There are ~700 million people living in poverty according to Google.
The total combined wealth of the top 1% is ~43 trillion according to Google.
That comes out to ~61k per person.
So while that would be life changing money for a lot of people it certainly wouldn’t magically fix everyone’s situation.
As for the food but we have produced more than we needed globally for awhile now. It’s really more of an issue of logistics. The places where food is the biggest issue tend to be fairly remote meaning that even with money there isn’t always an easy way to get food/water consistently out to them. It’s often better to set up those remote communities with local water and farming/hunting if possible.
If we took all of the wealth, it would be insane to just give it to the poor without any kind of support. They’ve never had that much money, they haven’t learned to save and are going to spend it it too quickly before they realize what they did.
If you’re going to take all the excess wealth, then you have to build infrastructure that will support lives. Homes, grocery stores, farms, mills, mines, schools, colleges, and assign those to educated/trained citizens to support the local communities. Handing money out is a recipe for disaster, it’s how the Republicans/democrats are always setting the poor up for failure on support. Instead of making sure food prices support feeding a family, they make sure the helps comes as stimulus and gets gobbled up by inflation or skyrocketing rent. You don’t just give money, you build infrastructure that supports lower prices and let the poor pay with their own money. Affordable housing, neighborhood gardens, citizen owned farms that are trained to use sustainable practices, and even local power generation using wind, solar, geothermal, or anything else locally that is consistent enough to always provide power(it likely won’t generate enough to replace large energy corps, but it will force them to lower rates as its no longer a monopoly), build things to compete against the free market and prices will drop because the monopoly is broken.
I don’t doubt that you’ve done the math and I’m not really going to do anything practical with it, so let’s work with your numbers.
Imagining that not everyone needs that 60k, I wonder to what extent the aggregate of all those “extra” 60ks would fund away the logistics issue of getting food to the people who need it.
My Google says 700 million in poverty worldwide but it says this about wealth “In 2023, the world’s richest 1% owned 47.5% of the world’s wealth, which is roughly $214 trillion.” So 214 trillion ÷ 700 million ≈ $305,714.28.
“total wealth of the top 1% of American households was $44.6 trillion” perhaps you used this figure instead which is just the US.
I’m pretty sure most people in poverty would be able to fix their situation on $300k.
My take on the food as well is, we have planes that fly everywhere all over the world, celebrities using jets to fly an hour to another city, but there’s no way we could just take some planes and air drop or land and deliver food? It would be pretty damn easy logistically. Of course they should be self-sustaining, but the western world throws away so much food that doesn’t bring a profit, we could absolutely afford to give a lot of it away.
There are ~700 million people living in poverty according to Google.
The total combined wealth of the top 1% is ~43 trillion according to Google.
That comes out to ~61k per person.
So while that would be life changing money for a lot of people it certainly wouldn’t magically fix everyone’s situation.
As for the food but we have produced more than we needed globally for awhile now. It’s really more of an issue of logistics. The places where food is the biggest issue tend to be fairly remote meaning that even with money there isn’t always an easy way to get food/water consistently out to them. It’s often better to set up those remote communities with local water and farming/hunting if possible.
If we took all of the wealth, it would be insane to just give it to the poor without any kind of support. They’ve never had that much money, they haven’t learned to save and are going to spend it it too quickly before they realize what they did. If you’re going to take all the excess wealth, then you have to build infrastructure that will support lives. Homes, grocery stores, farms, mills, mines, schools, colleges, and assign those to educated/trained citizens to support the local communities. Handing money out is a recipe for disaster, it’s how the Republicans/democrats are always setting the poor up for failure on support. Instead of making sure food prices support feeding a family, they make sure the helps comes as stimulus and gets gobbled up by inflation or skyrocketing rent. You don’t just give money, you build infrastructure that supports lower prices and let the poor pay with their own money. Affordable housing, neighborhood gardens, citizen owned farms that are trained to use sustainable practices, and even local power generation using wind, solar, geothermal, or anything else locally that is consistent enough to always provide power(it likely won’t generate enough to replace large energy corps, but it will force them to lower rates as its no longer a monopoly), build things to compete against the free market and prices will drop because the monopoly is broken.
I don’t doubt that you’ve done the math and I’m not really going to do anything practical with it, so let’s work with your numbers.
Imagining that not everyone needs that 60k, I wonder to what extent the aggregate of all those “extra” 60ks would fund away the logistics issue of getting food to the people who need it.
My Google says 700 million in poverty worldwide but it says this about wealth “In 2023, the world’s richest 1% owned 47.5% of the world’s wealth, which is roughly $214 trillion.” So 214 trillion ÷ 700 million ≈ $305,714.28. “total wealth of the top 1% of American households was $44.6 trillion” perhaps you used this figure instead which is just the US. I’m pretty sure most people in poverty would be able to fix their situation on $300k.
My take on the food as well is, we have planes that fly everywhere all over the world, celebrities using jets to fly an hour to another city, but there’s no way we could just take some planes and air drop or land and deliver food? It would be pretty damn easy logistically. Of course they should be self-sustaining, but the western world throws away so much food that doesn’t bring a profit, we could absolutely afford to give a lot of it away.