Man Of The People

Bernie Sanders pointed out last night that Michael Bloomberg "owns more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans". Bloomberg's net worth is $64.2 billion, making him the eighth-richest person in the United States.

It's a shocking statistic, but Matt Bruenig (People's Policy Project) believes Sanders understated Bloomberg's wealth.

Bruening states that the bottom 38% of American households have a collective net worth of $11.4 billion, meaning that Bloomberg owns nearly six times as much wealth as they do. Citing the Federal Reserve's latest Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) data:

The definition of wealth used in the official SCF publications includes cars as wealth. But academics that study wealth inequality, like Edward Wolff, often do not count cars as wealth because they are rapidly-depreciating consumer durables that most people can't really sell for the practical reason that they need a car to get around and live. When you exclude cars from the definition of wealth, what you find is that the bottom 48 percent of households have less combined wealth than Michael Bloomberg does. This is 60.4 million households or 158.9 million people.

Some math-challenged individuals are pointing out that Sanders, with a net worth of $2.5 million, is also a rich man. No question, that is a nice chunk of dough. But it is sofa-cushion change compared to Bloomberg's bank account.

Let me illustrate:

One million seconds is 11 days. One billion seconds is 32 years.

If you had one million dollars and spent $1,000 a day, you would run out of money in 3 years.
If you had one billion dollars and spent $1,000 a day, you would run out of money in 2,740 years.

If you earned one dollar per second, you'd earn Sanders's net worth in 29 days.
If you earned one dollar per second, you'd earn Bloomberg's net worth in 2,035 years.

If you had $64.2 billion in the bank, you'd earn $2.5 million in interest in one day.

If you deducted Sanders's net worth from Bloomberg's net worth:

$64,200,000,000 (Bloomberg)
-    $2,500,000 (Sanders)
---------------
$64,197,500,000

Rounding that off, Bloomberg's net worth would change from $64.2 billion to ... $64.2 billion.

Here's another fun fact about a different wealthy person (but a similar delusional asshole):

If you were given $7,000 an hour, every day since the birth of Jesus Christ, Jeff Bezos would still have more money than you.