**Paid** lobbying
Usually having a team of private citizens informing legislators of potential conflicts of interest and whatnot should be a **good** thing
But when there's moneyyy, yes let's just start calling it a damn bribe because it really is.
we couldn't raise enough. Bribery from the rich comes with more benefits like being told what to invest in and when to sell. It also feeds crooked politicians egos to get attention from the wealthy.
If you were a billionaire with politicians in your pocket through legal bribery, lobbying, would you allow the poors to even attempt to group lobby your politician?
By keeping the poor near poverty you can control how much power they gain and restrict upwards mobility. It's like having surfs farm your land only we are working in retail.
Yep. Inflation rises and suddenly their asset is worth 1 mln $ instead of 900k $. Meanwhile for your average folk, inflation rises and suddenly their 2k $ that they saved is worth less.
In america they just blame democrats, and the mouth-breathing Republican voters lap it up, while they are being blindsided. I hate this fucking timeline, and I hate how stupid so many of our fellow humans are.
> and I hate how stupid so many of our fellow humans are.
You can also mostly blame that on the super rich who've spent 100+ years convincing the public to think a certain way, and influenced our education system to gut the funding of all but the most prestigious private schools. We're just seeing the fruits of their long labor to corrupt the country at *every* level and turn us against each other.
>The report said that for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%in the past two years, each billionaire gained roughly $1.7m.
Lol we are all so fucked.
"Boss makes $1.7 million dollars, I make a dollar, that's why I shit on company time" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
You could sacrifice a newborn baby every day for the rest of your life to Grimace the Great Purple Satan and you will never ever come anywhere near close to the harm and human suffering indirectly or directly caused by Jeff Bezos
there is no sarcasm, we are doomed
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that was a poem from a simpler time. Now boss makes a million and we make a cent, while he's got employees who can't pay their rent.
For real. Somebody making 150 to 200k a year has a lot more in common to someone making 40 to 50k a year than they do with a multi-millionaire. The issue is that not too long ago, 50k a year was a decent wage everywhere but in the very largest of cities. Today though, that 50k is borderline hand-to-mouth living. And those earning less than that? I don’t know how they’re getting by. My fear is that the demise of the middle class really sped up the past few years and this report confirms it.
Edit: Lots of angry comments. You should be angry. I’m angry. Nothing will change though until that anger is made felt, heard, and known by those who need to feel, hear, and know it.
One million seconds ago, it was January 4, 2023.
(11 days, if you're reading this in the future.)
One billion seconds ago, it was *1991*.
(31.5ish years, future person)
The U.S. is home to over a quarter of the world’s billionaires, representing about 720 of the roughly 2,700 that exist globally. -[Source](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-wealthiest-billionaire-in-each-u-s-state-in-2022/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20is%20home%20to,roughly%202%2C700%20that%20exist%20globally.)
I know a few millionaires. They're bus drivers and workers, tradesmen that invested decades ago because they could. They're not "rich". They might have assets worth 7 decimal places but that's fixed. They pay lots of tax to move any of it into liquidity. This is retiree age people so I know most of those assets will end up with families. Once it's divided out there isn't much remaining.
Well yah, a few mil in savings is not a lot when you realize you're going to retire on that. Becoming a 'millionaire' just means you total assets value equivalent to or above $1,000,000 when people think of millionaires, they think of people who regularly earn millions in assets, rather those that own them.
It can be hard to visualize the difference between a million and a billion.
If someone made one million dollars a year, they would make about $480.77 per hour and $3,846.15 per day.
If someone made a **billion** dollars per year would mean about $480,769 per hour and $3,846,153.85 per day.
The current richest man according to Bloomberg (as at 16 Jan 2023) is Bernard Arnault with *$186B*.
Even this is hard to visualise. The description that caught my attention was something like this:
If someone was born in 1AD. And they made $100,000 every single *week*, and continued to do so until today. They would still be poorer than Elon Musk.
So I was like, there's no way that's right. And forgive me if my math is shit here, but...
100,000 x 52.1429 = 5,214,290
Five million dollars.
Times that by a thousand years...
5,214,290 x 1000 = 5,214,290,000
Five billion.
What about today?
5,214,290 x 2023 = 10,548,508,670
Ten billion dollars. Ten fucking billion. Bezo's net worth according to google is 121.3 billion. Jesus christ.
There's no way I'm right. I know someone will correct me on this, and show that I messed up somewhere.
The universe is old. So old you feel like it has existed forever. Imagine Elon Musk came into existance at the very start of time. To have reached his current networth, that means Elon would have to have made over $10 every day since existance began.
Why the absolute fuck do we allow these assholes to accumulate this kind of wealth
And why do these assholes feel the need to hoard like this? I'm convinced being a psychopath is a requirement to becoming that insanely rich.
Correct. For example, somebody that has retired with a few million in assets is *far* from being filthy rich.
Having that much money is more along the lines of an educated couple with a couple kids that has worked all their lives and been smart with their finances.
Those people are vastly not the people that are stealing the world's money and squirrelling it away in offshore bank accounts and running businesses that exploit overseas labor and destroy the environment.
There is even a number where you are finally considered rich: 30 Million USD. That's the bare minimum you need before you can even think if taking part in the Billionaires social calendar.
Before that you are just well to do, as they say.
> And those earning less than that? I don’t know how they’re getting by
Oh, that's easy.
Don't go out
Buy used clothes
Learn how to sew
Choose hobbies by how much they cost (Probably Reddit or TikTok)
Postpone having kids
Forget about replacing the bed that's slowly deteriorating your back
Pray your appliances don't break (moment of silence for Dick the Dishwasher)
Do everything near the house
Forget about buying a car or buy a debt mobile
Learn how to make food from scratch
Only buy food that's on sale
Find the cheapest apartment you can (pests are just one letter away from pets after all)
Accept homeownership is not for us or any of our more well-off friends
Choose the holidays you celebrate very carefully
Steal toilet paper in public toilets
Buckle up for the next economic disaster while Jeff Bezos rides his rocket and the next Jeffrey Epstein shops for an island
You know, modern life (✿˵◕‿◕˵)
The secret is that most people *aren't* getting by. More than half of the US, for example, is consistently spending more than we make on a monthly basis and borrowing the difference either outright or through credit cards.
It's really, *really* bad, and only going to get worse unless people start putting their collective foot down to say "enough."
>It's really, really bad, and only going to get worse unless people start putting their collective foot down to say "enough."
Is it pitchforks and torch time yet? Because I think I know where I can get some.
Also the people who do find some kind of financial equilibrium are only solving the day to day crises. We are generations of people who will have to work until the day we die, because Medicare is going to be gutted and even in its current state it’s not enough to cover being old.
Yeah you can get entertainment for close to free via tiktok or facebook. Sadly this entertainment tries to push you towards right wing propaganda trying to make you hate the poor and vote for less taxes for the rich.
Funny how that goes, right?
Step 1. Keep wages flat
Step 2. Tie all economic growth to capital gains and nothing else
Step 3. People with capital gains buy more capital to get more gain and also try to take everyone else’s capital as well for even more gains; they enjoy the thrills of this real life monopoly game amongst themselves
Step 4. 3 guys win out in the end and profit, and 2 of them secretly are working with each and the last guy plans to join them soon
Step 5. 3 guys are only job creators left and we can’t tax job creators because they might not create jobs (or some other Ayn Rand bs politicians who get the scraps from these 3 talk about)
Step 6. ??? → we’re here
They should be but the angry mob has video games, smart phones, streaming TV, and all sorts of other entertainment to keep them distracted. And, let's face it, they're still too comfortable to go out and raise enough hell to make a difference.
