Matt Ygelsias has a chart featuring the four wealthiest Americans. At the top sits Bill Gates, with a combined net worth of $54 billion, followed by Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison, and Christy Walton. Yglesias points out that the gap, even here at the very high end, is enormous. Gates' net worth is more than twice Walton's; Buffett's is just shy. Consider that for a moment. The two wealthiest individuals in the United States are each worth twice the fourth wealthiest.
Yglesias asks what would happen should any of these individuals intervene in politics in a "heavy handed way", which prompts all sorts of outrage among his commenters, who mis the point. I doubt Yglesias is naive enough to believe that these folks don't intervene. In particular, consider Christy Walton. Heir of Sam Walton, her wealth is due in large part to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart impacts all sorts of economic issues, usually at the local and state level, although their anti-union stance combined with their national presence and enormous resources dedicated to keeping Wal-Mart union-free are a huge factor in keeping labor organization stymied.
All the same, while several comments note that both Gates and Buffett in particular have set up philanthropic organizations to deal with all sorts of social concerns - poverty, women's rights and health, and others - my guess is Yglesias is asking what would happen if, say Bill Gates simply offered up half his net worth - some $27 billion - in a bid to transform our politics. In the first place, he would drop from first to third place on the list, but still have an immense amount of resources with which to do all sorts of philanthropic projects. In the second place, it would create a situation almost without parallel in our history (I say almost, because, at one point during one of the "panics" of the late 19th century, the US government received a loan from financier and steel magnate J. P. Morgan to prevent insolvency).
At a practical, less hypothetical level, we should probably concern ourselves less with these individuals - for all their truly obscene personal wealth fascinates and inspires us - and those far more mundane and relatively common folks, still at the higher end of the income scale, who insist that even having a combined annual income near half a million dollars is not enough to deal with our current economic troubles. Therefore, it seems, we should not be asking of those who can afford to do so to contribute a larger portion of their income so that all of us (including them) can be more economically secure.
That is the question at issue as the Republicans insist that allowing the tax rates to resume their Clinton-era levels, for those who earn $250,000 or more a year, will be a drag on the economy. Please recall, they argued this in 1993. A partial result of the passage of the Clinton-era tax policies was a more robust and sane fiscal outlook, not the least including the elimination of the operating deficit and the prospect, should those surpluses have been allowed to continue, of the eventual elimination of our federal obligations. It seems to me that, quite apart from questions of what would happen if Bill Gates paid every voter in America $100 to vote for his preferred candidates (a pittance, really, of roughly $1.5 billion), we need to be asking this question in light of certain facts.
