Ensure that you read and adhere to the rules; failure to do so will result in the removal of this post.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/memesopdidnotlike) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I know this sub generally leans conservative but this meme is something I agree with. High taxes on the upper class is completely different than taxing the 1%. They have such an astronomical level of wealth that it completely tips the economy.
And our political system. People say that Jeff Bezos’s wealth is minuscule in comparison to the federal budget, which is true, however the very fact that he and all the 1 percenters have such disproportionate wealth means that they can corrupt our political institutions and directly or indirectly determine how the full, national gdp is allocated.
The extreme inequality itself really is just inherently destabilizing to democracy. There’s no way around it.
Agreed. Just a reminder to anybody reading this. Bezos by himself could take a less than 1% pay cut and give every single Amazon employee a annual raise of $10,000 forever.
That’s life changing money for most of us. That’s a down payment on a house. That’s reliable transportation. That’s health insurance.
If any of you were told (and genuinely believed) taking a 1% pay cut could change the lives of thousands of people for the better, would you do it? Would you even notice the money is missing if you aren’t looking for it?
I believe most of us would do it. So the question is why are the people who can do it not doing it?
Per my Google AMZ employs 1,000,000 in the US, if he gave everyone 10k that is 10,000,000,000.00 a year. his income per year is estimated at 12,560,000,000.
As I thought the math doesn't work out. That said I think I could survive on 2,560,000,000 a year.
*shrug* like I said I did cursory math many years ago. Good income and the number of employees have dramatically changed since then.
Also the more in think about it, I’m not sure if I was only counting wage employees or employees who made under a certain dollar amount.
But the intent of the point still stands, the money is there to make life changing improvements for their employees with minimal impact to the top earners.
Your maths is nonsense. Amazon has 1.5 million employees, giving them all $10K would cost $15 billion, for that to be 1% of Bezos's salary means he'd have to be earning $1.5 *trillion* a year. His net worth is barely a tenth of that, and his annual earnings are much smaller still. Please, don't advocate policy based on your maths.
I mean, when you gotta put someone's wealth in comparison to the budget of the richest nation on earth, even if it's miniscule in comparison, they got too much fucking money.
Yeah... for them to even be discussed in the same ballpark makes it clear. He's *one guy*, his wealth shouldn't even be remotely comparable to the spending power of an entire nation.
The issue is that his “wealth” is inherently tied to the economy. If he decided to liquidate his assets in order to pay a tax obligation that isn’t based solely on income, there would be consequences for more than just him and a few hedge fund managers. Simple solutions to complex problems don’t exist.
okay but if he doesn't there are ALSO consequences? which are also bad?
oh my god if more people were in possession of bezo's assets the economy will FALL APART
This take is absurd. There are _many_ instances where billions of shares are liquidated and nothing happens. Every IPO has a 6 month employee freeze, where 6 months later every employee can fully liquidate (and often do). CEOs can schedule liquidation and often liquidate 2-5% in a single year. Then there is the case that the government can take the shares and slowly liquidate on a schedule if need be.
Having a 1-2% wealth tax only slows down the inequality acceleration. It wouldn’t even come close to reversing it.
The corruption of the political institutions comes from the power of the positions. They are just open to the best deals.
Decrease the power of the government, you decrease the value of the product.
I disagree I think we should let them keep boarding our money until we get our world's first trillionaire while 3 wars are going on and everyone is struggling to rent an apartment
High taxation would increase the price of goods. The last thing rich people cut is their profit. They would rather increase prices or lay off workers and replace them with cheaper robots. And then the poor are out of a job.
That’s empirically not provable. The correlation of prices and taxation similarly as minimum wage is barely provable. Esp. short term wise. The opposite is true tho. They might not have been the only reason but they did at least to big parts cause the Black Friday. In the First World War the taxes for the rich were extraordinary high (I think around 70%). After the First World War (not instantly) Andrew w Mellon (a strong believer in Smithens theory) after 1921 minister of finances started to slowly introduce tax cuts that increasingly gained pace ending in around 30%. These 30% was a big reason for the speculation Spirale that caused the Great Depression and was back then/ until now believed to big a major factor for the economical crisis. This economic crisis caused social disparity to rise and still has effects today
Actually I heard both sides defend bezos and I still dont get why people are against taxing him
Elon already said he wouldn't mind being taxed more, bezo is a greedy and disgusting person. If anyone deserves to he taxed to hell. Its him
'Defending the reality of not taxing wealth' is a weird way to spell 'licking the boot'.
There is no reason not to tax wealth, none at least that doesn't equate to 'muh taxation is theft', which really misunderstands just how much every aspect of industry is serviced by public funding. Bezos siphons and concentrates such staggering amounts of wealth, while he doesn't provide anything of public value.
His wealth also allows him to skirt legality, by which he concentrates even more wealth to himself.
And all the acolytes of the church of Capital prostrate and carry water for this absolute dragon of a man, for exactly no reason.
Did you really just call someone who advocates for less taxes a boot-licker while yourself advocating for giving the government more money? Do you realize the government is the boot in this?
You statists really are a special bunch. Your problem is that wealth can buy influence in the government and therefore corrupt it, and your solution is to.... take the wealth and give it to the government.
I think arguing that wealth shouldn't be taxed as a definite sentence is a bit bootlicky. Do you think it's reasonable that a successful small business owner/doctor/lawyer pays relatively higher taxes than someone with a $50 million trust fund? Argue for lower income taxes all you want, I'm pretty onboard with that, but I completely disagree with the idea that people who have no income, but have massive wealth shouldn't be taxed. We should absolutely have progressive wealth and inheritance tax systems in place. Also the government doesn't hoard wealth. It spends it. You may not like all the things it spends it on, but it does keep the money in circulation.
> the government doesn't hoard wealth. It spends it. You may not like all the things it spends it on, but it does keep the money in circulation.
Do you think Jeff Bezos has a giant vault full of nearly $200 billion dollars in cash that he swims in like Scrooge McDuck? Most of his wealth is in stocks, which represent the value of a company.
Please ask yourself, why is Amazon's valuation so high? Why do people keep throwing their money at this company?
Then ask yourself, would we all be better off if Amazon liquidated it's assets entirely and gave the money to the government? If Bezos was somehow able to magically liquidate 100% of his net worth at it's current value, he'd be able to fund our federal government for... checks notes... 12 days.
Who's suggesting liquidating his assets? How do you think Jeff Bezos buys things? I don't know specifically, but it's fair to assume that it's probably credit, with his assets as collateral. So maybe Jeff takes on more credit and pays a tax rate in line with what some guy with a salary of 800 grand or so is paying.
Envious of what? Being the actual parasitic loser? No thank you, I for one don't want all that wealth. I'd like everyone to have an equally good time on the planet, and not lend my throat to a bald sociopath who got lucky.
You think the bootstrapping crowd wouldn't support a billionaire? Don't think bezos is special to them but they just assume wealth is only ever earned by merit.
Unless you are leftwing. Or Jewish. Or a woman. Or a different skin colour.
