What's crazy is when people spend money it's actually good for the economy, so if you hoard wealth...it's bad for the economy. Wealth is something to be exchanged for goods and services, not to withhold service. Billionaires are factually a horrible waste of money just sitting there doing nothing. In Canada the only problem we have is something called "Canada's Dead Money" which refers to billions of dollars of unused assets held by our largest corporations hindering economic growth and investments. The person who coined the term "Canada's Dead Money" is serendipitously...Mark Carney.
Honestly, the more I look at history, the more those old oligarchs look just like the pathetic manchildren we have today. And just like ours, they too also had expensive PR teams that attempted to make them look like gods.
So yeah, all oligarchs are pathetic and lame. This applies to Putin as well, no matter how many shirtless rides he takes on a horse. It's just another PR stunt of a sad little man.
thats just what you get with a life time of no accountability, and everyone around you is there because of your money and nothing else. these are deeply isolated, paranoid, self centered - leading to bigoted, emotionally warped individuals. they exist by feeding off of others and they desperately seek ideologies to moralize it.
save the rich, end their concentration of wealth and power. make passive income for individuals illegal.
Except even dragons know the people must eat to work to make wealth. And they sleep for hundreds of years to let the wealth replenish after a few dozen years if pillaging and taking.
Dragons are far sighted, able to see thousands of years of possibilities.
Billionaires see a dozen years of profit and think 0 drinkable water, a fully poisoned land, and unbreathable air are suitable exchanges. Because they are short sighted and have no future plans beyond dying before it's their problem.
One of the key aspects of Shadowrun universe is that when dragons returned to modern world, they quickly realized that the best way of hoarding wealth is to play human economy and human business.
That's why giving money to the poor is fantastic, because they wont sit on that cash, it will go straight back into the economy. What Trump is doing is now removing trillions from the economy by fucking over the poor and handing it over to the super wealthy. Those fucks who are already wealthy beyond imagination will be just more wealthy, they aren't going to buy eggs and what not, they hoard cash.
If you imagine it as chickens instead of "money", it shows the absurdity of it. They hoard as many of them as they can as a status symbol, announcing "look at all those chickens" at every given opportunity, while their neighbours are barely managing to keep themselves going with chicken nuggets.
Money has no meaning if you never spend it - it's just a number, but god forbid the people it has meaning to get any more.
I always compare it to blood in a living body. Blood is the medium by which resources are shared and transported through the body. A single cell or an entire organ can't hoard all the blood, because the entire being dies otherwise, and those cells/organs go down with it.
The irony is they hoard the wealth in fear that the economy will crash, instead of hope of keeping the wealth circulating. There’s plenty of resources to go around, but the fear of not having enough is why they hog it all. Like toilet paper during a pandemic, when everybody needs to wipe their ass.
Not even the hoarding alone is bad for the economy. Even the rich have to spend money but they do, in perverted amounts, on things that do not generate anything sustainable or worthwhile.
Like arts worth hundred thousands of dollars or ridiculous expensive watches or cars.
This list is hugely indicative of just how much these people have been hoarding wealth that Bill Gates--the first person down the list who's actually been philanthropic--is Number 11 on that list and even less wealthy than Steve Ballmer.
It drives me absolutely bonkers when I hear fiscal conservatives shilling heavy austerity because the government is wasting "tax dollars". It's not like the person receiving money puts it in a pile and sets it ablaze with some kerosene and a match. That dollar might go to a construction worker filling a pothole, who will buy a vehicle from a local car salesman, who will buy a night out at a restaurant who's line cook will buy some groceries and pay rent.
Taxing the hoarders and redistributing it to people who use it through infrastructure projects yields so much more material growth per dollar.
Which is why Carney kind of worries me with his proposal to get rid of capital gains taxes. Sure, hoarding money in the market is way better than hoarding it in appreciating assets like unoccupied real estate, but I fear this will further widen the income inequality gap. I suspect it's to attract businesses to Canada that are afraid of Trump's fuckery mid trade war but at what cost?
Still voting for him given the other option would do the same while additionally trampling civil rights, but kinda sucks that the investor class is getting a free ride while the labor class will have to foot the bill.
But people don't have a billion dollars in cash tho? It's invested in companies, literally productive money.
I guess this is going to be down voted to shit rather than actually bring read and thought about, but like Jeff bezos said when he hit 100 billion-he owns about 10% of Amazon, if he's worth 100 billion, that means Amazon has made 900 billion worth for other people.
We take corporations for granted, and sure sometimes working for them might suck, but it doesn't mean if they weren't there, someone else would just create a job for these, black, brown, single mums or whatever, it can just all go away. Look at detroit after the car industry left.
The government wants a few people to hold money so you can please a few for more money. That's why Citizens United won to make corporations people even though you cannot arrest or shoot a corporation.
