Well, I don’t know about your but I’d prefer a system where it wouldn’t be possible for a single person to amass that many resources in the first place
Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all. In the long run some businesses like the Healthcare companies will suffer and have to downsize, but it’s always been absolutely astonishing to me that a company like Tesla, IBM, Boeing, Walmart or other mega-companies close plants or stores and send tens of thousands of people into joblessness and poverty nobody bats an eye.
The moment we talk about actions that might impact the insurance empires suddenly we have to all worry about the workers and all the businesses that are connected to the insurance company and so on.
While there is a list of cooperatives with varying degrees of worker-ownership and company profit, what usually stops them is the allure of money and how a business owner can easily embrace the long-standing culture of becoming a micro-baron and controlling the flow of wealth without any worry of repercussion or losses.
Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all.
Let’s talk about just one of these, “guaranteed income”. What annual amount do you think we as a country can afford to give everyone in the US?
Edit: The fact that I have negative points for asking a simple question is a textbook example of ideologues’ hostility to even the slightest bit of what one would strain to even call ‘dissent’. Pitiful.
How about we take all the money that we’ve been using to bail out corporations along with removing loopholes that allow corporations and the ultra rich to barely pay any taxes, if any.
Also, read up on Modern Monetary Theory. The finances of the federal government cannot be calculated the same way as household finances.
Also also as well in addition, as for the amount, UBI should be a livable income without a job to pay for all necessities, and jobs should be supplimental income for luxuries.
Well let’s see. In October of 2023 there were 735 billionaires in the US. Assuming each had only $1B and could make an average of 8% on that money (the stock market averages 10%) and we taxed them the equivalent of 6 of that percent, giving all of that to say the lowest income people in the US (so no overhead here to distribute it), the money could provide 735,000 people with a salary of $60k/year. They would still be billionaires drawing a salary of only $20m/year each. So three quarters of a million people, could have the average yearly income in the US and it would only mildly inconvenience 735 people.
Knowing that many billionaires have more than just one billion dollars and that other high earners, say people with $100m or more significantly outnumber them imagine how many people could share the prosperity. I didn’t do that math but probably 3-5 million people I guess and it barely even effects the ultra wealthy.
The actual wealth of a billionaire is absolutely staggering.
Okay, so assuming the top end of your guesstimate of 5 million…so, the other 335 million people get a middle finger, or what?
“Guaranteed income” for 1.4% of the population, at most. Not quite how I’d define it.
But fuck the back of the napkin math, we’ve got solid numbers out there to use. The total net worth of all the billionaires in the US is about $5.2 trillion. And I’ll use your 6% that’s $312 billion a year. Now let’s also make the massive assumption (in your favor) that we can wave a magic wand and convert that net worth directly into exactly that much cash, which you obviously never could in real life.
So, $312 billion a year. Spread evenly, that’s literally less than $1,000 per person. Less than the stimulus we got during Covid, and you won’t find anyone who claims they went from poor to not poor after getting that stimulus.
The actual wealth of a billionaire is absolutely staggering.
I find this ironic, since you seem not to understand just how little it actually is, compared to what the government already spends, and among a population of 340 million people.
Did you know the US spends about $1.2 trillion a year on welfare already? The above amount is about a quarter of that; even if we abandon the idea of “guaranteed income” completely and just used this hypothetical amount as additional welfare for the poor, their benefit amount would increase by 25% on average. Do you think anyone who is impoverished is going to be lifted out of poverty with that?
Billionaires are a boogeyman. They’re not the source of poverty, and they literally don’t have enough to forcibly push the poor out of poverty, regardless of whether you try it by ‘skimming’ off their average wealth appreciation, or if you take it all at once.
If half of the energy complaining about billionaires was put into reducing single parenthood, and all of the other things that we know have a DIRECT correlation, with poverty, WAY more poor would be not only lifted up, but with the right tools and education, they’d STAY up, on their own.
I think you missed the point. First, the back of the napkin exercise I conducted was merely to point out just how big of an impact can be had without even hardly inconveniencing just a handful of people. The people I was referring to, would still have a billion dollars and a 20 million dollar a year income from interest. Second, not ever person in the US is poor. We don’t have to raise every single person in America out of poverty. Third, I Believe billionaires ARE the source of poverty. Fourth, I Believe you were off by three orders of magnitude. Six percent of 5.2 trillion dollars is actually $312 billion dollars, not million dollars. Fifth, I’m not suggesting that billionaires can just be taxed to the point that they alone can provide a salary to every person in America. What I’m suggesting, is if a system existed that was even slightly fair, billionaires wouldn’t exist and hopefully neither would the working poor.
just how big of an impact can be had without even hardly inconveniencing just a handful of people.
Which is to say, no real impact at all. There are 340 million of us, a plan that can potentially help less than 2% of them is no plan at all.
Second, not ever person in the US is poor. We don’t have to raise every single person in America out of poverty.
So you’re not talking about UBI, but just another welfare program.
I redirect you to where I pointed out that the amount of yearly aid your plan produces is nothing compared to the $1.2 TRILLION the US already spends on welfare. It is completely naive to think that a slight increase in welfare spending is going to create the kind of change you’re claiming it would.
Third, I Believe billionaires ARE the source of poverty.
You can believe it all you want, but the evidence simply does not support that conclusion. Go look up how many inflation-adjusted billionaires there were in the world a century ago compared to today, then go compare the incidence of global poverty back then to today, too. It’s literally an inverse correlation.
Fourth, I Believe you were off by three orders of magnitude. Six percent of 5.2 trillion dollars is actually $312 billion dollars, not million dollars.
My mistake, will correct my comment, but the point still stands, because $1000 isn’t anything resembling life-changing money, either.