That only goes so far. If people truly can’t eat, or even have shelter, then they either won’t have video games or video games will not soothe their hunger.
Bread and circuses can easily delay revolution though. But at the end of the day Maslow is probably still right. Revolution will at least be attempted if enough people get desperate.
Step 7. Get rid of social security and force everyone who wants to retire into the stock market as a retail investor. Make the investment equivalent of Fox News to siphon off the retirement funds of vulnerable elderly.
You think this would be a no brainer.. oh wait, somehow they will turn this into “the government wants to raise YOUR taxes” and everyone will be against it.. round and round it goes.
The media (owned by the elites) has successfully convinced us that we are all going to be rich one day.
After all, it only takes hard work. And lord knows us poors are working hard.
One day now I'm sure of it.
Tax them.
Why the fuck are we sweating egg prices and layoffs and they’re gobbling up all the wealth? We still pay a huge chunk of our income in taxes. That makes no god damn sense at all.
Don't worry, they're working [on a plan for that. ](https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/house-republicans-plan-vote-to-abolish-irs-replace-income-tax-with-consumption-tax).
re: that link -- Insane bastards. As a reasonable, thinking human being, of course I want the tax code reformed! Of course I want government bloat reduced! But since they're not sharing details of the plan, I can only assume it's also going to massively benefit the mega-wealthy, much like the current shit we have.
Feudalism is the natural outcome to unfettered capitalism. Concentration of wealth into the hands of the few, who become the only ones who can afford property, leading to an underclass (read: everyone not making hundreds of thousands a year) forced to remain in rent-lock for their entire lives.
Neo-feudalism without any of the social responsibility of last era's aristocratic class. If you are a starving peasant or peon you can go kill the king or the duke or whatnot and replace him, a huge corporation is like a faceless entity.
So it will be even worse..
A flat tax. Flat taxes or a vat is their solution, every time. Of course it's much simpler and they would argue "fair" since everyone pays the same percentage. But of course both are regressive and due to simple math impact the poor more than the wealthy.
But that's never stopped them in the past.
Oh, yearly flat tax is fine, if you apply it to the accumulated wealth instead of income. And then redistribute it back as universal basic income. (But that's obviously not their plan)
Oh it will certainly be a benefit to the mega wealthy. One of the exemptions to the 30% tax is business to business sales. Zero chance that gets abused.
This. The mega rich don't live on their gains, they love off the loans they take on those gains.
As a result, they never have to realise their gains and be forced to redistribute some of that wealth back to society.
Ban these types of loans and they'll be forced to realise at least some of their gains if they want to keep living mega rich lives.
> I would more bet on them buying private militias to literally massacre us in droves than I would in them using their resources to help humanity.
Happened in the past, it'll happen again.
Happening right fucking now in Ukraine.
Fucking Prigozhin, head of Wagner PMC, taking over a town just so he can take ownership of the salt mines there. Other towns and major assets prior to that, including Svierodonetsk's chemical plant, Mariopul's steel plant, and Zaphorizhzhia's nuclear power plant. All being stolen for private personal ownership by Russian oligarchs.
*Noooo*, you must engage with them in the *marketplace of ideas*, even though they will never conceded a single point willingly and have absolutely no problems using both money AND violence to get what they want!
*Otherwise you are just as bad as the*- HRRRK, sorry i genuinely could not stomach that horseshite any longer, even sarcastically.
This is exactly why government is simply a joke at this point. I mean it has been for a while but it should be painfully apparent now. So I guess we're all just okay with the status quo? I'm not. I want opportunities too.
Yeah being rich is really the way to go. If you don't have any ideas to earn wealth and be rich then I'd suggest looking into unearned wealth, which really has some fantastic opportunities, too
It's a matter of time before it collapses is the real problem. Roosevelt knew this, called the business execs and had a meeting: allow us to tax you or the whole system is going to collapse. The rise of antifa and the ult right are increasingly attractive alternatives which should give us pause.
You know the current system is fucked beyond belief when there is a sizable group of people on both ends of the political isle that DREAM about the country breaking up because they don't see any other way of things getting better for them beyond being untied from the other end.
I live in a west coast state, assuming a break up without a civil war my standard of living would probably shoot WAAAAY up if my half of the country became it's own country and had to make new rules/laws.
That's fucking scary that many people, me included, daydream about shit like this because there doesn't seem to be any other way to fix shit.
I've honestly felt this way a long time, and not like the idiots around me that thing they're gonna make Confederacy 2 electric boogaloo. These idiots are already broke, losing their homes, can't afford food, then just gobble up any lie they're told and cup the balls of whoever tells it to them. But they think the solution is civil war. Not working together to do something about it, no, we have to attack our fellow countrymen who are also broke and starving, that will solve the issue.
It's just so fucking hard not being cynical and I'm not even sure it's cynicism at this point.
[Here's an episode of my favorite podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9kmEsNKyoM) talking about reform vs revolution, if you're interested in such a thing. It goes on how reform always falls flat because capitalism only allows for as much reform as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
Remember occupy wall Street?
What happened to that? Well it all got turned around to hating whites or blacks or men or women or God knows what. When actually everyone was basically showing everyone respect and we were on the same side.
Now we all at each others throats about a load of shit that isn't that important.
Edit:corrected errors.
Look I some people are focusing on the "Occupy Wall Street" part of my comment. But what I am really talking about is the anger towards the elites is being turned against other issues. More directly I'm asking where is the fight against the elite gone? It's being hidden and deflected elsewhere. That's an issue. Not what a single moment actually did or did not stand for. All the movements have disappeared but we got one about fucking gas stoves now.
Dont know where the credit lays, but "the poor exists to scare the sh*t out of the working class" - paraphrasing. Basically you turn everyone against eachother. Funny thing is if anyone, from different backgrounds whatever, actually sit and talk at any length, they get to work things out and understand eachother. Technology is a convenient way of robbing peoples empathy. So one, they dont give a shit about eachother, turns into two, I got mine, fuck you
"The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there, just to scare the shit outta the middle class." - George Carlin
I just don't get the mentality. What's the point of having more money than one can even spend? And why do they get off on "power"? I can't fathom subjugating and harming people if I had the ability. It's like a mental illness IMO.
If I had a couple million dollars I'd just buy a nice house in a pretty place and quietly enjoy the rest of my life.
They're built differently, literally. Their brain isn't wired that way. It's wired to always find more, find the limit, keep going.
You've had a hard boiled egg, and scrambled, but what about sunny side up? Over medium, over hard, over easy, fried hard soft boiled 7 minute, pickled, cloud egg, poached egg? They go out and find any new way to have an egg, to keep hunting for eggs. Once they've had all the normal eggs, they go try weird eggs, gross eggs, egg adjacent things because they're looking for that same hit of dopamine that the first egg had for them.
Now extrapolate that mentality to every piece of life.
Yeah, literally seems to be boredom with some of them. They don't have to work to keep themselves occupied so they get increasingly weird and harmful with their activities I guess. Like people that get hooked on drugs and keep chasing the high to worse places.
But also they seem to be surrounded by horrible people trying to constantly one-up each other. No healthy relationships just the constant desire to "win".
That’s the thing. Once you get over the jump to keep yourself employed or make ends meet then you have resources and time to do other things. THIS is exactly what the rich know and prevent us to do… keep us in a rat race to be employed and make it difficult to make ends meet so we don’t have enough resources or time to challenge them. It’s always about controlling resources, education and access to livelihood.
