Eggs (A bit about wealth)

The daily cup – note the handle – it has seen a lot of use over many years.
Most every day, my extravagance is a cup of coffee at the Woodbury City Centre Caribou Coffee.
The most recent cup set me back $2.81, plus the usual $1.00 tip or $3.81. Caribou is where I start my day at 6 a.m. It is a part of my daily ritual, ever more simple as I age.
For most of us, “wealth” is not a familiar condition. Talk of Millions, Billions and Trillions is all but incomprehensable . Monetary “Wealth” is out of our league; what we earn is petty cash for the approximately 1,000 billionaires in the United States; but their wealth seems to dominate the official conversation. My opinion: too much is never enough for them: acquisition of power is the primary, almost sole, value. “Money” is one of the primary exhibitions of “Power” (a false criteria in my opinion).
In the interest of education, I offer the illustration below, which might help flesh out the abstract.
Illustration in pdf form: Wealth
Why start this post with Coffee, then later title it “Eggs”….
The recent campaign political narrative seemed to focus on kitchen table issues, like the price of eggs. The price of eggs seems to be mostly a matter of bird flu, not the fault of anyone. It would be the fault if remedial action were not taken to control the spread of the disease, which in turn decreases production and inevitably raises prices.
I don’t often look at the price of eggs, but recently made a specific point to look at our supermarket. Depending on the size of the egg, the cost was 50 to 60 cents.
The cost for the single egg hardly seemed confiscatory for by far the largest percentage of Americans.
A few days later I was at a local restaurant, and noted the menu Ala carte items: one egg was $3.50, coffee $4.50 and so on. Of course, at a restaurant no one orders just one egg. A bowl of oatmeal, a coffee a order of toast, plus tip set me back $20 – just for myself.
A few times in my life I’ve been to countries where eggs would be luxuries. One that comes to mind is rural Haiti, where I recall seeing eggs only one time: hard boiled. They didn’t look safe. Refrigeration is something not taken for granted in Haiti. If a chicken lays an egg, best used on delivery.
Another time, in the Philippines, we visited what I remember as a large commercial poultry operation, with the chickens in a restricted environment, more likely for safety from predators than egg factory. The chickens were certainly not raised for pets; the farm was not on a heavily populated island. The utility of the chickens is not known to me.
Of course, in my rural upbringing farm chickens were ubiquitous, and “egg money” was the housewives allowance sometimes. Chickens were utilitarian animals. Not only did they produce eggs, but they were ideal meal size – no waste. Perfect for family dinners or when company came.
There is a moral to the story: regardless of how we cry poor, the United States is an extraordinarily wealthy country measured against the rest of the world; and the disequity in wealth, already great, is getting greater still. One of the first priorities seems to give the already wealthy even more tax breaks, which, in turn, will increase the deficit, with cries to take money out of appropriations for the least among us to pay for it.
Be vigilant.
POSTNOTE ON WEALTH, GENERALLY.
Increasingly the internal gap in our own country between the ultra rich and the rest of us is more and more absurd.
At the inauguration January 20, the obvious guests of honor were the ultra wealthy, including Elon Musk and several others. It appeared there was no room in the inn for even one of the MAGA base, the very people the wealthy depend on to vote them into office.
It has long seemed to me to be a very odd paradox: to become wealthier, the wealthy depend on the poor to spend more money on things they cannot afford or don’t need. There are ultra-wealthy in all countries. I remember seeing at least one of their houses in Haiti, one of the poorest countries on earth.
At the same time, the energy is to depress wages and workers, making it more difficult for the working class to have disposable income to spend on the goods which bring more wealth to the already wealthy.
Paradoxical to me: our economy depends on people spending money, which grows wealth for some. Storing unused money away – excessive savings such as billionaires control – does nothing for the common good.
The wealthy must know this is absurd, but craving more is an addiction like any other.
Here is a piece of data very carefully developed by a friend of mine, Dr. Joseph Schwartzberg, for his book on transforming the United Nations system. The chart summarizes the Wealth of UN Countries. Note especially column 2 (% of world population) and 4 (% of Gross National Income). The U.S. had 4.4% of the World’s population, and 22.8% of the world’s gross national income. The data is now several years old, but doubtless remains true today.
The solution is up to each and every one of us, where we live.
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