What I’m suggesting, is if a system existed that was even slightly fair, billionaires wouldn’t exist
Not only can they exist, but it is literally inevitable, and moreso with each passing day, especially as the global population increases, more and more technology becomes more scalable, new technologies emerge, and more and more economy is globalized.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth today. One piece of software that catches on can produce $1 billion in profit in just a handful of years. OnlyFans was founded in 2016, less than a decade ago, and SIX years later, in 2022, it was valued at not $1 billion, but $18 billion.
wouldn’t exist and hopefully neither would the working poor.
Long-term poverty literally cannot be solved with an injection of funds alone–this is a very superficial take. The vast majority of poor people who win lotteries of multi-million amounts that can easily make one ‘set for life’, are broke again in just a few years. And you better believe government welfare isn’t giving any poor person tens of millions of dollars.
On the other hand, simply being raised by two parents instead of one, makes a person up to FIVE TIMES less likely to be impoverished long-term in adulthood. If we reduced the single parenthood incidence by even just 5%, we’d reduce long-term poverty to a degree even completely liquidating all billionaires would not accomplish.
Billionaires are largely a boogeyman, and time and effort and resources spent complaining about them, if applied to creating the changes that we DO empirically know actually lift people out of poverty, would do a hell of a lot more good. That’s what frustrates me.
Hating the rich is not the same as loving the poor.
What annual amount do you think we as a country can afford to give everyone in the US?
It’s ridiculous to try to pin someone down on this. I am an American citizen asking that my tax money, which I pay a helluva lot, go into helping people and giving us all more opportunities as individuals, I am fully aware that something like UBI will come with a huge bag of other issues and necessary regulations and safeguards to guarantee that it actually goes into helping people stay in their homes and fed, but that is still the direction that we and all developed nations should be pushing towards.
I am not designing policy, I am asking the people who’s salary I pay to design policy so that that we put money directly towards the issues and people who need it. I won’t even read any “wELL aKsHulLy” arguments how great everything really is and how we’re all just lazy, entitled peasants who need to know our place. I won’t and the harder you jackoffs push the message that it’s our fault we get laid off, have medical emergencies, health issues and lowered wages, the harder I will advocate and vote for ANY kind of socialist policies and candidates. I am absolutely enraged how easily the general public has become distracted with cultural conflict while ignoring the inequality that is making people so unhappy to begin with.
It’s ridiculous to try to pin someone down on this.
I disagree; not when you’re claiming that it, along with several other expensive things, could be done “RIGHT NOW” as if they’re so obviously doable that only literal malice/stupidity is preventing them from happening.
I’ve crunched the numbers on UBI, and have pretty solidly established the conclusion that it’s simply not feasible currently, from a purely pragmatic perspective. It’s just too expensive. So when that extremely bold claim was made, yes, I had to know how you figured it was so easy, especially as just one of a group of other massive changes. I didn’t even take into account any of the logistics, and asked only for the figure and where the money to pay that figure was going to come from. I’ll be honest, given the research I’d already done, I was expecting either a very paltry annual figure, or a plan to pay for it that literally assumed more available funds than there actually are. But I was open to being wrong, and hearing a proposal (not that I was expecting a white paper or something, but at least an overall ‘plan’) that at least sounded somewhat feasible.
Believe me, I wasn’t happy to learn how ridiculously expensive UBI would be in the US, and I calculated based on paying out a measly $10,000 a year, and only to citizens of working age. Even that costs trillions annually…
But I digress…if you don’t have any idea how we could actually provide any given amount of “guaranteed income” to the populace, (I even left it open for you to define the amount everyone gets!), then don’t frame it like this effortlessly-achievable goal. You should have expected some amount of pushback for talking about it like ‘obviously we can do this, there’s no good reason we can’t start doing it “RIGHT NOW”’.
Does the above really sound so “ridiculous”?
P.S. You really made a whole heap of assumptions about me and where I’m coming from, in your comment. You should try not to do that.
I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit, I made assumptions about you because I am not a child I can smell bullshit. I’m not an economist but I can tell when someone else is dumber than rock and lying like a snake. I too can quote corporate propaganda that sounds smart to stupid people. It’s sure amazing that something as complicated and multi-dimensional as this topic can just be fucking CRUNCHED by losers on the internet. Wow, I had no idea it was this simple.
I stopped reading there because I don’t like people who try to confuse issues and shoot down attempts at things we can do to make the world better. You’re arguing from a place of selfish needs and I don’t care. You can reply if you think anyone is reading down this far, it won’t be me.
I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit,
Wouldn’t be hard to do. Imagine we’re talking $1000/month (so $12000/year) UBI being delivered to every adult US citizen (part of what makes UBI UBI is that it is universal, everyone gets it). Let’s also imagine that the administrative costs of doing this are 0, to make the math simpler. There are roughly 258 million adults in the US.
258,000,000 times 12,000 = 3,096,000,000,000 or 3 trillion, 96 billion dollars in funding needed per year to pay for the disbursements (again assuming no administrative costs at all. That’s the amount you’d need to raise in additional revenue as a starting point to fund the program, and it’s something like half the size of the entire US budget or about a tenth of the current total US debt if you prefer. Some of that is going to cycle back into tax revenue, some you could get by taxing the super wealthy, some more will come from the economic activity created as a consequence that will cycle that money around a few times, but it’s a big amount of revenue to generate from…somewhere and adding an additional 3 trillion of debt every year beyond the current debt spending isn’t really sustainable.
I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit
??? It was very simple. I chose a deliberately-small-for-the-sake-of-argument annual figure of $10,000 UBI, learned how name working age people there are in the US (bit over 200 million), and multiplied.
The fact that even a measly $10k UBI, an amount that obviously wouldn’t be enough to replace the systems we presently have in place, would cost several trillions a year, made it clear that any amount of real UBI that actually could offer someone who isn’t working some semblance of financial peace of mind, was not realistically affordable, as things are now.
The point is that if it’s that daunting, even before you take into account all of the complexities that come with it, then obviously it’s not going to be easier after you do a full-on approach.
There’s a reason no UBI proposal ever made for the US has ever survived even the slightest scrutiny of feasibility. If you’ve seen one that has, please feel free to enlighten us all.
