10 Ways Billionaires Are Making Your Life Worse and 5 Ways to Fight Back

As a coeditor of Inequality.org, I get a lot of fan mail (and a few complaints). Greg B. recently wrote in, “None of my problems exist as a result of someone else being a billionaire.”

My response to Greg: “An economy rigged to funnel so much wealth and power to the billionaire class is bad for you and everyone else. It undermines your life in some major ways.”

I wrote my new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, for folks like Greg to talk about how extreme wealth inequality disrupts our daily lives. Here are 10 ways you are being burned by billionaires, pulled from my book.

My analysis doesn’t focus on the behavior of individual billionaires—though some are gnarly ones (while a handful show signs of decency). The problem is the system of laws, rules, and regulations tipped in favor of big asset owners at the expense of wage earners and working folks.

When I’m talking about billionaires, I’m thinking of more people than the 905 US billionaires that together control about $7.8 trillion in wealth. I include the top one-tenth of 1%, the 0.1% of households that have over $40 million on up to the billionaire class. People with wealth north of $40 or $50 million have every need and desire met and easily accumulate power. They’re not just buying mansions and private jets but also lawmakers and media outlets. That’s when we need to sound the alarm about “the billionaires.”

Here are 10 of the ways you are personally getting burned by billionaires:

1. The billionaires stick you with their tax bill. By opting out of their tax obligations, the billionaire class is shifting responsibility on to you to pay for everything from infrastructure to national defense to veterans services.

2. They rob you of your voice and vote. With the billionaire capture of the government, what you think barely matters. Your vote might still make a difference, but only in marginal situations where the billionaires haven’t dominated candidate selection, campaign finance, and policy priorities. The billionaires love gridlock and government shutdowns because they can block popular legislation from happening.

3. The billionaires supercharge the housing crisis—and profit from it. Billionaire demand for luxury housing is driving up the cost of land and housing construction, supercharging the already existing housing crisis. Billionaire speculators are buying up rental housing, single family homes, and mobile home parks to squeeze more money out of the housing shortage. Global billionaires are coming to “tax haven USA” to park their money in US farmland, timber and housing.

4. They inflame existing divisions in society. The billionaires don’t want you to understand how they are picking your pocket. So, they invest heavily—pouring millions into partisan media organizations and divisive politicians—to deflect our attention away from their harmful behavior. Their divisive policy and social agenda drives down wages, worsens the historic racial wealth divide, and scapegoats immigrants.

5. They are trashing your environment. The billionaires are the super polluters and carbon emitters, burning up the Earth with their excessive consumption through yachts, private jets, and multiple mansions. While you’re recycling and walking, they are zooming around in private jets and yachts with the carbon emissions and pollution of small nation states. While we all need to do our part, the billionaires make us feel like chumps for making ecological choices and sacrifices.

6. They are making you sick. Billionaire backed private-equity funds are buying up hospitals and health specialties—along with big pharma drug companies—with the aim of squeezing more out of healthcare consumers. Health outcomes in societies with extreme disparities in wealth are worse for everyone, even the rich, than societies with less inequality.

7. They are blocking timely action on climate change. Fossil fuel billionaires spend millions to block the transition to a healthy future. They fund politicians to declare a bogus energy emergency to keep their coal plants open and shut down competing wind projects. They are literally running out the clock for our governments to take action to avert the worst impacts of climate disruption.

8. They are coming for your pets. Billionaire private equity funds know we love our pets like family members and are sometimes willing to go into debt for their healthcare. To squeeze more money out of us, the billionaires are buying up veterinary care, medical specialties, pet food and supply—and even pet care services like Rover.com.

9. They are dictating what’s on your dinner plate. The food barons—the billionaires that monopolize almost every sector of the food economy—are dictating the price, ingredients, and supply of most food stuffs.

10. They are corrupting charity and philanthropy. Billionaire philanthropy has become a taxpayer subsidized form of private power and influence. As philanthropy gets more top-heavy—with most charity dollars flowing from the ultra-wealthy—it distorts and warps the independence of the nonprofit sector.

11. Bonus: They are buying up and hijacking the media. The billionaires are buying up the media: broadcast, social media, news outlets. We need more news and social media outlets that are independent of billionaires, like this one!

Burned by Billionaires isn’t another gloom and doom book. I talk a lot about what we can do together to fight the billionaire hijacking of our society and democracy. And you can read about our faces on the frontlines in our Inequality.org newsletter every week to see how people are taking action. A few action steps you can undertake today:

1. Talk to your neighbors about these 10 ways they are feeling the billionaire burn. Organize a discussion group of Burned by Billionaires. Don’t act alone. Join with others.

2. Advocate for taxing the rich and ensuring that billionaires pay their fair share. When your neighbor understandably complains about local and state taxes, explain how the billionaire class has lobbied for tax law changes—to shift taxes off the wealthy and onto everyone else; off federal tax systems onto local; off taxes on income from wealth and into taxes on wages.

3. Game-changing campaigns. Advocate for policies that tax billionaire wealth and invest in housing, educational opportunity, and the energy transition away from Earth-cooking fossil fuels. If federal changes are blocked by the billionaires, work at the state and local level. Tax luxury real estate transfers to fund affordable housing. Tax private jet fuel and fund green transit. Tax billionaire inheritances and fund debt-free higher education and job training.

4. Join the satirical resistance: Trillionaires For Trump! We see the power of comedians and late-night talk show hosts. You can join a new comic resistance effort, see www.trillionairesfortrump.org. Have fun while imitating and parodying the powerful billionaires and join their new health campaign, “Go Fund Yourself!”

5. If you haven’t already checked out Inequality.org, the web site I coedit. Please sign up for our weekly newsletter HERE. Every week we lift up action campaigns and heroic “faces on the frontline” of people working to reverse extreme wealth inequality.

If this intrigues you, I hope you’ll buy Burned by Billionaires from your local independent bookstores or online. Learn more at www.burnedbybillionaires.com.