this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I don't think everyone should be forced to give away everything they don't need to survive, I just think (in America's case) if you have enough wealth for several generations to live in luxury while our people are dying from inaccessible medicine and healthcare and more than half of our country has no savings living paycheck to paycheck, we've massively failed as a society to provide basic needs for our people. You could fund universal healthcare with just a tax on billionaires and they wouldn't have to change their lifestyle at all. If I had enough money that I lost 90% of it and I literally couldn't notice the difference, I'd be full of guilt every night watching people die because they rationed their insulin.
Even without a tax in place (and I seriously and truly support putting a tax in place), millionaires and billionaires could take relatively small steps to improve life for a lot of people.
Do you remember last year that news story where a church used the donations from the collection plate to buy up the medical debt for some people? If I'm recalling correctly, the church bought up the debt, pennies on the dollar, and with like $50k were able to help over 100 people. I may have wrong figures for the money value and the number of people impacted, but I think the point remains that a lot of people's lives got better without the medical debt, both financially and emotionally.
Billionaires have the capacity to do this same type of thing. Just pick any city and throw money at a major problem that directly impacts citizens. You don't even need to work with the city or state government there! Get together with your other billionaire friends and strategize to pick a variety of cities. Make a game out of it about who can afford to pay off the problems in Los Angeles or Chicago, and who can only afford to pay off the problems in Sacramento or Springfield.