I don’t mind billionaires existing, but I absolutely mind them getting special treatment and getting away with crimes.
edit: if you’re mad about this comment, I have to think you’re just jealous of the rich assholes. If billionaires paid their fair share of taxes and were prosecuted for crimes, the world would be objectively a better place. Instead, I guess for some that’s not enough, it’s a fully socialist world or NOTHING.
No one is “mad” at your comment. People just think it’s stupid to think inequality should exist
I never said fuck-all about what should exist. I said “I don’t mind [with an important caveat]”. Indicating that I’d prefer a step toward equality than a less realistic absolutist approach to it
There can be no billionaires without inequality. If you’re ok with billionaires existing, you’re ok with inequality.
Right. Absolutism is the only way.
Humanity will destroy itself because of this mind virus. All or nothing. Destroys lives at every level and it will lead to our extinction. But go ahead and embrace it. Because you’re RIGHT, after all.
A genuine attempt at civil discussion:
What you’re pointed at is that, unless the world’s GDP suddenly skyrockets millions of percents, we can’t make everyone a billionaire.
And if only select few can be billionaires, this is inequality.
Thereby, what is suggested is to redistribute money more evenly so that non-billionaires (i.e. pretty much everyone) could enjoy a better life, as opposed to few people buying their second golden toilet for the sake of it.
I’m not sure I follow. Thanks for seemingly being non-reactionary though.
If I could wave a magic wand, I’d first come up with some new form of socialism where maybe not everyone is 100% equal, but where literally everyone would get to live a fully comfortable life without fear of death or suffering. They’d get to take extended vacations and have fully paid healthcare. No starvation and no being limited to the shittiest food available. Maybe some people could have more than that, if they accomplished something to justify it.
Since I don’t have that magic wand, I’d just settle for billionaires paying equal percentages of taxes and being jailed when they break the law.
Apparently, suggesting the latter, for a lot of these commenters, means that I am a huge capitalist who loves inequality. Because I couldn’t possibly recognize that capitalism is both a huge piece of shit in practice but also does provide motivation to workers.
that capitalism […] does provide motivation to workers
I wonder how all of those people in other civilisations survived which didn’t had a capitalistic system.
In other words: I hope you’re aware that capitalism is not the only way to motivate people to do stuff. As if people weren’t interested in ensuring their survival or even progress.
People just think it’s stupid to think inequality should exist
This has to be some of the most naive text I’ve ever read.
Inequality will never not exist. Humans are not equally talented, equally diligent, equally intelligent, etc. They don’t have equally-capable bodies, they don’t have equal desires.
My coworker is lazy and chronically late, I’m not. You will never convince me or anyone with a functioning cerebrum that we deserve to be paid the same. And that’s just one tiny example.
I’m talking about systemic inequality not your workplace drama.
Even if meritocracy wasn’t a fairy tale, no one deserves to have more money than they could possibly spend in 10 lifetimes while others starve, regardless of how much you hate your dumbass coworker.
I’m talking about systemic inequality not your workplace drama.
So am I, goofball, hence the ‘one tiny example’ word choice and the fact that it was a tidbit at the very end of the comment. Sneaky, pathetic evasion attempt.
Time for some reality checks you seem to desperately need:
- The poor aren’t poor because billionaires exist. There are far more billionaires in the world than there were 100 years ago, and yet, somehow, global poverty was several orders of magnitude worse back then.
- Net worth is a price tag, not cash money, and cash money is what the poor lack. As an example, if Amazon suddenly ceased to exist tomorrow, its $1 trillion plus of value would also vanish. Not a single poor person would get a single extra dollar in their wallet if that happened.
- The US spends about $1.2 trillion, with a T, every year on welfare programs and the like. The combined net worth of all US billionaires is $5.2 trillion. Even assuming for the sake of argument that we could wave a magic wand and convert, straight across, that net worth figure into cash money one to one, the implication that increasing a year’s welfare benefits payouts by 4.3x, ONCE, would actually have any measurable effect on long-term poverty, is pitiably ignorant. Hell, the vast majority of poor multi-million lottery winners are broke again inside of a couple of years.