Your entire comment is the equivalent of you reacting to someone saying “no matter how strong you are, you simply can’t hit the moon with a thrown rock” with all sorts of angry, smug whining about how they’re full of shit and “lying like a snake” because they didn’t talk about any of the physics such a prospect would entail. As if it takes a physics background to realize that’s impossible.
I know my example is simplistic; that’s the fucking point, lmao. You’re mad that I left out variables that would make the goal even harder to achieve, goofball. Holy shit lol
The fact that I have negative points for asking a simple question is a textbook example of ideologues’ hostility to even the slightest bit of what one would strain to even call ‘dissent’. Pitiful.
I’m going to take the rage bait on this one, in hopes that you’re not trolling:
No. It’s stuff like this, which makes several of your comments here earning downvotes.
If it were “a simple question” you wouldn’t whine about getting downvotes. The fact, that you care about votes here and in this context at all is a sign of your “ideologues’ hostility” towards contrary opinions. If it were “a simpue question” you wouldn’t be so condescending to call downvotes “ideologues’ hostility” or “pitiful”.
Your “simple question” can still be suggestive and carry a message which clearly show that your intentions are not to neutrally ask a question but to challenge the readers and the common opinion found among them. Given this context, such questions can even seem ridiculuous to ask at all, as the amount of wealth accumulated by wealthy people is insane. (See for example this one of many illustrations: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ ) In other words: your question seems a bit like rage bait.
Combined with your other comments here, a clear picture cristallises about your opinion on this topic, which further hardens, that it’s not just “a simple question”.
It’s totally fine for me and probably a lot of other users here if you’ve got a different opinion. If people disagree with you or don’t like it, you get downvotes. That’s the way of Lemmy. Heck, I’ll probably earn a downvote from you. Do I care? No. Not really. Of course it would be nice if we could agree. But I accept that you probably won’t like what I’ve written here and that you’re giving me a downvote for that. It’s an expression of your opinion. And that’s ok.
If you were about to get banned for your “simple question”, or your question got removed, then we could talk again about hostility. Until then it’s political discourse. Isn’t democracy beautiful? ;)
I agree that copyright is bullshit. We’ve been watching it get the shit kicked out of it for 20 years. I can’t imagine it’s got much more fight in it. I think both personal and private property will not go down nearly so easily - people really really like their special purple pants and their cozy familiar bedrooms.
Public property = what we all own, and has been privatized (outright stolen) as much as possible.
The rich go out of their way to not actually “own” most of what they have stolen. Since even they acknowledge that it’s not technically theirs, outlaw corporations that aren’t worker owned, or nationally owned democratic co-ops and be done with the corrupt thieves at the top. Let them get a job for once.
Personal property = Things you own for personal use
Private property = things you own that other people use
public property = things we collectively own
It’s not simply ‘corporations’ owning things, it’s the relationship of who owns the thing (and has first claim to all the benefits) and who uses the thing
Can you clarify a bit more? I have enough money where I could stop working for the next 8 or 9 months if I chose. Should I be allowed to keep this?
What about my neighbor, his house is 3x the size of my wife’s and mine, and he lives alone. He could sell one of his three cars and survive for a year if he had to. I’m sure he has a savings that could last him 5 years or more. How much should he be allowed to keep? Or should he just be forced to take a vacation until he gets closer to average?
Or should the cap be more around one lifetimes worth of savings?
We are within Capitalism, so without replacing it with a better system, we cannot remove accumulation.
I am not advocating for putting a cap on accumulation in Capitalism, I am advocating for replacing the entire Capitalist system with one where accumulation is not only impossible, but unnecessary and unwanted.
Capitalism will naturally burn itself out by eventually resulting in such an efficient creation mechanism that there will be no more scarcity. Maybe this mechanism won’t care about preserving humanity, though, so that might suck. I suspect that trying to replace capitalism with something else would just make it continue on in a different costume so it can continue its mission.
Capitalism is juat a reflection of human nature. Not many people are genuinely interested in living in a way that isn’t selfish. It is a spectrum, but have you ever met anyone who always puts the necessities of everyone one else above at least some unnecessary pleasure for themself?
Medical surgery is new, but it is also a reflection of human nature, and humans desire to learn about and control their environment and to survive. In the same way, capitalism is both new and a reflection of human nature. People are just getting better at manifesting their selfish desires. If you gave a chimpanzee the option to have herself and her offspring have absurd abundance at the expense of strangers, she’d absolutely go for it. It’s just an issue of selfish gene survival. The same is true of us, and every generation since our common ancestors with chimpanzees, and way before that. It is just our increasing intelligence(individual and collective from our ancestors) that has made it so common now.
Capitalism will eventually evolve into techno-socialism. Premature, pipe-dream socialism would just cause societal decay. Capitalism is the long, hard walk to a better place.
Human Nature itself is a fallacy, what is considered Human Nature changes based on environment.
Why would Socialism cause decay? Why is Capitalism a road to a better place when it results in deliberate over-exploitation of the Global South, preventing development?
I think this is where capitalist understanding of capital goes into contradiction with marxist understanding of capital. I won’t go over everything in Das Kapital that relates to this topic, but I’ll give the short gist. Capitalism takes a very general “everything is capital” approach which means whatever money you collect is capital. Marx defined capital different to show the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system. From the point of view of money it becomes capital when you use that money for the specific purpose of making more money.
Let’s say you give someone the tools to make a thing and then you pay them $40 to make that thing. You then sell that thing for $50 making $10 for yourself from that. If we imagine this as a black box, you put in $40 and you get $50. Collect until you have $80 and then you get back $100. That is capital. You do nothing but you make money and you use that money to make more money.
What isn’t capital is if it costs you $40 to make something, you sell that thing for $50, you take that $10, collect until it’s a million and then buy a house or something. That is not capital because that’s the product of your labor and that money returns into circulation.