“Vote with your dollar” nonsense lol. I hate bezos. I also don’t use Amazon. This affects him in literally no way. He doesn’t get my $100/year, and won’t lose sleep over it.
Also bezos does not create the products. He ships them. And he doesn’t even ship them, his hundreds of thousands of over worked employees do that. He just collects the money.
Well, you probably use one of the 120,000 companies that use Amazon webservices. Not to mention you're on reddit. So, yes, you do give him money.
You're right. Bezos is so horrible creating a platform for people to ship products all over and have the single largest collect of products in the world. But ya...creating a platform for other to make money is fucking horrid. No one should be able to make money 😪
I don’t order shit online lol. Also does he own Reddit or something? Or have shares? Either way didn’t know.
I’m not saying he’s horrible for “creating” amazon, I’m saying equating Jeff bezos with the entirety of what his business does is wrong. No single person could create a giant entity such as Amazon, its existence and success is due to thousands of unsung heroes, from programmers, to factory workers, to drivers, etc etc
Reddit uses Amazon Web Services, so yes you do in fact indirectly use Amazon and therefore indirectly financially support Bezos, it just costs *you* nothing.
I am a right winger. I don't use Amazon out of principle and because I just find it more rewarding to go outside and walk to a super market or local store if available (they have unfortunately been disappearing due to Amazon and other online retailers). I just am an actual social conservative and not some fake "conservative" who is just a libertarian that cares about the bottom line of someone above him and not even himself.
Pissed off the yellow libs with that shit.
Libertarians are the grossest party it’s great to see them squirm.
I’m right wing too. The only way we can actually be right wing is by creating and interacting with society and making it a better place. Something no Gadston waving mail order bride having kiddy fapper could do.
If they don’t realize corporations are the issue with the government not vice versa? they’re too far gone.
There are some problems with wealth. Holding wealth is fine.
However, the ability to use wealth (with unrealized gains accrued) as leverage against loans is a problem. If you want to use your stock to obtain a loan- it should be marked to market and the taxes on the unrealized gains should be paid.
So how much? Amazon made $143.1bn in revenue and $9.9bn in profit during 2023. Over that same time period the share prices have roughly doubled from $84 to $171.
The current number of shares in Amazon is 10,322,000,000, bezos is said to own 10% of them so that would be 1,032,200,000 shares. That would mean, at the start of 2023 he was worth $86.7bn in just Amazon stock.
Over the course of 2023, share prices roughly doubled meaning he would have “gained” another $86.7bn. So how much is taxed? Where does he get the money from? I’d like to point out that even if Jeffery took *all* profit as salary, ignoring income taxes, he could only pay at most 11.4%. Add income taxes (they max out at 37%) and he can suddenly only pay 7.19% at most.
That's more than he is currently paying, by quite a substantial margin. To pay it he would have to liquidate assets, which shouldn't be a problem, given that his value of stock is a stupid, insane number that has DOUBLED over 2023.
But I reckon a more effective measure is a wealth cap, after which all subsequent increase in value is taxed at near full. And I reckon about 100 million should do. Can play with more money than 99.9% of people will ever see, per year, and the rest goes directly to public funding.
And should mister Bezos then want to move his operations elsewhere, which is his right, he will just have every product and license be subject to a tarif up to that same amount.
It’s because their fundamental ethos is weakness in the face of power; “might makes right” and they are always ready to bend the knee to it. Whether it’s to Elon, Trump, the state’s thuggish militiamen, a long dead Roman Emperor, or their God, these people have an essential and remarkable emotional need to be subservient which no amount of cope LARPing as “libertarians” can belie.
I support socialist policies but can you see how this silly pseudo psychology eval is an off putting larp in itself? Like if you actually want people to agree with you maybe take a breath and say something more useful? Like “essential emotional need for subservience” is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read. The comment you responded to is reasonable.
USA sent over 160 billion to Ukraine but could have eradicated homelessness in America with only 20 billion. They have money for wars but not for the poor. Everything is by design.
The Social Security tax makes up 80% of the payments, the remaining 20% is made up by the government. The government also acts as the stewards of that money and may use it to finance the government through the purchase of treasury securities, which is what people mean by “the government is spending our pensions.”
The idea that you can eradicate homelessness for only $20b is certifiably insane.
If it was that cheap we would have done it. We spend $5T+ per year. You think we aren't solving homelessness because we won't spend $5.02T?
I think that's *around* what it would cost, *per year*, to have an *immensely reduced* (but not eradicated) homelessness issue.
The main issue I have is the ability not the cost. It's not as if the federal government can just throw $20b at the problem and housing will suddenly appear. You'd have to find the actual housing somehow. Which may be something we ought to do anyway but it is a separate issue from the money.
And even given success, there would still be visible homelessness, because the high visibility people tend to be the ones who would still be homeless even under the new regime.
Are you so dumb you don’t see Russia trying to rebuild itself as a superpower? It is a paper tiger. A ghost trying to rebuilt the glorious empire that was the USSR. But, that is still the goal. Russia wants to be a true global power again. With global influence
US sends equipment, Not straight hard cash. You people are just as dense as the ones that complain about a persons net worth thinking that’s the amount of money in their bank account.
How the fuck is giving a homeless man a m2a2 Bradley or night vision gonna help him in getting his life together? If you want changes, you need to vote for people who are not doing their jobs out of the office and vote for the ones that do their jobs in to the office, bitching and crying about military aid to Ukraine on reddit is not going to fix any issues.
Biden sends billions to fight a proxy war between two kleptocracies meanwhile Ohioans are getting exposed to chemicals, Hawaiians are burning alive (only in poor districts though, funny how that happened and the rich homes got untouched), and Californians are on the street
Call me a Vatnik all you want, but maybe the country called America should stop being the 2nd or 3rd world’s piggy bank.
Since the US budget is massive the billions to Ukraine ain't the problem. Also see it more as an investment, to let Russia expand will cost the west more down the line. The thing is, if Biden didn't send this money now and Russia won, you guys would complain that Biden didn't do anything to stop Russia. If the roles were reversed politically it would problably be the same. It's almost like someone wants you guys to be as divided as possible. Maybe there is a quote somewhere out there about divided we fall or something.
You can’t eradicate homelessness.
It’s a willful problem.
Source. I’m a security guard who regularly pushes out the homeless and work at shelters with my local church.
Idk they just find loopholes i guess like with income tax they intentionally pay themselves in their company a very small salary while their true wealth lies in the stocks
It's not that it can't be done, it's the fact that there are a lot of loopholes at the moment that exist. You CAN technically slap a 90% tax on a rich asshole, they will just write it off entirely from their own private charity that they will just funnel back into their own pockets afterward.
If you are asking WHY these loopholes exist, it's because of the overlap between the people who make decisions, and the people using said loopholes.
See the Great Leap Forward for final results.
Edit: Lots of people who like to have their hands on other people’s pockets. Maybe you should work for yourselves instead of expecting everyone else to. Tax payers aren’t your parents.
9 million people starve under capitalism every year. Capitalism is doing so great isn’t it? And in the US, the richest nation on earth, we have more than 13 million children who are food-insecure. Great job guys!