- No one, regardless of how wealthy they are or aren’t, ought to give any amount of care to how much wealth you think they deserve to have.
Once again, it’s abundantly clear that hurting the rich is a higher priority for than helping the poor, for those pushing these lines of rhetoric.
First, I’d like to say that I personally don’t have a problem with someone wanting to be a billionaire or even being a billionaire. I have a problem with how they get there and what they do when they get there.
The question above was whether or not billionaires should exist, NOT how do we solve poverty or hunger or anything else.
I think you keep approaching this incorrectly. You simply equate the number of billionaires with the number of poor or something like that. That is not HOW billionaires cause poverty. Billionaires have influence over those who make laws. Laws that favor them and not us (us being the non-ultrawealthy). They also usually own or control major corporations which employ us. This gives them the ability to hold wages low. There are a myriad variety of other ways they influence who is poor and who is not and how we are treated. They also have a major influence over people’s lives. As an example Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars yet there are many documented cases of employees at Amazon being so pressured to make him and the others at the top more money, that they can’t even use the fricken bathroom. I believe this is a certain mentality that is shared amongst most, if not all, billionaires and it is despicable.
Do you think it was the average voter who thought it was a great idea to keep the federal minimum wage stagnant for a decade, as if inflation simply didn’t exist? If you work full time for minimum wage, you will be very close to the federal poverty level. I don’t think that’s a fair way to treat a hard working, productive citizen of a wealthy country like the United States.
If you think welfare is a handout that isn’t going to help, fine, then let’s start at the top and remove the welfare that is so readily doled out to major corporations two third of which don’t pay taxes. I personally won’t complain too much about handing taxpayer money to taxpayers.
The middle class isn’t sending jobs overseas. Poor people aren’t giving illegal immigrants American jobs. Minimum wage earners, I’m guessing, don’t have lobbyists. No one offered ME the opportunity to buy shares of Facebook during the IPO.
I personally don’t suggest just marching into a billionaires home and ripping cash straight from their hands (not sure I would cry about it at this point, though). What I mean is, the system should be set up in such a way that is not so unfairly biased toward them. I mean if the system was fair, they wouldn’t exist because they wouldn’t be handed all of the wealth in the first place, but WE don’t make those decisions. THEY do! If you own 80% of America, you should pay for 80% of America.
Most of the changes you are suggesting can’t be legislated. What are you going to do about single parent households? Create a law forbidding divorce? Force people to remarry after a loved one dies. And exactly how would I put this massive amount of energy I’m using to create this post into helping someone on welfare? As if complaining online is so much energy you could somehow power a city off of it.
NO, they emphatically should NOT exist.
The question above was whether or not billionaires should exist, NOT how do we solve poverty or hunger or anything else.
And my point is that the former is a complete waste of time and energy, because a society with any size gap of wealth between the poorest and the wealthiest, but also a society with no one in poverty, is absolutely more desirable than a society with less or even no wealth gap, but which has people in poverty.
I think you keep approaching this incorrectly. You simply equate the number of billionaires with the number of poor or something like that. That is not HOW billionaires cause poverty.
But the fact that this demographic’s growth in numbers is negatively correlated with the incidence of poverty, is a pretty big wrench in the assertion that their existence causes poverty.
You’ve assumed that billionaires cause poverty, but I’m a step before you. I’m not convinced their existence has a significant causal relationship with poverty, not least because of the above.
At the very least, the above fact needs to be contended with, before moving further. You need to explain, or at least hypothesize, how it can be true that billionaires’ actions increase poverty, if as the number of billionaires goes up, poverty goes down.
