Global Billionaire Wealth Increases to $4 Trillion During Pandemic

The cost of vaccinating the world is estimated at $141.2 billion

.

by 

Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo

APRIL 1, 2021

SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk poses next to Axel Springer CEO Mathias Doepfner 

on the red carpet of the Axel Springer Award 2020 on December 01, 2020 in Berlin, Germany. 

(Photo by Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images)

As over 2.8 million people have died globally from Covid-19 in the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires has surged.

The planet’s 2,365 billionaires have seen their wealth increase $4 trillion, or 54 percent, during the pandemic year. Their combined wealth rose from $8.04 trillion to $12.39 trillion between March 18, 2020 and March 18, 2021.

Thirteen billionaires saw their wealth increase over 500 percent (see the “500 Percent Club” below).  Many of them are connected to companies that benefited enormously from the conditions of the pandemic, including having their competition shut down or diminished.

There are 270 new billionaires on this year’s global list, while 91 billionaires fell off the list.

The analysis was conducted for the Patriotic Millionaires (and their affiliated UK Millionaires) and Millionaires for Humanity by the Institute for Policy Studies –Program on Inequality, drawing on research from Forbes, Bloomberg, and Wealth-X.At the global level, the wealthiest 20 billionaires have a combined $1.83 trillion in wealth –with an increase of $742 billion, or 68 percent, over the pandemic year.  In comparison, the 2019 GDP of Spain was US $1.3 trillion.

At the global level, the wealthiest 20 billionaires have a combined $1.83 trillion in wealth –with an increase of $742 billion, or 68 percent, over the pandemic year.  In comparison, the 2019 GDP of Spain was US $1.3 trillion.

While billionaires were getting richer, the pandemic caused the global economy to shrink by 3.5 percent in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund. COVID-19 has been an accelerant on global inequality, with acute adverse impacts on women, youth, the poor, the informally employed, and those who work in contact-intensive sectors.

The Need for Wealth Taxation

If global billionaires had paid an annual wealth tax in 2020, modelled on the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” levy proposed by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, they would have paid an estimated $345 billion in wealth taxes. Based on the current expectations of wealth growth, a small wealth tax such as this would raise $4.14 trillion over the next decade.  Of course, there is no institutional body to levy such a global wealth tax and this is for illustrative purposes.

The “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” would levy an annual 2 percent wealth tax on assets over $50 million –and a 3 percent tax on assets over $1 billion.  Our estimates track this law by exempting wealth under $50 million and tax assets between $50 million and $1 billion at a 2 percent rate.

The annual revenue from this wealth tax would be more than twice the estimated $141.2 billion cost of delivering COVID-19 vaccines to every person on the planet, according to estimates from Oxfam.

The U.S. accounts for less than one-third of billionaire wealth on the global list. In the US alone, if this tax was applied to US billionaires on the Forbes Billionaires List, this would generate $120 billion a year, or $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

Wealth in the United Kingdom:

In the UK, between March 2020 and 2021, the 54 UK billionaires saw their wealth increase £40 billion (US $54.9 billion), a gain of 36 percent. Their combined wealth increased from £112.3 billion (US $154 billion) to £152.36 billion (US $208.9 billion).

In the same year the UK economy shrank by a record 9.9 percent and the number of people on Universal Credit – a welfare payment that supports people out-of-work or on a low income – increased by 98% to 6 million people.

In December 2020, the UK Wealth Tax Commission recommended that a one-off wealth tax in the UK, of 1 percent over 5 years, could generate £260 billion if applied to individuals with wealth over half a million pounds. If the 54 billionaires in the UK paid a one-time 5 percent wealth tax, exempting £500,000, it would raise an estimated US $8.6 billion, or £6.28 billion.

Pandemic Wealth Gainers: The 500 Percent Club

Fourteen global billionaires have seen their wealth increase more than 500 percent over the pandemic. Here they are, with a summary of their percent gain and amount of wealth increased over past year.

