I won $10k of that $1 billion a few months ago. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation and mtvU hosted a video game design contest and I won. You can play the game at http://debtski.com
It's a game about personal fiscal responsibility. At the time, I didn't realize how much press the game would get, but it picked up traction pretty quickly. The highlight for me was when the game was a featured story on the Yahoo! homepage for ~45 minutes.
That's probably the single best summary of the fundamentals of U.S. fiscal problems I've seen. I will keep this in mind to point people to when questions about government debt come up.
If you need to sum up the U.S. debt crisis in a single sentence, I would go with:
"This staggering amount breaks down to a $483,000 burden on every American household, or a $184,000 burden on every man, woman, child and newborn in this country."
It really sucks that each of my kids is already $184,000 in the hole, through no fault of their own.
"Except for the extraordinary fact that a single person can accumulate 1 billion"
Are you jealous? Bill Gates accumulated a whole lot more. So did Buffett. What's extraordinary about 1 billion? The guy is not even among the world's top 100 richest.
"The scale of debt should be applied equally to the scale of wealth"
Should? Why? The rich can move their assets to another country at any time of their choosing. Just because America's blindness led to a huge debt, I don't see why the rich should pay for it... after all the Iraq War, the government's stupidity, the energy inneficiency, the over-consumption and lack of savings are not to be blamed on one billionaire alone, but on the entire American people.
It's time for people to realize that the post-WW2 superpower status was an anomaly, not a birthright. The next generation of Americans won't enjoy the same standard of living as their parents did. Learn to live with it.
I am jealous of that kind of wealth, yep. Even a million dollars can stretch around half of a lifetime of food, rent, water, electricity, and leisure.
I was speaking in terms of that site that claims how much each individual person "is in debt" for the government. It doesn't take into account that certain people profited more while that debt was incurred. So yeah, people that earn more while the country is gaining debt should theoretically owe more when it's put in those terms.
It's actually more logical that the rich are to blame since they have done very well for themselves during a period in which very bad decisions were made. Some of those decision were made by political agendas, to which the rich have some level of control. (And some were not, I do realize.)
For starters, I speculate that Peterson's 1 billion are mostly marked to Blackstone's stock. I doubt he has 1 billion in dollar bills under his mattress. Moreover, the guy is going to donate most of it. Sure, he's going to spend it in what seems to be a rather shady area, but nonetheless...
I am not American. I came from a "socialist" country in Europe. I am tired to this blame-the-rich meme, the envy, the spiritual mediocrity associated with "socialism". If people do well in life, they should be able to keep most of their money. I personally think all billionaires should do philantropy, but I am don't think they should pay higher taxes. I believe one should have the right to decide how to distribute one's wealth, not allow the government to subsidize its propaganda machine with other people's money. Moreover, wealthy people doing philantropy are most likely better equipped than the government to distribute their wealth in an efficient manner. Do you honestly believe that the people working in the government are there to serve the American people?
Yet again: I was referring to something else (which concerned a site that claimed an individual's DEBT as incurred by the government), NOT TAXES.
You're confusing the two topics: Peterson the man, and Peterson the non-profit. See this: http://www.pgpf.org/about/faq/ under "Our Nation's Debt." Question #2 in that states, "or a $184,000 burden on every man, woman, child and newborn in this country." I was simply stating that a child that has earned $0 should not be grouped similarly to a man that's earned $1,000,000,000.
Pete Peterson is a Wall Streeter who's spending millions trying to convince people that Social Security is in crisis (it's not) and that we should privatize it. Giving a billion dollars to promote the prosperity of future Wall Streeters ain't charity.
Anyone who talks about future deficits and doesn't talk about healthcare costs isn't serious. Social Security will be more or less fine with some combination of tax increases and/or benefit reduction (i.e. raising retirement age). But this New Yorker piece makes clear that healthcare costs are skyrocketing - not because of Medicare or private insurance, but because doctors are going out of control, without any noticeable increase in quality of care: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_...
But there's nothing in it for Wall Street if we constrain healthcare costs, so Peterson will go back to shilling for Social Security privatization.
Please read the article before commenting on what it does or does not talk about:
"the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded entitlements and promises, ... the metastasizing health-care costs, our energy gluttony. These structural deficits are unsustainable."
Also, I would be wary of any analysis of a situation as complex as US health care that lays blame 100pct on "out of control doctors."
Wow...that's awesome, and I'm especially excited about the mission of his foundation. That said, this really bugged me:
Kurt Vonnegut once told a story about seeing Joseph Heller at a wealthy hedge-fund manager's party at a beach house in the Hamptons. Casting his eye around the luxurious setting, Vonnegut said, "Joe, doesn't it bother you that this guy makes more in a day than you ever made from Catch-22?" "No, not really," Heller said. "I have something that he doesn't have: I know the meaning of enough."
I hate stuff like that. Heller wasn't giving up 90% of his possessions and living in a shack eating beans and rice, which would be "enough" for many people in the world. It's all relative, ultimately. Just because someone with wealth chooses to live what you consider to be an opulent lifestyle doesn't mean they don't know what enough is. Billionaires have such a staggering amount of wealth that they can give 95% of it away and still live an incredibly comfortable and extravagant lifestyle. I like to think about Gates and Buffett here, both of whom will ultimately probably give away over $100 billion, but who both live very comfortable lifestyles, Gates much more so than Buffett, but even Buffett flies around in a private jet.
I try not to. If you want to donate all you have to the poor and be homeless, awesome. If you want to earn a billion dollars and throw lavish parties every single day and burn through it all, go for it. Who am I to say that either way is better? It's your money and your life; do what you want.
"...my mind was still sharp and my energy was good...My schedule had too many blank spots. I was liberated. I was free. But I was joyless."
Another way to get back some joy would be to share yourself along with your money. Many people here aren't really interested in your money (well, some of us anyway), but I bet almost everyone is interested in you. How did you do it? What do you believe? What advice would you give? Probably most of all, what do you do to stay sharp at 81? Inquiring hackers want to know.
He was one of the top guys at Blackstone. They are a private equity group. Their stock has gone down 80% since they IPOed. He was lucky that he cashed out when he did. Getting rich buying companies with borrowed money, and then unloading them on somebody else was the ultimate bubble business. Now that the credit bubble has burst, existing private equity has died. They're left with companies with enormous debt burdens that no one wants - think Sam Zeller and the Chicago Tribune company. I don't think Blackstone has sold a company since 2007. I'm not sure there are any lessons to extrapolate from this.
This is phony. He won't say what his money is going for, because that would be a big embarrassment. People who are not libertarians should look closely at what he supports and rue the day that he gave $1 Billion toward making the poor poorer.
"Our representatives, unlike our Founding Fathers, see politics as a career. As a result, they are focused not on the next generation, but on the next election."
Some incisive social criticism but short on details, even philosophical ones, about what's going to make his foundation any different from the thousands which exist today.
"A: Pete has put his money where his mouth is. If the necessary reforms are adapted to address this problem, Pete will certainly see his own taxes raised. A proponent of fiscal discipline for decades and co-founder of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition in 1992, he believes the wealthy should pay higher taxes and forego government-subsidized benefits they don't need."
From what I've seen, the self-made billionaires don't mind the extra tax. Buffet doesn't, Gates doesn't. It's the millionaires, those still trying to put together their nest egg, they are the ones who are worried about taxes.
I'm sure he is pretty agnostic about the future of the tax code after he, as a hedge fund manager, already avoided even the level of taxes you or I would pay:
I would have appreciated more information from the article on what the 1 Billion dollars was going to be used for.