“Over 1 million Americans have now died from Covid-19. It isn’t a random group of people: one preprint paper found that working-class Americans were five times more likely to die from Covid-19 than college-educated Americans. Working-class Hispanic men had a mortality rate 27 times higher than white college-educated women. Another study analyzed Covid-19 mortality rates in over 219 million American adults and found that if racial and ethnic minorities between 25 to 64 years old had faced the same mortality rate as college-educated white Americans, there would have been 89 percent fewer deaths.”
“From the top down, the official US government response has been slow, incompetent, and poorly suited to what was at stake. Abolishing billionaires would not magically make Trump more competent.
In that context, I find it hard to wish that Bill Gates had been taxed until he no longer had the resources he’s now spending to try to attack this pandemic. And until the problems that produced this government response are fixed, I’m opposed to tearing down the philanthropic safety net that has been there to catch us when the Trump administration failed. To be sure, Gates isn’t necessarily representative of his class. But the point remains: Abolishing the billionaire class hardly guarantees the kind of competent government response needed in a crisis like this.”
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“for all the good Gates and other billionaires might be doing, it’s important to remember that it will not be nearly enough to meet the current crisis.
In a catastrophe of this magnitude, no billionaire can actually do a fraction as much as the US government can. If Gates liquidated all his wealth — no more vaccine programs, no more Gates Foundation — to distribute to every American, everyone would get less than $300 each. The $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package spends far more money than all the billionaires in America combined could.So the sensible role for philanthropists is not replacing the government. They can’t do that. It’s filling in the gaps — moving faster than the government, moving around bureaucratic red tape, making sure that good ideas break ground immediately instead of waiting weeks for approval.”