The phrase “time is money” is attributed to Benjamin Franklin in 1748, even though it appeared in a Whig newspaper in 1719. That exemplifies the rich and famous overshadowing the not-so-powerful. The historic meaning of the phrase was about a relationship to work, not cash. The sentiment was that adults should be busy with work that allowed sustaining one’s living. The phrase was a warning against becoming a “ne’er-do-well” (1737, Scots/English), a term defining someone lazy and irresponsible.
In contrast, the modern use of “time is money” is all about the cash generated by any means. An hourly wage or a yearly salary is a way that cash is generated on a personal level over time. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), yearly sales, and quarterly reports are how governments and businesses report their productivity measures in money for a time period. These are reflections of money earned through physical and mental effort and “work” in various forms of human activity.
Investors do it differently. Their money “works” for the investor. The investor has accumulated more money than they need to live on, so the surplus is “invested” in a variety of options for the wealthy. Financial investing is defined as “putting your money to work….to grow your wealth over time.” Time is money.
Timing, business opportunity, and workers’ labor produced America’s first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, in 1916. Historians debate whether the first American billionaire was actually Henry Ford in 1920. What did these two men do with their unimaginable wealth? Rockefeller created an original grant-making institution in 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation (currently Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors). He focused his wealth on public health, universal renewable energy access, and global food security. Henry Ford paid his workers five dollars a day so they could afford to buy the cars they were building. Other industrialists were angered by Ford’s pay scale as their workers flocked to Ford’s factories. Henry Ford founded the Ford Foundation in 1936, which emphasized individual grants helping people help themselves. The Foundation also created hospitals and schools. The ethics of these early billionaires were to give back to the society, people, and circumstances that created the context of their wealth accumulation.
How much is a billion dollars? It is impossible to envision that number of dollars in a physical sense. A financial report or bank statement does not do justice to the absolute volume of a billion dollars. Since “time is money,” let’s define a billion dollars in time. Human time. If a single second represents a single dollar, it would take 11.6 days to reach a million. A billion is reached in 32 years. If you spent one thousand dollars every day, a million would last almost 3 years. A billion dollars would last 2,700 years. If you saved a hundred thousand dollars a year, it would take you 10 years to reach a million, but it would take 10,000 years to accumulate a billion.
These numbers are for one billion dollars. For insight into staggering wealth, multiply the above numbers by $811.2 billion of Elon Musk or $322.3 billion of Larry Page. Try your math skills along with shock at $297 billion (Sergey Brin, Google), $271.5 (Jeff Bezos, Amazon), $240 billion (Larry Ellison, Oracle), and so on and so on for the 989 American billionaires. America has more billionaires per capita than any other country. American billionaires collectively hold approximately twenty trillion dollars of wealth. Convert twenty trillion dollars into miles. That would get a spaceship to our farthest planet, Neptune, 4.7 billion miles from Earth, a total of 2,128 round-trips. Round-trip!
The holders of this enormous wealth are not paying state and federal taxes like you and me. The recent “big beautiful bill” was the largest tax cut for the wealthy in American history. This truth is in spite of the fact that the American infrastructure that supported their profits is deteriorating. National debt is increasing, and dams, roads, and bridges need repairs. Rather than taxing enormous wealth, the current administration in Washington, DC, is planning to sell our public lands, parks, forests, and wilderness lakes to private entities as “an asset to the federal balance sheet.” An income tax on twenty trillion dollars is also an asset, but is allowed to go untapped by a very small group of selfish people in positions of power.
American workers, taxpayers, are paying for the increased electrical, road, and water costs of the developing data centers. AI and internet services are the largest single generator of new wealth in America, approximately seventy-five percent of stock market returns, and the majority of recent GDP growth. It is a technological gold rush. Why should citizens pay for the required infrastructure when the businesses and individuals benefitting from huge profits are not paying their fair share? Taxpayers do fund roads and public utilities, but these are not profit centers in private ownership. For-profit businesses on any scale should fund themselves and pay fair taxes back to the counties and states that are foundational to their success.
The American workforce that has supported profitable businesses is also suffering. Wages have not kept up with rising costs of living. Remember, Henry Ford paid his workers a very high wage for the time so they could buy the car they were making. Modern Walmart workers are paid so little as to qualify for food stamps. The Walmart heirs collectively have $450 billion in assets, but won’t pay their employees a living wage. They rely on our taxes to fund food stamps so their employees can eat. Highly successful companies should take note of Ford’s logic in supporting his workforce. Living wages, affordable childcare, and health insurance are basic to maintaining a viable workforce that makes companies profitable. Simply put, some of the profits go into the workforce. That is ethical, moral, and just good business in the long run. Individual income taxes and payroll taxes contribute 84% to the federal budget, while corporations contribute a mere 10%.
I think America needs to recommit itself to sustainable capitalism. Consider business activity like a lake. A lake is a body of water made dynamic by water flowing into and out of that body. It’s a very productive system. If the input is choked off, the lake dries up like the Aral Sea in Russia and our own Great Salt Lake and Salton Sea. If the lake is drained of all assets, it also dies. If American billionaires drain too many assets without putting a substantial amount back into our economy, America will dry up. If you think it “can’t happen here,” look at your own cash flow. It is already happening.
