Sparks Fly! Thom Hartmann vs. Austin Petersen...Ending Billionaire-ism? [View all]

[thomhartmann]

Austin Petersen, FreedomWorks, joins Thom Hartmann. Consider this: The Forbes 400 richest billionaires in America have a combined wealth of over $1.7 trillion. Now imagine we took some of that wealth - leaving each billionaire with just one billion dollars - and they’re free to do whatever they’d like with it. What’s it matter, they couldn’t even spend a billion dollars in their lifetime. That would suddenly free up 1.3 trillion dollars of wealth to be spent and invested in the economy.

With the average price of going to college at a state school pegged at roughly $22,000 a year, that 1.3 trillion could send 59 million young people - an entire generation - to school. We’d have an entire generation of college graduates who’d have access to good paying jobs - who’d stimulate the economy - who’d pay taxes to lower our deficits - and who’d make American once again the most educated and nation with the most sophisticated workforce on the planet. Or - what about those 150 million Americans who don’t have savings and are one setback away from poverty? Imagine if they all had an extra $8,000 in their bank account. They wouldn’t be so fearful of poverty - they could spend more money in the economy - and they could take more risks \\

Even the billionaires would earn more money now that they have more consumers spending more money at restaurants, at shopping malls, and on vacations. And what’d we sacrifice for this new prosperity for millions of Americans? We simply asked the billionaires - people like the Koch Brothers, the Walton family, and Sheldon Adelson - to get by with being simple billionaires rather than multi-billionaires. Something tells me they’ll be ok. The NoBillionaires campaign is the best way to get out economy on track - and reverse thirty years of failed Neoliberal economics. Go to NoBillionaires.com

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