Billions
Tax Systems. Endings.
I wanna be a billionaire so fucking bad
Buy all of the things I never had
I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine
Smilin’ next to Oprah and the Queen
- Travie McCoy & Bruno Mars, “Billionaire”
Now if you wanna be a billionaire
Fuck you, you can’t
Unless it’s, like, in pesos then I guess it’s fine
I get that billionaires are easy targets, but it bothers me that no-one ever writes songs about how bad the tax system is.
I spent at least two evenings last week writing a lengthy diatribe about these two songs - how my kids introduced me to Rocky Leon, how I tried to teach them about the tax system, about the inequity of wealth, about how there are some good billionaires but they all have a bad name because of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. But what I really wanted to say was simple: billionaires are a symptom - the disease is a tax system that doesn’t scale, and which those with money can exploit to their benefit.
This is all my woefully-undereducated opinion so take it with a grain of salt.
Being a billionaire isn’t the problem with billionaires and we know this because there are some good ones. Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife Mackenzie Scott has given away some $25.6 billion USD, the majority of her fortune from leaving Bezos. Indian entrepreneur Azim Premji has pledged to give away most of his money. Illinois governor JB Pritzker is a prominent supporter of liberal financial policy.
I think when people say ‘billionaires are the problem’, what they mean is Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the rest of the Trump-Epstein Class are the problem, this crop of assholes who have conflated wealth with greatness and believe themselves to be somehow elevated (or, in the case of Thiel, divinely inspired) to guide humanity forward, even though we don’t want space rockets shaped like dicks and artificially intelligent agitprop - we want them to use a little bit of their wealth to (checks math) fix all of our planets issues several times over.
Instead of funding data centres that consume our planet, invest in science that might one day save us. Instead of designing another pair of smart glasses that nobody really wants, feed a few hundred million people.
We could do it ourselves through government funding … except that the tax system of every country, including ours, seems to be rigged in favour of the rich. Most billionaires don’t declare any income; their wealth is in assets and stock and they fund their lifestyles by taking out loans against them. And by playing with the tax system, they can avoid all sorts of non-income-related payments like lower-percentage capital gains taxes. If that is even a thing in your country; it isn’t in New Zealand.
The end result is that you probably paid more income tax in the 2025-26 financial year than the majority of the top 1% by personal wealth. It makes me furious that I’m struggling with the price of butter while the richest in society avoid paying a cent toward our society.
But as the saying goes: don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Maybe the lesson here is that I’m too verbose. I’ve noticed some of the stuff I try to write is meandering and all over the place; I wrote a piece for Chris Schulz about the new Deftones album last week (link below) and the poor guy had to edit out half of it because it was a bit of a mess - an entire section was committed to me flipping through CDs in Whangarei’s to independent music stores, replete with footnote explaining what happened to both of them. It wasn’t the time nor the place for that. Maybe I’ll write about them here one day.
Then I hit an additional problem: I never know how to end a piece.
You write about your subject and you feel like you got your point across and then you have to finish it without just writing a corny summary. Sometimes I’d love to just end suddenly like the last episode of The Sopr
Till next time,
Chris xo
PS Here’s that piece I wrote for Chris Schulz - thanks Chris!
