 Approximately 660 billionaires in the United States increased their wealth in the pandemic just during the pandemic by about $1.8 trillion. In other words, the entire stimulus bill was $1.9 trillion, so they could afford to have paid for the entire stimulus and be no worse off than they were when the pandemic started. The very rich in this country have used philanthropy as a public relations device to take away attention from the fact that they are basically cleaning up. Inequality increased dramatically during the pandemic, and the little bits that billionaires and the very rich give out in philanthropy was just a tiny sliver of the amount their fortunes grew during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, for example, provided during the pandemic $100 million to food banks, and everybody applauded. Isn't that wonderful of Jeff Bezos? Well, yes, that was good, but $100 million, that's 11 days worth of Jeff Bezos' income off of his assets. 11 days, folks, over the last five years, the Gates Foundation earned from its investments $28.5 billion. How much of that did the Gates Foundation actually pay out in charities, charitable contributions, $23.5 billion? Doesn't that seem a little bit odd? But worse, it is actually ironically paid for by the rest of us, because you see there's something called the charitable deduction. A charitable deduction or the charitable deduction allows the wealthy to reduce their taxable incomes by the amount that they give in charity. That comes to about $44 billion a year. In a way, the rest of us are saying, here, take this $44 billion and you decide how you want to distribute this. If you want to give it to concert halls and operas that you frequent, so you can have your name etched in the marble, go ahead, do that. We'll give you that $44 billion you decide instead of we, the people of the United States, deciding how our tax money is going to be used. Another thing that's troubling is conflicts of interest. I mean, the Gates Foundation provided $250 million to companies in which the Gates Foundation actually holds stocks and bonds. If that's not a conflict of interest, I don't know what is because remember, all of these contributions are subsidized by American taxpayers. A lot of people look at the charitable contributions of the ultra wealthy and they say, oh, isn't that wonderful? We don't need as a country to worry as much about the very poor or about our social safety nets that are coming apart. What they don't realize is that even if you add up all these charitable contributions together, there are small portion of what the government can and should be doing and has done for the poor in the past. So we can't rely on these charitable contributions even if they actually did go to the poor. They would not be a substitute in any way for public assistance.