I’m reminded of when anti-porn activists would claim in the earlier days of the Internet that the proliferation of Internet porn would cause rape and sexual assault to spike massively. There are still such activists out there, still making that same argument, despite the fact that all the data shows that as Internet porn became more widespread, the incidence of sexual crimes actually DEcreased. In fact, “plummeted” would be a fair description, imo.
Most of the changes you are suggesting can’t be legislated.
That’s true. A top-down approach won’t solve these problems, as they’re largely cultural and self-perpetuating (find a girl who got pregnant at 15/16, and chances are good that her mother was under the age of 20 when she got pregnant with her daughter, as well). Education/awareness/outreach and similar, are the only real way to get there, but it needs to be a true, concerted, dedicated, continued effort, and right now, there’s only pockets of it scattered around, far as I can tell.
As a grim example, in the 1960s, the Moynihan Report was put out by a guy who was essentially freaking out over the current incidence of ‘fatherlessness’ in the black population, and calling for action to be taken. Today, we know more than ever about how much worse off kids are (financially, to my point, but also in many other ways) who aren’t raised in stable, two-parent homes are, and today, there isn’t a single racial demographic in the US that doesn’t have a higher rate of single parenthood than the black population did at the time of that Report. And yet, today, despite everything, even beginning to talk about these issues is political suicide, no one will even touch the topic.
What I’m trying to say is that we’ve got much bigger fish to fry, if the goal is reducing/eradicating poverty. And if indeed y’all care more about whether someone should be “allowed” to have a net worth beyond some arbitrary point, than that, then all I have to say is that you’ve lost the plot.
Is the line right at billion, how rich should people be allowed to be?
Should it matter how the money was acquired?
Should everyone always have to have the same amount of money as everyone else?
Money shouldn’t exist. Hope that helps!
How should goods and services be exchanged?
Should everything be done with bartering?
Basic needs and resources should be provided, the rest by bartering or agreement, yes.
Have you seen Star Trek?
Money would like immediately be reinvented.
“I need my window repaired but I don’t know how to do it”
“I can repair windows but I need someone to help my sick dog”
“I can diagnose animals but I need someone to translate Spanish”.
"I can translate Spanish but I need someone to deliver this package "
They’re not going to all line up and do a series of trades. Someone’s going to be like "what if I give you a token, and we all agree that token is worth work? Then you can take that token to anyone*
Nobody is advocating for keeping the current system and simply removing the concept of money. Money is of course a necessity of the current system, but need not be if the system itself is changed.
Money is a unit of measurement. This is as insane as talking about removing the concept of length.
Wrong, they should CEASE to exist
Well, I don’t know about your but I’d prefer a system where it wouldn’t be possible for a single person to amass that many resources in the first place
Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all. In the long run some businesses like the Healthcare companies will suffer and have to downsize, but it’s always been absolutely astonishing to me that a company like Tesla, IBM, Boeing, Walmart or other mega-companies close plants or stores and send tens of thousands of people into joblessness and poverty nobody bats an eye.
The moment we talk about actions that might impact the insurance empires suddenly we have to all worry about the workers and all the businesses that are connected to the insurance company and so on.
Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all.
Let’s talk about just one of these, “guaranteed income”. What annual amount do you think we as a country can afford to give everyone in the US?
Edit: The fact that I have negative points for asking a simple question is a textbook example of ideologues’ hostility to even the slightest bit of what one would strain to even call ‘dissent’. Pitiful.
What annual amount do you think we as a country can afford to give everyone in the US?
It’s ridiculous to try to pin someone down on this. I am an American citizen asking that my tax money, which I pay a helluva lot, go into helping people and giving us all more opportunities as individuals, I am fully aware that something like UBI will come with a huge bag of other issues and necessary regulations and safeguards to guarantee that it actually goes into helping people stay in their homes and fed, but that is still the direction that we and all developed nations should be pushing towards.
