Bill Gates’s annual salary in 2015, according to the Internet, was three billion, seven hundred and ten million dollars. In numerical notation that’s $3,710 plus six more zeros. I like the purely verbal form. The words roll impressively, in Hamlet’s phrase, “Trippingly off the tongue.” In fact they roll so trippingly that I find them addictive. I am going to use them in this essay.
That salary is seventy-one million, three hundred forty-six thousand, one hundred fifty-three dollars and eighty cents ($71,346,153.80 for you bean counters) per week. Every week. Fifty-two weeks a year. I am impressed, not to speak of bowled over, by a number so large.
It can also be expressed (assuming a 5-day week) as fourteen million, two hundred sixty-nine thousand, two hundred and thirty dollars and eighty cents ($14,269,230.80) per day. I’ll give Bill Saturdays and Sundays off, since he presumably does his employees. Everyone needs a respite from “All work and no play …”, even if it’s only counting dividends and interest.
It is also one million, seven hundred eighty-three thousand, six hundred and fifty-three dollars and eighty-five cents ($1,783,653.85) an hour. That’s assuming a normal blue-collar eight-hour day; not bankers’ hours, which would inflate the result in the same way our economists inflate industrial productivity figures by using a reduction in the number of workers (layoffs, in everyday language) rather than an actual increase in the output of goods. Either way it’s enough to overflow the screen of your adding machine.
You have to sympathize. Think of being asked to calculate Bill’s taxes. All those investments, all those foundations, all those charitable contributions, all those complicated loophole-oriented tax deductions, all those lawyer fees. Unbelievable.
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By contrast the doorman at my New York City apartment building, a nice gentleman named Michael Kearney, who regards it as dereliction of duty to sit down during working hours (he terms as “slackers” the younger and more fit doormen who sit lazily on stools during working hours), has no problem at all with his taxes. Every penny he makes in salary is reported directly on his W-2 by his boss, who has been instructed by (but not paid by) the government to do the bookkeeping. Thanks to his union, he makes a bit over fifty thousand dollars ($50,000) a year — right around the New York City median wage. And he gets unofficial “wink-wink” indulgence from the IRS to “overlook” some of his tips that might exceed the “reasonable” allowance established by the government’s standard deduction. In due time, when he retires, he will get a pension in addition to Social Security benefits, and his health and his arches permitting, he will finally be able to sit down and relax.
Mike’s salary is nine hundred sixty-one dollars and fifty-four cents ($961.54) per working week.
Which is one hundred ninety-two dollars and thirty-one cents ($192.31 per working day..
Or twenty-four dollars and forty cents ($24.40) an hour.
As a consequence, every hour of every working day of every week of the year,
measured just between Bill Gates and Michael Kearney alone, the gap between the wealth of our top earners and our normal middle-class breadwinners is increased by one million, seven hundred thirty-three thousand, six hundred twenty-nine dollars and forty-five cents ($1,783,653.45), the difference between Bill’s and Mike’s hourly wages. Every hour of every day of every week, all year long! That can add up.
There were two thousand and eighty (2,080) such normal working hours last year. That works out to three billion, seven hundred and nine million, nine hundred and fifty-nine thousand, six hundred and sixty dollars ($3,709,959,660). (I am rounding off the cents — my enthusiasm for nitpicking is not infinite.)
Using these figures as a basis, would someone out there like to try to calculate for me how many years it will take for Bill Gates’s bank account to outstrip Michael Kearney’s by more dollars than there are miles between Mission Control and the Mars Rover?
(And while we are working on that calculation could we perhaps find a way to shorten up Mike’s day by a couple of hours so he can go and sit down and rest once in a while. Despite two heart attacks he’s been on the job for forty years now.)
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It must be acknowledged that our elected representatives in Congress, reluctantly made aware of this problem by protest groups like the ‘Occupy’ movements, have proposed several suggestions for rectifying the imbalance. One that is popular because it costs nothing is just to remind us in Op-Ed pieces that a rising tide raises all boats. A one percent (1%) rise in both Bill’s and Michael’s salary boats would provide Mr. Gates with an extra thirty-seven millions ($37,000,000) a year. Mr. Kearney, as his share, would receive the magnificent additional sum of $500 (less taxes) to spend in any irresponsible way he might choose. I’m sure he and his family would be pleased but I can’t think there would be any meaningful change in their lifestyle or in the rate of increase of our national inequality gap.
Another suggestion I have heard is for an across-the-board tax cut, which could provide Mr.Gates and his friends with extra funds with which to bankroll new job-creating ventures. This is the approach currently being pitched by President Trump, who says massive tax cuts are the best way to create more jobs. These jobs would of course include those producing fat fees for the brokers and lawyers in charge of preparing the legal paperwork to set up and later sell those ventures to the public, and thus contribute to the growth of our national GDP. (One or more of those brokers or lawyers might even by chance, according to the laws of literary irony, be living in an apartment in my very building and she might be motivated by this added income to increase Mike’s Christmas tip by as much as ten dollars, thus providing the first ever verified evidence of Ronald Raegan’s trickle-down theory.) Whether lowered taxes would in fact encourage the superrich to invest their money in start-ups that would actually provide new jobs, or whether they would just order larger yachts and more expensive penthouse apartments is a question to which we cannot get an answer without an actual experiment, so we are likely to get the answer too late if the idea proves faulty.
Lawmakers have also pointed out that by working on the disparity from the government spending side (reducing the amount of Michael’s pending Social Security benefits) the government would be able to save several billions more, especially down the road when our as yet unborn but relentlessly aging and greedy AARP’d grandchildren will otherwise be driving the budget into the red. It might not be immediately obvious how much this would narrow today’s wealth inequality gap, but possibly it would abate the terror that afflicts the wealthy today when they contemplate any change in their elevated status with regard to the lower 99.9%. There is also the (remote) possibility that legislation might have some effect if Washington were to transfer some budget lines from underwriting the Pentagon’s toys to a few things of value to the rest of us, like some roads with fewer potholes or maybe cheaper train travel or better care for veterans, instead of sinking all our money into more nuclear weapons whose only usefulness is that they remain unused.
None of these seem to me to be currently attainable, given our present political situation. Can anyone out there suggest something more promising? Mr. Trump? Mrs. Clinton? Bernie? Ms. Warren? Mr. O’Connell? Mr. Paul? Mr. Cruz? Mr. Bannon? Ivanka?
Vance Weaver 