Billionaires are the new scapegoat Saw this sticker on the back window of an SUV today. “The only minority destroying the country are the billionaires.” Let’s take a look at that claim. There are 989 billionaires in the United States, according to Forbes. All their money added together comes to $8.4 trillion. The federal government spent $7 trillion last year. Take every dollar from every billionaire, hand it to the government, and it covers government spending for just over one year. The next year the government still needs $7 trillion, and the billionaires have nothing left to take. The rich, despite what you’re told, pay far more than their fair share. The richest 1 percent of Americans paid 40 percent of all federal income tax in 2022 and 38 percent in 2023. The bottom half of Americans paid 3 percent. Those are IRS numbers. Billionaires fund a government that has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. They also hold most of their wealth in company stock. Stock means you own a piece of a company. Companies started by billionaires: Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Oracle and Dell. Those companies created the products and technology we use every day and take for granted. By inventing and producing, those companies give people jobs. Amazon employs more than a million people. Walmart has 1.6 million workers in the United States. The Walton family, big-time billionaires, owns Walmart. The Walmart down the road that sells a gallon of milk for under $3 is where their money comes from. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage in 1994. Today anything you order shows up in two days anywhere in Ohio. Jensen Huang’s company Nvidia makes the computer chips that run AI, the technology behind ChatGPT, the “AI Overview” at the top of your Google search and the app that answers your questions on your phone. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX builds the rockets that carry American astronauts to the space station. From 2011 to 2020 America had no rocket that could do that. NASA bought seats on Russian rockets for $80 million a ticket. He was also once the darling of the press and the Democrats for building Tesla, the electric car. Have billionaires stepped on the backs of Americans to get rich? In 1990 the United States had 66 billionaires. Now it has 989. Look at what happened to people like you and me over those same years. The typical American family made $65,440 in 1990 and $83,730 in 2024, after adjusting for inflation. That is an $18,000 raise. A 42-inch flat screen TV cost $15,000 when Sony and Sharp first sold one in 1997. Walmart sells one for under $200 today. In 1990 a long-distance phone call cost money by the minute. Today you video chat with your grandkids for free. You needed a paper map to find an address. Now your phone talks you there. You went to the library to look something up. Now you ask your phone. You drove to the store, stood in line and hoped they had it. Now it shows up at your door. The people who built those things got rich doing it, while making your life easier and cheaper at the same time. That is capitalism, powered by incentives and built on free markets, innovation and personal freedom. And guess what: other countries already tried to penalize the bad billionaire types. Venezuela and Cuba ran their rich people out. How’d that go? Venezuela sits on the largest oil reserves on earth. In 1998 the average Venezuelan earned $3,870 a year. Then Hugo Chavez took office. He seized oil companies, farms, banks and grocery chains from their owners and put them under government ownership. By 2017 the average Venezuelan had lost 24 pounds in one year for lack of food. That comes from a survey of 6,168 people by three Venezuelan universities. Nine out of ten Venezuelans lived in poverty. Six out of ten woke up hungry with no money for food. Prices rose 4,000 percent that year. Today the average Venezuelan earns $3,495 a year, less than in 1998. Next door, Colombia tripled its income per person over the same years. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans left the country. That is one out of every five. Cuba in 1958 was one of the five richest countries in Latin America, richer than South Korea, Hong Kong or Singapore. Then Fidel Castro took the farms, factories, hotels and banks from the people who owned them and put them under the regime’s control. Today the average Cuban earns about $10 a month. Cuba’s minimum wage is under $5 a month. Haiti’s minimum wage is higher than Cuba’s. The irony: even the sticker smearing billionaires comes from the free market and consumer choice the sticker villainizes. Think about it. Somebody designed that sticker on a computer. Somebody sold it online. A truck delivered it. I took this picture on an iPhone. Apple, driven by consumer demand, made Steve Jobs a billionaire. Billionaires do not pass laws. Congress does. Congress decides how much the government spends and how much it borrows. Congress ran the national debt past $40 trillion. Then the same politicians point at 989 billionaires and tell you they are the problem. Follow the money. A politician who says “tax the rich” is asking you to hand him more money and more power. He is not going to give it to you. He is going to spend it, borrow against it and come back for more. That is how the debt got to $40 trillion. Blaming billionaires is how the power-hungry politician keeps you from looking at his racket. The haves-versus-have-nots story is a tool created by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. It splits people into teams. It makes you angry at the man who built the company you work for, the store you shop at and the phone in your hand. While you are angry at him, the politician raises your taxes, prints money that drives up your grocery bill and regulates small businesses out of existence. Free markets built the richest country in history. Politicians who attack free markets are not after fairness. They are after control. The politicians are dangerous. But do you know who I think is even more dangerous? The people who repeat the lies that “billionaires are bad” and “they need to pay their fair share.” The politician knows he is lying. The guy with the sticker on his SUV believes it. He votes on it. He teaches it to his kids. He never checks his anger and rage against the facts. Every empty shelf in Caracas and every $10 paycheck in Havana started with people who believed that sticker. The minority destroying this country is not 989 billionaires. It is the politicians who sell the lie and the millions who buy it without reading the receipt. Read the receipt.