Not all Extremely Wealthy People are Evil Greedheads
Many of them really believe they should be paying higher taxes, and that they should be doing something with their excess wealth to make the world a better place.
From Timothy Egan’s NYT blog:
SEATTLE – There are plenty of rich people to hate these days, starting with Bernie Madoff, who will face a judge Thursday as well as the possibility of spending his remaining years in a cell where he can think about all the lives he ruined.
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Bill Gates Sr. is 83 years old, six-foot-seven inches tall, with the kind of thin-haired crown that newborn babies and older men have in common. Though he looks like an avuncular conductor of a giant toy train set, he labors daily trying to give away one of the world’s biggest fortunes, that made by his son at Microsoft.
Senior, as he’s known, has a short, big-hearted book coming out next month, “Showing Up for Life,” which should be handed out to all those hedge-fund managers now filing for bankruptcy or otherwise wondering why their lives are so empty. His book is a sort of Last Lecture from the Greatest Generation, similar to the collected musings of Randy Pausch, who died last year of cancer at age 47.
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Warren Buffett, who until the recent meltdown was the world’s richest man (Bill Gates is tops again), is a fellow far-sighted traveler, who has pledged the bulk of his fortune to senior’s care at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – the world’s largest philanthropy.
Consider one example of how that money changes lives: global deaths from measles have fallen from 750,000 to 197,000 in just seven years, in part because the foundation started focusing on vaccinations for such diseases.
Like all but the most fraudulent – or cautious – investors, Buffett has lost a pile on paper in the last year. He made news this week when he compared the current crisis to an economic Pearl Harbor. But he was more forgiving than many, saying that we may have to look beyond our anger at the crooks, legal and otherwise, who got us into this mess.
“The people who behave well,” he said in a CNBC interview, “are no doubt going to find themselves taking care of the people who didn’t behave so well.”
Read the rest here.
