Insatiable; a Porn Story, but Not That Kind

I was glancing through the newspaper a few days back, wondering where all the positive stories had gone from our news, when I ran across this:

‘Tech stocks battered after disappointing Amazon and Alphabet results: after the bell, Amazon tanked 8 percent. The fall came after the online retailer and cloud computing heavyweight reported that its quarterly net sales rose to $56.58 billion from $43.74 billion a year earlier. That missed analyst estimates of $57.1 billion’…(Investing.com)

So, the Insatiable investor class punished Amazon by 8% for missing their estimates by 2 ½%. Well, that oughta teach ‘em. “When we make quarterly estimates, no matter that we don’t have a fucking clew about how to actually run such a company, they better listen up,” said Ritchie Rich, flashing his Insatiable investor million-dollar smile and raising a carefully tweaked and surgically enhanced eyebrow.

That’s pornographic.

That’s what we’ve come to in the world of flash trades. All those little old widows who used to rely on GE and GM for their financial futures are yesterday’s tune. Today the Insatiables have won the game and it’s no longer three-strikes,you’re-out. A dropped fly-ball is the whole game.

The Trump tax cut was going to ‘bring offshore wealth back home to invest in American business.’ Instead, what we got, as the corporate tax rate dropped, was stock buy-backs and increased dividends. Another score for the super wealthy and a ground-out to third base to end the game for the middle class.

I can’t wait for the stats for 2018. Last year, the 1% pocketed another $1 trillion (that’s a thousand billion) and yet they’re hungry. They thirst for more and they will get it. ‘A fly-ball to deep center field and It’s going…going…gone’ 

So, let’s drop the baseball metaphor and take a look at the future. How much can it take, on a yearly basis, to sustain the life of an insatiable? $200 million? $500 million?

Of course to sustain such a life, we must first define ‘sustain:’ to sustain is to ‘lengthen or extend in duration or space.’

Let’s say you (as an Insatiable) already have multi-million dollar homes in five or six countries, a super-yacht, a private jet, lavish travel allowances and staff to run all of the above.

Staff for 6 homes, I give you $6 million.

Keeping a yacht in the water and a jet in the air, another $2 million.

You need to be amused, clothed, fed and traveled, so throw in another couple million, give or take a few bucks.

We’re now at $10 million and I’m going to double that because I’m not all that skilled at budgeting in that range. So, call it $20 million.

A billion dollars, at 10%, returns $100 million a year. The Insatiables, on average, increased their pot by 21% in 2017 alone.

Pornographic as well, by definition.

It’s not so much I’m pissed off by that (although I am), it’s that it’s so out of proportion to any degree of human need. 

So, here’s a thought.

Let’s buy them the homes, yachts and planes. That could be done by the military budget and nary a war would suffer. Then, on an annual basis, we kick in $20 million so they can keep those yachts afloat and take the rest—every single year—for taxes.

That suit you? It does me.