You’re allowed to keep your money because you’ve earned it. Your neighbor is allowed to keep his house, his cars and all the savings assuming he did the worth to earn it. There is no actual cap beyond what you’re capable of earning from your labor. I won’t get into the “what if he didn’t earn it” or the “Person X made billions of their own work” discussions because I’m not here for that. I’m here to give a quick explanation to your questions because we’re not taught Marxism. The outcomes of Marxism comes across as very nonsensical and puzzling, when all you’ve been taught is capitalism. If you don’t care to read Das Kapital this is a good summary where the 4-5th video starts to get into the meat of the subject
It would be amazing if there really was a black box that could guarantee $40 in and $50 out! Sign me up, lol! As it is, the best capitalism has done is ($40 and research in) and (a chance at $50 out). If that first box existed, then everyone would use it. Many people think it exists, and then they are confused when the box just eats their money. That’s because they naively neglected the research input and didn’t realise that it was only ever a chance at $50.
It does exist, it’s called being the owner of a company or in modern times, being an investor.
From Marxs critique those people were factory owners. The factory made X amount of money and the owner chose how it gets split between him and the workers. The factory owners only input in the labor process is owning the tools, they themselves don’t put any labor into what the factory produces.
In modern times you still see the same thing in some companies that are big enough that the owner doesn’t do any work but small enough to not be publicly traded (obviously with some exceptions like Valve corporation), but usually the “owner” is replaced by a board of investors. The investors don’t do any actual work, their input is cash and in return they get more cash back. And what’s the requirement to be an investor? To already have a large amount of money. That’s why everyone can’t do, because they don’t have that kind of money and they never will.
This is why leftists are against billionaires and such, because they’re essentially leeches. The vast majority if not all of them didn’t earn that money, their wealth comes from the collective pocket of the workers like you and me. We do the work, we make the money and they take a part of it because they own our workplace.
Do you think that everyone who starts a business or invests in companies is guaranteed to make a profit? I don’t think so, but I have no idea what percent end up profitable. It seems like a big gamble to me, so I can’t help but wonder if the ones that we see and pay attention to just so happened to be the ones that either chose really well or got really lucky. I have no idea which is more common.
I do know that there are a shitton of trust fund kids that don’t end up as billionaires. If it really was just as simple as having “lots” of money automatically gets you way more money, then it seems like there would be a runaway affect where there would just have to be more and more money created at a faster and faster rate in order to keep paying off all these rich people and their black boxes. There is something about that that doesn’t seem quite right to me, like just on a mathematical level, doesn’t it seem like the amount of money in existence would have to be going up exponentially in order for this story to be true?
I don’t know, I’m not an economist, it’s just that something feels a bit off to me in this narrative.
Do you think that everyone who starts a business or invests in companies is guaranteed to make a profit? I don’t think so, but I have no idea what percent end up profitable. It seems like a big gamble to me, so I can’t help but wonder if the ones that we see and pay attention to just so happened to be the ones that either chose really well or got really lucky. I have no idea which is more common.
There are no guarantees in life. There’s no guarantee that working for a company gets you paid either, the company could go bankrupt and all you have is a claim for unpaid work. And in that sense anyone who starts a business isn’t likely to make a profit. Anyone investing, there are very safe investments that are essentially guaranteed to make money. If you want an easy example I’m sure your bank is happy to take your money, invest it, take the risk, and guarantee you something like a 2% payout on your money. My rainy day fund is currently invested by bank on a guaranteed 4% return to combat the inflation. Unless you’re investing irresponsibly or with a very high risk it’s as close to a guarantee to make money.
I do know that there are a shitton of trust fund kids that don’t end up as billionaires. If it really was just as simple as having “lots” of money automatically gets you way more money, then it seems like there would be a runaway affect where there would just have to be more and more money created at a faster and faster rate in order to keep paying off all these rich people and their black boxes. There is something about that that doesn’t seem quite right to me, like just on a mathematical level, doesn’t it seem like the amount of money in existence would have to be going up exponentially in order for this story to be true?
It’s not about becoming a billionaire. Billionaire is a blanket term some people use to refer to the ultrawealthy. They don’t need to be billionaires, they just need to be wealthy enough live off of investment returns. If I had 10 mil at hand I’d consider myself ultrawealthy, because I’ve done the math and if I invested that much money into a relatively safe investment I could spend the rest of my life living off the investment returns. I’d be set for life. And remember, 10 million is still more than 900 million away from a billionaire. At about 20 mil I’d be getting more from my investment returns than I do at my actual job, but I live in a relatively cheap area.
don’t know where you’re from so I’ll use America as an example. 20 million at a 4% return in a year (which is what my bank gives me) is 80k a year. The average annual wage in the US in 2022 was 77k. Minus taxes at 20 mil on a 4% return you’ll make just below what the average american makes, without doing anything. You can do a similar calculation for your country. Find out what’s the safest maximum rate your bank provides (that will be the floor of how much you’d make investing), find out what’s the annual average wage in your country (or better yet, use your own wage), find the tax rate, throw them all together and see how many millions you’d need to live the rest of your life without ever needing to work. From there you get a relatively good idea how much money you’d need for that runaway effect, where you can do pretty much whatever and you’ll just keep getting richer. And if you to the calculation, maybe for you that number is 100 million. That’s still 900 million away from a billionaire, just to remind you of how obsenely wealthy billionaires are.
You’re assuming that all possible future economic systems would have to work the same way as our current one. Even in the current one eg. taxation could be used to limit wealth after some arbitrary amount of millions owned, but note that I’m not advocating for this, just illustrating the point
I assumed you meant we should be taxing people who make too much money or just not allowing them to acquire more resources. Although this stuff is easily beaten since the people who enforce the taxes are the puppets of actually powerful people who have lots of wealth. I was just curious where you thought that line should be.
I think the actual future will be much more like an AI-powered hippy commune where money is mostly just found in history lessons. Maybe the most powerful people/entities will have something like money in their negotiations, but not the average person. I think this will naturally come about as a result of our current system.
