# Where are the billionaire philanthropists? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 18, 2026, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-the-billionaire-philanthropists/1030192 "2026-05-18T19:49:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 73
**Author:** ![DavidNRockies](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidnrockies/32/6279_2.png) [@DavidNRockies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidNRockies)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2026, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-the-billionaire-philanthropists/1030192/73 "2026-05-19T17:41:45Z")
Tangentially (or better) related, and something I posted on another thread: the social compact is effectively dead. When today’s uber-wealthy are actually (domestic) job creators, it’s a happy accident or a necessary evil – something they couldn’t get around. In fact, Trump made big hay out of promising to resurrect the American dream, where ‘lower skilled’ jobs were plentiful, could create a middle-class life for a family, put fairly new cars in the driveway, afford home ownership, and put the kids through college, and allow one to imagine a stable and dignified retirement. That was a tacit acknowledgement of what the oft-derided ‘redistribution of wealth’ in the last half-century _really_ looked like: Radically upward. [And, of course, the only thing Trump’s done about that particular situation is to make it markedly worse, _further_ pushing wealth upward – Supply-Side Economics, to coin a phrase] > [@Socialism(or at least, a version thereof) Vs Capitalism](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialism-or-at-least-a-version-thereof-vs-capitalism/927389/44): > > I would certainly agree with that. But some measure of that was a negative sum game, particularly where outsourcing took formerly solid middle-class jobs away from entire US communities. Which was totally foreseeable. One of the things I’ve said here before is that the ‘ownership’ class made conscious (and gleeful) decisions to displace substantial domestic workforces in large swaths, leaving them Dollar General and OxyContin in exchange. We created the rust belt in – relatively – extremely… --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-the-billionaire-philanthropists/1030192)._