According to a spokeswoman for private rental company NetJets, inquiries for flights increased from last year.
Bilton added:
"Meanwhile, the gap between the haves and the have-nots in Silicon Valley has only grown. The coronavirus pandemic has proven to be more fruitful for tech than almost any other single event in history. Surfer-guy Zuckerberg is now the fourth-richest person on the planet, worth $100 billion. Jeff Bezos has reached another vertiginous high; he's now worth around $190 billion, depending on the time of day, and he set a record last month when his net worth jumped by $13 billion in single day. Elon Musk, who has spent half the pandemic schilling conspiracy theories about COVID-19 or attacking Gavin Newsom for shuttering businesses, has seen his net worth skyrocket; last month it reached $70 billion, helped along by a $6.1 billion bump in a single day, edging him past Warren Buffett on the list of the world's richest people. When he passed the benchmark, Musk told Forbes, 'I really couldn't care less.'"
The affluent have always found a way to insulate themselves from real-world problems.
It isn't just occurring now during the pandemic.
For example, middle-class and lower-income Californians are seeing their homes go up in smoke while their affluent neighbors--many celebrities--are employing private firefighters to protect them and their mansions.
The coddling too many of us here in real America give the wealthy is misguided at best, ignorant at worst.
The Republican party has for years adopted the Libertarian position of privatizing all social programs and safety nets upon which the middle class was built-Social Security, Medicare, unions, environmental regulations, public education, fire and police protection, libraries, etc.
To them, if we simply relieve ourselves of "big government," we will organically become more self-sufficient and, eventually, "freer."
In their minds, we could all be rich if we just eliminate "government entitlements."
We here in real America know, though, this is just a ruse designed to hook-wink us into supporting economic policies that disproportionately favor the wealthy, making the rest of us poorer.
If the wealthy can afford private firefighters to protect their mansions and rapid COVID tests so they can throw wild bacchanals like Prince Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Masque of the Red Death," more power to them.
But therein lies the problem.
In 2018, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collected $3.5 trillion in taxes, almost 95 percent of total federal revenues.
But there is also an amount taxpayers do not pay by the filing deadline, called the tax gap, the IRS estimates between 2011 and 2013 to be, on average, $441 billion annually.
Harvard University research shows those responsible for 70 percent of that tax gap are the richest one percent of income earners.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
