Money and the Wealth Gap

     Arguments that there is a huge and "growing" gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is largely fallacious, a non-existent bugaboo hauled out by liberals on cue.  There are poor people in the United States but compared to poor people elsewhere they do pretty well.  They have cars, TV, refrigerators, central AC and so on.  No, I wouldn't want to be one of them but I would rather be one here than just about anywhere else.
     Consider the following:  Wealth is not money.  It is things money buys.  Viewed that way, there is a lot less difference between you and Bill Gates or Warren Buffet than you may think.  Suppose that you have a net worth of one million dollars ($1,000,000) and that Gates and Buffet are each worth fifty billion dollars ($50,000,000,000).  That means that they are each worth fifty thousand times what you are.  They may each have more business suits than you do, of course, but certainly not fifty thousand times as many.  Before I retired I had two or three business suits in my closet and probably another one I could use if necessary.  That's four.  It is possible that I had as many business suits as Gates and Buffet combined, and very probably more than Bill Gates himself, given his penchant for casual attire!  Of course they could have a lot more if they want to, but they could not use a lot more.  Johnny Carson used to wear a different coat-and-tie combination every night, meaning about 250 a year.  And Carson was not a poor man.  Yet that was about all he could possibly use and he was in a business that required fashion.
     You probably eat three meals a day.  So do Gates and Buffet.  If they have much more than that they would be too fat to function.  They may even eat less.  You can afford just about any food that they can; maybe not as often but pretty much of the same quality.  The same with travel to exotic places and all sorts of other things.  They can go to Hawaii and come back to Seattle and Omaha every day.  You can go there at least once a year and that is probably enough.  You see all the same things they do --- the waterfalls, the beaches, the whole ball of wax.  They use more fuel than you do, but not fifty thousand times as much --- just more.  They may have a greater sense of security than you do but you don't need that much money to have as much security as you can possibly use. 
      The point is that two of the wealthiest men in the world do not draw a significant amount of actual wealth from the stream of goods and services which are produced and consumed every day.  Gates' or Buffet's paper assets do not cause anyone to be poor or go without necessities.  In fact, if he lost everything in a fire and had to get a job at McDonald's who knows how many people would be out of a job that he has produced the way it is?  And if Gates had always worked at McDonald's where would we get the products which his genius and work have provided?