Usually I don't mess with politics on social platforms, for various reasons.
But I think that this is really interesting, and a bit beyond politics, too:
According to Forbes, in 2006, there were 700 billionaires in the World, with a total wealth of 3 TRILLION dollars.
In 2018, after a world economic crisis, there are 2200 billionaires, with 9.1 TRILLION dollars.
Can you grasp it? I can't realize the amount of money, I can't understand how it happened, I can't understand why there are still people struggling to survive, homeless, with no education and healthcare, when just a small fraction of these TRILLIONS can take care of that.
Check out the video (referring to Amazon & Jeff Bezos mostly) and a big thank you to @cryplectibles for mentioning it:
Most of this money isn't in a liquid form. It is what their assets are valued at. Your net worth is quite high if you own a significant stake in a company worth what Amazon or SpaceX or other large companies are worth. The only way to turn such ownership into liquid assets that could be given away is to sell your ownerships stake...which means someone else would have to buy it with money that could otherwise go towards doing the things you mention.
I think it's also important to note that most of these people do give vast sums of money to charities. The problem is that giving itself doesn't make the problem go away or it often does so only temporarily. Someone has to devise sustainable solutions for places that can't produce enough food, people have to be willing to get an education when provided the means, problems with healthcare regulation and supply have to be dealt with, etc.
In other words, I don't think that billionaires giving away their money (which many already do to some degree anyway) will make these problems go away, certainly not overnight. Obviously it helps but it is going to take new techniques and technologies to truly rid the world of these problems (and many of these billion dollar companies are developing such technologies).
One further point is that billionaires spending their money, even for their own pleasure, does a lot towards keeping the economy in good shape and providing jobs. If everyone gave every spare dollar towards feeding the poor, there would be fewer jobs and more poor people to feed.
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You are correct about the liquidity & assets, but I think it does not matter with such huge amounts of money: just consider the profits they have as individuals, and donating 1% of that; the principle is the same.
And I agree with you about how to spend the money, there should be sustainable solutions indeed. For example, in my country (Greece) a lot of people have raised funds for the refugee crisis, but then the trail of that money got lost before reaching the refugees! Now everyone wonders where did that money go.
So, don't just give the money to feed the poor, but train them to be useful in some way and earn money for themselves; give them jobs. You know, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day - teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
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But they already do what you say is one of my points. Most billionaires donate more than 1%. Some much more.
https://metro.co.uk/2015/07/03/here-are-the-worlds-biggest-charity-donors-were-talking-billions-5276452/
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It is good to see that there are some billionaires that help and support those in need, thanks for the link. Congratulations to them; they set an example that all the rest should follow.
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Whatever money "they" seem to spend outside their own indulgences (with a few exceptions that took the Gates pledge) is massive amounts of money for promoting how bad Socialism is and brainwashing the masses to believe that Socialism is pure evil, and of course influencing elections.
As long as people are stupid enough to believe that, they will amass even more wealth and more people will slip into poverty.
But of course Socialism in the form of tax cuts for the wealthy is supposed to be good, because it "trickles down", so they said since Thatcher and Reagan. That's when the numbers you mention started to really take off.
And at the time I am watching this, 354 (billionaires? or idiots? or a mix of both?) posted thumbs down on YouTube.
In my movie collection on YouTube, I had stored this one for a number of years already - if you ever have time to watch:
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A video came up in my feed yesterday that is actually related ... kind of...
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