Yeah absolutely true. Frankly I don’t think we’ll be able to unfuck ourselves before it’s much too late from a climate viewpoint – and I’m not entirely convinced we haven’t already passed the point of no return
Well, I don’t know about your but I’d prefer a system where it wouldn’t be possible for a single person to amass that many resources in the first place
Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all. In the long run some businesses like the Healthcare companies will suffer and have to downsize, but it’s always been absolutely astonishing to me that a company like Tesla, IBM, Boeing, Walmart or other mega-companies close plants or stores and send tens of thousands of people into joblessness and poverty nobody bats an eye.
The moment we talk about actions that might impact the insurance empires suddenly we have to all worry about the workers and all the businesses that are connected to the insurance company and so on.
There is literally nothing that stops someone starting a business from organizing it as a worker co-op.
That’s what I’m sayin.
While there is a list of cooperatives with varying degrees of worker-ownership and company profit, what usually stops them is the allure of money and how a business owner can easily embrace the long-standing culture of becoming a micro-baron and controlling the flow of wealth without any worry of repercussion or losses.
Let’s talk about just one of these, “guaranteed income”. What annual amount do you think we as a country can afford to give everyone in the US?
Edit: The fact that I have negative points for asking a simple question is a textbook example of ideologues’ hostility to even the slightest bit of what one would strain to even call ‘dissent’. Pitiful.
How about we take all the money that we’ve been using to bail out corporations along with removing loopholes that allow corporations and the ultra rich to barely pay any taxes, if any.
Also, read up on Modern Monetary Theory. The finances of the federal government cannot be calculated the same way as household finances.
Also also as well in addition, as for the amount, UBI should be a livable income without a job to pay for all necessities, and jobs should be supplimental income for luxuries.
Well let’s see. In October of 2023 there were 735 billionaires in the US. Assuming each had only $1B and could make an average of 8% on that money (the stock market averages 10%) and we taxed them the equivalent of 6 of that percent, giving all of that to say the lowest income people in the US (so no overhead here to distribute it), the money could provide 735,000 people with a salary of $60k/year. They would still be billionaires drawing a salary of only $20m/year each. So three quarters of a million people, could have the average yearly income in the US and it would only mildly inconvenience 735 people.
Knowing that many billionaires have more than just one billion dollars and that other high earners, say people with $100m or more significantly outnumber them imagine how many people could share the prosperity. I didn’t do that math but probably 3-5 million people I guess and it barely even effects the ultra wealthy.
The actual wealth of a billionaire is absolutely staggering.
Okay, so assuming the top end of your guesstimate of 5 million…so, the other 335 million people get a middle finger, or what?
“Guaranteed income” for 1.4% of the population, at most. Not quite how I’d define it.
But fuck the back of the napkin math, we’ve got solid numbers out there to use. The total net worth of all the billionaires in the US is about $5.2 trillion. And I’ll use your 6% that’s $312 billion a year. Now let’s also make the massive assumption (in your favor) that we can wave a magic wand and convert that net worth directly into exactly that much cash, which you obviously never could in real life.
So, $312 billion a year. Spread evenly, that’s literally less than $1,000 per person. Less than the stimulus we got during Covid, and you won’t find anyone who claims they went from poor to not poor after getting that stimulus.
I find this ironic, since you seem not to understand just how little it actually is, compared to what the government already spends, and among a population of 340 million people.
Did you know the US spends about $1.2 trillion a year on welfare already? The above amount is about a quarter of that; even if we abandon the idea of “guaranteed income” completely and just used this hypothetical amount as additional welfare for the poor, their benefit amount would increase by 25% on average. Do you think anyone who is impoverished is going to be lifted out of poverty with that?
Billionaires are a boogeyman. They’re not the source of poverty, and they literally don’t have enough to forcibly push the poor out of poverty, regardless of whether you try it by ‘skimming’ off their average wealth appreciation, or if you take it all at once.
If half of the energy complaining about billionaires was put into reducing single parenthood, and all of the other things that we know have a DIRECT correlation, with poverty, WAY more poor would be not only lifted up, but with the right tools and education, they’d STAY up, on their own.
I think you missed the point. First, the back of the napkin exercise I conducted was merely to point out just how big of an impact can be had without even hardly inconveniencing just a handful of people. The people I was referring to, would still have a billion dollars and a 20 million dollar a year income from interest. Second, not ever person in the US is poor. We don’t have to raise every single person in America out of poverty. Third, I Believe billionaires ARE the source of poverty. Fourth, I Believe you were off by three orders of magnitude. Six percent of 5.2 trillion dollars is actually $312 billion dollars, not million dollars. Fifth, I’m not suggesting that billionaires can just be taxed to the point that they alone can provide a salary to every person in America. What I’m suggesting, is if a system existed that was even slightly fair, billionaires wouldn’t exist and hopefully neither would the working poor.
Which is to say, no real impact at all. There are 340 million of us, a plan that can potentially help less than 2% of them is no plan at all.
So you’re not talking about UBI, but just another welfare program.
I redirect you to where I pointed out that the amount of yearly aid your plan produces is nothing compared to the $1.2 TRILLION the US already spends on welfare. It is completely naive to think that a slight increase in welfare spending is going to create the kind of change you’re claiming it would.
You can believe it all you want, but the evidence simply does not support that conclusion. Go look up how many inflation-adjusted billionaires there were in the world a century ago compared to today, then go compare the incidence of global poverty back then to today, too. It’s literally an inverse correlation.
My mistake, will correct my comment, but the point still stands, because $1000 isn’t anything resembling life-changing money, either.
Not only can they exist, but it is literally inevitable, and moreso with each passing day, especially as the global population increases, more and more technology becomes more scalable, new technologies emerge, and more and more economy is globalized.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth today. One piece of software that catches on can produce $1 billion in profit in just a handful of years. OnlyFans was founded in 2016, less than a decade ago, and SIX years later, in 2022, it was valued at not $1 billion, but $18 billion.
