According to statista.com, there were 49 billionaires in the year 2000 in America, and according to cnbc.com, there were an astonishing 705 billionaires in the year 2018 in America. Yet, as reported by census.gov, we find that in America, "In 2018, there were 38.1 million people in poverty." So clearly a rising tide does not lift all boats and clearly this unprecedented and unhealthy concentration of wealth is mainly good for those that are the billionaires, but does little or nothing, for those that have little or nothing of material assets, or of opportunity, or of hope.
The fact of the matter is that the taxing authority of this great nation appears to have been subsumed and thereby compromised by those that are the richest amongst us, for the express benefit of that individual wealth, as well as corporate ownership of wealth. Further to the point, antitrust laws that once stood for something and meant something of significance when so implemented, apparently is no more, as the easiest path for any entity, individual or corporate, to accumulate massive amounts of wealth over short periods of time, is to have monopoly or dominant positions in enterprises in which the barrier for entry for any other entity is prohibitive; and therefore these privileged organizations are able to extract extra profits for their businesses and suck dry the pocketbooks of other enterprises or various people without the fear that they will ever be undercut or overcome by something else.
It is to the great shame of America, that this the richest nation in aggregate wealth in the world, somehow has 38.1 million of its citizens that live in poverty; of which, this very small elite of people that have become extraordinarily rich in America, still somehow believe that they deserve every dollar of their wealth, and that further it is not their responsibility or necessarily even their desire to see poverty, as an institution, being placed into the dustbin of American history. Perhaps the most telling reason of why this is so, is because the very wealth that these billionaires have is often fundamentally based upon their successful exploitation of others, be it in this country, or countries throughout the world, of which their cleverness in milking every angle and every loophole that benefits them at the expense of others, is their signal calling card.
Those that are billionaires should never be seen as heroes, but should be seen for the frauds that they actually are, because none of these billionaires, no, not a single one, is about being fair to society and in particular being fair to the people that make up that society; but rather they are always about getting and extracting all that they can get from that society, and hiding behind the false front, that what they have done, isn't illegal, probably because they can afford the finest legal minds, the finest talent, the finest lobbyists, and the finest accountants that money can buy. First thing that these billionaires really need to do to get their hearts right is to recognize and to understand that nobody begrudges anyone else a fair profit, nor does anybody begrudge anyone else that works extraordinarily hard to have the fair fruits of that labor; but to leave 38.1 million peoples behind, when you can be a force of good for at least some of those people, is the very reason why billionaires that have their pleasure now, will find that all of their money and all of their influence, is not the coin of the realm that they will fatefully face in the afterlife.