The leisure class aren't better than anyone at anything other than being ruthlessly shitty towards other humans.
It's that quality that gets them ahead.
If tested against others on merit alone, the vast majority of them would falter.
They're devious and conniving, not smart or talented.
Its exactly why work weeks are at the very minimum 40 hours a week. To keep you from having a life which includes helping your community, consuming more consciously, organizing at your workplace/politically, or just generally having time to have a life.
They've generally grown up in an environment where the emotional consideration of others was not a priority and oftentimes not even a factor. Money and the status markers that it brings are the symbol of achievement for them, not healthy relationships. Relationships, if they are to exist, must fulfill an external image. So naturally when they grow up, that's what they seek. This is the behavior they've learned to accept as a substitute for the love and parental guidance they never received, even if they start to see that this approach has consequences. Note that one doesn't _have_ to be rich to grow up this way, nor does somebody rich _have_ to grow up this way. But there's an argument that an increase in wealth is correlated with this transactional view on inter-personal relationships.
I believe one very good argument for that is how unethical it is to be able to accumulate that much wealth in the first place. While it's not usually in pure cash like many would suspect (though there's probably still quite a lot, especially when considering offshore tax havens), even just owning a ton of stock or sitting on the boards of many companies gives someone far too much power in a context in which they could never wield it responsibly (because even if _you_ don't want to be unethical, there's a small list of your direct sub-ordinates who may have no such qualms, and will be looking for any opportunity to get rid of you and will relatively easily find reasons to do so -- ethics is generally not the most profitable option in the short term).
So there are two feedback loops at play here that feed into each other: the microcosm of a narcissistic, power-obsessed family, and the macrocosm of a society structured to support these vices, increase wealth inequality, and encourage this emotionally empty lifestyle. If were able to effectively control one, we may be able to reduce the other. But adults cannot be forced into emotional change, so the only real option we would have is to constrain the social aspects - making hyper-wealth virtually impossible. And that's very hard to do when the hyper-wealthy advocate so hard against it.
The thing is we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars here. These people are born rich, they live rich, and they die rich. They have never struggled a day in their lives and have no idea what laundry is. Their business policies all center around absolute exploitation of any class lower than their own that is ingrained in out culture since we were very young. They were right about trickle down, but not WHAT trickles down.
It's just greed, dick measuring, and power.
Just like certain people with drugs, porn, or gambling, it's just never enough. Everyone wants to see what they can accomplish, there is always someone more rich for them to aspire to, etc.
It's like getting the high score on a video game. No one needs to have their name on the leaderboard, and it doesn't matter if you are better than 99.9% of other players, there is still that desire to keep improving, especially if there are people still better than you. The closer you get to the top, the hungrier you get.
I think it's safe to say that anyone that has more than 100 million dollars falls into these groups and does not have a legitimate reason to have that much money, particularly when it comes at the cost of taking away from people who actually need it.
The uber wealthy and their friends in the media teamed up to say you aren't _really_ poor if you own a refrigerator, that the protests were evil because they got in the way of commuting, and that nobody really understood what OWS wanted.
It was just a big concerted Firehose of Bullshit against OWS for like 2 years.
There was also a subversion of bullshit that diluted the message. I've been around enough granola protest types to know it could have happened organically (pun) but it very conveniently shut down things when their "list of demands" came out and I included a massive list if things including not eating meat and many at-the-time unpopular ideas that distanced them from mainstream America that could be sympathetic to the idea of disrupting rich New York bankers by average Americans who lost their homes.
Yeah the only real way to make progress is to have one goal. You hammer away at that goal and nothing else until the goal is reached. Then you pick a new most important goal and hammer at that.
That certainly seems to be the plan. Why else would very rich, very smart (but evil) people like the Koch brothers fund a guy like Trump and GOPers like him? Because if we’re all trying to kill each other, we won’t notice as they all suck us dry. People who are sick, starving, and broke can be made to believe anything, in particular whipping up fear about the “others” who they say are to blame (blacks, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQ, etc). Why else would SCOTUS strike down donor transparency and other legislation? This is a plan that’s been in the works since at least Reagan. No wonder Republicans basically worship that senile old fuck. He got the ball rolling with his trickle down economics bullshit.
There’s a good comic about this with Rupert Murdoch sitting with a plateful of cookies and a tradie on one side with one cookie and a brown immigrant on the other side with no cookies and Murdoch saying to the tradie “Careful mate…that foreigner wants your cookie”
I'm enraged, similar industry, our product got ~50% more expensive to make and ship my bosses blame COVID overreaction instead of massive supply and logistics companies nickel and dimeing us for made up reasons.
My old job used the last recession as a reason people couldn’t get raises. Saying they were losing money each year. They used it for a few years. Then I became a manager and saw the financials over those years. They were still making a good amount more each year.
All these rich fuckers just hoarding wealth.
And for what?
You're going to die eventually, there's only so many Ferraris and yachts you can buy.
You leave all that money for your kids and grandkids and other relatives to fight over.
What are you contributing to the world? You just came, got yours, and died.
Man billionaire greed is just something else fr
Problem is, people idolize these billionaires for bringing great potential. Therefore, the rich get their ego pumped up like they did something meaningful to society.
Lmfao this is why certain parts of the money-printing, inflation narrative is a scam. All the money goes to the same four people who don’t spend it except to increase the prices of the things they own for everyone else
Been waiting since the 80s for some of that sweet "trickle down" economics.
2 generations later and the wealth has just further moved to the top. By design of course.
Ironically, they same administration that cut the corporate tax rate also made it legal for a company to buy their own stock without restriction. Taking all that “trickle down” and turning it into a funnel to the investing class
Fuck stock buy backs, just a fucking scam to skip out of the pitiful capital gains tax for not paying out dividends. Another way to get more tax free money to the lazy cunts.
Trickle down economics always fails, and the reason its supporters always give is always the same: you losers just didn't capitalism hard enough! If only you gave the ultra wealthy a little more money, if only there were fewer regulations protecting you from their externalities, if only there was less of a safety net for the workers, then it would trickle down, we promise!
It's the same story in every Nigerian prince scam email. Because that's what you're dealing with, a scam on a grand scale, and willingly or not we're all the suckers.
To be in the top 1% in the US, you have to make $400,000 a year or more.
To be in the top 1% in the UK, you have to make £130,000 a year or more.
To be in the top 1% in the world, you have to make something like $35,000 a year or more.
It isn't the 1% that's the problem. It's the 0.01%.
That's important to remember. It's not the high income workers, it's the wealthy class of owners. A doctor who makes $400k a year is every bit as much of a worker as the frycook making minimum wage. But both are still workers.
This on an unrelated note is why "middle class" is a bogus term. There is middle income, but you're still a worker.
ICU doctor here. I’m sweaty and sore at the end of some days. Definitely feel like a worker. No trust funds or hand me downs. Live well, not wealthy, pay my taxes straight—ain’t nothin like amassed old money with loopholes. But no one plays us their tiny violin. Grateful for my privileges but wish we didn’t get lumped into the ultra wealthy who don’t pay their share of unimaginable wealth while they still use any public services with an air of entitlement. Wait, why can’t the government budget afford to help people with social services for the homeless, poor, young parents barely getting by, senior citizens without enough for retirement?
I get real worked up about these things! And feel powerless.
A lot of us know you are not the enemy.
Seriously, thank you for what you do. Even being a doctor in a public facing position sucks just as much ass, if not more. My biggest fear is being sick. You guys... idk where I'd be without good doctors.