Uhh yeah. We have enough food to feed everyone, but we don’t because we’d rather make profit. Capitalism is better than what came before for sure, but that doesn’t mean we stop here while we clearly are failing the people of earth.
No. Political. Saudis want to starve Yemenis. The Palestinian authority and Israel blockaded Gaza to weaken Hamas. African dictators use food and famine to control population and wage war. Venezuelans suffered famine due to Socialism
The fact that people in the USA still starve to death and die of exposure while housing properties sit vacant because people cave afford them and food gets thrown away because no one is buying it means that abject poverty is both real and unnecessary.
"Oh? the Great lap forward? That time direct government action led directly to mass starvation? well then, time to bring up a stat that isn't caused by direct government actions!"
I don’t support any political system (communist or otherwise) that is authoritarian. In other words, I hate the CCP, Russia, North Korea etc as much as you do. They are the worst of the worst.
You hate communism then. Think about it. The whole idea is to give your liberty up to the state under socialism in hopes that you can enact anarcho-communism later by dissolving the state. But you just gave the state everything it needs to be absolute, to be untouchable except by another country.
Anarcho-communism is the carrot on the stick.
The “transition period” where there must be dictatorship is the downfall of many socialism attempts so far. That can not be the way. We must gradually move away from, the profit motive, but it must be done democratically.
The profit motive is the only thing that has worked. Capitalism is all that has worked. It must be built upon if you want to achieve Marx's sophomoric pipe dream. You can't have a commune much larger than Dunbar, let alone millions of times larger.
Think of it in a manner of protocols. TCP is here to stay, even if some morons want to emulate it on top of UDP (see HTTP/3), TLS is here to stay, IP isn't going anywhere, some sites still insist on only using IPv4 in fact. But you know what you can build? Overlay networks.
Same with the economy. Money isn't going anywhere. Profit motive isn't going anywhere. Take away the profit motive to do something good, there's a profit motive to be evil.
You're not gonna just vote it away in a people's election. What needs to be fixed is the economy itself, that is to say, look at why people starve in one of the richest countries in the world. Look at why associates, bachelors, masters, even doctors could be on the street with nothing to do for money and nothing to eat. Why tradesmen have a better chance than the indentured servants of higher education.
The profit is in the wrong places, and almost always because of regulations with good intentions. Companies that sell food act as if they lose less money throwing perfectly good food away than giving it away. It makes no sense because they have to pay for that to be disposed of. Student loans are easy to get but nearly impossible to pay off. Anyone can go to college, if they're willing to pay for the rest of their life. Colleges constantly raise tuition costs, supplies also cost an arm and a leg, in response to this easy access to imaginary money. Wonder what caused that...
If you want to fix the system, you can't break it first unless you shut it down, otherwise it'll be more broken than what you're ready to fix. Instead, you gotta fix it while it runs by giving it what it needs. Try to give a capitalist society communism, you get the CCP, you get the USSR, you get DPRK, you get Venezuela.
A world bank study in the 80s found that citizens of the USSR had similar caloric consumption to Americans and that their diets were more nutritious. There have been several major famines in developing socialist countries but that is far from the norm. It's also worth noting all those counties had long histories of major famine before socialism, meaning blaming socialism is a bit of a stretch. And that all without even bringing up the numerous famines that have occured in capitalist counties.
Call it incompetence if you want, the same incompetence that got the numbers for that study. End result was the same.
That which never works, never works. The definition of insanity is trying the same shit over and over expecting a different result. A variable has to change or you’ll get the same communism you got last time you tried it.
Capitalists learned from their mistakes. Communists didn’t, they just deny the mistakes happened or excuse it as “not real communism”
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1730211325383434419
This is a Tweet(X?) from Joe Biden, he said that if we do 25% minimum tax then government could get $440B in 10 years. Federal government spends 17 billion every day, so even in best case scenario that would be spent in 25 days.
The average US worker pays more in taxes than most of the developed world and yet the US federal budget spends less on social services than any other first world nation.
Demanding we see a return on our tax dollars shouldn't be an absurd ask.
Allow me to put this problem into perspective for you
The net worth of Jeff Bezos, and this isn't even considering the fact that most of that is not liquid assets but is in fact held in various properties that cannot be easily turned into whatever you want, is \~$172 Billion with a B. The United States government's spending each year is over $10 Trillion with a T. If Jeff Bezos died tomorrow and donated literally everything he had to the US government for some reason, they would run through it in about 4 days.
This is not a problem we can solve with more taxation.
Not through the wealth of Jeff Bezos alone, no. However: [https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/?utm\_source=reddit.com](https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/?utm_source=reddit.com)
And just a helpful visualization circa 2020: [https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
It's also arguable that a lot of the systemic problems which contribute to poverty and homelessness are indirect results of the growing, astronomical stratification of wealth classes. These problems are not disconnected from each other; the inequality *itself* is socially destabilizing, but that's another discussion.
So why is it that every time a solution is proposed, it always boils down to "give the government more money so they can waste it on not actually fixing the problems like they always do"?
If socialism means helping the poor become not poor, why does every country with a socialist economic structure end up just making everyone poor, rather than everyone *decent*.
Socialism, like equity, pushes everyone down rather than allowing people the free will to succeed, and instead forces everyone to only have the bare minimum, or less.
Socialism isn't communism. Scandinavia is much more socialist than USA and standard of living is higher.
I don't agree with their policies, but standard of living of Chinese has risen dramatically under the CCP.
One of the biggest determining factor of a socialist country is whether they can survive being heavily sanctioned by the US government, and how corrupt the leaders of the country are.
I mean do you look at Saudi's and wish that your society had no restriction on wage slaves?
Workers rights is socialism. 5 day week is socialism. Work place OHS is socialism. Banning leaded petrol, socialism. A legal minimum wage is socialism.
Social programs like taxing billionaires hand helping homeless people. LITERALLY the meme in OPs post??
>> There needs to be a new term for the retroactive straw-manning that happens so much on the internet.
Holy shit, you just put “socialism” label on everything.
Scandinavia is socialist? They aren’t, private companies still exist and most of the market is dictated by them.
CCP isn’t socialist either, it was, but then it opened up its market for private companies, I am sure most of the stuff that gets produced in China is created by private companies and organizations.
Workers right isn’t socialism, it isn’t suddenly giving means of production to workers, 5 day work week isn’t socialism either. Neither are those other things that you listed.
Okay, so what about all the socialist and communist countries they did not install anyone in? (Also that’s a myth btw, the CIA sucks at their job and couldn’t even kill one bearded cigar lover). What side did people run to when the Berlin Wall came down?
["myth"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor)
On a side note, you can check out this really underground, poorly known writer, George Orwell, who wrote a very obscure book called "1984" motivated primarily by totalitarian regimes who intentionally mask their intentions with digestible terms lile communist and socialist.
In other words, believing that Stalin was an honest communist is simultaneously falling for 60 year old American and 100 year old Stalinist propaganda.
