BEACHCOMBER

101 YEARS OLD AND STILL MAKING THINGS ADD UP...

TWO of the major events of the past week have been the introduction in Britain of a sugar tax on fizzy drinks and the grilling by US senators of the Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg but have you noticed how closely the two are connected?

Yes, you got it in one. Zucker is the German for sugar but I suggest that this is no mere coincidence, for not only does zucker mean sugar but berg is mountain and that is the key to understanding the motivation behind what has happened.

Mark Zuckerberg is said to be worth $64.1 billion, making him the fifth richest person on Earth according to the Forbes list of billionaires. He was born on May 14, 1984, so he is 31 days short of being 34 years old which means he has lived for 12,387 days. So since birth, his fortune has increased at an overall rate of $5,174,780 a day which works out at $215,615 an hour or $59.89 a second.

This, incidentally, means that if he sees a pile of money in the street, it is not worth him spending four seconds to pick it up and put it in his pocket, unless the sum is greater than $239.56, though he might well consider paying someone a much smaller sum to pick it up for him.

But that is by the way, for the UK Government, as you probably know, has been wondering how to get Facebook to pay its fair share of taxes but all its money is so tangled up in international finances that it has managed to avoid doing so.

It seems to me that seeing this $59.89 a second that Mark Zuckerberg has been earning has given them a cunning plan: they’ll tax him personally instead and so that he does not see it coming, they’ll disguise it as a tax on fizzy drinks with added sugar. Just see how the figures add up.

The lowest rate of the sugar tax is 18p per litre of drink. There are 28.3 litres in a cubic foot, so that works out at £5.09 per cubic foot which is currently equal to $7.22.

So what sort of tax bill can a sugar mountain (or Zuckerberg) expect?

Well in Great Britain and Ireland, the term “mountain” is generally applied to any summit higher than 2,000ft. Mountains are roughly conical in shape and their height is approximately equal to the radius of their base.

The formula for the volume of a cone is a third of the height times the area of the base or With r and h both equal to 2,000 feet, the volume works out to be 8.378 billion cubic feet. So if we fill it with fizzy drink and charge $7.22 for each cubic foot, we end up with a grand total of $60.5bn, which would still leave Mark Zuckerberg with $3.6bn of his own to play with which should be enough for anyone.

If he or his accountants query this, we could threaten to impose the 24p a litre charged on high-sugar drinks, which would wipe out his Facebook holdings entirely. Since Donald Trump’s net worth is estimated to be only $3.1bn, taxing Zuckerberg at the lower rate would still leave him ahead of the President which would be a considerable source of consolation.