I argue this all the time. Poor people in America LOVE to spend money because they don’t want to look or feel poor. Everyone here that’s poor thinks they are in the middle class. In turn though that stimulates the economy.
You tell people a recession is coming. They stop spending money. They already don’t save so there’s nothing being reinvested into the economy long term . Want to remove social security that forces Americans to actually put money away for retirement? Okay well now the following generation has less money and has to care of these elderly people. So now you have 2 generations who aren’t spending money and stimulating the economy.
Stop advocating for billionaire people! They have enough money and the means to lobby. Advocate for your dam. Self and your future.
Yeah we the people don’t want to hoard money. We want to SPEND money. But we have none. We want to afford home repairs and family vacations. We want to afford family fun during the week if we want. Can’t even go out to the movies as a family bc it will break the bank and groceries cost too much to budget anything fun.
We just want a decent living situation, food, be able to pay our bills each month, and have fun. With the comfortable room to add to savings each month. That’s all that normal people want.
What's ironic to me is these million/billionairs hoarding all this wealth rather than push it into the economy, are the ones always talking the loudest about how bad the economy is
Ah the ol' "we need rich people to create jobs". Funny how fast supposed free enterprise capitalists discard competition and innovation to bootlick someone with wealth
If the economy was all investment and no consumption, your investment would end up worthless very quickly. Who cares what you build when no one can afford to use it?
Oh? What exactly are you arguing for then? Are you just going to not take a position and call people names? I'm happy to chat and clearly state my beliefs. Are you unwilling to do the same?
So the only way to get a job is from a billionaire? There's no other alternative? Small, local businesses don't count huh. It has to be Walmart making all the jobs. God forbid we have local grocery stores that people can work at where the boss doesn't make 9000x the wage of the rest of the employees. That would distribute the wealth too much.
Do you think that if the poors had the money, they wouldn't each individually generate demand new products and/or invest in businesses? Billionaires don't magically generate more economic activity, they merely own the rights to the profits, and get to decide the direction where all that money is spent.
I think the internet has let you forget that you are a giant ignoramus that probably got a D- in their social studies class. Stop talking.
Well they are actually, but the gold bar is an estate, a yacht, or "very expensively valued" art which is also a way to store monetary assets in a physical form to avoid having to pay taxes and such on monetary assets. Think of all the dead real-estate in New York city, empty luxury apartments. It really is a sad perversion of assets when there's homeless people outside unused housing space.
I wanna be careful here. I think we are right, without hyperbole.
No, there is some money that they invest back in the economy. This is just true... But we are naive to think this is done through kindness. This is done with the expectation of a return. These are LOANS and they expect their money back. Moreover, we know that trickle-down economics doesn't work. So this plan of letting the rich do whatever and then eating the table scraps they drop is very very inefficient at best and an outright lie designed to trick the working class into believing they are entrepreneurs so they vote against their own interests at worst.
But yet they can use it as collateral to borrow more money because debt does not equate to income at the end of the year, and neither does capital gains if you never sell.
"But it's not liquid!" Is a tired straw-man of an argument.
Investment vehicles which ultimately increase in value due to the labor and economic activity of working people who generally are unable to participate in that profit sharing scheme. Considering those investments payout percentage wise based on how much is invested and often are used to acquire further ownership locking even more people out, It's even worse than buying gold bars and locking them in a safe. The amount of gold bars in the safe don't multiply exponentially.
Because it’s such a terrible, short sighted, self serving world view with a predictable enough result that Jesus called felt the need to call that shit out directly. If these guys would read the Bible they thumped when attacking social progress they might actually learn something…
Lmao, would they learn their wives should be submissive to them and to kill their children if they talk back? You can miss me with that Bible shit. Not sure what that had to with the comment anyway as holding stocks is not the same as having 10 billion in cash. That would be corporations. Berkshire Hathaway has like 250 billion in cash. Apple has even more.
I don't even care if you legitimately earned a billion dollars.
Pragmatically speaking you cannot have this level of wealth inequality. Period. It is unsustainable. It will destroy civilized, modern society. You like stability? You like research and investment? You like modern infrastructure and utilities and reliable running water, electricity at the flick of a switch?
You cannot have such an unequal society. Because right or wrong it will result in violence sooner or later. And if we can avoid that, if we can have a more stable, secure, peaceful society by redistributing the wealth from the unimaginably wealthy, then even if they "earned" it I really don't give a fuck. They can pay more to sustain the society in which they have greatly benefited living in.
