Could you live on $300 million a year?

Hedge fund manager John Paulson “earned”  $5 billion in 2010. (Yes, that’s a five with nine zeros behind it.) Under our current tax laws, if Mr. Paulson paid the full tax owed on that sum of money, rather than the discount rate he actually pays after loopholes, deductions, and money stashed overseas, he would have paid 35% tax on his income, (which is, coincidentally, the same tax rate as mine because of self-employment taxes, though his income was approximately 100,000 times larger than mine last year).

Besides the obvious income disparity, there are other differences between me and Mr. Paulson. For instance, I earn money by writing about environmental topics, wrangling composting worms, and teaching Federal inmates how to vermicompost food waste. I also grow, forage and scrounge a lot of our food. In other words, I am flying by the seat of my pants, which are getting increasingly threadbare. Mr. Paulson, on the other hand, made much of his money last year by “shorting,” which means that he made money by betting against our economy: the worse the economy got, the more money he made. Thus he had no incentive whatsoever to try to help the economy or create jobs. Could anyone possibly get farther from being “a jobs creator” than that?

The highest tax bracket ever in the United States was 94% in 1944-1945, at the end of WWII. This top bracket, was for people who earned more than $250,000 a year. But $250,000 ain’t what it used to be: those 1944 dollars translate to approximately $3.2 million in 2011 dollars.

I have wracked my single functioning brain cell that does numbers, and figured out that if Mr. Paulson had paid the 1944 tax rate on his 2010 “earnings,” his take home pay would have been $300 million. And I don’t know how anyone could possibly survive on such a paltry sum. Could you?