This commentary is by George Longenecker, a resident of Middlesex.
Elon Musk just spent $44 billion to purchase Twitter. His net worth of $279 billion is incomprehensible without a calculator.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to find an affordable house in the Montpelier area or anywhere in Vermont.
In a public rec path shelter downtown, homeless people wait out their days. Some sleep on riverbanks and edges of woods. There have been many articles about the situation, but a small city in a small state has too little money and resources to truly fix the root problems of homelessness and income disparity, though many people in Vermont are doing admirable things with housing.
In Vermont, it’s getting harder to find a good house for under $500,000. At that price, Elon Musk could buy 558,000 homes and never have to worry about a mortgage.
It’s not just about Elon Musk; it’s about growing disparity. It’s about people who work two jobs and barely get by.
If Elon Musk earns just 5% on his wealth, he makes more than $5 billion per week, more than $740 million per day and $30 million an hour. The average American earns $53,490 per year, and has a median net worth of $121,000. Something is very wrong here.
I’ve been on a town selectboard and a budget committee, so have a sense of what it costs to run things. This year our town was bogged down in mud so bad we couldn’t make it across town. It’s challenging to maintain roads and pay salaries for under $1,400,000.
Elon Musk’s fortune would run our town for almost 200,000 years. Or perhaps Musk’s fortune could go toward our five-town school district, where it would last only 7,500 years.
Of course, that’s unlikely to happen. So what should happen to a fortune greater than the GDP of all but 48 of the world’s 192 countries? Sure, Elon Musk gives away a few billion, and his beneficiaries are glad to get it. But that does little for the growing disparity in wealth between the uber-wealthy and the penniless. That does little for a nation with people living on the street, with roads almost beyond repair, with understaffed schools.
The U.S. must pass higher income tax and Social Security rates on the top 1 percent. Perhaps we need laws like the monopoly statutes passed early in the 20th century, which would limit any individual controlling so much corporate wealth.
Until that happens, too many people wait out their days with nothing to do and nowhere to live.