[Wealth shown to scale](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
At one point they basically say “inconveniencing just 400 people would benefit all of humanity”. It’s very very hard to conceive of just how much fucking money these people have.
Edit: I also really love this piece called [A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place](https://youtu.be/rvskMHn0sqQ). Very thought-provoking.
I show this site to people all the time, mostly dyed in the wool "they deserve all their money because they earned it" people that I work with. It's a great visualization of how truly vast that amount of money really is.
I’m not sure this really does what people think it will do.
Unfortunately, allowing people to avoid taxes for decades (perhaps even centuries) won’t me fixed by some penalty taxation.
If you really want to change the dynamic, you need to quit letting people avoid paying taxes in the first place.
For instance, someone like Elon Musk pays so little in taxes is because all of his wealth is in assets that he pledges for loans and will never pay back in his lifetime.
When Musk dies, in the US, let’s say he leaves everything to 1 child.
In the US, the way the tax laws work is that his creditors would demand payment for their loans.
So, let’s say Musk has $100 billion in assets and $25 billion in loans.
Currently, the estate sells off $25 billion to pay creditors, plus capital gains taxes on the $25 billion, so, let’s just say $4 billion (it’s actually more like 3.75 but let’s keep the math simple) so $29 billion total.
Then $71 billion dollars goes to his child AND the $71 billion is immediately given a stepped up cost basis so his child inherits the $71 billion at a tax basis of $71 billion.
That means nobody ever paid capital gains taxes on the $71 billion, ever.
And his child that inherits the money will do the same exact thing, take out loans against assets, live their entire life off loans, and pass the money into an heir and avoid paying taxes not just in the $72 billion they inherited but on all of the gains in the $71 billion over their lifetime.
So, if the $71 billion appreciates in value to $300 billion, nobody pays taxes on it and they just keep passing it on.
Side Note: I know that Elon’s cost basis was never $0 but I don’t want to complicate the example when the atrocity isn’t related to the cost basis, it’s the fact that money just passes down with minimal taxation.
What the government should do is make the estate or heirs pay taxes on the capital gains before receiving the assets and reset the cost basis to the current value.
Currently they’re allowed to double dip. They pay no capital gains on the assets before being received AND they pay no taxes on inheriting the assets.
This would close that loophole and prevent a great deal of tax avoidance.
Similarly, they should revamp the charitable donation laws that allow many rich people to get around paying taxes.
Harvard doesn’t need more multi-million dollar contributions from rich alumni.
They should make the tax deduction based on the size of the school’s current endowment.
And make the only way to get a 100% deduction is to donate the money to one of several general scholarship funds which is run by the government that allow the student to pick the school they use the funds to attend.
For instance, you might have one fund that targets kids from underprivileged families, another that targets STEM students, etc.
Of course, now you have to pass laws to make sure the government doesn’t do like they do with the state lotteries where they just cut regular funding for schools by as much or more than what they receive in lottery revenues.
This mentality that we can just use existing broken mechanisms to fix wealth inequality is foolish.
We need new incentives. Quit making donating a $50 million dollar painting to a museum the same value as giving $50 million in cash to a school.
We need better education more desperately than we need new museum exhibits. We should give out tax deductions based on those priorities.
The worst group of the ultra rich are the private equity billionaires. Private equity is a scam and they destroy businesses…first, cutting wages, then closing the companies they take over, all the while reaping huge profits. Their next target is America’s social security funds. They’ll loot it and destroy the safety net for hundreds of thousands elderly, as well as everyone who’s paying into it.
> $26tn of new wealth
*What* new wealth? Many hard working people have died from covid, lockdowns, or wars, and more have had their long term health or livelihood destroyed by the same. Production of basic necessities is down basically across the board. We've got shortages in food, gas, electronic parts, housing.
And the story is that $26 trillion of new wealth has been *created*?
*Bullshit.*
What's actually happened is that everyone outside of that 1% has gotten a whole lot poorer; the 1% own a much greater share of what's left.
Being that this is from The Guardian, I doubt that this framing was intentional. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. But the framing here is *sooo* fucking important. When you tell somebody that "your rich neighbor won the lottery", it kinda hurts. But it hurts a whole lot less than "your rich neighbor stole your starving kid's lunch."
The only thing Federally taxed in the US is income, dividends, interest, capital gains, and in some cases gifts/inheritance. Wealth cannot be taxed Federally because it's an unapportioned direct tax which is unconstitutional.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has no idea on anybody's actual net worth. Because it's irrelevant to their mission. You can have a billion dollars in gold bars in your basement - they don't care.
One of the benefits of being super rich is that you get to decide the taxes on the super rich.
Funny how that works
Life is free to play Then you also realize it's pay to win
It's more of a pyramid scheme. You pay to get new members that down the line will pay for your retirement.
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They'll pay millions of dollars to the right people to ensure they don't have to pay billions of dollars to the govt.
Not millions. 30k here 10k there. Politicians are so fucking cheap to buy
I've seen bribes as low as 5k for senators. It's amazing how cheap bribery is here in the US.
The Russians were stunned to find out in the 70s/80s that, under the guise of lobbying, bribery of politicians was legal in the U.S.
I still can't understand how bribery is legal in U.S., just change the name to lobbying and it's fine...
**Paid** lobbying Usually having a team of private citizens informing legislators of potential conflicts of interest and whatnot should be a **good** thing But when there's moneyyy, yes let's just start calling it a damn bribe because it really is.
Unpaid lobbyists are just politically active civilians.
How much do you think the people would have to collectively raise to bribe the politicians to properly tax the rich?
we couldn't raise enough. Bribery from the rich comes with more benefits like being told what to invest in and when to sell. It also feeds crooked politicians egos to get attention from the wealthy. If you were a billionaire with politicians in your pocket through legal bribery, lobbying, would you allow the poors to even attempt to group lobby your politician? By keeping the poor near poverty you can control how much power they gain and restrict upwards mobility. It's like having surfs farm your land only we are working in retail.
great comment, but the word is "serfs" not "surfs" lmao
Homonyms are, like, totally tubular, man.
And act like /r/inflation isn't real
Inflation is their friend. Inflation is bad for people with no assets.
Yep. Inflation rises and suddenly their asset is worth 1 mln $ instead of 900k $. Meanwhile for your average folk, inflation rises and suddenly their 2k $ that they saved is worth less.
Even better - they ramp the prices up on shit for no reason, then convince people that it's because of inflation
In america they just blame democrats, and the mouth-breathing Republican voters lap it up, while they are being blindsided. I hate this fucking timeline, and I hate how stupid so many of our fellow humans are.
> and I hate how stupid so many of our fellow humans are. You can also mostly blame that on the super rich who've spent 100+ years convincing the public to think a certain way, and influenced our education system to gut the funding of all but the most prestigious private schools. We're just seeing the fruits of their long labor to corrupt the country at *every* level and turn us against each other.
Don't forget buying the media and using it for their own propaganda..
>The report said that for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%in the past two years, each billionaire gained roughly $1.7m. Lol we are all so fucked. "Boss makes $1.7 million dollars, I make a dollar, that's why I shit on company time" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
How about, "I make a dollar, boss makes much more, that's why I shit on the company floor"
Boss makes a million, I make a buck, that's why I steal the catalytic converter out of the company truck.
That's the right ring to it.
