billionaires and Average Per Capita Income

Open email to Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Dear Sen. Sanders,
I have read your recent newsletter on US billionaires. You obviously don't like them, and you would presumably eliminate them by distributing their wealth among the general public. It is not clear to me whether you have a purely socialistic interest in establishing wealth equalization or whether you are using this approach to generate jealousy in the general public and through that obtain more votes for your reelection.
Perhaps some data will convince you that an emotional approach is many times inconsistent with the facts.
There are 187 countries for which annual per capita incomes are listed. This is a little more data than can be easily handled, so I decided to take the first five countries in each of the four quartiles.
In the first quartile, the average annual per capita income ranged from $70,000 to $145,000. The number of billionaires in the five countries was 45.
In the second quartile, the average annual per capita income was in the $10,000 range. The number of billionaires in the five countries was 53.
In the third quartile, the average annual per capita income ranged from $2000 to $3000. The number of billionaires in the five countries was 13.
In the fourth quartile, the average annual per capita income range from $600 to $900. The number of billionaires in the five country was zero.
I don't know what you will get out of this, but to me the message is clear. The more billionaires you have in a country, the greater is the average per capita annual income. In other words, the presence of billionaires in a country is favorable to the financial status of the average inhabitant. I will not speculate on whether the country has made the billionaires or the billionaires have improved the country. I can only say we need more billionaires to improve the financial status of the average person.
See the attachment for more detail.