35,000 or So

Trey Smith

I was reading an article at Mother Jones yesterday that featured a very illuminating chart. It shows that there are a tad more than 35,000 individuals in the US who have a net worth of $50 million or more. That's more than most of the rest of the world put together.

On one hand, 35,000 sounds like a big number. However, in terms of overall US population, it's a teeny weenie number. As of the beginning of this year, the population of the US stood at 314 million people. So, let's do the math!

35,000 ÷ 314,000,000 = 0.000111465

See, I told you, it's a dinky number!

And yet, both the President and Congress work diligently to insure that these 35,000 or so are happy. While both sides throw around a lot of emotional rhetoric about the rest of us, their chief goal is to make sure that our laws, regulations and policies in no way impede this tiny subset of the overall population. If they believe that they must sacrifice the rest of us in order to keep these 35,000 folks purring along, then that is exactly what they will do.

To put this in a perspective, let's say you live in a town of approximately 9,800 citizens. Using that minuscule percentage above, it would mean that ONE person is all that really matters to your town's government officials. Every ordinance or policy brought up for discussion would center around whether or not it benefited or injured this one individual. If, for example, the decision would benefit this ONE person and no else, it would get the green light. If the decision would not benefit this ONE person, even if it benefited everybody else, it immediately would be voted down.

Does that sound fair to you? (Probably so, if you happen to be that ONE person!)