almost four times what our lifetime billion would afford. Hell, someone who makes a paltry $13 million per year has as much daily pocket money as our lifetime billionaire.

So now the question becomes: Does anyone really need to earn $50 million dollars per year? Does anyone even need to earn $13 million? Why do we accept this? And why in the hell aren’t we filling the streets in protest against Bush wanting to give huge tax breaks to the rich?