1. Zhong Shanshan (3,300 percent/$66 billion gain), Saw his wealth rise an eye-popping 3,300 percent during the pandemic year, from $2 billion to $68 billion. The wealth surge was the result of two of his companies going public in 2020, Nongfu bottled water and Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy.
2. Tatyana Bakalchuk (1,200 percent/$12 billion gain), Founded the e-commerce apparel company, Wildberries. Her wealth increased by $12 billion over the pandemic, rising from $1 billion to $13 billion.
3. Zuo Hui (714 percent/$15.9 billion gain), China. Chair of Homelink, China’s largest real estate brokerage company. Wealth increased $15.9 billion, from $2.2 billion to $17.9 billion
4. Bom Kim (670 percent/$6.7 billion gain), Wealth has increased 670 percent, from $1 billion to $7.7 billion over the pandemic year. Founder of the e-commerce giant Coupang, the Amazon of South Korea. Kim’s fortune surged as high as $11 billion after the company’s IPO in early March.
5. Dan Gilbert (642 percent/$41.7 billion gain), Owner of Quicken Loans, which capitalized on cloistered citizens tapping online financing. His wealth increased 641.5 percent, from $6.5 billion to $48.2 billion over the pandemic year.
6. Cheng Yixiao (614 percent/$13.5 billion gain), Co-founder of Kuaishou, a video platform based in Beijing. His wealth increased $13.5 billion, from $2.2 billion to $15.7 billion during the pandemic year.
7. Su Hua (583 percent/$16.9 billion gain), Also a co-founder of video platform and live-streaming app, Kuaishu. Hua’s wealth increased $16.9 billion during the pandemic year, from $2.9 billion to $19.8 billion.
8. Ernest Garcia II (567 percent/$13.6 billion), US. Wealth increased 566.7 percent, from $2.4 billion to $16 billion during the pandemic year.  Biggest shareholder of Carvana, the online car sales and auto-financing giant.
9. Elon Musk (559 percent/$137.5 billion gain), Musk is now the third wealthiest person in the world as his shares in Tesla, Space-X and other companies that he owns continue to climb. His wealth increased $558.9 percent, from $24.6 billion to $162.1 billion during the pandemic year (down $9.9 billion from March 17, 2021, so fluctuating wildly).
10. Brian Armstrong (550 percent/$5.5 billion gain), US. Chief executive of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the country. Wealth increased 550 percent, from $1 billion to $6.5 billion during the pandemic year.
11. Chan Tan Ching-Fen (540 percent, $8.1 billion gain), Hong Kong. Wealth comes from Hang Lung Group, a large real estate founded by her late husband. Wealth increased $1.5 billion to $9.6 billion, an increase of $8.1 billion over the pandemic year.
12. Bobby Murphy (531 percent/$10.1 billion gain), US. Wealth increased 531 percent, from $1.9 billion to $12 billion during the pandemic year. Co-founder of Snapchat, with his Stanford fraternity brother, Evan Spiegel (490%/$9.3 billion gain).
13. Forrest Li (500 percent, $9.5 billion gain), Li’s wealth increased $9.5 billion, from $1.9 billion to $11.4 billion during the pandemic year. He is owner of the online gaming and e-commerce platform, Sea.

View the report HERE and the complete digital worksheet on Global Billionaires HERE.

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org, and is author of the new book, "Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good."  He is co-founder of Wealth for the Common Good, recently merged with the Patriotic Millionaires. He is co-author of "99 to 1: The Moral Measure of the Economy" and, with Bill Gates Sr., of "Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes."

Omar Ocampo is a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He graduated from the University ofMassachusetts Boston with a B.A. in Political Science and holds a Masters in International Relations from the American University in Cairo. His thesis focused on the politics of international oil and humanitarian intervention in Libya.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

55 US Corporate Giants Paid $0 in Federal Taxes in 2020 Thanks to 'Gaping' Loopholes

"If you paid $120 for a pair of Nike Air Force 1 shoes, you paid more to Nike than it paid in federal income taxes over the past 3 years," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

by

Kenny Stancil, staff writer

Published on Friday, April 02, 2021

by

Common Dreams

A person holds a sign urging lawmakers to "Tax the Rich" at a protest in New York City

 on March 29, 2021. (Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

For millions of ordinary people in the U.S., 2020 was a painful year in which loved ones and jobs were lost as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its devastating economic repercussions. But for many of the country's major corporations, last year was a lucrative one—particularly if they were among the 55 companies that paid $0 in federal income taxes on a combined $40.5 billion in profits, as a new study shows.

"We should be asking bigger questions about a tax system so flawed that it asks next to nothing of profitable corporations that derive great benefit from our economy."
—Matthew Gardner, ITEP

Released Friday, the report is based on the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's (ITEP) analysis of 2020 financial reports filed by the country's largest publicly traded corporations. 