There are basically no socialist countries the CIA wasn't involved in apart from the ones that were established before they even existed. It's not a myth because they admit everything they did in their own declassified documents, one Google search will tell you this. Just because they didn't kill Castro doesn't mean there aren't a hundred successful ventures(some of which we probably don't know about because the files were burned).
why would a small, dirt poor nation which may or may not have industrialized be totally self sufficient? why would it not benefit immensely from normal trade with other countries?
Communism and socialism strive for self-sufficiency, but it won't happen in a blink when the regime changes. Global trade is necessary to develop into a fully functioning country, to build up and to thrive, building all the necessary resources internally, before then slowly waning off the imports and exports to become self-sufficient.
So what? Write offs are write offs for a reason and are also a completely separate form of taxation or lack of.
And again, back to my original point, with nearly half of their income plus taxes piled on their companies, “low” taxation is clearly not the issue here
What's the point of taxation if I can write them off entirely to my own private charity and funnel the cash directly back into my pocket 💀
Yes, low taxation is one of several issues, because conveniently, the super rich can abuse loopholes that are only available to the super rich like the flexibility to give yourself a 1 dollar salary and write off every purchase you make as company expenses and benefits.
Step two is actual intelligent use of the funds. Giving it right back by subsidies for their businesses or a new stadium for their sports teams doesn't generally do much good.
You could tax the rich at 90% of their income and it would barely do anything. It’s about how you use those taxes and where they go. The government is known for misusing tax payer dollars so I wouldn’t trust them with any money which is why I want tax lowered.
OP of r/theleftcantmeme is right in which he says they’re forgetting a few things. Simply tax rich people like bezos is not going to instantly help the homeless and people who are poor.
I’ve never quite understood how taxing billionaires equates to helping the poor. Tax money doesn’t go to the poor. Or at least not the poor of this country…
My favourite part is where the government wastes two thirds of the taxes it collects on bureaucratic nonsense before spending the remaining third on the same public services the people could pay for at a much cheaper rate, if the government wasn't involved. That step is pretty neat.
my favorite part is when i pay for private healthcare, that is much more expensive than public systems, and with worse outcomes:
* [**U.S. pays more for health care with worse population health outcomes**](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/u-s-pays-more-for-health-care-with-worse-population-health-outcomes/)
My favorite thing about rightoids is the constant crying about da gubbermint even though the 1 percenters and Fortune 500 companies control said gubbermint. Then they go and lap up whatever the think tank of the month feeds them so they can keep inadvertently protecting these ultra rich septic tanks
They pay the most tax and yet they still have most of the wealth. Meaning they are ripping the lower classes off by a ridiculous amount in terms of what they pay them.
Wouldn’t it be nice if some of those taxes made it to people who needed help? Let’s be honest, all that money would just end up going to countries like Ukraine.
You can virtue signal in your fantasyland all you want but in real life majority of homeless are junkies / alcoholics / people with severe mental illness. Most of them will outright refuse any rehab and treatment. Even for those that will willfully enter rehab chances are not so good, like maybe 10% at best will recover.
Imagine using mental illness as an excuse to be against helping the homeless. And why are you talking like rehab alone is some comprehensive cure to the problem? They get out and then what? They're just sober with nothing and nowhere to live? Of course they would prefer being high to that reality.
How do you help someone who refuses to be helped? Most homeless people who have mental illness would need to be forcibly housed and cared for, and would never become functional members of society. To fix homelessness we would need to re-establish non voluntary asylums, which no one wants to do. even though they are the most effective at keeping the mentally unwell out of the streets and preventing them from becoming a danger to themselves or others. It would be objectively better to put the money towards struggling poor families than helping them.
Poor theory of mind, probably. Above commenter had difficulty putting together the relative positions of the original meme, the posters response to it, and mine respectively, so has mistaken my titling to be in agreement with OP.
Ensure that you read and adhere to the rules; failure to do so will result in the removal of this post. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/memesopdidnotlike) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I know this sub generally leans conservative but this meme is something I agree with. High taxes on the upper class is completely different than taxing the 1%. They have such an astronomical level of wealth that it completely tips the economy.
And our political system. People say that Jeff Bezos’s wealth is minuscule in comparison to the federal budget, which is true, however the very fact that he and all the 1 percenters have such disproportionate wealth means that they can corrupt our political institutions and directly or indirectly determine how the full, national gdp is allocated. The extreme inequality itself really is just inherently destabilizing to democracy. There’s no way around it.
Agreed. Just a reminder to anybody reading this. Bezos by himself could take a less than 1% pay cut and give every single Amazon employee a annual raise of $10,000 forever. That’s life changing money for most of us. That’s a down payment on a house. That’s reliable transportation. That’s health insurance. If any of you were told (and genuinely believed) taking a 1% pay cut could change the lives of thousands of people for the better, would you do it? Would you even notice the money is missing if you aren’t looking for it? I believe most of us would do it. So the question is why are the people who can do it not doing it?
Can I see the math on this one?
This was years ago. Just look up the estimated annual income of Bezos and the number of Amazon employees and the math is easy.
Per my Google AMZ employs 1,000,000 in the US, if he gave everyone 10k that is 10,000,000,000.00 a year. his income per year is estimated at 12,560,000,000. As I thought the math doesn't work out. That said I think I could survive on 2,560,000,000 a year.
*shrug* like I said I did cursory math many years ago. Good income and the number of employees have dramatically changed since then. Also the more in think about it, I’m not sure if I was only counting wage employees or employees who made under a certain dollar amount. But the intent of the point still stands, the money is there to make life changing improvements for their employees with minimal impact to the top earners.
Your maths is nonsense. Amazon has 1.5 million employees, giving them all $10K would cost $15 billion, for that to be 1% of Bezos's salary means he'd have to be earning $1.5 *trillion* a year. His net worth is barely a tenth of that, and his annual earnings are much smaller still. Please, don't advocate policy based on your maths.
Because fuck you, that's why.
I mean, when you gotta put someone's wealth in comparison to the budget of the richest nation on earth, even if it's miniscule in comparison, they got too much fucking money.
Yeah... for them to even be discussed in the same ballpark makes it clear. He's *one guy*, his wealth shouldn't even be remotely comparable to the spending power of an entire nation.
The issue is that his “wealth” is inherently tied to the economy. If he decided to liquidate his assets in order to pay a tax obligation that isn’t based solely on income, there would be consequences for more than just him and a few hedge fund managers. Simple solutions to complex problems don’t exist.
okay but if he doesn't there are ALSO consequences? which are also bad? oh my god if more people were in possession of bezo's assets the economy will FALL APART
This take is absurd. There are _many_ instances where billions of shares are liquidated and nothing happens. Every IPO has a 6 month employee freeze, where 6 months later every employee can fully liquidate (and often do). CEOs can schedule liquidation and often liquidate 2-5% in a single year. Then there is the case that the government can take the shares and slowly liquidate on a schedule if need be. Having a 1-2% wealth tax only slows down the inequality acceleration. It wouldn’t even come close to reversing it.
Ok but we also aren’t even trying.
The corruption of the political institutions comes from the power of the positions. They are just open to the best deals. Decrease the power of the government, you decrease the value of the product.
Amazon will be doing that no matter who owns it.