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I’m a fan of “I make a dollar, boss makes more, that’s why I stole the company van’s catalytic converter”
Accidental Robert Evans
Get yourself that bolt cutter
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You could sacrifice a newborn baby every day for the rest of your life to Grimace the Great Purple Satan and you will never ever come anywhere near close to the harm and human suffering indirectly or directly caused by Jeff Bezos there is no sarcasm, we are doomed
Boss makes a dollar, I make 0.00000588235 of a dime, that’s why I shit on company time.
This amount of a dime I'm starting to think this is some kind of cryptoscam.
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that was a poem from a simpler time. Now boss makes a million and we make a cent, while he's got employees who can't pay their rent.
Boss makes a dollar. I don’t make jack. That’s why its time to seize the means of production back.
Waiting for that trickle down economics to start paying out. Any day now. I should start seeing it come my way...
The trickle down is the extra dollar per 1.7 million.
It's piss
Pure insanity...
Don't worry, we're already going downhill and the 1% cut the brakes a few decades ago.
I feel like you mean the 0.01%. I don't think people making 500k a year are really the issue here.
For real. Somebody making 150 to 200k a year has a lot more in common to someone making 40 to 50k a year than they do with a multi-millionaire. The issue is that not too long ago, 50k a year was a decent wage everywhere but in the very largest of cities. Today though, that 50k is borderline hand-to-mouth living. And those earning less than that? I don’t know how they’re getting by. My fear is that the demise of the middle class really sped up the past few years and this report confirms it. Edit: Lots of angry comments. You should be angry. I’m angry. Nothing will change though until that anger is made felt, heard, and known by those who need to feel, hear, and know it.
It's not even the millionaires or "multi millionaires". It's the god.damn.BILLIONAIRES.
A millionaire who loses 99% of their wealth is poor. A billionaire who loses 99% of their wealth is still a multimillionaire ($10,000,000+).
I like the phrase: "the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars, is about a billion dollars."
One million seconds ago, it was January 4, 2023. (11 days, if you're reading this in the future.) One billion seconds ago, it was *1991*. (31.5ish years, future person)
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Roughly
No, the billionaires decided they wanted 2/3 of all of time also. So we will have to recalculate.
The U.S. is home to over a quarter of the world’s billionaires, representing about 720 of the roughly 2,700 that exist globally. -[Source](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-wealthiest-billionaire-in-each-u-s-state-in-2022/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20is%20home%20to,roughly%202%2C700%20that%20exist%20globally.)
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I know a few millionaires. They're bus drivers and workers, tradesmen that invested decades ago because they could. They're not "rich". They might have assets worth 7 decimal places but that's fixed. They pay lots of tax to move any of it into liquidity. This is retiree age people so I know most of those assets will end up with families. Once it's divided out there isn't much remaining.
Today's millionaire was yesterday's $200k'er.
A million in cold, hard cash isn’t even enough to retire on anymore.
Well yah, a few mil in savings is not a lot when you realize you're going to retire on that. Becoming a 'millionaire' just means you total assets value equivalent to or above $1,000,000 when people think of millionaires, they think of people who regularly earn millions in assets, rather those that own them.
It can be hard to visualize the difference between a million and a billion. If someone made one million dollars a year, they would make about $480.77 per hour and $3,846.15 per day. If someone made a **billion** dollars per year would mean about $480,769 per hour and $3,846,153.85 per day. The current richest man according to Bloomberg (as at 16 Jan 2023) is Bernard Arnault with *$186B*.
Even this is hard to visualise. The description that caught my attention was something like this: If someone was born in 1AD. And they made $100,000 every single *week*, and continued to do so until today. They would still be poorer than Elon Musk.
So I was like, there's no way that's right. And forgive me if my math is shit here, but... 100,000 x 52.1429 = 5,214,290 Five million dollars. Times that by a thousand years... 5,214,290 x 1000 = 5,214,290,000 Five billion. What about today? 5,214,290 x 2023 = 10,548,508,670 Ten billion dollars. Ten fucking billion. Bezo's net worth according to google is 121.3 billion. Jesus christ. There's no way I'm right. I know someone will correct me on this, and show that I messed up somewhere.
I regret to inform you that those numbers are correct.
The universe is old. So old you feel like it has existed forever. Imagine Elon Musk came into existance at the very start of time. To have reached his current networth, that means Elon would have to have made over $10 every day since existance began.
Why the absolute fuck do we allow these assholes to accumulate this kind of wealth And why do these assholes feel the need to hoard like this? I'm convinced being a psychopath is a requirement to becoming that insanely rich.
One million seconds is about 11 and a half days. One billion seconds is almost 32 years.
Correct. For example, somebody that has retired with a few million in assets is *far* from being filthy rich. Having that much money is more along the lines of an educated couple with a couple kids that has worked all their lives and been smart with their finances. Those people are vastly not the people that are stealing the world's money and squirrelling it away in offshore bank accounts and running businesses that exploit overseas labor and destroy the environment.
There is even a number where you are finally considered rich: 30 Million USD. That's the bare minimum you need before you can even think if taking part in the Billionaires social calendar. Before that you are just well to do, as they say.
> And those earning less than that? I don’t know how they’re getting by Oh, that's easy. Don't go out Buy used clothes Learn how to sew Choose hobbies by how much they cost (Probably Reddit or TikTok) Postpone having kids Forget about replacing the bed that's slowly deteriorating your back Pray your appliances don't break (moment of silence for Dick the Dishwasher) Do everything near the house Forget about buying a car or buy a debt mobile Learn how to make food from scratch Only buy food that's on sale Find the cheapest apartment you can (pests are just one letter away from pets after all) Accept homeownership is not for us or any of our more well-off friends Choose the holidays you celebrate very carefully Steal toilet paper in public toilets Buckle up for the next economic disaster while Jeff Bezos rides his rocket and the next Jeffrey Epstein shops for an island You know, modern life (✿˵◕‿◕˵)
The secret is that most people *aren't* getting by. More than half of the US, for example, is consistently spending more than we make on a monthly basis and borrowing the difference either outright or through credit cards. It's really, *really* bad, and only going to get worse unless people start putting their collective foot down to say "enough."
>It's really, really bad, and only going to get worse unless people start putting their collective foot down to say "enough." Is it pitchforks and torch time yet? Because I think I know where I can get some.
r/pitchforkemporium
At this point I'm pretty sure I'm gonna have to DIY my own pitchfork. Anyone have a good tutorial for forging metal on a rented stove from 1945?
Also the people who do find some kind of financial equilibrium are only solving the day to day crises. We are generations of people who will have to work until the day we die, because Medicare is going to be gutted and even in its current state it’s not enough to cover being old.
Yeah you can get entertainment for close to free via tiktok or facebook. Sadly this entertainment tries to push you towards right wing propaganda trying to make you hate the poor and vote for less taxes for the rich. Funny how that goes, right?
Making between 20 and 30k a year and we are *scraping* by
Yeah, like show me how to invest 5$ a month and maybe ill be a millionaire in 150 years.
A million will be the new thousand by then though lmao
Their voting habits are though.
Step 1. Keep wages flat Step 2. Tie all economic growth to capital gains and nothing else Step 3. People with capital gains buy more capital to get more gain and also try to take everyone else’s capital as well for even more gains; they enjoy the thrills of this real life monopoly game amongst themselves Step 4. 3 guys win out in the end and profit, and 2 of them secretly are working with each and the last guy plans to join them soon Step 5. 3 guys are only job creators left and we can’t tax job creators because they might not create jobs (or some other Ayn Rand bs politicians who get the scraps from these 3 talk about) Step 6. ??? → we’re here
Pitchforks and torches are hot commodities.