Instead of paying a collective $8.5 billion in federal income taxes on last year's profits of $40.5 billion, as mandated by the statutory 21% rate, the 55 companies exploited preexisting loopholes and pandemic-related tax breaks to reduce their tax bills to zero.

Not only did these corporations secure a zero-tax liability, they received a collective $3.5 billion in rebates, bringing the total amount of lost federal revenue to $12 billion. And 26 of them haven't paid a dime for the past three years, a time period in which the GOP's "morally and economically obscene" tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans have been in effect.

"We should continue to call on policymakers to address the gaping corporate tax loopholes that make this kind of tax avoidance possible," said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at ITEP and an author of the report.

"But in a pandemic year when so many small businesses shuttered and millions of people lost their economic livelihoods," he added, "we should be asking bigger questions about a tax system so flawed that it asks next to nothing of profitable corporations that derive great benefit from our economy—in good and bad economic times."

Perhaps...and stay with me here...our current corporate tax system is not working very well. https://t.co/HnPaVbK1xB

— Michael Linden (@MichaelSLinden) April 2, 2021

In the report, Gardner characterized the latest example of tax dodging by profitable companies as part of "a decades-long trend of corporate tax avoidance by the biggest U.S. corporations [that] appears to be the product of long-standing tax breaks preserved or expanded by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) as well as the CARES Act tax breaks enacted in the spring of 2020."

The report includes a table listing the profits and effective tax rates of all 55 companies.

Some publicly traded corporations that paid $0 in federal income taxes in the most recent fiscal year, such as Zoom, are not included because they are not yet part of the S&P 500 or Fortune 500. But many of the companies—which represent a variety of industries, including technology, utilities, manufacturing, banking, agriculture, and others—are household names.

Some of the most well-known brands, according to ITEP's analysis, include the following:

• Food conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland enjoyed $438 million of U.S. pretax income last year and received a federal tax rebate of $164 million.
• The cable TV provider Dish Network paid no federal income taxes on $2.5 billion of U.S. income in 2020.
• The delivery giant FedEx zeroed out its federal income tax on $1.2 billion of U.S. pretax income last year and received a rebate of $230 million.
• The shoe manufacturer Nike didn't pay a dime of federal income tax on almost $2.9 billion of U.S. pretax income in 2020, instead enjoying a $109 million tax rebate.
• The software company Salesforce avoided all federal income taxes last year on $2.6 billion of U.S. income.

If you paid $120 for a pair of Nike Air Force 1 shoes, you paid more to Nike than it paid in federal income taxes over the past 3 years, while it made $4.1 billion in profits and Nike's founder, Phil Knight, became over $23 billion richer. Yes. We must #TaxTheRich.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 2, 2021

As Gardner wrote, "the biggest and most profitable U.S. corporations have found ways to shelter their profits from federal income taxation" for decades, which ITEP has documented "since the early years of the Reagan administration's misguided tax-cutting experiment."

"A widely cited ITEP analysis of an eight-year period (2008 through 2015) confirmed that federal tax avoidance remained rampant before the TCJA," but now that "most corporations [are] reporting their third year of results under the new corporate tax laws pushed through by President Donald Trump in 2017, it is crystal clear that the TCJA failed to address loopholes that enable tax dodging—and may have made it worse," he added.

According to ITEP, "the companies used a combination of old and new tax breaks to secure a zero-tax obligation." Gardner documented the "familiar" tactics that corporations used to slash their effective federal tax rate on corporate profits:

• More than a dozen used a tax break for executive stock options to sharply reduce their income taxes last year;
• At least half a dozen companies used the federal research and experimentation credit to reduce their income taxes in 2020;
• Tax breaks for renewable energy are part of the tax avoidance scheme for several utility companies; and
• A provision in the TCJA allowing companies to immediately write off capital investments—the most extreme version of accelerated depreciation—helped more than a dozen companies reduce their income tax substantially. 

In addition, Gardner noted, there is "a new factor driving down corporate tax bills: the CARES Act, ostensibly designed to help people and businesses to stay afloat during the pandemic."