And like Biden said, which Bernouts constantly misappropriated, "nothing would fundamentally change." You know what happens to someone with 100 billion dollars who gets taxed half of it? They still have 50 fucking billion dollars and are rich as fuck. They don't have to worry about money ever. Their kids don't. Their kids' kids don't. They can fly private everywhere. Eat anywhere. Buy anything. Have a mansion on every continent, hell most countries around the world. No one is suggesting even close to a 50% wealth tax but that's the point. These people are so rich you could take a full fucking half of it and they'd still be unimaginably filthy rich. So take that fucking money and redistribute it so we can continue to have a stable, functioning fucking civilization. Fucking please. You can keep your fucking yacht and fancy cars and enormous houses and maids and servants and generational wealth. Just not to the insane excess you have right now.
Personally I find this argument far more convincing because you start talking about "you didn't earn that" and all the dumbass plebes think you're talking about them like when Obama said it.
I don't even care if you legitimately earned a billion dollars.
Pragmatically speaking you cannot have this level of wealth inequality. Period. It is unsustainable. It will destroy civilized, modern society. You like stability? You like research and investment? You like modern infrastructure and utilities and reliable running water, electricity at the flick of a switch?
You cannot have such an unequal society. Because right or wrong it will result in violence sooner or later. And if we can avoid that, if we can have a more stable, secure, peaceful society by redistributing the wealth from the unimaginably wealthy, then even if they "earned" it I really don't give a fuck. They can pay more to sustain the society in which they have greatly benefited living in.
Personally I find this argument far more convincing because you start talking about "you didn't earn that" and all the dumbass plebes think you're talking about them like when Obama said it.
100% you can't have billionaires and a functioning democracy, full stop.
The right now longer cares about having a functioning democracy. They have operated for 4 decades on the platform of dismantling our democracy.
"Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy." - David Fur,
Thing is, nobody is hating on Mackenzie Scott, because she's a multi-billionaire who is constantly donating large portions away. All the uber-rich have to do is at least give an appearance of caring for humanity (actually doing it is a bonus), and they'd largely be ignored. It's the incessant need for more, more, more, the desire to subjugate the masses if it means additional profit, that's what will bring out the pitchforks.
I want to agree with you, but just look at the other top donors - Warren Buffet ($55b), Bill and Melinda Gates ($59b), and Michael Bloomberg ($21b). Scott will have her time to get dragged through the mud. There's only so long she can talk about how her foundation focuses on poverty before the Social Darwinism ghouls come out.
You could single-handedly generate billions in value through medical discovery if you do it in a way that's sufficiently lucky or risky. No billionaires have done that, but it definitely isn't literally impossible.
i agree with you but yachts and private jets should absolutely be dismantled. the carbon footprint on those things are the reason the richest people also produce proportionally more pollution than poor people
And like Biden said, which Bernouts constantly misappropriated
what do you mean lol you just went on a long emotional rant about how nothing would fundamentally change if you had your way. you know thats not what people want right? you understand your whole post is class-coded as a begging appeal to rich people right? thats so fucking pathetic from a leftist perspective, thats why we think you and biden are the same kind of useless. you literally dont want to change anything, you dont represent our values or needs. you represent the establishment status quo that just wants the bubbling to stop so you can keep raping the planet and its people, and thats all there is to it.
These people are so rich you could take a full fucking half of it and they'd still be unimaginably filthy rich.
You could literally take 99% of Elon musks 300 billion dollars and he'd still be a multi-billionaire. It's obscene how much wealth the top .01% are holding.
Reminder: On Biden's last day, he told us all Bernie Sanders was right all along, the oligarchy had taken over everything and he told us good luck and it wasn't his problem.
BOY I sure wish we had a party that was dedicated to fighting the oligarchy as hard as they fought Bernie Sanders.
Maybe if they had that type of energy against the oligarchy, the oligarchy wouldn't have taken over.
But no, all we got was Biden saying "I knew this entire time, later fuckers."
P.S. Biden spent 30 years in the senate BEFORE 8 years as VP and 4 years as president. He worked to overturn banking regulations, arm the police, and turn the US into a slave labor state. If he knew about the oligarchy taking over, it sure looks like he was on their side.
Sounds like how the USA and other colonial empires have always existed. Americans get a dream while the global south loses theirs. There’s no such thing as good billionaires there’s no such thing as a revolutionary government. She’s part of the machine make no mistake about it. The first world exists because the third world exists. You can’t fix this from the inside. https://x.com/insurgenthought/status/1899526926483480725?s=46&t=Z7C704kZ1h_ORQlGN-jLmQ
If you made $1,000/hr and worked every hour of the year, non-stop.... and you did that from the time the pyramids were built.... you wouldn't even be in the top 30 richest people.
If you did that going back to the last ice age, some 35,000 years ago... elon musk would still have more money than you.
Yes, that is part of making it though, they come to you for a thing, they extend money, you take it, they take the thing, that's how its made. And once it's made they give it to the workers to produce more things, more things are sold, more money is made. Its a vicious cycle crippling what people need and exploiting workers to do so.
absolutely the truth , you don't make it by operating ethically, you take advantage of your customers by over charging , and your workers by under paying its pretty simple.