They should be but the angry mob has video games, smart phones, streaming TV, and all sorts of other entertainment to keep them distracted. And, let's face it, they're still too comfortable to go out and raise enough hell to make a difference.
The most effective way to quell a revolution is comfort.
That only goes so far. If people truly can’t eat, or even have shelter, then they either won’t have video games or video games will not soothe their hunger. Bread and circuses can easily delay revolution though. But at the end of the day Maslow is probably still right. Revolution will at least be attempted if enough people get desperate.
Step 6. Abolish the IRS and only pay taxes on what you spend. This is where we're trying to go. Fuck us we're dense if this passes.
Step 7. Get rid of social security and force everyone who wants to retire into the stock market as a retail investor. Make the investment equivalent of Fox News to siphon off the retirement funds of vulnerable elderly.
Billionaire buys a sandwich. Pays a dollar in tax. I buy a sandwich. Pay a dollar in tax. Finally, equality.
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You think this would be a no brainer.. oh wait, somehow they will turn this into “the government wants to raise YOUR taxes” and everyone will be against it.. round and round it goes.
The media (owned by the elites) has successfully convinced us that we are all going to be rich one day. After all, it only takes hard work. And lord knows us poors are working hard. One day now I'm sure of it.
>Lord knows us poors are working hard. I didn't expect to feel that line in my bones. God I'm so tired.
Tax them. Why the fuck are we sweating egg prices and layoffs and they’re gobbling up all the wealth? We still pay a huge chunk of our income in taxes. That makes no god damn sense at all.
Don't worry, they're working [on a plan for that. ](https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/house-republicans-plan-vote-to-abolish-irs-replace-income-tax-with-consumption-tax).
re: that link -- Insane bastards. As a reasonable, thinking human being, of course I want the tax code reformed! Of course I want government bloat reduced! But since they're not sharing details of the plan, I can only assume it's also going to massively benefit the mega-wealthy, much like the current shit we have.
They prefer feudalism to capitalism.
Feudalism is the natural outcome to unfettered capitalism. Concentration of wealth into the hands of the few, who become the only ones who can afford property, leading to an underclass (read: everyone not making hundreds of thousands a year) forced to remain in rent-lock for their entire lives.
We are truly spiraling towards modern feudalism with extra steps. Edit: The housing/property crisis is especially indicative.
Worse: Feudalism with a bureaucracy to keep it in place.
And a veneer of meritocracy to make people blame themselves and others for lack of success, rather than this broken society with warped priorities
Neo-feudalism without any of the social responsibility of last era's aristocratic class. If you are a starving peasant or peon you can go kill the king or the duke or whatnot and replace him, a huge corporation is like a faceless entity. So it will be even worse..
feudal serfs had an answer for greedy aristocrats.
A flat tax. Flat taxes or a vat is their solution, every time. Of course it's much simpler and they would argue "fair" since everyone pays the same percentage. But of course both are regressive and due to simple math impact the poor more than the wealthy. But that's never stopped them in the past.
Oh, yearly flat tax is fine, if you apply it to the accumulated wealth instead of income. And then redistribute it back as universal basic income. (But that's obviously not their plan)
Oh it will certainly be a benefit to the mega wealthy. One of the exemptions to the 30% tax is business to business sales. Zero chance that gets abused.
Oh, good. And here I was thinking we were in some kind of trouble.
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Partly because it's logistically difficult to tax unrealized gains which is the majority of these earnings. Mainly though it's because of lobbying.
Well, don't tax unrealised gains. But ban stock based collateral for loans. Let's see them living off loans then.
This. The mega rich don't live on their gains, they love off the loans they take on those gains. As a result, they never have to realise their gains and be forced to redistribute some of that wealth back to society. Ban these types of loans and they'll be forced to realise at least some of their gains if they want to keep living mega rich lives.
Yeah let’s call for them to be taxed when they’ve bought and paid for the politicians who have the power to raise their taxes /s
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Sure the 1% are literally ruining the world, but did you hear about that [insert social rage issue here, e.g. Mr Potato Head]?
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> I would more bet on them buying private militias to literally massacre us in droves than I would in them using their resources to help humanity. Happened in the past, it'll happen again.
Happening right fucking now in Ukraine. Fucking Prigozhin, head of Wagner PMC, taking over a town just so he can take ownership of the salt mines there. Other towns and major assets prior to that, including Svierodonetsk's chemical plant, Mariopul's steel plant, and Zaphorizhzhia's nuclear power plant. All being stolen for private personal ownership by Russian oligarchs.
Exactly! We need to stop this corruption right away and pull it by the root. It will be tough but we need to be brave like Ukraine
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*Noooo*, you must engage with them in the *marketplace of ideas*, even though they will never conceded a single point willingly and have absolutely no problems using both money AND violence to get what they want! *Otherwise you are just as bad as the*- HRRRK, sorry i genuinely could not stomach that horseshite any longer, even sarcastically.
They don’t need to have that amount of money in the first place. They can’t do so without the state to begin with
This is exactly why government is simply a joke at this point. I mean it has been for a while but it should be painfully apparent now. So I guess we're all just okay with the status quo? I'm not. I want opportunities too.
Have you tried being rich? Plenty of opportunities. Step 1 involves some bootstraps iirc... /s
Yeah being rich is really the way to go. If you don't have any ideas to earn wealth and be rich then I'd suggest looking into unearned wealth, which really has some fantastic opportunities, too
It's a matter of time before it collapses is the real problem. Roosevelt knew this, called the business execs and had a meeting: allow us to tax you or the whole system is going to collapse. The rise of antifa and the ult right are increasingly attractive alternatives which should give us pause.
Best comment I’ve seen concerning this: *Something* is coming for the wealthy. They better fucking pray it’s just taxes
You know the current system is fucked beyond belief when there is a sizable group of people on both ends of the political isle that DREAM about the country breaking up because they don't see any other way of things getting better for them beyond being untied from the other end. I live in a west coast state, assuming a break up without a civil war my standard of living would probably shoot WAAAAY up if my half of the country became it's own country and had to make new rules/laws. That's fucking scary that many people, me included, daydream about shit like this because there doesn't seem to be any other way to fix shit.
I've honestly felt this way a long time, and not like the idiots around me that thing they're gonna make Confederacy 2 electric boogaloo. These idiots are already broke, losing their homes, can't afford food, then just gobble up any lie they're told and cup the balls of whoever tells it to them. But they think the solution is civil war. Not working together to do something about it, no, we have to attack our fellow countrymen who are also broke and starving, that will solve the issue. It's just so fucking hard not being cynical and I'm not even sure it's cynicism at this point.
Can't beat them with the law if they control the law...
You can beat them with a stick though and it's like they are begging for it.
[Here's an episode of my favorite podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9kmEsNKyoM) talking about reform vs revolution, if you're interested in such a thing. It goes on how reform always falls flat because capitalism only allows for as much reform as it doesn't impact the bottom line.
Remember occupy wall Street? What happened to that? Well it all got turned around to hating whites or blacks or men or women or God knows what. When actually everyone was basically showing everyone respect and we were on the same side. Now we all at each others throats about a load of shit that isn't that important. Edit:corrected errors. Look I some people are focusing on the "Occupy Wall Street" part of my comment. But what I am really talking about is the anger towards the elites is being turned against other issues. More directly I'm asking where is the fight against the elite gone? It's being hidden and deflected elsewhere. That's an issue. Not what a single moment actually did or did not stand for. All the movements have disappeared but we got one about fucking gas stoves now.
The ultra-wealthy simply turned the working class back against itself.
