I saw a bumper sticker today with the Obama logo and the words "trickle-up poverty." It struck me that it would be pretty hard, actually, to impoverish the wealthy of this country. But I kind of like math, so I decided to see just HOW unlikely "trickle-up poverty" actually is.
The lowest 15% of people in this country live in poverty, defined as making less than just about $20,000 per year for a family of three.
I went ahead and rounded up to the lowest 20%; that's 23,682 households (not people).
Although you can separate them into smaller chunks, the average amount they make in that 20% is $10,000 to $14,999 per year.
I rounded up, and figured they would need about $10,000 per household to not be officially in poverty. (Technically, I'm rounding still more, because most of the households in the lowest quintile consist of fewer than three people, so they would qualify for being out of poverty with even less cash.)
23,682 households multiplied by $10,000 means we'd need $230,682,000. That's a LOT!
The total population of the U.S. is about 313,914,040, so the top 1% represents 3,139,140 people.
To reach our lofty goal of having $230 million and change to bring people out of poverty, they'd have to contribute...
$75 each.
So you know how all those politicians and rich guys are always like, "If Warren Buffet thinks he should pay more taxes, let him write a check!"? I think those guys should suck my balls.
For the record, I don't necessarily think this is a great plan (neither the $75 checks nor the ball-sucking). I also recognize that there are differences between households and people (like Mitt AND Ann Romney would have to kick in $75, for a total of $150). And frankly, if we really want to fix the system, we're going to have to pour a lot more money than $230 million into education, social security, health care, etc. I realize that the contribution would have to be yearly, not a one-time check. And frankly, just having $20,000 doesn't really make a family of three exactly comfortable. The only point to this super-fun-time math is that you could take the ENTIRE COUNTRY out from under the federal poverty level, and the super-wealthy maybe couldn't buy ten hand-carved ice cubes. Depending on where you look, the 1 percent's net worth averages between 6.8 and 16 million per household.
I'm not blaming the 1% (although there are plenty of reasons why I could), but shit, y'all.