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this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Good for her, but I'm gonna be real here for a minute:
Why isn't she spending $16.5 billion on lobbying to ensure higher taxes for billionaires? As we've seen, House Reps and Senators can be bought for absurdly small amounts of money.
Oh wait, I forgot, it's because she doesn't actually want to be taxed. She, like all billionaires, still wants full control of what happens to her money, which means society still loses because we're still reliant on billionaires pet projects to have any forward movement.
Charity is a farce, she needs to put her money where her mouth is and spend it on lobbying to remove tax breaks for people who have her vastness of wealth.
I strongly suspect she won't, because this has all seemed like PR dedicated to making her seem "classier" than Bezos, despite her hand in growing a positively ruthless company with ruthless internal staffing environment.
Every other billionaire is spending their money on lobbying to get their taxes even lower. Maybe she could still have an impact through lobbying and influence peddling, but she’s outmanned and outgunned.
I’m not saying that she’s an angel. I haven’t seen anything in the press about her motives or political stances; you could be 100% correct. But paying politicians to go against all the other donors isn’t a trivial undertaking
EDIT: In this weeks episode of "Where Keeping It Real Goes Wrong."
This is a good point, and it brings to mind something I ignored from my previous post.
A lot of the people in congress can be "bought" for so little while in congress because the actual "payday" they get is when they leave office and enter into a cushy job where they're paid to do not much at all, because they've already done the job of getting bad legislation passed.
Scott is not in a position to be offering them cushy jobs at Amazon once they leave, so one of the main ways to "pay off" this class of politician is actually out of reach for her as an individual instead of as the head of a business.
It's easy to get lost in frustration with having to rely on charity, but it's good to step back and think about it a little more clearly for a minute. Cheers, mate.
You make a great point here. The way that I think about it is that when you have a certain amount of money, it stops working like money and starts functioning as straight up power. Part of the "exchange rate" when considering money as power is the commitment to the cult of the line - the line must always go up. If you opt out from this, money starts being more like money.
Totally. This semi-reminds me of the story that was floating around yesterday (I think), about Arby's Foundation wiping out student lunch debt for 8000 student in Georgia. Like, yes, that's great, but also... how fucking sad we leave it to the "goodness" of billionaire's charities so that *checks notes* CHILDREN CAN BE FED?? Sad state of affairs
Exactly. Why are the students in debt for lunch anyway? They're children!
It's literally the Orphan Crushing Machine. "We saved these orphans from being put in an Orphan Crushing Machine" while no one questions what the entire point of the Orphan Crushing Machine is to begin with.
FTFY.
Fair points, but I'd imagine any single person attempting what you propose would automatically fear for their lives, becoming a huge target. That certainly would be the hero move though.
Indeed, every individual who gets to repeatedly skim publicly-traded corporate profits just because they threw some money at it at some point, and then turns around and plays philanthropist... is essentially claiming money that could have been put into more livable wages and more reasonable work conditions for 1000s of people. And we're expected to believe that money is better spent by them, precisely because they don't need it.
Because they don’t get the benefit of claiming it’s philanthropy if it is enforced.
What I think of when I think of "philanthropists."
Yeah, people generally do lol.