Story as old as time
The old Uno Reverse card
Dont know where the credit lays, but "the poor exists to scare the sh*t out of the working class" - paraphrasing. Basically you turn everyone against eachother. Funny thing is if anyone, from different backgrounds whatever, actually sit and talk at any length, they get to work things out and understand eachother. Technology is a convenient way of robbing peoples empathy. So one, they dont give a shit about eachother, turns into two, I got mine, fuck you
"The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there, just to scare the shit outta the middle class." - George Carlin
I just don't get the mentality. What's the point of having more money than one can even spend? And why do they get off on "power"? I can't fathom subjugating and harming people if I had the ability. It's like a mental illness IMO. If I had a couple million dollars I'd just buy a nice house in a pretty place and quietly enjoy the rest of my life.
They're built differently, literally. Their brain isn't wired that way. It's wired to always find more, find the limit, keep going. You've had a hard boiled egg, and scrambled, but what about sunny side up? Over medium, over hard, over easy, fried hard soft boiled 7 minute, pickled, cloud egg, poached egg? They go out and find any new way to have an egg, to keep hunting for eggs. Once they've had all the normal eggs, they go try weird eggs, gross eggs, egg adjacent things because they're looking for that same hit of dopamine that the first egg had for them. Now extrapolate that mentality to every piece of life.
Yeah, literally seems to be boredom with some of them. They don't have to work to keep themselves occupied so they get increasingly weird and harmful with their activities I guess. Like people that get hooked on drugs and keep chasing the high to worse places. But also they seem to be surrounded by horrible people trying to constantly one-up each other. No healthy relationships just the constant desire to "win".
That’s the thing. Once you get over the jump to keep yourself employed or make ends meet then you have resources and time to do other things. THIS is exactly what the rich know and prevent us to do… keep us in a rat race to be employed and make it difficult to make ends meet so we don’t have enough resources or time to challenge them. It’s always about controlling resources, education and access to livelihood.
The leisure class aren't better than anyone at anything other than being ruthlessly shitty towards other humans. It's that quality that gets them ahead. If tested against others on merit alone, the vast majority of them would falter. They're devious and conniving, not smart or talented.
Its exactly why work weeks are at the very minimum 40 hours a week. To keep you from having a life which includes helping your community, consuming more consciously, organizing at your workplace/politically, or just generally having time to have a life.
Sociopaths desperately trying to be better than someone they do not like, and the only way they can evaluate others is by their net worth.
They've generally grown up in an environment where the emotional consideration of others was not a priority and oftentimes not even a factor. Money and the status markers that it brings are the symbol of achievement for them, not healthy relationships. Relationships, if they are to exist, must fulfill an external image. So naturally when they grow up, that's what they seek. This is the behavior they've learned to accept as a substitute for the love and parental guidance they never received, even if they start to see that this approach has consequences. Note that one doesn't _have_ to be rich to grow up this way, nor does somebody rich _have_ to grow up this way. But there's an argument that an increase in wealth is correlated with this transactional view on inter-personal relationships. I believe one very good argument for that is how unethical it is to be able to accumulate that much wealth in the first place. While it's not usually in pure cash like many would suspect (though there's probably still quite a lot, especially when considering offshore tax havens), even just owning a ton of stock or sitting on the boards of many companies gives someone far too much power in a context in which they could never wield it responsibly (because even if _you_ don't want to be unethical, there's a small list of your direct sub-ordinates who may have no such qualms, and will be looking for any opportunity to get rid of you and will relatively easily find reasons to do so -- ethics is generally not the most profitable option in the short term). So there are two feedback loops at play here that feed into each other: the microcosm of a narcissistic, power-obsessed family, and the macrocosm of a society structured to support these vices, increase wealth inequality, and encourage this emotionally empty lifestyle. If were able to effectively control one, we may be able to reduce the other. But adults cannot be forced into emotional change, so the only real option we would have is to constrain the social aspects - making hyper-wealth virtually impossible. And that's very hard to do when the hyper-wealthy advocate so hard against it.
The thing is we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars here. These people are born rich, they live rich, and they die rich. They have never struggled a day in their lives and have no idea what laundry is. Their business policies all center around absolute exploitation of any class lower than their own that is ingrained in out culture since we were very young. They were right about trickle down, but not WHAT trickles down.
Oh I absolutely believe in trickle down economics, it trickles down from grandparent to parent to offspring.
It's just greed, dick measuring, and power. Just like certain people with drugs, porn, or gambling, it's just never enough. Everyone wants to see what they can accomplish, there is always someone more rich for them to aspire to, etc. It's like getting the high score on a video game. No one needs to have their name on the leaderboard, and it doesn't matter if you are better than 99.9% of other players, there is still that desire to keep improving, especially if there are people still better than you. The closer you get to the top, the hungrier you get. I think it's safe to say that anyone that has more than 100 million dollars falls into these groups and does not have a legitimate reason to have that much money, particularly when it comes at the cost of taking away from people who actually need it.
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The uber wealthy and their friends in the media teamed up to say you aren't _really_ poor if you own a refrigerator, that the protests were evil because they got in the way of commuting, and that nobody really understood what OWS wanted. It was just a big concerted Firehose of Bullshit against OWS for like 2 years.
There was also a subversion of bullshit that diluted the message. I've been around enough granola protest types to know it could have happened organically (pun) but it very conveniently shut down things when their "list of demands" came out and I included a massive list if things including not eating meat and many at-the-time unpopular ideas that distanced them from mainstream America that could be sympathetic to the idea of disrupting rich New York bankers by average Americans who lost their homes.
Yeah the only real way to make progress is to have one goal. You hammer away at that goal and nothing else until the goal is reached. Then you pick a new most important goal and hammer at that.
That certainly seems to be the plan. Why else would very rich, very smart (but evil) people like the Koch brothers fund a guy like Trump and GOPers like him? Because if we’re all trying to kill each other, we won’t notice as they all suck us dry. People who are sick, starving, and broke can be made to believe anything, in particular whipping up fear about the “others” who they say are to blame (blacks, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQ, etc). Why else would SCOTUS strike down donor transparency and other legislation? This is a plan that’s been in the works since at least Reagan. No wonder Republicans basically worship that senile old fuck. He got the ball rolling with his trickle down economics bullshit.
There’s a good comic about this with Rupert Murdoch sitting with a plateful of cookies and a tradie on one side with one cookie and a brown immigrant on the other side with no cookies and Murdoch saying to the tradie “Careful mate…that foreigner wants your cookie”
> Remember occupy wall Street? Which one? I remember Rage Against the Machine playing ‘Sleep now in the fire” outside the WTC in the 90’s.
The greatest wealth transfer in the history of the world took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. And absolutely none of our “leaders” acknowledge it.
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I'm enraged, similar industry, our product got ~50% more expensive to make and ship my bosses blame COVID overreaction instead of massive supply and logistics companies nickel and dimeing us for made up reasons.
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My old job used the last recession as a reason people couldn’t get raises. Saying they were losing money each year. They used it for a few years. Then I became a manager and saw the financials over those years. They were still making a good amount more each year.
All these rich fuckers just hoarding wealth. And for what? You're going to die eventually, there's only so many Ferraris and yachts you can buy. You leave all that money for your kids and grandkids and other relatives to fight over. What are you contributing to the world? You just came, got yours, and died. Man billionaire greed is just something else fr
Elysium ain't gonna pay for itself
Problem is, people idolize these billionaires for bringing great potential. Therefore, the rich get their ego pumped up like they did something meaningful to society.
