Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.
Civics 101 host Nick Capodice joins Julia this week to talk about billionaires, why there are more of them these days than ever before and how they exercise influence over policy decisions in our country.
Transcript
It feels like there are a lot more billionaires than there have been in the past. Is that true?
It certainly is, Julia. In the 1950s, in the United States, we had one, maybe two billionaires. And right now, the United States has about 2,000 billionaires. And real quick, I just want to make sure everybody out there understands what a billionaire is. So just by way of example, 1,000,000 seconds ago was last week and 1,000,000,000 seconds ago was 1993.
Whoa.
Yeah. So, a billionaire has more money than they could ever count. It is such a staggering sum that it becomes quite apparent rather quickly that there's nothing left to buy. There is a recent study by Yahoo Finance that determined that the billionaire lifestyle, like the private plane and the mansion and the butler and the cars, that costs about $50 million a year to maintain. And that is way less than the interest billionaires are already making on the money they own already.
Well, how did this happen? How are there so many nowadays?
Well, it is the direct result of wealth equaling power and people using that power to secure more wealth. So, billionaires have the ability to spend money to support political campaigns of people that they know will help them, and also to spend money on lobbyists to advocate for their interests. And the policy that is passed as a result of this lobbying is, frankly, uninteresting. It's about tax rates and pass-through provisions and cryptic financial policies that directly benefit one person or one company. And nobody really pays attention to these small pieces of policy. And to demonstrate to you, Julia, just how much influence the super wealthy have in the U.S., I'm going to give you a statistic here. The top 1% of income holders in the U.S. were polled, and they were asked if they'd spoken personally to an elected official in the last six months. And over half of them said they did. When asked what they talked about, the most popular reported answer was an issue of, quote, “a fairly narrow economic self-interest.” So, once you bought everything you could possibly want, there's nothing left to buy. The only thing you can spend money on is power.
And money and power are going hand in hand in a new way in the current administration. Donald Trump himself is a billionaire. But is he the first billionaire to be president?
Yeah, he is indeed the first. And the combined wealth of his cabinet is about $14 billion. If we did include the former head of the now defunct Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, who is set to be the world's first trillionaire, that number would be a lot higher. So, the rise of wealth that billionaires are making is increasing at an exponential rate. For example, The New York Times broke a story where they revealed the United Arab Emirates wanted to buy AI chips under the Biden administration. President Biden refused to sell those. And then the UAE went on to buy $2 billion worth of World Liberty Financial stablecoins. That's a cryptocurrency controlled by the Trump family. And lo and behold, President Trump then agreed to sell them the chips.
So, what can be done to check the power of billionaires? How do we ensure we live in democracy versus an oligarchy?
It's a tough battle, Julia. I don't know if it's going to change anytime soon, because the wealthy have far greater resources to get what they want than the non-wealthy. But I will say, if people organize in ways that do not support the super rich through collectives like unions and other groups that can get together to lobby for their own interests versus the interests of the very few, political pressure can be applied to make a change.
