Edit: That argument is just “trickle down economics” with extra steps.
I disagree.
Billionaires have outsize influence. They buy politicians to set public policies that affect the working class and divert billions of our dollars into their pockets.
If you put all of their money in a pit and set it on fire, it would have a greater impact than just taxing them 2% and spending all of it on public programs, because they would no longer be able to do harm on a billionaire scale.
The people could heal.
We’d still have other beasts to deal with, but the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Even if I had asserted that billionaires cap the lives of the working class to the poverty line (which I didn’t), the poverty line is an outdated, unserious measure of how Americans are doing.
More about the FPL
My assertion is that billionaires are a cap on the lives of the working class, not that the cap is set at the federal poverty line.
I can’t see your links (imgur says their servers are overloaded), but I’ll use US figures for the sake of argument.
The [federal poverty line is] derived from the official poverty thresholds, which were originally developed in the 1960s based on the cost of a minimum food diet multiplied by three — reflecting the “fact” [quotations mine] that food makes up about one-third of a typical family’s budget. (What is the federal poverty level?)
Look up “average American monthly expenses”, and you’ll see that food consistently accounts for less than 15%. The FPL is outdated and has been for decades.
There’s controversy about the right way to measure poverty, but no one serious on either side of the argument points at “the percentage of the population living in poverty” and calls it a day.
The majority of Americans support progressive policies. But whether or not a policy is passed depends on whether or not it has the support of the billionaire class.
More on the popularity of progressive policies and the impact of wealth on policy change
Over half of Americans say they lack the cash to cover a $1,000 unexpected emergency expense. Increased earnings — not lower spending — is main driver for boosting emergency funds. The most common cause of emergency expenses in the United States is a medical emergency. Regardless of whether or not they meet a 1960’s definition of poverty, Americans are not, by and large, financially well.
When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
…
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.
Edit: That argument is just “trickle down economics” with extra steps.
I disagree.
Billionaires have outsize influence. They buy politicians to set public policies that affect the working class and divert billions of our dollars into their pockets.
If you put all of their money in a pit and set it on fire, it would have a greater impact than just taxing them 2% and spending all of it on public programs, because they would no longer be able to do harm on a billionaire scale.
The people could heal.
We’d still have other beasts to deal with, but the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Billionaires (inflation-adjusted, of course) per capita in the US increased by about 7x compared to 100 years ago, while the percentage of the population living in poverty is 4-6x lower today than it was 100 years ago, compared to what it is today.
The correlation is in literally the opposite direction as what you claim. How do you reconcile these facts with your assertion?
Correlation is not causation.
Even if I had asserted that billionaires cap the lives of the working class to the poverty line (which I didn’t), the poverty line is an outdated, unserious measure of how Americans are doing.
More about the FPL
My assertion is that billionaires are a cap on the lives of the working class, not that the cap is set at the federal poverty line.
I can’t see your links (imgur says their servers are overloaded), but I’ll use US figures for the sake of argument.
Look up “average American monthly expenses”, and you’ll see that food consistently accounts for less than 15%. The FPL is outdated and has been for decades.
There’s controversy about the right way to measure poverty, but no one serious on either side of the argument points at “the percentage of the population living in poverty” and calls it a day.
The majority of Americans support progressive policies. But whether or not a policy is passed depends on whether or not it has the support of the billionaire class.
More on the popularity of progressive policies and the impact of wealth on policy change
Over half of Americans say they lack the cash to cover a $1,000 unexpected emergency expense. Increased earnings — not lower spending — is main driver for boosting emergency funds. The most common cause of emergency expenses in the United States is a medical emergency. Regardless of whether or not they meet a 1960’s definition of poverty, Americans are not, by and large, financially well.
The majority of Americans support progressive programs that address the causes of this precarity: paid maternity leave, childcare support, boosting the minimum wage, free college, and Medicare for All.
But what we want doesn’t get passed.
Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.
In other words, they put a cap on it.