Money Money Money!

Good Evening my splendid People,

Do you have enough money? You probably don't think so. But the very fact that you are reading this on your PC with an internet connection tells me that you are doing fairly well for yourself when compared to a lot of people in the world.

Did you know that there are children dying from diarrhoea? In 2007!!! What is going on? That isn't right is it? While most of us are worrying about how much tax we have to pay and and how many holidays we can have this year, there are people dying because they don't have clean water to drink. And to stop this costs a fraction of what most of us spend on lunch every day!

It seems to me that there is plenty of money in the world, it's just not shared out very well. I'm not a communist by any means, and I understand and accept the need for capitalism, but I think capitalism needs to have a bit more of a social conscious.

I feel a new global decree coming on.......

GLOBAL DECREE #3
The Half Billionaire Rule
No-one is allowed to have more than US$500 million dollars. Anything over $500 million gets taken away and used to improve the standard of living of those who are most in need.

$500 million is a lot of money isn't it? I think if someone had $500 million dollars they would have a very comfortable life don't you? So why would they NEED any more than that? To be honest, I don't think anyone NEEDS anywhere near that much money. I think I am being extremely generous setting the limit at $500 million!!! It is certainly far more money than 99.99% of us could even contemplate having. I heard on the radio today that someone has just paid US$70 million for an Andy Warhol painting! Whoever can afford to pay that sort of price for a damn painting has got too much money!

According to the Forbes list, in 2007 there are 946 billionaires in the world with a total worth of $3.5 trillion ($3,500,000,000,000). For the sake of simplicity, lets say there is 1000 billionaires. If i took away all there money and gave the each $500 million to go off and live a life of luxury, that would leave $3 trillion left in the pot. And that is just the billionaires! That doesn't include the thousands of people who have between $500-999 million.

But let's be conservative and say I have $3 trillion dollars. That is three million million dollars! That is the equivalent of $500 for every single person on the planet! Now most of us don't need that $500 (remember people, there is a difference between want and need)!

I'm fairly sure I could stop children dying from diarrhoea with $3 trillion, and still have enough change to make sure everyone in the world had enough to eat, got an education, had basic healthcare etc etc etc, and put systems in place to make sure that those provisions were on-going.

And how did we do this? Just by telling 1000 people (from a population of 6 billion!) that they can only have $500 million to live on. I can already sense that you feel desperately sorry for these poor former billionaires!

Another great thing about me being the supreme leader of the world is that it will completely get rid of third world debt! No country will owe any other country anything. Since I will be the ruler of the entire world we'll just call it quits on everything seeing as there will only be one government (i.e. me!). And no, I won't be living in a huge palace on top of a mountain when I am Supreme Ruler of Absolutely Everything - at least not we've have sorted out those people in the world who really need a little help.

Sorry if this latest installment has been a bit heavy, it can't all be fun fun fun running the world. Sometimes we do have to look at serious things too.

Until next time (and please give generously!)
The Mighty and Benevolent Chris