Another way to see the huge difference between $1m and $1b:
Let's say you made $1/second (which is an insanely good salary, $3600/hr), and you earned this not just business hours, but 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Earning $1m would take you less than 12 days. Earning $1b would take you over 31 years.
This is entirely nonsense, though. $1,000 is NOT a lot of money, and if that was your entire net worth, you would absolutely not be squandering single dollars like you do when your net worth is many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Think about someone who earns $100,000 a year (let alone that it's their entire net worth). Do you think they just spend $100 like its meaningless?
If your net worth is a billion dollars, saying "a million dollar is a rounding error" depends very much on the context of that million dollars. Are you talking about earning $1m? Or spending $1m? Is it a one-time purchase? Or something you are suggesting they spend regularly? What are they spending it on?
Someone who earns $100,000 presumably doesn't balk at going out to a restaurant and spending $100 once in a while, but they don't necessarily do it every day. they might not bat an eye at their income going up or down $100 a year, but they may or may not think twice about spending $100 on a concert or sports ticket.
To a billionaire, a thousand dollars is a "rounding error". Ten thousand dollars is a "rounding error". I wouldn't say the same about a million dollars. A hundred thousand is probably in border territory.
if that was your entire net worth, you would absolutely not be squandering single dollars like you do when your net worth is many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There's validity to that logic, but I still don't think that a billionaire looks at a million dollars like it's nothing. Hundred thousand? Maybe. But a million? You still can only blow (or not blow - just spend) a million dollars a thousand times before you have blown a million dollars. In the long run, that's not THAT many times, if you are frivolous with money as much as "rounding error" can make it sound like you are.
Edit: I'm not saying they can't afford to spend or donate or blow $1m... but they can't afford to do that all the time like comparing it to pocket change of $1 suggests. Many people of typical incomes consider that amount so frivolous, they spend 5x that amount daily on a coffee. I don't think billionaires look at/spend millions as casually as we non-billionaires look at coffee money. I mean, I'm sure there are a few that do, but doubt that is common.
This is why I laugh at the bootlickers who cry that raising taxes on the rich would be "punishing success". If you just take away 99% of a billionaire's assets, he's still got ten million bucks. There's no appreciable effect on their quality of life, even after losing statistically everything.
Um... you know that if all the owners disappeared tomorrow, the workers could still go to work and make products, right? They'd just be doing it for themselves and their communities instead of some rich asshole.
My wife is a corporate tax accountant, her responsibility is calculating how much her company owes in sales tax for purchases. I remember just a few years ago when she started auditing her old company's tax liability they hounded her to find every single nickel and dime of possible savings because it was a relatively small company. Still large but small enough. Now she's at a multinational company. She was going over taxes for some purchase earlier this year and managed to get their total liability down to $1.2 million, but she had a discrepancy of $15k that she was pouring over trying to get to zero and her boss was like "and? Just pay it. It's only $15k."
I have no idea what her company does but she comes home some days and is like I just had to pay $10 million in taxes. Not a $10mil purchase, the sales tax was $10 million. And that was after she was able to bring it down using various magic witch tricks to find tax discounts. I know enough about tax to know I hate it.
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u/duhogman 5d ago
If you made $100k per year that would put you at half way to being a billionaire. Kinda hurts to put that into perspective.