Should billionaires exist? Recently, there has been a heated debate in the US and the UK on this topic. The fact that we are even having this debate is a depressing indication of the extent to which extreme inequality has been normalized. Of course, billionaires shouldn’t exist. This shouldn’t be a remotely controversial thing to say, it shouldn’t even be considered a leftwing thing to say. Even with today’s promising wage trends, the gap between the rich and the poor is now the biggest it has been in half a century. The 400 richest Americans have tripled their share of overall wealth in the past 40 years. 

It is extremely difficult to fathom how much one billion dollars even is. According to TheCampus.com, “If you worked every day, making $5,000 a day, from the time Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492 to the time you’re reading this, you still would not be a billionaire. (The math is simple: $5000 x 365 days x 528 years = $963,600,000.)” Consider Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the richest person in the world. Bezos has a net worth of $114 billion, which comes to roughly $2.2 billion a week, or $312 million a day. And he’s not the only one making an outrageous amount of money. There are 607 billionaires in the U.S., including the guy currently occupying the White House. Most of them are multi-billionaires, meaning they amass more than $100 per second.

 Hoarding that much wealth in a society like ours, where so many people are suffering, is immoral. Fewer than 200 of the 2,200 billionaires in the world have signed the Giving Pledge, created by Bill and Melinda Gates, to donate the majority of their money to charity. Billionaires have immense power with their fortunes, they could end homelessness in the United States. If each billionaire donated only 14 percent of their net worth, they could solve world hunger several times over. Billionaires have the power to solve development problems and improve thousands of lives, but many instead choose to keep money they will never use. 

The existence of billionaires is a vivid example of the money-obsessed society that we live in. It is also a demonstration of systemic racism, as less than one percent of billionaires in the United States are Black. The three richest billionaires in the United States are white men with a combined net worth of over $300 billion, while the wealthiest Black billionaire, Robert F. Smith, has a net worth of $5 billion. Some may argue that billionaires earned their money and should be entitled to keep it. However, billionaires made their fortunes with aid from their employees, who did not necessarily get paid the full economic value of their work. Amazon is known for exploiting its workers through technology that monitors workers’ time off and expecting employees to be as productive as robots. All the while, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos could spend $100 million a year without his fortune running out for 1,140 years.

Billionaires should not exist, and a wealth tax is imperative to end the extreme disparity between the affluent and the poor. Billionaires are enabling social inequality by hoarding their money. But if they genuinely want to do good in the world, they too will support a wealth tax.