Is equity even possible?

We’ve heard about it for years. I heard it more and more progressively throughout my childhood and adolescence into adulthood. The gap between the wealthy and the working poor is growing larger and larger.

This is especially worth noting, due to the fact that we have a big election coming up soon, and everyone is talking about one kind of change or another.

I don’t know a single person who can get by without any income. And, of course, we have to pay income tax... as well as personal property tax, sales tax, and so on and so forth. Most of us can’t imagine what it must be like to live life in such a carefree manner. Who could do such a thing?

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

Enough of us have heard enough things to inform us that wealthy people purchase expensive pieces of art and multiple properties and yachts and things like that. Do they do so just because they want to have lots of stuff?

Let’s say I have a painting that appraises at $500,000. I’m CEO of a giant corporation and, for tax purposes, I show on paper that I don’t take a salary — or I just take a small one. But I’m living like a wealthy person because I own an expensive painting, right? How do I do it?

I go to the bank after figuring out the cost of my daily survival needs for the year and determine that all I need — in addition to the money I already have sitting in savings — is $300,000. So, I go to the bank and I say: “Hey, give me $300,000. Trust me, Bro.” And I use that expensive painting as collateral. I have leveraged my asset for money, and guess what? The government doesn’t tax debt.

I get to sit on my investments as they continue to appreciate and gain value; and if I never pay off that loan, the bank can seize the painting. But I got $300,000 of income that wasn’t income. And I could just as easily have placed some portion of that into other investments and just made payments with accumulated interest.

This is how Elon Musk bought Twitter. He did it with other people’s money. He went to the bank and said, “Give me $44 billion. I have all this Tesla stock as collateral.” It was what is called a leveraged buyout.

Take a moment and let this information sink in.

According to taxfoundation.org, the average working American pays 14.9% for income taxes.

According to Yahoo Finance, “ProPublica’s report showed that between 2014 and 2018, (Jeff) Bezos paid $972 million in total taxes on $4.22 billion of income. Meanwhile, his wealth grew by $99 billion, meaning the true tax rate was only 0.98% during this period.”

Take a moment and let that sink in as well.

Take a moment to consider that, according to Fortune magazine, Bezos’ vanity trip into space cost $5 billion in total. That’s billion with a B!

Let’s also consider how so many wealthy individuals put a lot of money into supporting certain politicians. For instance, Peter Thiel is worth $9.1 billion. He loves emerging technologies and is a part owner of Facebook, as well as numerous other tech/internet ventures. Most recently, he has been pushing cryptocurrency and owns millions of dollars worth of two different cryptocurrencies. He is very much behind one particular candidate who, all of a sudden, has just started talking about cryptocurrency. Not only that, but this one particular candidate has a running mate in the next election who has just started selling NFTs (a crypto-related way to move a lot of money) and just spoke at a crypto conference in July.

That particular candidate used to call crypto a scam as recently as three years ago.

Now billionaires who have a serious interest in cryptocurrency are financially backing these candidates, it’s suddenly a different tune they are singing.

Guess what else: cryptocurrencies perform better and surge in value when the US dollar is struggling. The reason is because it’s a different form of currency.

Now... why would billionaires with a major stake in an alternate form of currency want to financially back key decision-makers in our government?

I will let you speculate. For my part, I will just sit here and wonder what this means for the average American who has no cryptocurrency or investments. And I’ll think about the statistic from Bankrate that says almost 60% of homes in America can’t cover a $500 emergency. Something tells me that equity is not on the table for this election.

Jonathon Dawe is a staff writer at the Daily American Republic. He can be reached at jdawe@darnews.com.