Critics of the wealthy take pride in pointing out the way many of these fat cats live – yachts and planes and mega mansions. The criticism implies their wealth has deprived you and me of something.
Criticism often claims – ignorantly – that the wealth of these innovative creative people should be used to give a raise to millions of workers
I say I wouldn’t mind having a plane to get about, that would be lovely, but I didn’t earn the ability to do so. I worked for others, I didn’t create anything.
Musk, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page, and Schultz did create things including around 2,453,000 jobs plus an untold number indirect jobs, even businesses. And think how that have changed the world, overwhelming for the better
Most of their critics have created nothing except envy and a sense of entitlement and victimization.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
Interesting analogy to Buffet’s wealth; but you know, probably half the world’s population is doing OK, so take their $12 share and give to the poorer half. Now they’ve got a whopping raise $24 .
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Arguably. The American Economic Association says:
“…that high marginal labor income tax rates on top earners are an effective tool for social insurance even when households have high labor supply elasticity, households make dynamic savings decisions, and policies have general equilibrium effects. We construct a large-scale overlapping generations model with uninsurable labor productivity risk, show that it has a realistic wealth distribution, and numerically characterize the optimal top marginal rate. We find that marginal tax rates for top 1 percent earners of 79 percent are optimal as long as the model earnings and wealth distributions display a degree of concentration as observed in US data.”
And rich athletes and entertainers are scraping the bottom of billionaires lists.
Tiger Woods: “at least” $1 B
Oprah Winfrey: $2.5 B
Gina Rinehart : $30.2 B (mining)
Steve Ballmer: $91.4 B (Microsoft)
Sure, spread Warren Buffets money around and it won’t go far, but what if you redistribute a reasonable portion of –all– billionaires? Way more than $12.
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Per a quick Google search I just performed, Warren Buffett has a net worth of 94.1 billion dollars. There are 7.753 billion people in the world. So take all of Warren Buffett’s wealth, distribute it evenly across the earth’s population… and everybody gets just over $12.
Not much of a raise, is it?
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Today, there are more than 2.2 billion children on Earth. Nearly two billion of these live in a developing country.
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Our nation is messed up because the emphasis is on entitlement and not personal responsibility.
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I think people need to ponder your statement, “I worked for others, I didn’t create anything” and understand what that means. In order to receive value, you must first create it. Well said.
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You nailed this. You and I are on the exact same planet👍🏻
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