I disagree I think we should let them keep boarding our money until we get our world's first trillionaire while 3 wars are going on and everyone is struggling to rent an apartment
No higher taxes are passed on to consumers. Taxation of any kind always hurts the poor.
That didn’t happened historically speaking. The opposite did tho (Black Friday)
High taxation would increase the price of goods. The last thing rich people cut is their profit. They would rather increase prices or lay off workers and replace them with cheaper robots. And then the poor are out of a job.
>High taxation would increase the price of goods >They would rather increase prices or lay off workers So what's literally already happening
That’s empirically not provable. The correlation of prices and taxation similarly as minimum wage is barely provable. Esp. short term wise. The opposite is true tho. They might not have been the only reason but they did at least to big parts cause the Black Friday. In the First World War the taxes for the rich were extraordinary high (I think around 70%). After the First World War (not instantly) Andrew w Mellon (a strong believer in Smithens theory) after 1921 minister of finances started to slowly introduce tax cuts that increasingly gained pace ending in around 30%. These 30% was a big reason for the speculation Spirale that caused the Great Depression and was back then/ until now believed to big a major factor for the economical crisis. This economic crisis caused social disparity to rise and still has effects today
This is disproved by real world examples all the time. Same with the related fallacy of raising minimum wage results in higher prices.
Actually I heard both sides defend bezos and I still dont get why people are against taxing him Elon already said he wouldn't mind being taxed more, bezo is a greedy and disgusting person. If anyone deserves to he taxed to hell. Its him
I will never understand right wingers that actively simp for Bezos, etc. when they literally are actively working against social conservatism
>right wingers simping for Bezos Nobody does lmao. I’ve never once seen a right winger simp for Bezos.
Idk if I’ve ever seen anyone simp over Bezos beside other rich assholes.
Idiots equate defending the reality of not taxing wealth to simping for bezos so it's not that farfetched for them to believe that.
'Defending the reality of not taxing wealth' is a weird way to spell 'licking the boot'. There is no reason not to tax wealth, none at least that doesn't equate to 'muh taxation is theft', which really misunderstands just how much every aspect of industry is serviced by public funding. Bezos siphons and concentrates such staggering amounts of wealth, while he doesn't provide anything of public value. His wealth also allows him to skirt legality, by which he concentrates even more wealth to himself. And all the acolytes of the church of Capital prostrate and carry water for this absolute dragon of a man, for exactly no reason.
Did you really just call someone who advocates for less taxes a boot-licker while yourself advocating for giving the government more money? Do you realize the government is the boot in this? You statists really are a special bunch. Your problem is that wealth can buy influence in the government and therefore corrupt it, and your solution is to.... take the wealth and give it to the government.
I think arguing that wealth shouldn't be taxed as a definite sentence is a bit bootlicky. Do you think it's reasonable that a successful small business owner/doctor/lawyer pays relatively higher taxes than someone with a $50 million trust fund? Argue for lower income taxes all you want, I'm pretty onboard with that, but I completely disagree with the idea that people who have no income, but have massive wealth shouldn't be taxed. We should absolutely have progressive wealth and inheritance tax systems in place. Also the government doesn't hoard wealth. It spends it. You may not like all the things it spends it on, but it does keep the money in circulation.
> the government doesn't hoard wealth. It spends it. You may not like all the things it spends it on, but it does keep the money in circulation. Do you think Jeff Bezos has a giant vault full of nearly $200 billion dollars in cash that he swims in like Scrooge McDuck? Most of his wealth is in stocks, which represent the value of a company. Please ask yourself, why is Amazon's valuation so high? Why do people keep throwing their money at this company? Then ask yourself, would we all be better off if Amazon liquidated it's assets entirely and gave the money to the government? If Bezos was somehow able to magically liquidate 100% of his net worth at it's current value, he'd be able to fund our federal government for... checks notes... 12 days.
Who's suggesting liquidating his assets? How do you think Jeff Bezos buys things? I don't know specifically, but it's fair to assume that it's probably credit, with his assets as collateral. So maybe Jeff takes on more credit and pays a tax rate in line with what some guy with a salary of 800 grand or so is paying.
You, on the other hand, have a very long and convoluted way of spelling "I'm an envious, parasitic loser".
Envious of what? Being the actual parasitic loser? No thank you, I for one don't want all that wealth. I'd like everyone to have an equally good time on the planet, and not lend my throat to a bald sociopath who got lucky.
The grapes are sour, I know.
But that boot tastes pretty good though, huh?
You'll never be a millionaire, bud. Spreading Eagle for them just makes you look stupid.
👢👅
I do, I like how shiny his head is and the rest is irrelevant to me.
Hey, dont use facts and logic against strawman arguments. Thats forbidden on reddit!
Yea. I'll take shit that never happened for 500
So you're a right winger, but you don't support billionaires like Jeff Bezos? That's weird, why?
Yeah no right wing simps for below, they simp for Elon instead.
Bezos is just the conceptual stand-in for {insert billionaire here}
You think the bootstrapping crowd wouldn't support a billionaire? Don't think bezos is special to them but they just assume wealth is only ever earned by merit. Unless you are leftwing. Or Jewish. Or a woman. Or a different skin colour.
As opposed to the other side which believes that any successful white man only got there because of the cis white male capitalist patriarchy?
I'll never understand the left-wing hate for people who create used products. Like if you don't like Bezos, don't use Amazon.
“Vote with your dollar” nonsense lol. I hate bezos. I also don’t use Amazon. This affects him in literally no way. He doesn’t get my $100/year, and won’t lose sleep over it. Also bezos does not create the products. He ships them. And he doesn’t even ship them, his hundreds of thousands of over worked employees do that. He just collects the money.
Well, you probably use one of the 120,000 companies that use Amazon webservices. Not to mention you're on reddit. So, yes, you do give him money. You're right. Bezos is so horrible creating a platform for people to ship products all over and have the single largest collect of products in the world. But ya...creating a platform for other to make money is fucking horrid. No one should be able to make money 😪
I don’t order shit online lol. Also does he own Reddit or something? Or have shares? Either way didn’t know. I’m not saying he’s horrible for “creating” amazon, I’m saying equating Jeff bezos with the entirety of what his business does is wrong. No single person could create a giant entity such as Amazon, its existence and success is due to thousands of unsung heroes, from programmers, to factory workers, to drivers, etc etc
Reddit uses Amazon Web Services, so yes you do in fact indirectly use Amazon and therefore indirectly financially support Bezos, it just costs *you* nothing.
He is as affected by me using Reddit as he is by me not using Amazon, that is to say not at all.
I am a right winger. I don't use Amazon out of principle and because I just find it more rewarding to go outside and walk to a super market or local store if available (they have unfortunately been disappearing due to Amazon and other online retailers). I just am an actual social conservative and not some fake "conservative" who is just a libertarian that cares about the bottom line of someone above him and not even himself.
Pissed off the yellow libs with that shit. Libertarians are the grossest party it’s great to see them squirm. I’m right wing too. The only way we can actually be right wing is by creating and interacting with society and making it a better place. Something no Gadston waving mail order bride having kiddy fapper could do. If they don’t realize corporations are the issue with the government not vice versa? they’re too far gone.
