Friendly Reminder: rooms full of money edition
by digby
In this morning’s New York Times story on the GOP’s operation chaos campaign, it was mentioned in passing that the Koch brothers had spent upwards of 200 million dollars on it so far. That’s a whole lot of money and it’s just one little piece of their political activities. It occurred to me that it’s probably time to revisit this little illustration to show how such expenditures impact their bottom line. This was written a year and a half ago about Sheldon Adelson who was throwing millions around in the GOP primary. He was reportedly worth 25 billion dollars at the time.
The following illustration compares an human being against a stack of $100 currency note bundles. A bundle of $100 notes is equivalent to $10,000 and that can easily fit in your pocket. 1 million dollars will probably fit inside a standard shopping bag while a billion dollars would occupy a small room of your house:
Adelson has 25 of those rooms full of money. Even if he does spend a full hundred million, as he’s been reported to be planning, it is the equivalent of a modest week-end getaway for you and me. He really is that rich.
We have never before had so much money concentrated at the top. These are vast fortunes beyond our imaginations. It makes perfect sense that some of these oligarchs would spend tens of millions to buy elections. It’s not that much money to them.
The Koch brothers are up from their reported combined 50 billion dollar fortune of last year. This year Forbes has them at 72 billion. They can afford to spend a whole lot more on these projects and call it a rounding error.
Our problems will never be fixed until we do something about the fact that so much money is now flowing to the very top.
.