The truth about Wealth
I need people to spread this around. I'm leading the post with this because I feel it's so important. -
I'm reposting this information here and not in a reply to someone because I think it's something people need to understand about how the rich stay rich and get more rich. If you read through it, I think you'll be as angry as me.
We'll use David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Discovery, as an example. His salary in 2021 was 3 million. His compensation package was 240 million, including 12 million in dividends. 4.4 million in a monetary bonus, with the majority of the rest in stock options.
Stock options, for those who don't know, are not actual stocks but a guarantee that you can purchase the stock at a pre-set price, the value of it when you got the option. It means that in the future, you can pay the original price but you get the current value.
So while you technically don't "own" that money yet, it's still there. Usually, people will hold on to these until the value of the stock is at a very high rate and then cash in and put that money elsewhere. They can literally double and triple their earnings or more! All this while also avoiding paying taxes on it because until they cash in, it's only speculative money.
But here's the real kicker. The super wealthy don't pay for anything from their actual money. That would involve spending money they own. Instead, they take out low interest bank loans using their wealth as collateral. So they don't have money on hand that they "own" which is money the govt can tax them on, instead they work on "borrowed" money which is considered an expense and can be written off.
So they can keep their money in locations where it's safe from government taxation, but still use it whenever they want while claiming that actually they have no taxable income beyond their deliberately "low" salaries. In the meantime, they're able to accumulate more wealth, simply shifting the money from one nebulous tax-free bunker to another to avoid paying the government.
And don't get confused because "income" and "wealth" are not the same thing, but the vast majority of people in the USA don't realize this because they don't ever have the opportunity to accumulate wealth so they think it's the same thing, but it's not.
Income is what you earn in a year. Wealth is the value of what you own that carries over from year to year. Rich people don't have their millions in the bank, they have it in properties, in stocks, in other things where the money is used to generate more money for them. People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don't have billions of dollars in bank accounts, they keep it in other assets that generate more money from them. The assets of a billionaire are literally so vast that it's virtually impossible to spend money faster than they're making it through passive means.
Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, gets most of his wealth in these things, that's why talking about salary is useless, because Bob, like most rich assholes, doesn't want money. Money can be taxed at a higher rate. He wants assets.
And that's why it's especially insidious that they try to compare themselves to us, to frame their personal profits as though it's the same as the income that hourly or even salaried workers get. We can understand the concept of earning money. "Earning" money is something that we do in the lower classes. But don't be fooled by them. They don't "EARN" money. They don't work for the vast majority of their money. They don't even USE their own money to pay for their day to day lives.
So any attempt to compare a slash in their oncome to anything they do to our pay is calculatedly false and meant to try and make people who don't know much about wealth sympathize with them. "Oh those poor billionaires, they work for that money" . Except they don't. Their assets generate more wealth and they live off of money borrowed from banks and other entities so they never have to touch their own vast fortunes.
You could literally slash the pay and benefits of people like Bob Iger and David Zaslav down to zero and the assets they already have would still generate millions of dollars on a yearly, or even on a monthly basis. They wouldn't have to change a single thing about how they live.
So don't fall for it. Don't ever fall for their "we're just like you, we'll suffer if we don't keep even more money" bullshit. They're trying to play on our human sense of compassion, when they have none to give us in exchange.
Please, if you found this at all informative, spread it around. I'm not writing these things for personal validation, I'm writing them because I feel education is important for people to understand WHY things are the way they are and to know the real issue
This is the kind of thing that has always been cloaked in vague language so the layperson doesn't understand it. We need to spread this information and make it known to everyone. We need to KNOW the details of what we're fighting in order to win.