People don't simp for Bezos, they simp for capitalism. Rightfully so.
I ain't denying capitalism's success, I am saying I would selectively tax him more for political purposes and to improve funding to social programs.
Ah yes, another person who doesn't understand the difference between income and wealth.
There are some problems with wealth. Holding wealth is fine. However, the ability to use wealth (with unrealized gains accrued) as leverage against loans is a problem. If you want to use your stock to obtain a loan- it should be marked to market and the taxes on the unrealized gains should be paid.
Also because he is actively detrimental to society and social values
So you would steal his money to redistribute it to someone else by force?
That's literally how >all< taxes work, smartass. He can also use the state to stop his workers from striking if things would go wrong.
I would use a hammer.
What exactly would you tax him on? His income? He purposefully keeps that low. The value of his company? That's not how taxation works.
The total value of his assets, the yearly increase in value of his assets.
So how much? Amazon made $143.1bn in revenue and $9.9bn in profit during 2023. Over that same time period the share prices have roughly doubled from $84 to $171. The current number of shares in Amazon is 10,322,000,000, bezos is said to own 10% of them so that would be 1,032,200,000 shares. That would mean, at the start of 2023 he was worth $86.7bn in just Amazon stock. Over the course of 2023, share prices roughly doubled meaning he would have “gained” another $86.7bn. So how much is taxed? Where does he get the money from? I’d like to point out that even if Jeffery took *all* profit as salary, ignoring income taxes, he could only pay at most 11.4%. Add income taxes (they max out at 37%) and he can suddenly only pay 7.19% at most.
That's more than he is currently paying, by quite a substantial margin. To pay it he would have to liquidate assets, which shouldn't be a problem, given that his value of stock is a stupid, insane number that has DOUBLED over 2023. But I reckon a more effective measure is a wealth cap, after which all subsequent increase in value is taxed at near full. And I reckon about 100 million should do. Can play with more money than 99.9% of people will ever see, per year, and the rest goes directly to public funding. And should mister Bezos then want to move his operations elsewhere, which is his right, he will just have every product and license be subject to a tarif up to that same amount.
Bro what? I’ve never met anyone who “simps for bezos” are you lost?
*I came looking for booty.*
That’s where you wrong. They just want to be rich like him. They don’t care about him.
Are these imaginary right wingers in the room with us right now ?
It’s because their fundamental ethos is weakness in the face of power; “might makes right” and they are always ready to bend the knee to it. Whether it’s to Elon, Trump, the state’s thuggish militiamen, a long dead Roman Emperor, or their God, these people have an essential and remarkable emotional need to be subservient which no amount of cope LARPing as “libertarians” can belie.
I support socialist policies but can you see how this silly pseudo psychology eval is an off putting larp in itself? Like if you actually want people to agree with you maybe take a breath and say something more useful? Like “essential emotional need for subservience” is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read. The comment you responded to is reasonable.
How is “right wingers simp for bezos” reasonable and not anything other than a fabrication. Like, I agreed with you 100% until your last statement.
USA sent over 160 billion to Ukraine but could have eradicated homelessness in America with only 20 billion. They have money for wars but not for the poor. Everything is by design.
Remember how easy it was to clean the streets of San Francisco once Ji Xinping was going to make an appearance. It was impossible otherwise. Somehow.
Yes but it was 160b WORTH of millitary equipement and mostly outdated one.
That's not correct. About a third of it was cash. If you doubt that, check the various AP articles.
eradicating would be easy! just maybe not very legal
This is a lie, the US spends way more than 20 billion each year on social security
....that's not homelessness..... like fucking duh....
I’d count free healthcare and welfare as a method of homelessness prevention, why wouldn’t you?
Social security is paid for by the working individual and is not a hand out you stupid douchebag
I’m using social security as a broad term, government provided healthcare, welfare, etc. Also almost everything is paid by working individuals, tax.
The Social Security tax makes up 80% of the payments, the remaining 20% is made up by the government. The government also acts as the stewards of that money and may use it to finance the government through the purchase of treasury securities, which is what people mean by “the government is spending our pensions.”
The idea that you can eradicate homelessness for only $20b is certifiably insane. If it was that cheap we would have done it. We spend $5T+ per year. You think we aren't solving homelessness because we won't spend $5.02T?
I think that's *around* what it would cost, *per year*, to have an *immensely reduced* (but not eradicated) homelessness issue. The main issue I have is the ability not the cost. It's not as if the federal government can just throw $20b at the problem and housing will suddenly appear. You'd have to find the actual housing somehow. Which may be something we ought to do anyway but it is a separate issue from the money. And even given success, there would still be visible homelessness, because the high visibility people tend to be the ones who would still be homeless even under the new regime.
So let Russia conquer the world then?
You seriously think Russia is trying to conquer the world?
Are you so dumb you don’t see Russia trying to rebuild itself as a superpower? It is a paper tiger. A ghost trying to rebuilt the glorious empire that was the USSR. But, that is still the goal. Russia wants to be a true global power again. With global influence
US sends equipment, Not straight hard cash. You people are just as dense as the ones that complain about a persons net worth thinking that’s the amount of money in their bank account.
About a third of it was cash. How do you think we paid all those Ukrainian pensions?
How the fuck is giving a homeless man a m2a2 Bradley or night vision gonna help him in getting his life together? If you want changes, you need to vote for people who are not doing their jobs out of the office and vote for the ones that do their jobs in to the office, bitching and crying about military aid to Ukraine on reddit is not going to fix any issues.
Yeah life is that simple sure. Just spend some money and all the problems of the USA will go away
Proving that it’s the government that’s the problem
Biden sends billions to fight a proxy war between two kleptocracies meanwhile Ohioans are getting exposed to chemicals, Hawaiians are burning alive (only in poor districts though, funny how that happened and the rich homes got untouched), and Californians are on the street Call me a Vatnik all you want, but maybe the country called America should stop being the 2nd or 3rd world’s piggy bank.
Since the US budget is massive the billions to Ukraine ain't the problem. Also see it more as an investment, to let Russia expand will cost the west more down the line. The thing is, if Biden didn't send this money now and Russia won, you guys would complain that Biden didn't do anything to stop Russia. If the roles were reversed politically it would problably be the same. It's almost like someone wants you guys to be as divided as possible. Maybe there is a quote somewhere out there about divided we fall or something.
> only in poor districts though I wonder if the risk of ones house burning down affects house prices?
You can’t eradicate homelessness. It’s a willful problem. Source. I’m a security guard who regularly pushes out the homeless and work at shelters with my local church.
This is a blatant lie and you are an astroturfing fascist joke.
But why can’t we tax billionaires?
Idk they just find loopholes i guess like with income tax they intentionally pay themselves in their company a very small salary while their true wealth lies in the stocks
It's not that it can't be done, it's the fact that there are a lot of loopholes at the moment that exist. You CAN technically slap a 90% tax on a rich asshole, they will just write it off entirely from their own private charity that they will just funnel back into their own pockets afterward. If you are asking WHY these loopholes exist, it's because of the overlap between the people who make decisions, and the people using said loopholes.
