Stop Giving Billionaires Your Money
You might have heard the lament that there is no real “Left” political movement in the United States; that what passes for the “Left” nowadays is just a coalition of grievances without the will or the power to introduce any true Leftist ideas into the political discussion.
Well, let me humbly propose a real Leftist idea: stop giving your money to billionaires. Oh, but you already hate billionaires and want to tax them into oblivion, right? You’re going about it the wrong way.
The valuation of billionaires’ vast fortunes is not based on money, or more precisely, taxable income, at least not in the traditional sense. As Warren Buffet, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, repeatedly points out, 99% of his personal fortune is comprised of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Berkshire Hathaway has a market capitalization of over one trillion dollars, that’s $1,000,000,000,000. There are currently 11 companies with market capitalizations over one trillion dollars, led by Nvidia, with a market cap of $4.6 trillion. I’m old enough to remember, way back in 2018, when Apple became the first company to reach the one trillion market cap milestone. Depending on your algorithm, that story got a lot of press back then.
These huge corporations are valued at many times their earnings. The ratio of stock price to earnings per share is referred to as the P/E ratio, which is one metric that investors use, or used in the past, to determine if a stock, or equity, is fairly valued, overvalued or undervalued. This metric is crude because it does not translate well between industries. However, P/E ratio is a good metric to contextualize the radical Leftist idea of not giving billionaires your money. Here’s the context: Tesla has a P/E ratio of around 380. This means that for every one dollar of earnings per share, you pay $380 dollars. Tesla currently trades at around $417 per share. This means that for every share of Tesla that you buy, you’re getting about $1.10 of earnings. Berkshire Hathaway, on the other hand, has a P/E ratio of about 16. This isn’t a one-to-one comparison because Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway are very different types of corporations, in very different industries, with very different strategies for the future. Tesla’s value is very much driven by investors’ optimism in its growth potential, thereby justifying its high P/E ratio. Warren Buffett, on the other hand, is famous for being a “value” investor, which means he looks for stocks that are undervalued.
So, where does the stock price come from? And, who determines that Tesla is currently worth $417 per share with a P/E ratio of 380 and Berkshire Hathaway (class B) is currently worth $498 per share with a P/E ratio of about 16? Well, of course, the stock market determines the price of the stocks.
This is where you come into the story. If you have a job working for the government or for some quasi-government corporation, such as UPMC, Pitt, AHN, PNC, or any other large corporation, you probably have a certain amount of money deducted automatically from your paycheck for “retirement.” Your employer might even “match” your contributions. The money that gets deducted from your paycheck probably then gets invested into some sort of exchange traded fund (ETF) or mutual fund. ETFs and mutual funds are (actively or passively) managed funds that invest each dollar based on some formula. The most popular ETFs track certain indeces, like the S&P 500 or the Russell 2000. For example, the Vanguard VOO fund directly tracks the S&P 500. ETFs that track certain indeces are referred to as index funds. This means that each dollar that you invest in VOO is proportionate to the relative size of each of the 500 largest U.S. companies. Currently, 31% of each VOO dollar is invested in technology companies like Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, etc. VOO currently holds 615,201,878 shares of Nvidia stock, valued at $114,735,150,247. This is 7.5% of VOO’s holdings. Nvidia has 24.3 billion shares outstanding, with nearly 70% held by institutional investors like Vanguard.
As an employee, with access to an employment retirement plan, you usually get a few choices of funds to invest in. For example, there will usually be an option to invest in a total stock market fund, or a large cap fund, or a fund that splits each dollar between stocks (equities) and bonds (debts). Some people like to invest in target-date funds that balance the proportion of each dollar invested between growth and value stocks and bonds based on the date that the contributor expects to retire. As the expected retirement date gets closer, the investment strategy is balanced to lessen risk. There are also sector funds that let you invest in certain sectors like energy, technology, consumer staples, utilities, etc. There are funds that focus on growth stocks or value stocks or a mix of both. There are funds that focus on market capitalization allowing you to invest in companies of various sizes. There are funds that let you invest in emerging markets or established markets, that let you exclude certain countries, regions, or industries. There are even funds that let you invest in “socially conscious” companies, as determined by the people who manage the fund. While brokerages like Vanguard, Fidelity, or Blackrock offer many different types of funds, employer retirement plans, like the federal TSP, usually offer relatively few options. As of January 2026, there are nearly 200,000 TSP millionaires, with the highest account valued at around $10 million dollars.