Long-term poverty literally cannot be solved with an injection of funds alone–this is a very superficial take. The vast majority of poor people who win lotteries of multi-million amounts that can easily make one ‘set for life’, are broke again in just a few years. And you better believe government welfare isn’t giving any poor person tens of millions of dollars.
On the other hand, simply being raised by two parents instead of one, makes a person up to FIVE TIMES less likely to be impoverished long-term in adulthood. If we reduced the single parenthood incidence by even just 5%, we’d reduce long-term poverty to a degree even completely liquidating all billionaires would not accomplish.
Billionaires are largely a boogeyman, and time and effort and resources spent complaining about them, if applied to creating the changes that we DO empirically know actually lift people out of poverty, would do a hell of a lot more good. That’s what frustrates me.
Hating the rich is not the same as loving the poor.
It’s ridiculous to try to pin someone down on this. I am an American citizen asking that my tax money, which I pay a helluva lot, go into helping people and giving us all more opportunities as individuals, I am fully aware that something like UBI will come with a huge bag of other issues and necessary regulations and safeguards to guarantee that it actually goes into helping people stay in their homes and fed, but that is still the direction that we and all developed nations should be pushing towards.
I am not designing policy, I am asking the people who’s salary I pay to design policy so that that we put money directly towards the issues and people who need it. I won’t even read any “wELL aKsHulLy” arguments how great everything really is and how we’re all just lazy, entitled peasants who need to know our place. I won’t and the harder you jackoffs push the message that it’s our fault we get laid off, have medical emergencies, health issues and lowered wages, the harder I will advocate and vote for ANY kind of socialist policies and candidates. I am absolutely enraged how easily the general public has become distracted with cultural conflict while ignoring the inequality that is making people so unhappy to begin with.
You can go ahead and reply with your chart that is somehow supposed to make me feel better. I’m sure it will really improve all of our situations.
Yes I am defensive, any reply pointing that it will get blocked before reading.
I disagree; not when you’re claiming that it, along with several other expensive things, could be done “RIGHT NOW” as if they’re so obviously doable that only literal malice/stupidity is preventing them from happening.
I’ve crunched the numbers on UBI, and have pretty solidly established the conclusion that it’s simply not feasible currently, from a purely pragmatic perspective. It’s just too expensive. So when that extremely bold claim was made, yes, I had to know how you figured it was so easy, especially as just one of a group of other massive changes. I didn’t even take into account any of the logistics, and asked only for the figure and where the money to pay that figure was going to come from. I’ll be honest, given the research I’d already done, I was expecting either a very paltry annual figure, or a plan to pay for it that literally assumed more available funds than there actually are. But I was open to being wrong, and hearing a proposal (not that I was expecting a white paper or something, but at least an overall ‘plan’) that at least sounded somewhat feasible.
Believe me, I wasn’t happy to learn how ridiculously expensive UBI would be in the US, and I calculated based on paying out a measly $10,000 a year, and only to citizens of working age. Even that costs trillions annually…
But I digress…if you don’t have any idea how we could actually provide any given amount of “guaranteed income” to the populace, (I even left it open for you to define the amount everyone gets!), then don’t frame it like this effortlessly-achievable goal. You should have expected some amount of pushback for talking about it like ‘obviously we can do this, there’s no good reason we can’t start doing it “RIGHT NOW”’.
Does the above really sound so “ridiculous”?
P.S. You really made a whole heap of assumptions about me and where I’m coming from, in your comment. You should try not to do that.
I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit, I made assumptions about you because I am not a child I can smell bullshit. I’m not an economist but I can tell when someone else is dumber than rock and lying like a snake. I too can quote corporate propaganda that sounds smart to stupid people. It’s sure amazing that something as complicated and multi-dimensional as this topic can just be fucking CRUNCHED by losers on the internet. Wow, I had no idea it was this simple.
I stopped reading there because I don’t like people who try to confuse issues and shoot down attempts at things we can do to make the world better. You’re arguing from a place of selfish needs and I don’t care. You can reply if you think anyone is reading down this far, it won’t be me.
Wouldn’t be hard to do. Imagine we’re talking $1000/month (so $12000/year) UBI being delivered to every adult US citizen (part of what makes UBI UBI is that it is universal, everyone gets it). Let’s also imagine that the administrative costs of doing this are 0, to make the math simpler. There are roughly 258 million adults in the US.
258,000,000 times 12,000 = 3,096,000,000,000 or 3 trillion, 96 billion dollars in funding needed per year to pay for the disbursements (again assuming no administrative costs at all. That’s the amount you’d need to raise in additional revenue as a starting point to fund the program, and it’s something like half the size of the entire US budget or about a tenth of the current total US debt if you prefer. Some of that is going to cycle back into tax revenue, some you could get by taxing the super wealthy, some more will come from the economic activity created as a consequence that will cycle that money around a few times, but it’s a big amount of revenue to generate from…somewhere and adding an additional 3 trillion of debt every year beyond the current debt spending isn’t really sustainable.
??? It was very simple. I chose a deliberately-small-for-the-sake-of-argument annual figure of $10,000 UBI, learned how name working age people there are in the US (bit over 200 million), and multiplied.
The fact that even a measly $10k UBI, an amount that obviously wouldn’t be enough to replace the systems we presently have in place, would cost several trillions a year, made it clear that any amount of real UBI that actually could offer someone who isn’t working some semblance of financial peace of mind, was not realistically affordable, as things are now.
The point is that if it’s that daunting, even before you take into account all of the complexities that come with it, then obviously it’s not going to be easier after you do a full-on approach.
There’s a reason no UBI proposal ever made for the US has ever survived even the slightest scrutiny of feasibility. If you’ve seen one that has, please feel free to enlighten us all.
Your entire comment is the equivalent of you reacting to someone saying “no matter how strong you are, you simply can’t hit the moon with a thrown rock” with all sorts of angry, smug whining about how they’re full of shit and “lying like a snake” because they didn’t talk about any of the physics such a prospect would entail. As if it takes a physics background to realize that’s impossible.
