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Quote of the day: Trust in the Bezos as he labors for you.
This feels like something straight out of Sorry to Bother You
Revolution and the end of capitalism aside, I have yet to find a Lib who can explain to me why it would be wrong to take everything from the rich except, say, 500 million. There would be no losers. The rich would still be rich, but we could do so much good with the money.
100 million tops. 50 million ideally. These people buy governments for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. No one should be wealthy enough to even consider buying elected officials, also all solitary positions of executive power should be split into councils of not less than 9 people, but always an odd number on the council.
Even number but nobody works every single day.
"it would be wrong because one day i might have 500 million bucks and a penny and i'm not giving you that fucking penny" shitlibs i guess
Can you show a single example of someone actually expressing this sentiment, though? I've seen "quotes" like this hundreds of times, but never anyone on the 'other side' ever actually make this argument.
You've never gone outside and talked to Americans have you?
i could but i'm not doxxing the idiots i live near
I suppose the common response would be that preventing billionaires from hoarding insane amounts of wealth would remove incentive from them to “innovate and create jobs”. Not that I buy that as being true or worth the wealth disparity currently seen.
To that I'm thinking that humans have an innate desire to innovate, and we wouldn't need jobs if we had fair taxation of the ultrawealthy and UBI.
So basically... the main argument against UBI? LMFAO
Yeah, I mean whether you subscribe to the belief or not, that is the general liberal thinking. If they thought differently, they probably wouldn’t be liberals anymore.
IMO the main argument against UBI is:
"I think all the money would go to landlords because I don't know what elasticity is but nonetheless feel qualified to speak about economics."
One of the issues is that their value isn't fixed. A billionaire as relatively little in the way of liquid (or liquidatable) assets. Their company might be worth billions, but, by taking it, you will destabilise it. Its value will plummet.
In order to access that money, you need to syphon it off more slowly. Think of the goose that lays golden eggs. Cutting it open won't get you a glut of gold. The counterpoint is that you still need to collect the eggs!
In my opinion, we need a tax setup that forces individuals to regress to the mean. (Default is the rich and poor both move towards average when they are of average performance).
We also need to force companies to follow a power law. A few big companies, with the number growing as you move down. A tax setup that punishes forming big conglomerates, and so encourages more medium and small companies would be optimal. Have it adjust based on the overall industry. This both keeps industries competitive, and syphons money from those most able to bear it.
There is a huge difference between knowing what is needed, and how the fuck to implement it however!
Kill the poisoned goose, see if it's children can function as democracies rather than dictatorships.
Killing the goose blindly is just self destructive. We want to them to be able to die, but we need to reduce their size first. That way better options can take up the slack.
Answer me this. Collapse every company worth more than $1B simultaneously. What would happen to the quality of life of those at the bottom? It would be...bad.
Not much worse than the current system that has a planned economic meltdown every decade or so, to prevent the poors from ever gaining a foothold.
You massively underestimate the complexity and fagility of the systems supporting you right now. Food, power and good production would basically collapse.
The biggest problem is the megacorps, they are too big to fail and so need to be broken up. The best way to do that is to make it financially in their interest to shatter themselves. Power law taxes would help both so it now, and keep companies from growing to that level. It also controls the speed of the change, so the supply lines we rely on remain functional.
You massively underestimate the number of us who don't need those systems, and have nothing to lose.
The rich own the people (and now, drones) that stand between you and taking it from them.
There are roughly 50,000,000 of them that enforce the current system. There are over 8,000,000,000 of us. We don't need everyone, just 500,000,000 of us could topple them.
When you put it like that, the liberal brain implodes.
Don't ask me exactly how or why, it just does, they become emotional and irrational at that point.
Maybe pictures of dragons sleeping on piles of gold would help, stories about how they only leave them to terrorize nearby village folk, occasionally abduct a young girl and steal her away to a mythical island, for god knows what purposes.
I loved this game as a kid and my mindset has only gotten more violent towards them.
As of 2024, 806 people in the US control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the population.
