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?
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
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
Personally, I would not suggest attending a pinata party while high, that seems very irresponsible to me.
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.
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!
“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.
i could but i’m not doxxing the idiots i live near
The rich own the people (and now, drones) that stand between you and taking it from them.
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.”
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.
What would be the standards for getting an asset seizure? Would it be the individual or governments job to prove the asset? What would be the rules for conflict of interest? How does due process work? Who gets the money?
Does a mayor just get to seize assets rather than balance their city budget? Does the federal government get to pick and choose who gets inspected? If the taxpayers refuse to send bombs to Israel or Saudi Arabia, can the president run down a list of people who haven’t been inspected yet? Can somebody park the wealth in the Caribbean and do wire transfers multiple times a day? Since most of the wealth is imaginary numbers, what the fuck is a bureaucrat supposed to do with Nvidia stock inflated to the moon? Do we just dissolve companies where the populace cannot comprehend how it benefits the economy/society? Or disagree on the companies value? Taxpayers strongly believe both sides of AIs value (or potential) to the economy.
Civil asset forfeiture is bad regardless of who it happens to. We could fucking just prosecute them instead for corruption and pass more taxes for a bigger return of money. Make screwing over billionaires a sport on how to squeeze away all the profits they want to skim from the top.
Taxes. The answer is taxes and actual audits. We’ve been doing that sort of thing for a very long time, it’s just that the rich assholes have had access to the tax code.
A full audit every year, and then you simply tax any wealth over the 500M mark. It’s that easy.
I think the commenter above you is implying that if everyone knew that 500M was the cap, then every bubble would pop and the market would crash.
I think it’s a good idea. If you can’t survive the rest your life on 500M then you’re doing things way too lavish for any society to support. (And that doesn’t mean you couldn’t invent and work and make more than you spend, keeping your worth at 500M indefinitely)
A full audit every year, and then you simply tax any wealth over the 500M mark. It’s that easy.
If, hypothetically, those audits ended up costing more than the additional tax revenue they yield, resulting in overall tax revenue decreasing, would you still want to do it?
I’m actually betting that a full audit of everyone who even claims to be worth more than, say, 100 million, would send most of these fucks to jail for financial crimes. Which is worth it on its own.
why it would be wrong to take everything from the rich except, say, 500 million.
It’s wrong because theft is wrong. Just because the thing you’re stealing is something the victim can do without, doesn’t magically make it not theft.
So theft it remains, and wrong it remains, because theft is wrong.
Pretty simple, really.
Retrieving property stolen by a thief is not theft itself
It’s not theft. It’s restitution.
Theft is what happens every day in every working relationship. Value is always and exclusively derived from labor. If someone has capital worth 500 million, that means they have the labor value of 500 million. Did they earn this value themselves? Of course not, it is the value of our labor that they have stolen.
But even if that weren’t the case, this argument is roughly on the same level as “drugs are illegal because they are prohibited.” Always remember: in the Third Reich, it was legally forbidden to hide Jews. But it was legally permissible to kill them. What the law says must never be the basis of morality. And on top of that, the law is simply something that is determined as such. It can just be changed. In your words: we can easily define it as “not wrong.”
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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
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.
Yes, I agree that’s how trickle down economics works in real life but I looked at this meme and was like ‘it don’t make sense’.
If the caption was something like ‘how aspirational capitalists think trickle down economics works’ and showed a picture of the imagined way trickle down economics works and the second image was the one in this meme with the caption ‘how trickle down economics actually works’ it would make more sense.
Even aspirational capitalists don’t think trickle down economics works the way you’re describing. It’s always supposed to be a grift. This has always been the goal. It’s not that this is how it works in reality, it’s that this is how it was always supposed to work.
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.
Holy false dichotomy.
