Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
How we benefit from billionaires
How we benefit from billionaires
Apr 26, 2025 12:30 AM
mon claim made by those who focus on economic inequality is that if business people have acquired massive wealth they must have done so at the expense of others. The solution, they claim, would be a tax on wealth that allows could be redistributed to the working poor. A key problem with this line of thinking is that the business rich aren’t as rich as we may assume.

The reality, as economist Timothy Terrell explains, is that most business wealth is owned in the form of corporate stocks which is not as liquid as we may assume. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may own 500 million shares of pany’s stock, but if he tried to sell it he would get substantially less than the current listed stock price.

They may still be incredibly rich, of course, but that is only because they are making other people better off too. In acquiring their wealth they created wealth for others. As Terrell says,

Take Wal-Mart, a favorite target of unfair wage practice claims. pany’s CEO, Doug McMillon, isaccused of earning 1,180 times more than the median workerwith an pensation package of $22.8 million. To a single individual, $22.8 million seems like a lot of money. But consider that Wal-Mart also has in the order of 2.2 million employees. If the CEO were to take a $1 salary and pany were to spread that over each worker, the worker would receive a one-time bonus of $10. Mr. McMillon would quickly go bankrupt just trying to buy dinner for each employee just once.

If we look atWal-Mart’s 2018 10-K report, pany produced revenues of $514 billion. Of that, $385 billion was a direct expense, primarily sent down the product chain to suppliers to pay for their workers and suppliers and so forth. Roughly $50 billion went to store workers. Another $107 billion was on SG&A, which can be assumed to be almost entirely labor related, either direct Wal-Mart employees or panies paying their workers.

All-told, an estimated $490 billion of those $514 billion in revenues ended up in the pockets of a direct worker somewhere in the world, supporting untold millions. Just the direct Wal-Mart employees collected an estimated 20-25% of the total revenues. The total pensation package doesn’t even register as a rounding error. Investors got a dividend of $6 billion, or just 1% of that. It’s important to note that many Wal-Mart investors hold their sharein individual investment accounts or pension systems, which also benefitline workers.

The wealthy owners of Wal-Mart, the Waltons, only see 0.2% of the economic activity generated by pany. That’s a far cry from the 95% paid to workers and the remainder going to retirement pension accounts for individuals. The workers, or the 99%, are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of all that wealth the Waltons formally own.

Read more . . .

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved