One of the many hilarious Republican talking points is that the private sector spends money more effectively than the government. Every corporation on the New York Stock Exchange disproves that argument on a minutely basis. [If you want a dramatic example, read William Cohen’s Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon.] If you can find a single CEO whose salary makes a lick of sense, you’re probably trying to bullshit yourself and me. No government office is arrogant enough to pay anyone millions of dollars for squatting in a corner office making foolish decisions. In fact, the biggest abuses of government funds are consistently when the government farms out work to the private sector. Private business can’t seem to do anything without doing it badly, other than cobbling together harmless or harmful and unnecessary widgets and toys; like assault weapons.
Idle billionaire playboy Jeff Bezos just launched his latest toy, a roughly half-billion-dollar megayacht that pretty much flaunts how much excess cash the boy has to flaunt. It is a “sailing yacht,” which means he has the time to let the wind blow him to his luxury destinations. At 417 feet/127m, Bezos’ “Koru” is the world’s largest sailing yacht equipped with three masts, an on-deck pool and a mermaid on the bow that looks like his girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez.
Bezos isn’t risking his precious time to the winds of fate, though. He also has a $75M Damen Yachting “butler boat,” the Abeona, a 246-foot support vessel toting the “toys” — the ATVs, supercars, seaplanes, motorcycles, smaller boats, scuba gear, personal submarines, and a helicopter hangar—and a 45 person crew to make sure Jeffy and his bimbo don’t have to lift a finger or sully their presence sleeping in the vicinity of minions. The $75M Abeona is a motorized yacht and has the range to go anywhere Bezos might want to travel on a single “tank” of gas.
At the moment, the world seems to be gorging on mindless and useless billionaires. As of April, Forbes Magazine says there are 2,640 billionaires in the world and they have hoarded at least $12.2 trillion and the USA has spewed 735 of those useless, money-grubbing, corporate-welfare morons across the planet.
Check out the comments on the NYT link above. Nitwits and asskissers said servile things like “Amazon is akin to the automobile. He deserves it. The fact that it drives the less accomplished to deep green envy is just an added bonus.” What could a person do to “earn” $125 billion dollars? What did Bezos do to “deserve” even a few million, let alone billions? What kind of work could possibly be worth that hourly wage? People who save lives for a living aren’t even in that economic territory. The President of the United States receives a $400,000 annual salary. Bezos, like every other rich asshole on the planet, was simply lucky, took advantage of the national infrastructure (transportation, digital and physical communications systems, business regulations, Republican income tax protection, and other semi-legal systems) that he in no way paid for, and put his money to work with Trump to reduce his tax obligations to near-zero. You might call that “smart” (Trump does.), but I’d call it treasonous and good reason to nationalize Amazon and put Bezos on that damn boat for life as an international criminal.
Yeah, lucky. Like Musk, Gates, and 99% of the billionaire élite, Bezos was a rich kid, spoiled and sent to the best schools anyone could afford, and had his success handed to him on a platter that even fool couldn’t miss picking up. Reagan trashing “unearned income” made it so that goobers like Bezos could hide his income through stock that he bestowed on himself as CEO and Chairman of the Amazon board of directors. If you don’t think Bezos’ parents were rich, explain how they were able to loan him US$245,000 in 1995 (equivalent to $477,134.28 in 2023) for an on-line bookstore? Who had a family that could cough up that kind of money in 1995, especially after putting him through a pair of degrees at Princeton? While he can make a bullshit claim to growing up with a single parent, his maternal grandparents had money and they generously handed it down to his step-father and mother. He couldn’t even find an original name for his company and stole “Amazon” from a Minneapolis lesbian-owned bookstore.
The Nixon/Reagan/Bush I & II/Trump “elections” (two of which were anointments, not elections, since Bush II and Trump lost the popular vote) proved that you can fool almost half of the voters all of the time. None of the “tax cuts” enacted by any Republican have made a nickel’s difference to working people, but they keep hoping it might. Dribble-down has been all negative for us, though. Political economists David Hope and Julian Limberg studied the effects of “tax cuts for the rich” and summarized their study with “We find that major tax cuts for the rich push up income inequality, as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The size of the effect is substantial: on average, each major tax cut results in a rise of over 0.7 percentage points in top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect holds in both the short and medium term. Turning our attention to economic performance, we find no significant effects of major tax cuts for the rich. More specifically, the trajectories of real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate are unaffected by significant reductions in taxes on the rich in both the short- and medium-term.” Since the rich get that way from extracting value and resources from labor and national treasure (including natural resources), worrying about their luxury and opulence makes no sense from the perspective of the 99%. But that is exactly what Republicans are selling to The Marching Morons.
Trump’s acting budget director (talk about ultimate oxymorons) Russ Vought, said “It’s not that Americans are taxed too little, it’s that Washington spends too much.” The world is awash in billionaires buying half-billion dollar yachts, building mansions all over the planet, and hoarding more money than most national budgets and these goobers think they need more? Heather Cox Richards, who provides a consistently brilliant analysis of the current political nonsense, wrote, “A 2020 study by Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards of the RAND Corporation showed that the changing economic distribution systems of the past forty years have moved a staggering $50 trillion upward, out of the hands of the bottom 90% of Americans. (The national debt is currently about $31.5 trillion.)” So much for rational spending from the “private sector.”
If you suspect that I harbor nothing but ill-will toward Jeffy and billionaires and multi-millionaires in general, you are not particularly perceptive. I am a firm believer in the thought behind Aerosmith’s “Eat the Rich” and one of my favorite dreams is driving to work one morning seeing assholes in custom tailored suits hanging from every telephone pole the whole way to downtown St. Paul. The first thing I thought of when I read about Bezos’ boat was hoping for a spontaneous hurricane to sink him and everyone he knows in the deepest part of the ocean and the second was wondering if we could take up a collection to pay China to torpedo the damn thing. Maybe he could invite his butt-buddies Musk and DeSantis to do their interview on the boat during hurricane season?
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