When a Couple Hundred Million Is Pocket Change

It’s beutiful, I’ll give you that.

A Guardian article crossed my monitor today: “Gustav Klimt portrait sells for $236.4m, making it the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which was looted by the Nazis and nearly destroyed in a fire during the second world war, sells at Sotheby’s auction.”

This sort of thing is commonplace today, and hardly raises more than a shrug and mumble. It seemed to me not so much the value of the painting, as the devaluing put upon us by a separation imposed upon us and our new and shiny billionaire class.

Well, maybe not so new, but certainly shiny enough to light up the sky.

There has always been a gap between rich and poor, but in the span of a couple generations, it’s grown by a thousandfold.

That’s serious stuff. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, real wage growth over that same period has been both modest and uneven, with a period of stagnation followed by some recent growth. Quite Possibly ‘modest and uneven’ is selected to make wage-slaves like you and me feel like we’re still in the game.

You feel still in the game? I gotta take a pass on that.

The median hourly wage in the U.S. was about $4.44 in 1979, increasing to $19.24 in 2023. However, adjusted for inflation, real wages in the U.S. were only about 19% higher in 2025 than in 1985.

Statistics. Don’t you love them?

They say, if you torture statistics sufficiently, they’ll confess to anything.

Jeff Bezos doesn’t get an hourly wage, which probably will come as no surprise. His ‘salary’ is a dollar a year, so he pays no ordinary income tax, which is no surprise either.

His income is derived from capital gains on his Amazon stock, which is taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income, and only paid when a portion of the stock is sold. Pay attention now, the super wealthy don’t ever sell their stock, so they pay no tax.

But , just like God, they need money, so how do they live?

I’m glad you asked.

I can’t answer for God, but when the super rich need money, they get a loan from a bank, using their corporate stock as collateral, and using that money to buy groceries, pay personal employees, eat out, and buy an occasional mansion, yacht or Rolls Royce. The interest on those loans is tax deductible, if and when they pay them back. But often they don’t, simply rolling them over and, essentially, living tax free.

Who made those laws?

Congress made those laws, paid for by their votes to do so by the super rich, which was also a tax deduction.

You get the feeling we wage-slaves are being scammed?

What made Bezos the second richest man in the world was the increase in the value of Amazon stock. But we can track that because it’s a matter of record and, in 2024, his wealth increased by approximately $51 billion, which is quite an approximation.

Calculated by the 2,000 hours in an average work year, that comes to an astounding $25 million an hour, while the average hourly wage for Amazon workers is around $22-$23 per hour.

It’s looked upon as almost criminal that average CEO pay for large corporations, compared to workers, has increased from 25 to 1 in 1975, to 285 to 1 currently.

Try on Bezos’s 1,000,000,000 to 1 for size.

Back to the Klimt portrait, the second most expensive artwork ever sold would have cost Jeff a whole ten hours of income. We can assume he never broke a sweat

The billionaire class didn’t simply drop down out of the clouds, it came from somewhere. The somewhere it came from is traceable.

Part One, is Reagan’s breaking of the unions, beginning with his opening scene as president, busting the air controllers union. Unions made the American Middle Class, and the decline of one foretold the decline of the other.

Part Two, is the offshoring of industry, particularly heavy industry, to China. Although running shoes are hardly heavy, Nike was the beginning. A $100 dollar shoe cost $20 to make in America and two bucks in China. Normal business economics would pass that reduction to the consumer, as a matter of competitive pressures. But, in this case, competitors saw the light and the additional $8 went directly to Nike shareholders.

Part Three is the offshoring of corporate offices to low, or tax free, countries such as Ireland. This is closely associated with Part Four, a steady stream of income tax breaks for the wealthy across every administration from Reagan to Trump.

It was no longer fashionable to be a millionaire, when billionairehood was within reach.

So, the real question at hand is this. Is art worth exponentially more today, or is the billionaire class built on fraud, deception and grounds so shaky that the walls may come tumbling down?

Consider this: The most expensive painting sold at auction in 1979 was Frederic Edwin Church’s “Icebergs,” which sold for $2.5 million at Sotheby’s. This was a record-breaking price for an American painting at the time. Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” sold for 95 times that price. A Mercedes sedan I bought new for $10,000 in 1972 now sells for $120,000, 12 times the price.

I had an upper middle-class income at that time to support buying a Benz. That class no longer exists. Granted, an automobile is not all that fair a comparison to a work of art, the one being a manufactured item and the other an irreplaceable one-off.

Even so, some truths come to light.

Fine art was pretty much always beyond the reach of all but the wealthy. Agreed. But that does not mean that the most expensive items in the world (private jets, multiple mansions, yachts, and art) should be available to anyone as simply the small change you and I lose down the sofa.

Further, Part One through Four (above) are all reversable.

What got us here can be undone and get us back.

It’s a choice.

But not when we are prevented from choice, and lied to about Klimt being the new normal.

I do not accept Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Elon as normal.