While "tax law previously allowed companies to carry back losses to offset profits in two prior years," Gardner wrote that "the TCJA bars companies from doing this (although it still allows companies to carry losses forward to offset profits in future years). However, the CARES Act temporarily restored companies' ability to carry back losses and, incredibly, is more generous than the pre-TCJA rules."

ITEP noted that "the provision's generosity (the act retroactively loosens rules even for losses in years before the pandemic) provides a ripe breeding ground for corporate tax accounting gimmicks." As Gardner pointed out, "some companies used a CARES Act provision to 'carry back' 2018 or 2019 losses to offset profits they reported in prior years, resulting in a rebate that reduced their 2020 taxes, in some cases to less than nothing."

Notably, the publication of ITEP's report coincided with the Biden administration's push to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% to fund the American Jobs Plan, as its physical and social infrastructure package is called.

This kind of BS is why Americans are MORE enthusiastic about the #AmericanJobsPlan if it's paid for by higher taxes on pandemic profiteers, the already-wealthy & big corporations. The @USChamber needs to stop complaining and admit that corporations need to pay their damn taxes. https://t.co/BJhtj1uwA5

— Heather McGhee (@hmcghee) April 2, 2021

"Fortunately," Gardner wrote, "the policy remedies Congress shunned in 2017 remain available today. By paring the tax breaks identified in this report, or by re-introducing some form of a 'minimum tax' requiring profitable companies to pay at least some tax in any profitable year, Congress and President Biden could take a major step toward a fairer and more sustainable tax system."

Tax the Rich. Here's How

These 7 ways of taxing the rich would generate more than $6 trillion over 10 years.

by

Robert Reich

 Published on Friday, April 02, 2021 

by

RobertReich.org

People participate in a "March on Billionaires" event on July 17, 2020 in New York City.

 (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Income and wealth are now more concentrated at the top than at any time over the last 80 years, and our unjust tax system is a big reason why. The tax code is rigged for the rich, enabling a handful of wealthy individuals to exert undue influence over our economy and democracy. 

Conservatives fret about budget deficits. Well, then, to pay for what the nation needs—ending poverty, universal health care, infrastructure, reversing climate change, investing in communities, and so much more—the super-wealthy have to pay their fair share.

Here are seven necessary ways to tax the rich.

First: Repeal the Trump tax cuts.

It’s no secret Trump’s giant tax cut was a giant giveaway to the rich. 65 percent of its benefits go to the richest fifth, 83 percent to the richest 1 percent over a decade. In 2018, for the first time on record, the 400 richest Americans paid a lower effective tax rate than the bottom half. Repealing the Trump tax cut’s benefits to the wealthy and big corporations, as Joe Biden has proposed, will raise an estimated $500 billion over a decade.

Second: Raise the tax rate on those at the top. 

In the 1950s, the highest tax rate on the richest Americans was over 90 percent. Even after tax deductions and credits, they still paid over 40 percent. But since then, tax rates have dropped dramatically. Today, after Trump’s tax cut, the richest Americans pay less than 26 percent, including deductions and credits. And this rate applies only to dollars earned in excess of $523,601. Raising the marginal tax rate by just one percent on the richest Americans would bring in an estimated $123 billion over 10 years. 

Third: A wealth tax on the super-wealthy.

Wealth is even more unequal than income. The richest 0.1% of Americans have almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. Just during the pandemic, America’s billionaires added $1.3 trillion to their collective wealth. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax would charge 2 percent on wealth over $50 million and 3 percent on wealth over $1 billion. It would only apply to about 75,000 U.S. households, fewer than 0.1% of taxpayers. Under it, Jeff Bezos would owe $5.7 billion out of his $185 billion fortune—less than half what he made in one day last year. The wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over a decade, enough to pay for universal childcare and free public college with plenty left over.

Fourth: A transactions tax on trades of stock.

The richest 1 percent owns 50 percent of the stock market. A tiny 0.1 percent tax on financial transactions—just $1 per $1,000 traded—would raise $777 billion over a decade. That’s enough to provide housing vouchers to all homeless people in America more than 12 times over.

Fifth: End the “stepped-up cost basis” loophole.

The heirs of the super-rich pay zero capital gains taxes on huge increases in the value of what they inherit because of a loophole called the stepped-up basis. At the time of death, the value of assets is “stepped up” to their current market value—so a stock that was originally valued at, say, one dollar when purchased but that’s worth $1,000 when heirs receive it, escapes $999 of capital gains taxes. This loophole enables huge and growing concentrations of wealth to be passed from generation to generation without ever being taxed. Eliminating this loophole would raise $105 billion over a decade.