I am not designing policy, I am asking the people who’s salary I pay to design policy so that that we put money directly towards the issues and people who need it. I won’t even read any “wELL aKsHulLy” arguments how great everything really is and how we’re all just lazy, entitled peasants who need to know our place. I won’t and the harder you jackoffs push the message that it’s our fault we get laid off, have medical emergencies, health issues and lowered wages, the harder I will advocate and vote for ANY kind of socialist policies and candidates. I am absolutely enraged how easily the general public has become distracted with cultural conflict while ignoring the inequality that is making people so unhappy to begin with.
You can go ahead and reply with your chart that is somehow supposed to make me feel better. I’m sure it will really improve all of our situations.
Yes I am defensive, any reply pointing that it will get blocked before reading.
It’s ridiculous to try to pin someone down on this.
I disagree; not when you’re claiming that it, along with several other expensive things, could be done “RIGHT NOW” as if they’re so obviously doable that only literal malice/stupidity is preventing them from happening.
I’ve crunched the numbers on UBI, and have pretty solidly established the conclusion that it’s simply not feasible currently, from a purely pragmatic perspective. It’s just too expensive. So when that extremely bold claim was made, yes, I had to know how you figured it was so easy, especially as just one of a group of other massive changes. I didn’t even take into account any of the logistics, and asked only for the figure and where the money to pay that figure was going to come from. I’ll be honest, given the research I’d already done, I was expecting either a very paltry annual figure, or a plan to pay for it that literally assumed more available funds than there actually are. But I was open to being wrong, and hearing a proposal (not that I was expecting a white paper or something, but at least an overall ‘plan’) that at least sounded somewhat feasible.
Believe me, I wasn’t happy to learn how ridiculously expensive UBI would be in the US, and I calculated based on paying out a measly $10,000 a year, and only to citizens of working age. Even that costs trillions annually…
But I digress…if you don’t have any idea how we could actually provide any given amount of “guaranteed income” to the populace, (I even left it open for you to define the amount everyone gets!), then don’t frame it like this effortlessly-achievable goal. You should have expected some amount of pushback for talking about it like ‘obviously we can do this, there’s no good reason we can’t start doing it “RIGHT NOW”’.
Does the above really sound so “ridiculous”?
P.S. You really made a whole heap of assumptions about me and where I’m coming from, in your comment. You should try not to do that.
I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit, I made assumptions about you because I am not a child I can smell bullshit. I’m not an economist but I can tell when someone else is dumber than rock and lying like a snake. I too can quote corporate propaganda that sounds smart to stupid people. It’s sure amazing that something as complicated and multi-dimensional as this topic can just be fucking CRUNCHED by losers on the internet. Wow, I had no idea it was this simple.
I stopped reading there because I don’t like people who try to confuse issues and shoot down attempts at things we can do to make the world better. You’re arguing from a place of selfish needs and I don’t care. You can reply if you think anyone is reading down this far, it won’t be me.
I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit
??? It was very simple. I chose a deliberately-small-for-the-sake-of-argument annual figure of $10,000 UBI, learned how name working age people there are in the US (bit over 200 million), and multiplied.
The fact that even a measly $10k UBI, an amount that obviously wouldn’t be enough to replace the systems we presently have in place, would cost several trillions a year, made it clear that any amount of real UBI that actually could offer someone who isn’t working some semblance of financial peace of mind, was not realistically affordable, as things are now.
The point is that if it’s that daunting, even before you take into account all of the complexities that come with it, then obviously it’s not going to be easier after you do a full-on approach.
There’s a reason no UBI proposal ever made for the US has ever survived even the slightest scrutiny of feasibility. If you’ve seen one that has, please feel free to enlighten us all.
Your entire comment is the equivalent of you reacting to someone saying “no matter how strong you are, you simply can’t hit the moon with a thrown rock” with all sorts of angry, smug whining about how they’re full of shit and “lying like a snake” because they didn’t talk about any of the physics such a prospect would entail. As if it takes a physics background to realize that’s impossible.