I know my example is simplistic; that’s the fucking point, lmao. You’re mad that I left out variables that would make the goal even harder to achieve, goofball. Holy shit lol
I’m going to take the rage bait on this one, in hopes that you’re not trolling:
No. It’s stuff like this, which makes several of your comments here earning downvotes.
If it were “a simple question” you wouldn’t whine about getting downvotes. The fact, that you care about votes here and in this context at all is a sign of your “ideologues’ hostility” towards contrary opinions. If it were “a simpue question” you wouldn’t be so condescending to call downvotes “ideologues’ hostility” or “pitiful”.
Your “simple question” can still be suggestive and carry a message which clearly show that your intentions are not to neutrally ask a question but to challenge the readers and the common opinion found among them. Given this context, such questions can even seem ridiculuous to ask at all, as the amount of wealth accumulated by wealthy people is insane. (See for example this one of many illustrations: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ ) In other words: your question seems a bit like rage bait.
Combined with your other comments here, a clear picture cristallises about your opinion on this topic, which further hardens, that it’s not just “a simple question”.
It’s totally fine for me and probably a lot of other users here if you’ve got a different opinion. If people disagree with you or don’t like it, you get downvotes. That’s the way of Lemmy. Heck, I’ll probably earn a downvote from you. Do I care? No. Not really. Of course it would be nice if we could agree. But I accept that you probably won’t like what I’ve written here and that you’re giving me a downvote for that. It’s an expression of your opinion. And that’s ok.
If you were about to get banned for your “simple question”, or your question got removed, then we could talk again about hostility. Until then it’s political discourse. Isn’t democracy beautiful? ;)
What’s the most amount of resources that it should be legal to acquire?
The answer is either “None of it” or “No more than you need”, depending on how based you are.
No personal ownership at all? If someone likes that picture you drew, then they should have as much right to it as you?
Without going into the difference between personal and private property, yes, copyright law is bullshit
I agree that copyright is bullshit. We’ve been watching it get the shit kicked out of it for 20 years. I can’t imagine it’s got much more fight in it. I think both personal and private property will not go down nearly so easily - people really really like their special purple pants and their cozy familiar bedrooms.
Personal property = what you own personally.
Private property = what corporations own.
Public property = what we all own, and has been privatized (outright stolen) as much as possible.
The rich go out of their way to not actually “own” most of what they have stolen. Since even they acknowledge that it’s not technically theirs, outlaw corporations that aren’t worker owned, or nationally owned democratic co-ops and be done with the corrupt thieves at the top. Let them get a job for once.
I might be mistaken but this is almost right
Personal property = Things you own for personal use Private property = things you own that other people use public property = things we collectively own
It’s not simply ‘corporations’ owning things, it’s the relationship of who owns the thing (and has first claim to all the benefits) and who uses the thing
Yeah, I may have oversimplified that
Accumulation should be removed, there should be no individual Capital Owners trying to collect more and more and more.
Can you clarify a bit more? I have enough money where I could stop working for the next 8 or 9 months if I chose. Should I be allowed to keep this?
What about my neighbor, his house is 3x the size of my wife’s and mine, and he lives alone. He could sell one of his three cars and survive for a year if he had to. I’m sure he has a savings that could last him 5 years or more. How much should he be allowed to keep? Or should he just be forced to take a vacation until he gets closer to average?
Or should the cap be more around one lifetimes worth of savings?
We are within Capitalism, so without replacing it with a better system, we cannot remove accumulation.
I am not advocating for putting a cap on accumulation in Capitalism, I am advocating for replacing the entire Capitalist system with one where accumulation is not only impossible, but unnecessary and unwanted.
Capitalism will naturally burn itself out by eventually resulting in such an efficient creation mechanism that there will be no more scarcity. Maybe this mechanism won’t care about preserving humanity, though, so that might suck. I suspect that trying to replace capitalism with something else would just make it continue on in a different costume so it can continue its mission.
Capitalism is juat a reflection of human nature. Not many people are genuinely interested in living in a way that isn’t selfish. It is a spectrum, but have you ever met anyone who always puts the necessities of everyone one else above at least some unnecessary pleasure for themself?
Capitalism will naturally destroy itself, yes. Socialism will then be the next step.
Capitalism isn’t a reflection of human nature, it has been around for less than 1% of Humanity.
Yeah, everything before it has proven worse
Medical surgery is new, but it is also a reflection of human nature, and humans desire to learn about and control their environment and to survive. In the same way, capitalism is both new and a reflection of human nature. People are just getting better at manifesting their selfish desires. If you gave a chimpanzee the option to have herself and her offspring have absurd abundance at the expense of strangers, she’d absolutely go for it. It’s just an issue of selfish gene survival. The same is true of us, and every generation since our common ancestors with chimpanzees, and way before that. It is just our increasing intelligence(individual and collective from our ancestors) that has made it so common now.
Capitalism will eventually evolve into techno-socialism. Premature, pipe-dream socialism would just cause societal decay. Capitalism is the long, hard walk to a better place.
Human Nature itself is a fallacy, what is considered Human Nature changes based on environment.
Why would Socialism cause decay? Why is Capitalism a road to a better place when it results in deliberate over-exploitation of the Global South, preventing development?
I think this is where capitalist understanding of capital goes into contradiction with marxist understanding of capital. I won’t go over everything in Das Kapital that relates to this topic, but I’ll give the short gist. Capitalism takes a very general “everything is capital” approach which means whatever money you collect is capital. Marx defined capital different to show the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system. From the point of view of money it becomes capital when you use that money for the specific purpose of making more money.
Let’s say you give someone the tools to make a thing and then you pay them $40 to make that thing. You then sell that thing for $50 making $10 for yourself from that. If we imagine this as a black box, you put in $40 and you get $50. Collect until you have $80 and then you get back $100. That is capital. You do nothing but you make money and you use that money to make more money.
