Today I Give $1 Billion Away

This just has to be said.  I won’t be writing things like this in blog form anymore, even though it should be out there consistently.  We still have nincompoops in this country who think it a bad idea or the beginning of a slippery slope to tax the uber-rich to benefit the rest of the country. We all know they either fear some lefty boogeymen or assume they with be wealthy one day.  They won’t.

            You won’t.

            We also can’t fathom how much money one billion dollars really is.  If you taxed someone with 50 billion, and they were left with 36 billion, that does not constitute a problem.  I don’t mind writing these words down: No one needs a billion dollars, let alone multiples of a billion.

            Anyhoo, I used my trusty calculator (app) and I did some math.  I imagined what I would do with a billion dollars if it fell in my lap.  (Hopefully in check form. One billion in one-dollar bills weighs 10 tons, or a full-grown hippo. End to end, they would go around the world almost four times.)

            And yes, I would do this. You’ll see that I’m still pretty comfortable after I figure out how to give all of this away, Brewster’s Millions-style.  I would give almost all of it away because I could never look another human being in the face when I know I could help them, and still be rich as fuck. It’s abhorrent.  Grotesque. Disgusting.

            Here we go.

            I would immediately do the following things:

Pay off my house.

Pay off my mother’s house.

One-million-dollar retirement investment for me and Amy.

Settle every bill, payment, loan I can find including my kid’s stuff.

Purchase an $8ooK home and a $200K cabin in the woods.

$250K nest eggs for all 3 of my kids.

Find 15 people in my life and settle their bills up to 15K each.

Give those same 15 people a new car each.

Create 25 $10K scholarships for all the people with small kids in my life.

Spend another $500K paying off medical bills for people in my life.

Um…buy my closest friends a 500K house each? 

Guess what?  I still have $982 million dollars left!  Look at all of that!  I’m giving away houses and cars like the lady at Costco handing out Sun Chips!  This is the total amount of spending I could think of for the people in my own life.  Debt relief, new cars new houses, nest eggs…  I still would make tens of thousands from the interest that money gets from sitting in a regular bank account. Okay…think harder…

Donate $10 million to ten great charities.

Establish a $25 million program to help Oregon’s homeless population.  Tack on $50 million for the rest of the country.

Donate $10 million each to my old school district and the one my kids attended.

Feed 10,000 families (of 4) for an entire year.

Those same families get $6000 each of credit card debt relieved.

Shit, those same families get a used car ($12K) each.

I still have $576 million dollars left.  I haven’t even spent half of it.  Think I went cheap? Tack on 15% to everything I’ve already spent. Now it’s $490 million. Ugh.

I feel sick.  This is exactly why someone like me will never have a billion to spend.  Because a billion isn’t meant for spending. It’s meant for making more billions. I think that’s the problem.