I know my example is simplistic; that’s the fucking point, lmao. You’re mad that I left out variables that would make the goal even harder to achieve, goofball. Holy shit lol
The fact that I have negative points for asking a simple question is a textbook example of ideologues’ hostility to even the slightest bit of what one would strain to even call ‘dissent’. Pitiful.
I’m going to take the rage bait on this one, in hopes that you’re not trolling:
No. It’s stuff like this, which makes several of your comments here earning downvotes.
If it were “a simple question” you wouldn’t whine about getting downvotes. The fact, that you care about votes here and in this context at all is a sign of your “ideologues’ hostility” towards contrary opinions. If it were “a simpue question” you wouldn’t be so condescending to call downvotes “ideologues’ hostility” or “pitiful”.
Your “simple question” can still be suggestive and carry a message which clearly show that your intentions are not to neutrally ask a question but to challenge the readers and the common opinion found among them. Given this context, such questions can even seem ridiculuous to ask at all, as the amount of wealth accumulated by wealthy people is insane. (See for example this one of many illustrations: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ ) In other words: your question seems a bit like rage bait.
Combined with your other comments here, a clear picture cristallises about your opinion on this topic, which further hardens, that it’s not just “a simple question”.It’s totally fine for me and probably a lot of other users here if you’ve got a different opinion. If people disagree with you or don’t like it, you get downvotes. That’s the way of Lemmy. Heck, I’ll probably earn a downvote from you. Do I care? No. Not really. Of course it would be nice if we could agree. But I accept that you probably won’t like what I’ve written here and that you’re giving me a downvote for that. It’s an expression of your opinion. And that’s ok.
If you were about to get banned for your “simple question”, or your question got removed, then we could talk again about hostility. Until then it’s political discourse. Isn’t democracy beautiful? ;)
Well let’s see. In October of 2023 there were 735 billionaires in the US. Assuming each had only $1B and could make an average of 8% on that money (the stock market averages 10%) and we taxed them the equivalent of 6 of that percent, giving all of that to say the lowest income people in the US (so no overhead here to distribute it), the money could provide 735,000 people with a salary of $60k/year. They would still be billionaires drawing a salary of only $20m/year each. So three quarters of a million people, could have the average yearly income in the US and it would only mildly inconvenience 735 people.
Knowing that many billionaires have more than just one billion dollars and that other high earners, say people with $100m or more significantly outnumber them imagine how many people could share the prosperity. I didn’t do that math but probably 3-5 million people I guess and it barely even effects the ultra wealthy.
The actual wealth of a billionaire is absolutely staggering.
Okay, so assuming the top end of your guesstimate of 5 million…so, the other 335 million people get a middle finger, or what?
“Guaranteed income” for 1.4% of the population, at most. Not quite how I’d define it.
But fuck the back of the napkin math, we’ve got solid numbers out there to use. The total net worth of all the billionaires in the US is about $5.2 trillion. And I’ll use your 6% that’s $312 billion a year. Now let’s also make the massive assumption (in your favor) that we can wave a magic wand and convert that net worth directly into exactly that much cash, which you obviously never could in real life.
So, $312 billion a year. Spread evenly, that’s literally less than $1,000 per person. Less than the stimulus we got during Covid, and you won’t find anyone who claims they went from poor to not poor after getting that stimulus.
The actual wealth of a billionaire is absolutely staggering.
I find this ironic, since you seem not to understand just how little it actually is, compared to what the government already spends, and among a population of 340 million people.
Did you know the US spends about $1.2 trillion a year on welfare already? The above amount is about a quarter of that; even if we abandon the idea of “guaranteed income” completely and just used this hypothetical amount as additional welfare for the poor, their benefit amount would increase by 25% on average. Do you think anyone who is impoverished is going to be lifted out of poverty with that?
Billionaires are a boogeyman. They’re not the source of poverty, and they literally don’t have enough to forcibly push the poor out of poverty, regardless of whether you try it by ‘skimming’ off their average wealth appreciation, or if you take it all at once.