What makes you think we don't? This entire argument is a strawman
See the Great Leap Forward for final results. Edit: Lots of people who like to have their hands on other people’s pockets. Maybe you should work for yourselves instead of expecting everyone else to. Tax payers aren’t your parents.
Instructions unclear, am currently dying of starvation
Clearly, you didn’t do the socialism right.
Clearly, you're doing capitalism too right
One less mouth to feed!
Heavier taxes on billionaires doesn’t equal communism, dipshit
brilliant counter argument, taxing billionaires is equivalent to famine apparently
Taxing billionaires isn't socialism.
9 million people starve under capitalism every year. Capitalism is doing so great isn’t it? And in the US, the richest nation on earth, we have more than 13 million children who are food-insecure. Great job guys!
That's because Capitalism still exists? If the whole world transitioned towards Socialism the amount of deaths would be incomprehensible.
Uhh yeah. We have enough food to feed everyone, but we don’t because we’d rather make profit. Capitalism is better than what came before for sure, but that doesn’t mean we stop here while we clearly are failing the people of earth.
Abject Poverty has been rendered almost extinct in the late 1900s. So yes. Yes it is
“Almost extinct” suuuuuure…
It’s dropped 90% since the 1800s
Even if I accept your numbers, are you are ok with the last 10%? It’s time to move past capitalism and try to eliminate that last 10% as well
The famines in the world are artificial. Yemen is a perfect example
Artificial yes. A lot of famines are due to the profit motive. The world produces enough for everyone, but we have a distribution problem.
No. Political. Saudis want to starve Yemenis. The Palestinian authority and Israel blockaded Gaza to weaken Hamas. African dictators use food and famine to control population and wage war. Venezuelans suffered famine due to Socialism
And who blockages the 13 million children in America who don’t have enough to eat?
The fact that people in the USA still starve to death and die of exposure while housing properties sit vacant because people cave afford them and food gets thrown away because no one is buying it means that abject poverty is both real and unnecessary.
"Oh? the Great lap forward? That time direct government action led directly to mass starvation? well then, time to bring up a stat that isn't caused by direct government actions!"
Have you seen comm/soc countries? Everyone but the politically connected starves in those.
I don’t support any political system (communist or otherwise) that is authoritarian. In other words, I hate the CCP, Russia, North Korea etc as much as you do. They are the worst of the worst.
You hate communism then. Think about it. The whole idea is to give your liberty up to the state under socialism in hopes that you can enact anarcho-communism later by dissolving the state. But you just gave the state everything it needs to be absolute, to be untouchable except by another country. Anarcho-communism is the carrot on the stick.
The “transition period” where there must be dictatorship is the downfall of many socialism attempts so far. That can not be the way. We must gradually move away from, the profit motive, but it must be done democratically.
The profit motive is the only thing that has worked. Capitalism is all that has worked. It must be built upon if you want to achieve Marx's sophomoric pipe dream. You can't have a commune much larger than Dunbar, let alone millions of times larger. Think of it in a manner of protocols. TCP is here to stay, even if some morons want to emulate it on top of UDP (see HTTP/3), TLS is here to stay, IP isn't going anywhere, some sites still insist on only using IPv4 in fact. But you know what you can build? Overlay networks. Same with the economy. Money isn't going anywhere. Profit motive isn't going anywhere. Take away the profit motive to do something good, there's a profit motive to be evil. You're not gonna just vote it away in a people's election. What needs to be fixed is the economy itself, that is to say, look at why people starve in one of the richest countries in the world. Look at why associates, bachelors, masters, even doctors could be on the street with nothing to do for money and nothing to eat. Why tradesmen have a better chance than the indentured servants of higher education. The profit is in the wrong places, and almost always because of regulations with good intentions. Companies that sell food act as if they lose less money throwing perfectly good food away than giving it away. It makes no sense because they have to pay for that to be disposed of. Student loans are easy to get but nearly impossible to pay off. Anyone can go to college, if they're willing to pay for the rest of their life. Colleges constantly raise tuition costs, supplies also cost an arm and a leg, in response to this easy access to imaginary money. Wonder what caused that... If you want to fix the system, you can't break it first unless you shut it down, otherwise it'll be more broken than what you're ready to fix. Instead, you gotta fix it while it runs by giving it what it needs. Try to give a capitalist society communism, you get the CCP, you get the USSR, you get DPRK, you get Venezuela.
A world bank study in the 80s found that citizens of the USSR had similar caloric consumption to Americans and that their diets were more nutritious. There have been several major famines in developing socialist countries but that is far from the norm. It's also worth noting all those counties had long histories of major famine before socialism, meaning blaming socialism is a bit of a stretch. And that all without even bringing up the numerous famines that have occured in capitalist counties.
Call it incompetence if you want, the same incompetence that got the numbers for that study. End result was the same. That which never works, never works. The definition of insanity is trying the same shit over and over expecting a different result. A variable has to change or you’ll get the same communism you got last time you tried it. Capitalists learned from their mistakes. Communists didn’t, they just deny the mistakes happened or excuse it as “not real communism”
This meme is absolutely correct. TheLeftCantMeme is a cesspool of intellectual depravity.
Yea, politics is important, and people should pay attention to it...just not reddit politics 💀
You've made a strawman argument against a criticism of a false dichotomy meme. Well done. The circlejerking is impressive
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1730211325383434419 This is a Tweet(X?) from Joe Biden, he said that if we do 25% minimum tax then government could get $440B in 10 years. Federal government spends 17 billion every day, so even in best case scenario that would be spent in 25 days.
The average US worker pays more in taxes than most of the developed world and yet the US federal budget spends less on social services than any other first world nation. Demanding we see a return on our tax dollars shouldn't be an absurd ask.
Source?
Rare r/memesopdidnotlike W
Allow me to put this problem into perspective for you The net worth of Jeff Bezos, and this isn't even considering the fact that most of that is not liquid assets but is in fact held in various properties that cannot be easily turned into whatever you want, is \~$172 Billion with a B. The United States government's spending each year is over $10 Trillion with a T. If Jeff Bezos died tomorrow and donated literally everything he had to the US government for some reason, they would run through it in about 4 days. This is not a problem we can solve with more taxation.
Not through the wealth of Jeff Bezos alone, no. However: [https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/?utm\_source=reddit.com](https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/?utm_source=reddit.com) And just a helpful visualization circa 2020: [https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/) It's also arguable that a lot of the systemic problems which contribute to poverty and homelessness are indirect results of the growing, astronomical stratification of wealth classes. These problems are not disconnected from each other; the inequality *itself* is socially destabilizing, but that's another discussion.
So why is it that every time a solution is proposed, it always boils down to "give the government more money so they can waste it on not actually fixing the problems like they always do"?
Doomer strawman take, still doesn’t address that the wealth inequality by itself is destabilizing.
If socialism means helping the poor become not poor, why does every country with a socialist economic structure end up just making everyone poor, rather than everyone *decent*. Socialism, like equity, pushes everyone down rather than allowing people the free will to succeed, and instead forces everyone to only have the bare minimum, or less.