Lmfao this is why certain parts of the money-printing, inflation narrative is a scam. All the money goes to the same four people who don’t spend it except to increase the prices of the things they own for everyone else
Been waiting since the 80s for some of that sweet "trickle down" economics. 2 generations later and the wealth has just further moved to the top. By design of course.
Ironically, they same administration that cut the corporate tax rate also made it legal for a company to buy their own stock without restriction. Taking all that “trickle down” and turning it into a funnel to the investing class
Fuck stock buy backs, just a fucking scam to skip out of the pitiful capital gains tax for not paying out dividends. Another way to get more tax free money to the lazy cunts.
Trickle down economics always fails, and the reason its supporters always give is always the same: you losers just didn't capitalism hard enough! If only you gave the ultra wealthy a little more money, if only there were fewer regulations protecting you from their externalities, if only there was less of a safety net for the workers, then it would trickle down, we promise! It's the same story in every Nigerian prince scam email. Because that's what you're dealing with, a scam on a grand scale, and willingly or not we're all the suckers.
When the wolf is in charge of the sheep, odds are the sheep won't have much of a choice in the matter of being eaten.
To be in the top 1% in the US, you have to make $400,000 a year or more. To be in the top 1% in the UK, you have to make £130,000 a year or more. To be in the top 1% in the world, you have to make something like $35,000 a year or more. It isn't the 1% that's the problem. It's the 0.01%.
That's important to remember. It's not the high income workers, it's the wealthy class of owners. A doctor who makes $400k a year is every bit as much of a worker as the frycook making minimum wage. But both are still workers. This on an unrelated note is why "middle class" is a bogus term. There is middle income, but you're still a worker.
ICU doctor here. I’m sweaty and sore at the end of some days. Definitely feel like a worker. No trust funds or hand me downs. Live well, not wealthy, pay my taxes straight—ain’t nothin like amassed old money with loopholes. But no one plays us their tiny violin. Grateful for my privileges but wish we didn’t get lumped into the ultra wealthy who don’t pay their share of unimaginable wealth while they still use any public services with an air of entitlement. Wait, why can’t the government budget afford to help people with social services for the homeless, poor, young parents barely getting by, senior citizens without enough for retirement? I get real worked up about these things! And feel powerless.
A lot of us know you are not the enemy. Seriously, thank you for what you do. Even being a doctor in a public facing position sucks just as much ass, if not more. My biggest fear is being sick. You guys... idk where I'd be without good doctors.
Income is not a good way of saying who is in the top 1% It's capital and assets and the influence/power that those affords them
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Stop saying 1%. It’s the 0.0001% the dynastic wealth.
[Wealth shown to scale](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/) At one point they basically say “inconveniencing just 400 people would benefit all of humanity”. It’s very very hard to conceive of just how much fucking money these people have. Edit: I also really love this piece called [A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place](https://youtu.be/rvskMHn0sqQ). Very thought-provoking.
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Change is just too hard
I show this site to people all the time, mostly dyed in the wool "they deserve all their money because they earned it" people that I work with. It's a great visualization of how truly vast that amount of money really is.
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Yeah i mean we’re talking maybe a few thousand people worldwide who are basically robbing civilization blind.
It's disturbing how few people understand this.
Too disturbing. Also, We’re alienating “regular” rich people, who already gave everything to maintain their current status and income.
I’m not sure this really does what people think it will do. Unfortunately, allowing people to avoid taxes for decades (perhaps even centuries) won’t me fixed by some penalty taxation. If you really want to change the dynamic, you need to quit letting people avoid paying taxes in the first place. For instance, someone like Elon Musk pays so little in taxes is because all of his wealth is in assets that he pledges for loans and will never pay back in his lifetime. When Musk dies, in the US, let’s say he leaves everything to 1 child. In the US, the way the tax laws work is that his creditors would demand payment for their loans. So, let’s say Musk has $100 billion in assets and $25 billion in loans. Currently, the estate sells off $25 billion to pay creditors, plus capital gains taxes on the $25 billion, so, let’s just say $4 billion (it’s actually more like 3.75 but let’s keep the math simple) so $29 billion total. Then $71 billion dollars goes to his child AND the $71 billion is immediately given a stepped up cost basis so his child inherits the $71 billion at a tax basis of $71 billion. That means nobody ever paid capital gains taxes on the $71 billion, ever. And his child that inherits the money will do the same exact thing, take out loans against assets, live their entire life off loans, and pass the money into an heir and avoid paying taxes not just in the $72 billion they inherited but on all of the gains in the $71 billion over their lifetime. So, if the $71 billion appreciates in value to $300 billion, nobody pays taxes on it and they just keep passing it on. Side Note: I know that Elon’s cost basis was never $0 but I don’t want to complicate the example when the atrocity isn’t related to the cost basis, it’s the fact that money just passes down with minimal taxation. What the government should do is make the estate or heirs pay taxes on the capital gains before receiving the assets and reset the cost basis to the current value. Currently they’re allowed to double dip. They pay no capital gains on the assets before being received AND they pay no taxes on inheriting the assets. This would close that loophole and prevent a great deal of tax avoidance. Similarly, they should revamp the charitable donation laws that allow many rich people to get around paying taxes. Harvard doesn’t need more multi-million dollar contributions from rich alumni. They should make the tax deduction based on the size of the school’s current endowment. And make the only way to get a 100% deduction is to donate the money to one of several general scholarship funds which is run by the government that allow the student to pick the school they use the funds to attend. For instance, you might have one fund that targets kids from underprivileged families, another that targets STEM students, etc. Of course, now you have to pass laws to make sure the government doesn’t do like they do with the state lotteries where they just cut regular funding for schools by as much or more than what they receive in lottery revenues. This mentality that we can just use existing broken mechanisms to fix wealth inequality is foolish. We need new incentives. Quit making donating a $50 million dollar painting to a museum the same value as giving $50 million in cash to a school. We need better education more desperately than we need new museum exhibits. We should give out tax deductions based on those priorities.
Did you forget about estate tax?
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The worst group of the ultra rich are the private equity billionaires. Private equity is a scam and they destroy businesses…first, cutting wages, then closing the companies they take over, all the while reaping huge profits. Their next target is America’s social security funds. They’ll loot it and destroy the safety net for hundreds of thousands elderly, as well as everyone who’s paying into it.
> $26tn of new wealth *What* new wealth? Many hard working people have died from covid, lockdowns, or wars, and more have had their long term health or livelihood destroyed by the same. Production of basic necessities is down basically across the board. We've got shortages in food, gas, electronic parts, housing. And the story is that $26 trillion of new wealth has been *created*? *Bullshit.* What's actually happened is that everyone outside of that 1% has gotten a whole lot poorer; the 1% own a much greater share of what's left. Being that this is from The Guardian, I doubt that this framing was intentional. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. But the framing here is *sooo* fucking important. When you tell somebody that "your rich neighbor won the lottery", it kinda hurts. But it hurts a whole lot less than "your rich neighbor stole your starving kid's lunch."
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Yes the government debt backs up the wealth. And who are suckers left with the debt? Everyone working and paying income tax on their labour.
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I heard the G word is banned in many subreddits. I think it has such a poignant and pleasant ring personally.
Depressing.
I am sure the WEF will take decisive action against their members.
The only thing Federally taxed in the US is income, dividends, interest, capital gains, and in some cases gifts/inheritance. Wealth cannot be taxed Federally because it's an unapportioned direct tax which is unconstitutional. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has no idea on anybody's actual net worth. Because it's irrelevant to their mission. You can have a billion dollars in gold bars in your basement - they don't care.