Six: Close other loopholes for the super-rich.

For example, one way the managers of real estate, venture capital, private equity and hedge funds reduce their taxes is the carried interest loophole, which allows them to treat their income as capital gains rather than ordinary wage income. That means they get taxed at the lower capital gains rate rather than the higher tax rate on incomes. Closing this loophole is estimated to raise $14 billion over a decade.

Seven: Increase the IRS’s funding so it can audit rich taxpayers.

Because the IRS has been so underfunded, millionaires are far less likely to be audited than they used to be. As a result, the IRS fails to collect a huge amount of taxes from wealthy taxpayers. Collecting all unpaid federal income taxes from the richest 1 percent would generate at least $1.75 trillion over the decade. So fully fund the IRS.

Together, these 7 ways of taxing the rich would generate more than $6 trillion over 10 years—enough to tackle the great needs of the nation. As inequality has exploded, our unjust tax system has allowed the richest Americans to cheat their way out of paying their fair share. 

It’s not radical to rein in this irresponsibility. It’s radical to let it continue.

Watch:

Robert Reich, is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. His book include:  "Aftershock" (2011), "The Work of Nations" (1992), "Beyond Outrage" (2012) and, "Saving Capitalism" (2016). He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, former chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." Reich's newest book is "The Common Good" (2019). He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

America's Military-Industrial Complex Squanders $1.7 Trillion on a Lame Fighter Jet While the President Begs for Infrastructure Cash

Isn’t there a better way?

by

Will Bunch

published on

Thursday, April 01, 2021 

by

The Philadelphia Inquirer

 

U.S. Air Force Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning stealth fighter flies over the

 San Francisco Bay in San Francisco, California on October 13, 2019.

 (Photo: Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

A Ferrari is surely a wonderful sports car, but let's be honest: Most of us couldn't afford the day-to-day maintenance, let alone the sticker price, and these beautiful creatures are hard to drive on America's pothole-plagued streets, and a massive pain in the butt to repair when they break down. So you can imagine the raised eyebrows earlier this year when a top U.S. Air Force general compared the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jet—decades and hundreds of billions of dollars into a lifetime that will cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion—to that Italian dream machine.

"I want to moderate how much we're using those aircraft," Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the Air Force chief of staff, told Pentagon reporters about the Lockheed Martin-built fighter in February. "You don't drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays. This is our high end, we want to make sure we don't use it all for the low-end fight … We don't want to burn up capability now and wish we had it later."

Experts have found that massive military spending—although it does create jobs at defense plants, so often located in the districts of key House members—is actually a drain on a nation's economy, because it diverts dollars from much more productive uses such as education...or infrastructure.

In so many words, Brown was admitting that one of the most expensive weapons systems known to humankind is a failure—to be kept under a heavy tarp in a padlocked garage six days a week. His words riled critics like William Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who today writes frequently about Pentagon waste. That's because the F-35 was sold to the public in the early 1990s not as a luxury item but as a lower-cost, everyday workhorse fighter jet. He said the flaws now deeply embedded in America's military-industrial complex—the Pentagon's demands for the newest gadgets and a defense contractor's skill at upping the ante—"is how you end up with a Ferrari instead of a Camry ... or even an Audi."

The massive swing-and-a-miss that is the F-35—which already has the Pentagon dreaming of a new, new next-gen fighter that might actually be cheaper and easier to use—is just one symptom of a much greater problem: In spending more on war-related costs than the world's next 10 nations combined, the U.S. wastes billions on weapon systems that are ineffective and often not even needed. This dollar drain hasn't let up even as America's highways fill up with those Ferrari-foiling potholes and bridges collapse, while the world's richest nation falls behind on everything from high-speed rail to solar energy to teaching our kids.

another great day for the $1.7 trillion airplane that can't fly in the rain and also sometimes shoots itselfhttps://t.co/FcIrczMEBH

— Doug (@averyvery) March 26, 2021

But the obscene failures of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn us about way back in 1961 seem particularly frustrating this spring, as President Biden begs Congress to help him pay for the $2 trillion infrastructure plan he unveiled Wednesday in Pittsburgh. His scheme aims to not only address those decades of shameful neglect of highways but also stop poisoning kids with lead in drinking water, as happened in Flint, and tackle 21st century problems like climate change—but the fight will be over how to pay for it.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with Biden's idea, which is to raise corporate taxes back to 2017 levels, before Donald Trump's irresponsible tax cut that—studies have shown—may have helped slightly fatten the bottom line for Big Business but did little for the everyday worker. But the Chamber of Commerce crowd and their GOP handmaidens on Capitol Hill will fight this with every fiber of their being, and even with Democrats using the 51-vote reconciliation tool there is no guarantee the badly needed plan will pass.