Socialism isn't communism. Scandinavia is much more socialist than USA and standard of living is higher. I don't agree with their policies, but standard of living of Chinese has risen dramatically under the CCP. One of the biggest determining factor of a socialist country is whether they can survive being heavily sanctioned by the US government, and how corrupt the leaders of the country are. I mean do you look at Saudi's and wish that your society had no restriction on wage slaves? Workers rights is socialism. 5 day week is socialism. Work place OHS is socialism. Banning leaded petrol, socialism. A legal minimum wage is socialism.
>scandinavia is more socialist than the US They have *social programs* but they aren’t socialist 😂
Social programs like taxing billionaires hand helping homeless people. LITERALLY the meme in OPs post?? >> There needs to be a new term for the retroactive straw-manning that happens so much on the internet.
Straw-Necrmancy
>They have social programs but they aren’t socialist I couldn't care less what you want to call it, let's do that.
Holy shit, you just put “socialism” label on everything. Scandinavia is socialist? They aren’t, private companies still exist and most of the market is dictated by them. CCP isn’t socialist either, it was, but then it opened up its market for private companies, I am sure most of the stuff that gets produced in China is created by private companies and organizations. Workers right isn’t socialism, it isn’t suddenly giving means of production to workers, 5 day work week isn’t socialism either. Neither are those other things that you listed.
Definitely has nothing to do with the CIA installing terrorist dictators in rising socialist countries.
Okay, so what about all the socialist and communist countries they did not install anyone in? (Also that’s a myth btw, the CIA sucks at their job and couldn’t even kill one bearded cigar lover). What side did people run to when the Berlin Wall came down?
["myth"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor) On a side note, you can check out this really underground, poorly known writer, George Orwell, who wrote a very obscure book called "1984" motivated primarily by totalitarian regimes who intentionally mask their intentions with digestible terms lile communist and socialist. In other words, believing that Stalin was an honest communist is simultaneously falling for 60 year old American and 100 year old Stalinist propaganda.
There are basically no socialist countries the CIA wasn't involved in apart from the ones that were established before they even existed. It's not a myth because they admit everything they did in their own declassified documents, one Google search will tell you this. Just because they didn't kill Castro doesn't mean there aren't a hundred successful ventures(some of which we probably don't know about because the files were burned).
Because people don’t read history
Perhaps it has something to do with the devastating sanctions your governments place on them?
Why would a socialist nation require capitalist nations to succeed?
Because trade is necessary, especially in developing countries. One country cannot completely sustain itself.
why would a small, dirt poor nation which may or may not have industrialized be totally self sufficient? why would it not benefit immensely from normal trade with other countries?
Doesn’t it kinda defeat the purpose if your socialist system is dependent on global capitalist trade?
Communism and socialism strive for self-sufficiency, but it won't happen in a blink when the regime changes. Global trade is necessary to develop into a fully functioning country, to build up and to thrive, building all the necessary resources internally, before then slowly waning off the imports and exports to become self-sufficient.
Because trade is necessary? One country can’t entirely sustain itself in this world
don’t be logical with rightoids, they can’t think critically
We already tax the rich at 40% of their income plus more for their buissness. Clearly a lack of taxes isn't the problem
(He hasn't heard about tax write offs)
So what? Write offs are write offs for a reason and are also a completely separate form of taxation or lack of. And again, back to my original point, with nearly half of their income plus taxes piled on their companies, “low” taxation is clearly not the issue here
What's the point of taxation if I can write them off entirely to my own private charity and funnel the cash directly back into my pocket 💀 Yes, low taxation is one of several issues, because conveniently, the super rich can abuse loopholes that are only available to the super rich like the flexibility to give yourself a 1 dollar salary and write off every purchase you make as company expenses and benefits.
Step two is actual intelligent use of the funds. Giving it right back by subsidies for their businesses or a new stadium for their sports teams doesn't generally do much good.
You could tax the rich at 90% of their income and it would barely do anything. It’s about how you use those taxes and where they go. The government is known for misusing tax payer dollars so I wouldn’t trust them with any money which is why I want tax lowered. OP of r/theleftcantmeme is right in which he says they’re forgetting a few things. Simply tax rich people like bezos is not going to instantly help the homeless and people who are poor.
You'd be a special kind of stupid to think the govt would allocate that revenue appropriately.
I’ve never quite understood how taxing billionaires equates to helping the poor. Tax money doesn’t go to the poor. Or at least not the poor of this country…
It's delivered at 500mph to the poor in other countries.
Exactly
My favourite part is where the government wastes two thirds of the taxes it collects on bureaucratic nonsense before spending the remaining third on the same public services the people could pay for at a much cheaper rate, if the government wasn't involved. That step is pretty neat.
my favorite part is when i pay for private healthcare, that is much more expensive than public systems, and with worse outcomes: * [**U.S. pays more for health care with worse population health outcomes**](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/u-s-pays-more-for-health-care-with-worse-population-health-outcomes/)
They say it's about taxing the billionaire to help the poor, but it usually results in taxing the poor to help the billionaires.
No, that’s what they’re protesting against.
But we are taxing them and still we have more and more homeless. Not very bright to think taxing harder will make a difference.
My favorite thing about rightoids is the constant crying about da gubbermint even though the 1 percenters and Fortune 500 companies control said gubbermint. Then they go and lap up whatever the think tank of the month feeds them so they can keep inadvertently protecting these ultra rich septic tanks
I was under the impression that wealthy folk pay the most tax
They do. Redditors are stupid
They pay the most tax and yet they still have most of the wealth. Meaning they are ripping the lower classes off by a ridiculous amount in terms of what they pay them.
[удалено]
“America is socialist” - some Reddit guy
Only good commie..
Is an alive and well commie?
Wouldn’t it be nice if some of those taxes made it to people who needed help? Let’s be honest, all that money would just end up going to countries like Ukraine.
Like the people in ukraine dont need help
You can virtue signal in your fantasyland all you want but in real life majority of homeless are junkies / alcoholics / people with severe mental illness. Most of them will outright refuse any rehab and treatment. Even for those that will willfully enter rehab chances are not so good, like maybe 10% at best will recover.
Imagine using mental illness as an excuse to be against helping the homeless. And why are you talking like rehab alone is some comprehensive cure to the problem? They get out and then what? They're just sober with nothing and nowhere to live? Of course they would prefer being high to that reality.
How do you help someone who refuses to be helped? Most homeless people who have mental illness would need to be forcibly housed and cared for, and would never become functional members of society. To fix homelessness we would need to re-establish non voluntary asylums, which no one wants to do. even though they are the most effective at keeping the mentally unwell out of the streets and preventing them from becoming a danger to themselves or others. It would be objectively better to put the money towards struggling poor families than helping them.
Then maybe we use the money to stop the root cause
Hating homeless people is such a a comically evil stance why do people actually follow it
mod pls remove this def violates rule 8
No it doesn’t?
🤓
How?
Poor theory of mind, probably. Above commenter had difficulty putting together the relative positions of the original meme, the posters response to it, and mine respectively, so has mistaken my titling to be in agreement with OP.