Obviously, your miniscule biweekly retirement contribution is nothing but grains of sand on the beach. However, there are tens of millions of people just like you, all contributing every other week to these gigantic index funds. There are an estimated 70 to 80 million people contributing to 401k plans. There are 7.2 to 7.6 million federal TSP accounts. There is an estimate that 65 million people hold IRA accounts. There are also pension plans, but the number of people who have access to them has declined significantly over the past 40 years. Tens of millions of dollars get invested in the stock market every day without the investors even thinking about it. Collectively, this is a huge amount of money. The only time you probably think about your retirement portfolio is when you get the quarterly or annual report. You look at it. You see that the amount of money in the account is greater than the amount of money that you contributed, and you are happy.
But, what you are doing is making billionaires of the people who own the largest shares of these corporations—people like Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Jensen Huang (who owns approximately $100 billion worth of Nvidia stock). You are literally giving them your money. You’re also creating staggeringly large brokerage firms that manage trillions of dollars. Blackrock manages $14 trillion dollars. Vanguard manages $12 trillion dollars. Fidelity manages between $15 to 16.4 trillon dollars. Suffice it to say, these three companies manage a lot of the world’s money, perhaps even most of it. So, what’s the alternative?
Instead of putting your money in complicated, government-created, retirement plans that invest in index funds, managed by gigantic brokerage firms, why not invest your money back into your community. The local community council can set up a corporation for the purpose of receiving money and spending it on local improvements and projects. This corporation could buy and repair blighted property, make infrastructure improvements, pay people a livable wage to work for local business. Provide grants and loans to local businesses to hire employees, pay them well, and improve storefronts, pay for childcare so people can work, pay to train people to do the jobs that the community needs, etc. The corporation could fund medical clinics and professionals to come into the community to provide services without the need for predatory insurance plans. The corporation could hire professional mediators to resolve torts without involving the government. How many landlord-tenant disputes could be resolved if the tenant simply had more money with which to pay his rent? The possibilities are endless.
The problem with this idea is that there is no direct benefit for you. On paper you would be poorer. Instead of having a retirement portfolio that gets bigger every year, you would have a nicer community. There would be less crime and better services. People would have a more direct relationship with the quality of their community and the health and wellbeing of their neighbors. But, the tradeoff is that you would not be able to “retire” in the traditional sense and live off the scraps that the billionaires leave you. The quality and ease of your golden years will be determined by the community in which you spent the beneficence of your working years.
The other problem is that a critical mass of people would have to agree to this. Nobody likes freeloaders and there would be no reason for me to sacrifice my retirement for your benefit if you are not willing to do the same for me. Also, the secondary benefits would not be proportional to the direct contributions. For example, a person who makes $150K a year working for the government or a quasi-government corporation would contribute more than a person making $30K a year working for a local private business. Finally, people would become very sensitive to market efficiency and inefficiency in a way that they aren’t with the government or quasi-government corporations. In other words, you wouldn’t tolerate a bad employee or a bad business in your neighborhood if you’re paying for it directly. If you go into a bagel shop and the service sucks, you are probably not going to want to continue to fund that business. Whereas you have no control over how well or poorly the government or quasi-government corporations are run. When you interact with the government, and the service sucks, there is literally nothing you can do about it. This is a large reason why private businesses are more sensitive to their customer preferences than the government is.
You might be thinking, isn’t this what taxes are supposed to do? Yes, in a sense. But taxes are filtered through government, and government is controlled by people who do not have your best interest at heart. The government’s purpose is to protect itself… from you. The current retirement system was designed by the power elite for the purpose of keeping itself powerful and rich, and making itself more powerful and richer. The current retirement system is effectively a wealth and power redistribution system that transfers wealth and power from the bottom to the top. The more money you have, the more you benefit from it. If you have neither wealth nor power, then the tens of trillions of dollars that flow through this system are completely and utterly inaccessible to you.
The power elite incentivizes you to behave in a way that increases its wealth and power at the cost of your freedom. So, the power elite would not be interested in a plan that reduces its direct control over the billions of dollars that are automatically sucked out of millions of paychecks every other week.
The idea that you should stop giving billionaires your money is a Leftist idea. You won’t hear it from anybody actively employed in the government except for the most libertarian and anarchist outsiders. Bernie Sanders doesn’t want you to stop giving your money to the millionaires and billionaires. He wants you to keep giving them your money, and then raise taxes on their “income”, which of course, they don’t have.
You either think this Leftist idea is fantastic or idiotic. Obviously, it could never work unless there was a fundamental change in the way that people think about money and their role and obligation to their community. As it stands now, people secure their own financial future, and once it is secured, then they become philanthropic. This idea reverses that mindset. Your philanthropy would come before and, in fact, at the cost of your ability to control your own financial future. You would depend on the very community that you helped create to determine what type of future you have when you’re no longer able to work. That’s a terrifying thought…