If half of the energy complaining about billionaires was put into reducing single parenthood, and all of the other things that we know have a DIRECT correlation, with poverty, WAY more poor would be not only lifted up, but with the right tools and education, they’d STAY up, on their own.
I think you missed the point. First, the back of the napkin exercise I conducted was merely to point out just how big of an impact can be had without even hardly inconveniencing just a handful of people. The people I was referring to, would still have a billion dollars and a 20 million dollar a year income from interest. Second, not ever person in the US is poor. We don’t have to raise every single person in America out of poverty. Third, I Believe billionaires ARE the source of poverty. Fourth, I Believe you were off by three orders of magnitude. Six percent of 5.2 trillion dollars is actually $312 billion dollars, not million dollars. Fifth, I’m not suggesting that billionaires can just be taxed to the point that they alone can provide a salary to every person in America. What I’m suggesting, is if a system existed that was even slightly fair, billionaires wouldn’t exist and hopefully neither would the working poor.
just how big of an impact can be had without even hardly inconveniencing just a handful of people.
Which is to say, no real impact at all. There are 340 million of us, a plan that can potentially help less than 2% of them is no plan at all.
Second, not ever person in the US is poor. We don’t have to raise every single person in America out of poverty.
So you’re not talking about UBI, but just another welfare program.
I redirect you to where I pointed out that the amount of yearly aid your plan produces is nothing compared to the $1.2 TRILLION the US already spends on welfare. It is completely naive to think that a slight increase in welfare spending is going to create the kind of change you’re claiming it would.
Third, I Believe billionaires ARE the source of poverty.
You can believe it all you want, but the evidence simply does not support that conclusion. Go look up how many inflation-adjusted billionaires there were in the world a century ago compared to today, then go compare the incidence of global poverty back then to today, too. It’s literally an inverse correlation.
Fourth, I Believe you were off by three orders of magnitude. Six percent of 5.2 trillion dollars is actually $312 billion dollars, not million dollars.
My mistake, will correct my comment, but the point still stands, because $1000 isn’t anything resembling life-changing money, either.
What I’m suggesting, is if a system existed that was even slightly fair, billionaires wouldn’t exist
Not only can they exist, but it is literally inevitable, and moreso with each passing day, especially as the global population increases, more and more technology becomes more scalable, new technologies emerge, and more and more economy is globalized.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth today. One piece of software that catches on can produce $1 billion in profit in just a handful of years. OnlyFans was founded in 2016, less than a decade ago, and SIX years later, in 2022, it was valued at not $1 billion, but $18 billion.
wouldn’t exist and hopefully neither would the working poor.
Long-term poverty literally cannot be solved with an injection of funds alone–this is a very superficial take. The vast majority of poor people who win lotteries of multi-million amounts that can easily make one ‘set for life’, are broke again in just a few years. And you better believe government welfare isn’t giving any poor person tens of millions of dollars.
On the other hand, simply being raised by two parents instead of one, makes a person up to FIVE TIMES less likely to be impoverished long-term in adulthood. If we reduced the single parenthood incidence by even just 5%, we’d reduce long-term poverty to a degree even completely liquidating all billionaires would not accomplish.
Billionaires are largely a boogeyman, and time and effort and resources spent complaining about them, if applied to creating the changes that we DO empirically know actually lift people out of poverty, would do a hell of a lot more good. That’s what frustrates me.
Hating the rich is not the same as loving the poor.
What’s the most amount of resources that it should be legal to acquire?
Accumulation should be removed, there should be no individual Capital Owners trying to collect more and more and more.
Good luck trying to enforce “this thing you purchased cannot under any circumstances appreciate in value”, lol
%100. No one needs that much money to live comfortably. It is a mental disorder.
“Hey, this stuff you bought/created 40 years ago? It’s worth a lot more now, so you have a mental disorder.”
if something you bought 40 years ago is worth billions then it is probably a part of the mental illness yes
Fellas, is it regarded to consider a good or service valuable?
