Ethan Kaur

Should billionaires be allowed to exist?

Everyone pictures a billionaire's net worth as a giant vault of cash they are sitting on. It's not. Almost all of it is stock in companies they built or funded, which means their "wealth" is mostly a claim on future value that only exists if those companies keep employing people and selling things people want. If a founder tried to convert a massive stake to cash tomorrow, the price would crater. Wealth numbers like we see on the Forbes list ([Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/)) are paper valuation, not their actual bank balance. And here's the part the "abolish billionaires" crowd never addresses. The era of billionaires is also the era of the fastest poverty reduction in human history. The World Bank's data shows extreme poverty falling from roughly 36% of humanity in 1990 to under 10% before the good ol covid pandemic ([World Bank poverty data](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY)). Correlation is not causation, but the claim that billionaires got rich by making everyone else poorer simply doesn't fit the numbers.

Should people with felony convictions automatically regain voting rights after serving their sentences?

Everyone talks about second chances, but almost nobody mentions how fast the second chance gets wasted. The [Bureau of Justice Statistics](https://bjs.ojp.gov/) found that 83% of state prisoners released were rearrested within nine years, which means a huge share of people restored on day one will be back inside before the next presidential election. I am not saying nobody deserves the vote, I am saying timing matters: a waiting period or a clean-record stretch proves the reintegration is real instead of assumed. States that restore rights after parole or probation ends already strike this balance, and their approach respects both the person who stayed straight and the community taking the risk. Automatic restoration at the prison door skips the only evidence that matters, which is what someone does with their freedom.