askyermom

I think a full trillion might be a little much. Let’s not get carried away. Instead of a trillion, let’s say we have half a trillion dollars to spend–that’s 500 billion. How are we going to do it?

Are we going to spend most of it on improvements? Wild creative projects? Are we going to help others or help ourselves with most of it? The latest estimate of what it would take to rebuild Ukraine is 500 billion over 10 years, so we could build a whole country!! Through the magic of time, we’d have some stray billions left over, too.

Wait. Let’s keep this more personal. For this example it’s my billions. I want to figure out what I would do. I want to really get my reasoning clear on how much of 500 billion I need for my own self help or my personal vision. Until now, I sort of wanted one mansion. Really, I just wanted a swimming pool and some land. Beyond that, I have no idea what to do with billions.

My first thought is that at the very least I would spend an hour or two a day looking for people and groups who could put some cash to good use. My inclination is toward tons of tiny stuff, like a century old library that needs a parking pad for its mobile book lending operation. Maybe I could put a roof on a school or install a playground. These are tiny things to a billionaire, but they are like seeds of caring in a neighborhood.

I wouldn’t be able to just walk around town finding candidates for cash. I’d have to hire people to help me research. Then I would have to hire people to double-check my researchers. On top of that, I would have to budget for 10% of my gift budget to just vanish. Someone I once worked with called it warehouse math. Grift is like rain, no matter how you try to protect yourself, if you go out, you’ll get wet. Likewise, giving away money costs money and it will always cause a little gift grift.

Anyhoo, it seems to me that it would be a lovely and fascinating job to re-home many of my billions, carefully. It is important to avoid doing harm, I think. I want to make sure I consult trusted experts so my projects don’t cause more trouble along the way. Shipping a bunch of cheese to a place that has no mammals seems nice until you realize they have no refrigeration, either. Maybe set up electricity first. Maybe find out if everyone is lactose intolerant, also, you know, before the cheese arrives.

Maybe I’m thinking too small and the billions should go to building fast trains with fabulous bridges to connect my favorite places with each other. I can be selfish with my money, since it’s mine, but it wouldn’t only be for me. I could fit a few more people on my trains, after all. It is grand to imagine, but the less grand part is that some of my money would need to be held up in reserve to maintain my fabulous train system. Everything you create needs care. Every sculpture needs dusting.

I could clean up the planet in my spare time, because restoring ecology would need very little maintenance, right? The Earth takes care of herself, ideally. Replanting a forest needs some TLC until the trees get sturdy enough for little drought or whatever. After that, it’s all gravy. Squirrels galore!! Maybe I’ll keep a little firefighter budget and hire someone to prevent too much squirrel poaching. Oh, and I might need to make sure nobody builds in my forest. Hmm. Forest staff is still cheaper than the train track in the sky!!

Maybe what I really need to do is make more billionaires. If I’m short on bright ideas, my junior billionaires could think up some cool stuff. I could send a million kids to a good college each year and my researchers could make sure they are the most likely to billion-out with a college nudge.

The spending choices are pretty vast, but not limitless. From my observation of real world spending, most people are better at wasting money than thoughtfully spending it.

There’s a spending pendulum that swings between analysis paralysis to frantic waste, with reasonable expenditure somewhere in the middle. So while the option to simply set all my money on fire is available, it seems like a very unfortunate dramatic gesture. I want to do better than that.

On top of all those considerations, wealth dissipates naturally. It would take a long time to just use up a half trillion dollars. Just sitting around a half trillion could be having 40 billion babies a year, baby dollars that is. 40 billion dollars could be 40,000 dollars given to a million people or a million dollars to 40,000 people. What a lottery!!

Honestly, I think the biggest difficulty in talking about huge sums of money in the U.S. is that most of us are not comfortable with the math. Millions, billions, Trillions, Gazillions. How many miles is it to the moon? A million? Nope. About a quarter million. Gallons in the ocean run into the quintillions. Liters? Forget about it!! (Okay, also quintillions).

It’s not too hard to track big numbers if you remember a billion is a thousand million and a trillion is a thousand billion and so on. Three more zeros get added each time. Having a grasp of the size of the numbers is another matter, these are crazy big numbers.

My casual research shows we have 106 trillion dollars in GDP
in the world right now, so if a country produces a trillion dollars of stuff, it’s about one percent of the world’s productivity. Income-wise, according to the World Bank, each person would have $22,000 in income if the global income was divided per person. That is more than the average social security recipient gets, but not a livable wage in most of the U.S. Then again, babies would get $22,000 also in this calculation, and babies are notoriously slow shoppers.

You could probably live a pretty swell life in Nauru on $22,000, but you would not have working toilets much of the time and no air conditioning. All the food on the island has to be imported, so that’s fine until food costs $60 per day (which adds up to your whole income in this set up). In order to enjoy your island lifestyle, you’d have to get a job solving the toilet problem anyway. 300 people pooping in the wild is a lot of wild poop, every day.

Anyway, whether or not you think money is great, money is evil or money is just a concept that is convenient for people who have money, or even if you think, like I do, that money is fake, you are still thinking about money. It owns some of your thoughts.

What would you do with an extra $10? $10,000? $10,000,000? Ten billion dollars? Have some fun with the idea!! What do you see actual billionaires doing with their money? Some of them have famously established foundations and created huge charity efforts and some of them have squandered their fortunes, wallowed in crime or engaged is huge vanity projects that may or may not be innovation.

Given the choice, would you do things to hurt or help humanity? Would you even think about humanity?

What do you think of someone who has a vast fortune and does not have any reputation for giving? None at all? What if that person sues and dodges the people they owe?

Under what principle do you fail to support others when you have crazy huge resources? Under what principle do you harm more people than you help with your ginormous wealth?

After all the mulling, I have settled on my personal billions budget goal. I would use my billions to help mothers to live free and unafraid to love and raise the next generation to fulfill their potential. Not as some theoretical mastermind, I would simply ask moms what they need to succeed and provide it.

I don’t see any reason this can’t happen in the U.S. or anywhere else.

Having huge piles of money buys you a seat at many tables. If you have all the money, you have a seat at all the tables you want, I guess.

When you buy and own things, you have a voice in the operation if you want it. Many people insist on having a say in the way their property is handled. Like shareholders, they expect to have say in the use of their shares. Paying gives you a voice.

If you don’t pay our billions, you don’t get to say what is done with our billions. They belong to us.

Love,
yermom

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