Meanwhile, the money blown on that sleek fighter jet behind the padlock on America's garage could have—OK, with help from a good accountant, perhaps—painlessly paid for 85% of what the Biden administration is seeking to do here. Or, what if we went crazy and tackled senseless Pentagon waste and raised taxes on corporations AND on billionaires like Jeff Bezos and used the savings for our other massive needs, like making community college and public universities free to attend? But here's the deal, folks—Uncle Joe isn't going there, not yet.

The new administration has already signaled to Capitol Hill that its next Defense Department spending plan slated for later this spring will be essentially "flat"—if that word can be used to describe a bloated Pentagon budget of about $704 to $708 billion. The Biden plan would ignore a letter from 50 House progressives pleading for real cuts to instead invest "in diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research." But of course there's also pressure from congressional conservatives who want to spend even more on weapons, to accelerate a new cold war with Russia but especially with China.

The latter idea is not only the morally wrong choice, but ignores how much money we throw away on the barely usable weapons we have now. The F-35 Lightning II—with its premature cracks in its initial testing, inevitable and frequent software glitches, "sluggish" performance in test battles against the older model F-16, and with demands from Pentagon bosses that made it under-perform earlier-generation jets but also more costly to maintain—is obviously Exhibit A. Some of the fighter jet's defects are comically ironic—including the fact that a plane that was named Lightning II has problems in flying through lightning.

But critics such as Astore point to other Defense Department boondoggles that could be killed or scaled back. His list includes the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers ($14 billion a pop) which the retired colonel joked is more like Chevy Chase's Saturday Night Live impersonation of a stumbling Ford, with elevators that don't work and airplane catapults that don't catapult, or the Boeing K-46 tanker which—again, ironically—leaks fuel, or the Navy's Littoral Combat Ships that one defense journalist called "floating garbage piles" (at a price of $5 billion for every 10). There's more, but you probably get the drift by now.

A practical, real world solution here isn't rocket science, or even aircraft-carrier elevator science. The Biden administration could find hundreds of billions of dollars to deal with America's more pressing needs at home, as critics like Astore have noted, with simple moves like a) ending its sudden skittishness on carrying out the president's 2020 campaign promise to end the war in Afghanistan as soon as humanly possible and b) trimming the Pentagon's annual budget back down to the roughly $600 billion level it was at before its massive boost under President Trump, who was so eager to please the generals, no questions asked. On the F-35, it's too late to kill the project (for one thing, we've already sold it to our so-called allies like the United Arab Emirates) but we could save hundreds of billions by building fewer.

Bill Astore @TomDispatch : How about it, America? Why not cancel those wasteful, ineffective weapons and build back better at home? https://t.co/85WSABsP7S

— Responsible Statecraft (@RStatecraft) March 14, 2021

Experts have found that massive military spending—although it does create jobs at defense plants, so often located in the districts of key House members—is actually a drain on a nation's economy, because it diverts dollars from much more productive uses such as education...or infrastructure. So cutting the Pentagon budget to pay for part of the Biden agenda seems like a no-brainer. But Democrats just can't quit their reflexive instincts from the Ronald Reagan era (Biden's heyday in the Senate) that the slightest hint of looking weak on defense will cause them to lose elections—even after the real Cold War ended in 1991.

Real courage and strength would be admitting that America can easily retain the world's strongest military while still reclaiming hundreds of billions of wasted dollars that could instead improve our schools—and maybe even better educate our kids to make smarter decisions about war and peace than my generation has. And how wonderful would it be to pay for the things that our middle class actually needs with a massive garage sale? We can start with the Ferrari.

© 2021 The Philadelphia Inquirer

Will Bunch is a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of its popular blog Attytood.