If every one of those billionaires has 10 billion dollars, thats equivalent to about 165 million people who each have ~49,000.
(EDIT: Each of) those 806, ten-billionaires then have ~204,082x as much wealth as any of those 165 million people.
However, I believe I can solve this problem for a fairly low cost.
Assuming each ten billionaire has approximately 10 close friends/relatives...and we want to just be super duper sure the problem is solved, so we'll buy 100 of those uh, investment options, per social contagion vector...
That works out to a total cost of around ~$310,000.
Split between those 165 million people, that's one fifth of a cent, per person.
Does anyone want to guess what my special purpose investment vehicle to achieve said disruption of the malignent social contagaion market is?
Also more facts, a bit shy of 1/10 Americans are millionaires.
So the distribution of wealth for the lowest class is horrendous. Almost 1/10 actually want this system and are arselicking the billionaires because they too are -illionaires.
Also also, a typical US family of mom dad kid1 kid2?
Yeah, turns out they need to be making $140k ... to just get by.
https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
I've been saying similar things as this guy for about a decade now... I'm also an econometrician, just signifcantly less pedigreed...
Ok so yeah anyway, only about 27.5% of households, or roughly 36 million of them, make that much.
So... just a tad more than a quarter of basically people are even capable of financially, safely, supporting a family.
Gee I wonder why birth rates are going down.
This is a good ... math exercise. However, you will likely need to add 10 or so more that will need to be contaminated before people actually stop investigating. That is the key ... making sure people are to afraid of those that are contaminated so the stay away and dont look around.
Shit.
Well ok then, add another 0.
5 whole cents per pinata partier.
Shame that everyone's so broke these days, eh?
where do you find pinatas for under five large? like, i wouldn't trust someone asking that little for a pinata. i'd assume they had, i dunno, smuggled drugs in the pinata and were trying to frame me to the fbi
How the fuck do you spent 5k on a pinata? Even a really fancy pinata with optics doesn't cost that much.
Uh... pinatabroker?
Failing that, your city or town probably has a pawn shop.
They probably feature pinatas for sale, from time to time.
pawn broker is precisely where i expect to get set up by the feds for buying an unlicensed pinata
... Just get a legally licensed pinata?
And then learn how to have a pinata party that is fully invite only, and leaves no mess behind, then goes home and back to their business?
The uh, recent bad pinata party that's been in the news?
Dude got away.
The FBI has literally nothing on this person, aside of some basically useless, shitty footage, of a POI, not even a suspect.
This person is ... pinata party capable, and just... at large.
They have no idea who he is, where he is.
I'm high and confused and want candy
Oim high and not confused and think that's a pretty great idea. Wanna go get some candy?
Personally, I would not suggest attending a pinata party while high, that seems very irresponsible to me.
Delivering swift and terrible justice to the gaggle of sociopaths and bigots that have channeled our collective wealth into institutionalized misery is cool and good.
But the wealth building doesn't come from taking a few bourgeois fucks out back to the wood chipper. Real wealth means building real infrastructure and bureaucracy that can sustain and improve the lives of your neighbors. I see a lot of progressive-ish folks who cheer guys like Luigi and whatisface the Charlie Kirk guy, then frown at the state bureaucrats in the AES states of Cuba and Venezuela and Sankara-era Burkino Faso. They lose track of the fact that the folks running the literacy programs and maintaining the train lines and working their way through the medical schools are doing 1000x more for their comrades than some vigilante in a western hellhole who got his lick in.
The definition of trickle-down economics is incongruent with the image that’s being displayed. If the second image shows that it’s a Piñata being hit (matching the definition of piñata economics) the first image should show trickle down economics as it ‘should’ work, which is that the top glass spills over to the next glass and so on.
Yes I’m autistic, how did you know?
The first image is how trickle down actually is. None of the money actually "trickles", but pools at the top, or in this case gets siphoned to their tax shelters.
The only trickling that happens it the rich practically peeing on the rest of us.
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