Suzanne Harrington: We need to tax the rich back to humanity

We need to make billionaires history. We need to tax them out of existence, writes Suzanne Harrington. 

My late dad, a keen Catholic, liked to tell us bible stories as bedtime stories. A favourite was the rich guy enjoying a banquet for one, while outside on the street a scabby, starving guy begged for his crumbs. 

My dad would put his voice into italics — even the dogs would lick his sores — before wrapping up with the inevitable heaven/hell denouement. Spoiler: it didn’t end well for the rich guy, but only after he was dead.

My takeaway from that story was — apart from atheism — that individual humans are not to be trusted with vast riches. 

That individual humans cannot be relied upon to share nicely. Even when they occasionally do — via that obscene idea we call ‘philanthropy’ — it’s still the rich individual making a choice in return for their name over the door.

Yet the Warren Buffets ($144bn) and the Melinda French Gates ($30bn) continue to be revered for their personal benevolence. For their crumbs.

You can see why, when the alternative to these billionaire philanthropists is the World’s First Trillionaire, an individual so loathsome I cannot bear to type his name. 

Someone who is living proof that money does not buy you happiness, friendship, love, respect, cultural cachet, charisma, or anything of value — just expensive machine factories and toxic social media platforms.

But first, let’s get our little pauper heads to try to imagine a trillion. A million millions. Twelve zeros. 

A sum that would take 2,700 years to earn, if your day rate was a million every 24 hours. Football pitches of money, unspendable in a thousand lifetimes.

What you could do with this incomprehensible sum, once you’d bought the mansions, the yachts, the diamond shoes, has already been endlessly discussed — useful things, like the eradication of hunger, thirst, pestilence. 

Climate breakdown could be slowed, perhaps even reversed. Species could be saved. Nature could be saved. Humans could be saved. The planet could be saved.

All those million millions could be smoothed over the cracked planet like a soothing balm, repairing damage, bringing comfort. Generating hope and optimism again. 

Imagine having those kinds of resources at your fingertips. Imagine deploying them. Imagine seeing the results. Your name over all the doors.

We’ll just have to keep imagining, because the only thing the World’s First Trillionaire enjoys spreading is misinformation — not content with sending machines into space, he is sending the far right to our town centres, propelled by the misinformation spewed from his platform. 

How very Bond villain. How very disappointing. Disappointing, but not surprising. 

To allow individuals to hoard such insane levels of cash is the definition of collective insanity — yet here we are, two thousand years after the biblical tale of the greedy rich guy and the scabby beggar.

Nothing has changed, except now we have social media. We continue to permit a skewed system, hoping that those who hoard wealth will chuck a bit back at us. Children still go to bed hungry.

I’m not saying we should eat the rich — although there is a strong argument for composting them — but we need to make billionaires history.

We need to tax them out of existence. The World’s First Trillionaire and his cohorts demonstrate daily how individual humans cannot, and should not, be trusted to self-regulate when it comes to greed. Hoarding is for squirrels. 

We need to take the concept of philanthropy and dropkick it back to the 19th century, where it belongs. Tax the rich. Tax them back to humanity.