What isn’t capital is if it costs you $40 to make something, you sell that thing for $50, you take that $10, collect until it’s a million and then buy a house or something. That is not capital because that’s the product of your labor and that money returns into circulation.
You’re allowed to keep your money because you’ve earned it. Your neighbor is allowed to keep his house, his cars and all the savings assuming he did the worth to earn it. There is no actual cap beyond what you’re capable of earning from your labor. I won’t get into the “what if he didn’t earn it” or the “Person X made billions of their own work” discussions because I’m not here for that. I’m here to give a quick explanation to your questions because we’re not taught Marxism. The outcomes of Marxism comes across as very nonsensical and puzzling, when all you’ve been taught is capitalism. If you don’t care to read Das Kapital this is a good summary where the 4-5th video starts to get into the meat of the subject
Thanks for the videos.
It would be amazing if there really was a black box that could guarantee $40 in and $50 out! Sign me up, lol! As it is, the best capitalism has done is ($40 and research in) and (a chance at $50 out). If that first box existed, then everyone would use it. Many people think it exists, and then they are confused when the box just eats their money. That’s because they naively neglected the research input and didn’t realise that it was only ever a chance at $50.
It does exist, it’s called being the owner of a company or in modern times, being an investor.
From Marxs critique those people were factory owners. The factory made X amount of money and the owner chose how it gets split between him and the workers. The factory owners only input in the labor process is owning the tools, they themselves don’t put any labor into what the factory produces.
In modern times you still see the same thing in some companies that are big enough that the owner doesn’t do any work but small enough to not be publicly traded (obviously with some exceptions like Valve corporation), but usually the “owner” is replaced by a board of investors. The investors don’t do any actual work, their input is cash and in return they get more cash back. And what’s the requirement to be an investor? To already have a large amount of money. That’s why everyone can’t do, because they don’t have that kind of money and they never will.
This is why leftists are against billionaires and such, because they’re essentially leeches. The vast majority if not all of them didn’t earn that money, their wealth comes from the collective pocket of the workers like you and me. We do the work, we make the money and they take a part of it because they own our workplace.
Do you think that everyone who starts a business or invests in companies is guaranteed to make a profit? I don’t think so, but I have no idea what percent end up profitable. It seems like a big gamble to me, so I can’t help but wonder if the ones that we see and pay attention to just so happened to be the ones that either chose really well or got really lucky. I have no idea which is more common.
I do know that there are a shitton of trust fund kids that don’t end up as billionaires. If it really was just as simple as having “lots” of money automatically gets you way more money, then it seems like there would be a runaway affect where there would just have to be more and more money created at a faster and faster rate in order to keep paying off all these rich people and their black boxes. There is something about that that doesn’t seem quite right to me, like just on a mathematical level, doesn’t it seem like the amount of money in existence would have to be going up exponentially in order for this story to be true?
I don’t know, I’m not an economist, it’s just that something feels a bit off to me in this narrative.
There are no guarantees in life. There’s no guarantee that working for a company gets you paid either, the company could go bankrupt and all you have is a claim for unpaid work. And in that sense anyone who starts a business isn’t likely to make a profit. Anyone investing, there are very safe investments that are essentially guaranteed to make money. If you want an easy example I’m sure your bank is happy to take your money, invest it, take the risk, and guarantee you something like a 2% payout on your money. My rainy day fund is currently invested by bank on a guaranteed 4% return to combat the inflation. Unless you’re investing irresponsibly or with a very high risk it’s as close to a guarantee to make money.
It’s not about becoming a billionaire. Billionaire is a blanket term some people use to refer to the ultrawealthy. They don’t need to be billionaires, they just need to be wealthy enough live off of investment returns. If I had 10 mil at hand I’d consider myself ultrawealthy, because I’ve done the math and if I invested that much money into a relatively safe investment I could spend the rest of my life living off the investment returns. I’d be set for life. And remember, 10 million is still more than 900 million away from a billionaire. At about 20 mil I’d be getting more from my investment returns than I do at my actual job, but I live in a relatively cheap area.
don’t know where you’re from so I’ll use America as an example. 20 million at a 4% return in a year (which is what my bank gives me) is 80k a year. The average annual wage in the US in 2022 was 77k. Minus taxes at 20 mil on a 4% return you’ll make just below what the average american makes, without doing anything. You can do a similar calculation for your country. Find out what’s the safest maximum rate your bank provides (that will be the floor of how much you’d make investing), find out what’s the annual average wage in your country (or better yet, use your own wage), find the tax rate, throw them all together and see how many millions you’d need to live the rest of your life without ever needing to work. From there you get a relatively good idea how much money you’d need for that runaway effect, where you can do pretty much whatever and you’ll just keep getting richer. And if you to the calculation, maybe for you that number is 100 million. That’s still 900 million away from a billionaire, just to remind you of how obsenely wealthy billionaires are.
You’re assuming that all possible future economic systems would have to work the same way as our current one. Even in the current one eg. taxation could be used to limit wealth after some arbitrary amount of millions owned, but note that I’m not advocating for this, just illustrating the point
I assumed you meant we should be taxing people who make too much money or just not allowing them to acquire more resources. Although this stuff is easily beaten since the people who enforce the taxes are the puppets of actually powerful people who have lots of wealth. I was just curious where you thought that line should be.
I think the actual future will be much more like an AI-powered hippy commune where money is mostly just found in history lessons. Maybe the most powerful people/entities will have something like money in their negotiations, but not the average person. I think this will naturally come about as a result of our current system.
Good luck trying to enforce “this thing you purchased cannot under any circumstances appreciate in value”, lol
Why would I? I am talking about implementing Socialism, not simply trying to achieve Socialism within Capitalism.
Too late for that, that’s the problem.
Yeah absolutely true. Frankly I don’t think we’ll be able to unfuck ourselves before it’s much too late from a climate viewpoint – and I’m not entirely convinced we haven’t already passed the point of no return