[xoxoxoBruce]

The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, calculates that 80 percent of the tax cuts in the coronavirus relief legislation will go to people making more than $1 million annually—just 43,000 people—and will cost $90 billion in 2020 alone. Even the relief that's nominally supposed to go to small businesses is flowing into the bank accounts of well-financed corporations—a fund meant to keep businesses with less than 500 employees afloat was designed in such a way that huge restaurant chains and a multi-millionaire Trump campaign donor with a large hotel chain are free to collect tens of millions of dollars from it.

For eight American billionaires, their fortunes have ballooned by at least $1 billion during the pandemic. Eric Yuan, for example, is the CEO of the video-conference platform Zoom. Since the outbreak began in China, Zoom's usage worldwide has grown by 1,900 percent, and Yuan's net worth has more than doubled to $7.57 billion in just the last three months. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has made $8 billion since March, reportedly by partnering with medical equipment companies, while rural hospitals across the U.S. are going broke and closing down, even as coronavirus is spreading out from urban centers.

No one has made out better than Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the world's richest man. Since January 1, 2020, his personal wealth has increased by $25 billion, slightly more than the GDP of Iceland or the equivalent of 25 Michael Bloomberg presidential campaigns. Chuck Collins, one of the study's authors, called this surge "unprecedented in modern financial history." And as Amazon stock has soared more than 30 percent this year, CNN wondered if it might be the "ultimate coronavirus-proof stock."

I can't begrudge these guys being in the right place at the right time to make a killing. Except Bezos keeps tweeting about the lock down is bad, I guess the more people hospitalized the more money he makes.

But bastards like this get my goat, especially when only 29% of jobless Americans received any benefits in March.

The government is also taking steps to keep businesses afloat—the Federal Reserve, for example, has announced it will buy almost unlimited amounts of debt to make sure corporations have more cash on hand. Thanks to that, the cruise company Carnival secured $6 billion on April 1. After that, CEO Arnold Donald, who reportedly made $11 million in 2019, told CNBC that the company could stay in business until 2021 even with absolutely no revenue.

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