Napkin Math | SNAP Benefits vs Weathiest 7 Wisconsinites

     I generally believe that wealth inequality is one of the most pernicious elements in our world today.  To be clear, I'm not aiming my ire at individual people who have become immensely wealthy.  Instead, it is that collectively a system that permits great wealth inequality creates societal moral failings.  This post is not an exploration of that belief.  Instead, I want to do some napkin math to briefly calibrate the scale of SNAP costs, and immense wealth.

    All over the news today is discussion about SNAP benefits being withheld or greatly reduced while the government is shut down.  There's plenty of news about what communities are doing locally to bridge the gap created by this situation.  This is good, and should be done.  But a truly moral approach would be not only to give, but to also advocate for changes to systems that permit emergencies like this.

    I would like to think that everyone across the economic spectrum would agree that access to food--i.e not allowing starvation-- is a worthy cause.  So if I started at the top, in Wisconsin, and asked "what would our wealthiest neighbors need to pony up to help feed our neediest Wisconsin neighbors",  where would I land?

    Now I'm not about to claim that there is any significant rigor in my numbers, only that I wanted to get an idea of the scale of difference.  What I came up with is that the 7 richest Wisconsinites would need to contribute about 2% of their net worth to cover all SNAP benefits in Wisconsin for a year.

    There are many ways to boggle the mind about this, but the fact that 7 individuals could sustain all Wisconsin SNAP benefits for a year without having any meaningful decline in their quality of life should give pause to all of us.  

    Now, I know that my model is truly napkin math, without much rigor.  We could argue about a number of things including net worth versus income, liquid vs illiquid assets and much more.  This point I can't emphasize enough:  I'm just trying to get my head around the relative scale of two things.  1). How Costly is SNAP?  2). How wealthy are the ultra wealthy?

    Oh, and as of November 4th, 2025, Elon Musk's net worth is about half a trillion dollars.  Which, to put to scale, since he showed an interest in our Supreme Court, maybe he would take an interest in our hungry neighbors:  he'd personally only need to provide 0.3% of his net worth to feed our SNAP recipients for a year.  Food for thought.  🤔