TL;DR: Without touching a penny of their existing wealth, while still leaving $500,000 per year income each, the top 1% in America could raise everyone above the poverty line 3,781 times over. Bezos could do it himself for less than the sales tax rate in most states. Musk could do it himself for less than one percent of his annual income. But instead, Musk is guiding a department that will have to cut benefits to those who need them.
Note: US dollars used throughout. I do not distinguish between "income" in the sense that wage-earners think of it and "annual revenue" any more than the sources I cite do; the point being that I’m talking about money they get every year, not counting amassed wealth.
As a particular kind of nerd, I adore pop-culture alignment charts.
They riff off the alignment system from Dungeons & Dragons, which uses a two-dimensional axis of "good-evil" and "law-chaos" to cover people’s attitudes. It’s a pretty blunt instrument; I personally expand it by including switching the order of labels to mark small differences. For example, I think MCU Steve Rogers is probably more "Good Lawful" instead of "Lawful Good", to reflect how he’ll break a law in order to do the "good" or "right" thing.
But the very existence of the chart begs a question: What, exactly, are we calling "evil"? Are there behaviors we can say are always evil? {1}
Is it the motives? A number of pop culture villains — particularly in the MCU (Killmonger, The Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) — have had at least understandable motivations, even if the actions they took based on those motivations were monstrous.
Is it the actions taken, then? But what about monstrous actions taken in order to create a greater good? (Ozymandias from Watchmen, the Operative from Serenity) At what point does an action become unjustifiable if it creates good?
Any kind of definition of "evil" has to be able to deal with both of these types of scenarios without breaking.
As far as I can tell, that leaves us with one working metric: greed.
I don’t simply mean the amassing of resources; specifically both a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed {2} and that also deprives others of needed resources.
What counts as "needed"?
In 2010, some economists did a study suggesting that incomes above $75K (or $109K in 2024 dollars) did not improve happiness]. There’s a more recent study that indicates that effect may go all the way up to $500K, although it plateaus somewhere around $200K, particularly if the person is already unhappy for other reasons.
So let’s pretend that "needed" is what will increase someone’s happiness. While we can argue that isn’t what need actually means, I think we can safely say that going beyond what will increase your happiness will also go beyond what counts as a "need".
If we use the plateau of $200K as our low mark, then it’s worth noting that only 14.4% of Americans made over $200K in 2023. But that’s a plateau, not a high point, so let’s go with themuch higher number of half a million dollars of income per year.
The idea of having a half-million dollars, let alone getting that every year is well out of my reach, as it is for nearly all Americans.
Interestingly, many of the summaries of income distribution in the US lumped all incomes above $200K into one big group. Still, I wanted to find something that separated out those above $500K a year, and finally found one.
Those who make over $500K a year — those who without question have more than they need — are literally the 1%. A tiny group that literally holds more wealth than the entire middle class in the United States.
In 2023, just over 50 percent of Americans had an annual household income that was less than $75,000.
The median household income — that is, halfway between the lowest and highest — was $80,610 in 2023. The average is a bit higher — $106K — but that is even more subject than the median to being shifted by the extremely high outliers of the 1%. I couldn’t find a good modal distribution or frequency distribution for 2023 data, but the chart below (using 2005 data) really hammers home the differences between "median" and "average" and how those numbers only give a very, very partial picture.
In 2023, there were 36.8 million people in poverty in the United States. With a current single-individual poverty income threshold of $12,880 per year, the amount needed to bring every single person in the United States above the poverty threshold is $497,168,000. {3}
So we have a group of people who are well and truly out of the "more can make their life better," while we have right here a whole bunch of people who objectively don’t have enough to pay their medical bills, afford a place to live, or enough to eat.
But still, that $500 million sounds like a lot to ask, even of the top 1%.
That’s because you’re still thinking of money at the kind of scale that the rest of us have to use.
Half a billion dollars is only 5.2% of Jeff Bezos’ estimated annual income of $9,600,000,000.
Half a billion dollars is only 0.35% of Elon Musk’s annual income of $141,535,081,983. {4}
For less — and in Musk’s case, far less — than the average sales tax rate in the US, either one of these two could literally and single-handedly lift every American above the poverty line, without touching their existing assets. And definitely without bringing them below that $500K line.
And that’s just two of them. Individually. The literal top 1% — the ones above that $500K a year mark — make up 18% of all annual income in the US. According to the CBO, that’s $2,520,000,000,000 a year.
The average income among the 1.28 million households in the top 1% of the distribution was about $2.0 million for a total of $2.6 trillion or about 18% of all pre-tax, pre-transfer income. The average income among the approximately 11,000 households in the top 0.01 percent of the distribution was about $48.5 million.
For those 1.28 million households to all have $500K per year is $640,000,000,000. Which again, seems like a lot of money.
In comparison to the annual income of the 1%, it’s not. It’s just over a quarter of their annual income. That leaves $1,880,000,000,000 in income per year above the $500K mark for the top 1%.
Without touching a penny of their existing wealth, while still leaving $500,000 per year income each, the top 1% in America could raise everyone above the poverty line 3,781 times over.
Without touching a penny of their existing wealth, while still leaving $500,000 per year income, the top 1% in America could literally give the 8.08 billion people living in the world over $230 each and every year. Or they could end extreme poverty for the 700 million people living on less than $1.90 a day worldwide nearly four times over.
There are some wealthy people who understand this. There’s a whole crop of young rich people who are dedicated to giving it away.
But the rest?
Well, I know where they go on the alignment chart.
{1} If your first thought is "violence", there are plenty of times that violence is not always automatically considered "evil." Intimate partner violence, because of the selfish power motivations behind it, does fall under this rubric for me (we are not forgetting you Brock Turner). For reasons, I’m not focusing on that particular class of behavior here, but yeah, totally in the "evil" camp.
{2} This first part is straight out of Merriam-Webster.
{3} This is obviously oversimplified; if you’d like to run the math for different size households and the like, feel free, but the point remains the same.
{4} You read that right — less than 1% of his annual income. Percentage wise, for a household making the US median income of $80K a year, that’s equivalent to only $283. Adjust for your own income, and see if you would pay that to literally raise everyone in the US above the poverty line.
Featured Photo by fikry anshor on Unsplash