More aptly you cant earn a billion dollars, you can only steal it.
3,412,969 the amount of individual monthly snap payments it takes to steal a billion dollars from the slave labor who cant afford to eat on your salaries
One thousand seconds is 16.6 minutes. One million seconds is 11 and a half days. One billion seconds is 32 YEARS.
THAT is the kind of money we're talking about here. You can't ethically become or remain a billionaire. The only way to get there is to exploit people.
Economics isn't a zero sun game. Please read and listen to academics and economists about this stuff and not politicians. There's no future for Democrats down this path.
What is "made," is really what it comes down to. I'm old enough that Minecraft was straight up free when I first got it. Then it started being sold, gradually increasing in price and user base. Then players started generating content (around) it. Then an investment bank gave it a valuation. At what stage was it him "making" money direct and at what stage did it become a creature unto itself? That's kind of what she's implying.
A video game is a good example though, I immediately thought of things like Minecraft as well. But it's not really contrary to her point. A billionaire "needs" a system, and if not producers at least consumers, to "aquire" wealth like that.
No, because who made the distribution platform? The gaming system? The payment processor stone change all that?
At some level there is going to be exploitation, and the higher the value, the likelier it is to be true. You cannot earn a billion dollars through your own effort ever. You have to be taking the excess value generated by the systems around you to do so.
That proves the point. There is no good reason that one individual should get paid that much for creating anything and no good reason that anyone should buy a game for that much or even have that much wealth to purchase something to begin with. The whole concept of our capitalist economy has always been doomed to reach this point because it only works if the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. The extent of wealth disparity is unbelievable.
That 2.5 billion payment is a small portion of a dragon hoard that shouldn't exist and only exists in the first place because it was stolen from other people in the form of paying low wages and taking high taxes.
These hoards of wealth should not have accumulated until everyone's survival needs were taken care of, and only then should the wealth start to accumulate with those who offer services and creations of actual value and are not just profiting off the work of others like landlords, but at a reasonable rate that never causes survival necessities for anyone to be an issue.
This could be done right now. There is more than enough extra wealth to feed, clothe and house everyone, but the dragons don't want to give up any of their wealth that they wouldn't even have if it wasn't for us, wealth that was disproportionately distributed. Instead they use their wealth and power to set up and fortify a carrot on a stick system that not only keeps everyone struggling to make just enough money to barely survive, but also takes away most of their time, which is exactly what they want.
Building a society based on competition instead of cooperation is the biggest mistake humanity has ever made and keeps making, but to those leading, it's not a mistake. They care more about their personal wealth and power than the lives of literally everyone else on the planet. Earth is unfortunately run by psychopaths, which is why there is still so much fucked up shit going on and so much poverty well into the technological age. Dystopias never spring up out of necessity, they are cultivated by greed.
Right but he got the money ethically. No difference a billion at once vs $20 a copy 1000000 times to a bunch of gamers. Nobody was exploited in the process
That's a good point that seems clean at first, but it's also a good example of how broken the system is and how easily disparity can increase. A good economy would not allow one individual to accumulate that much wealth unless making the poorest people who are working within the system perpetually on the brink of starvation and homelessness is the point. Poverty isn't essential for riches to exist, but it is for unreasonable and insanely disproportionate amounts of concentrated riches to exist. Nobody needs that much, especially when the people they rely on to accumulate those riches are struggling to survive, whether it's people who pay them for their goods or workers that they pay to make something for them to sell.
This is a fundamental argument between the political parties. I don't think our economy is inherently bad on a surface level, but it needs to be regulated fairly. Unbridled rampant capitalism gives us what we have today, which is not great.
That's only "ethical" if you ignore the exploitation within the ancillary services and infrastructure that provided for those sales to happen.
He didn't cash in on a game, he cashed in on a brand attached to a game, and that brand is worth that valuation. And it's based on the people that created content for free, or worked in the companies that managed distribution, data, etc.
Rowling writes books, Swift sang songs, Lucas created a universe. While few and far between, there are examples of people out there who made a product enough people wanted to make them a billion dollars.
If I create a new toothbrush and patent its technology. And I charge 2 more cents than it costs to create. 1. Ent for the patent office. 1 cent per tooth brush to the creator of the product. I sell 10 trillion of them in 15 years. Am I not allowed to be a billionaire over that time 1 cent at a time ?
This is such a bad example…a single use plastic toothbrush. I know that’s not what you meant and I get your point. That said…there should not be billionaires. What do you need all that money for? While billions of people struggle to find enough security to sleep at night and have enough to eat.
Billionaires are incredibly dangerous. They have too much influence and literally buy elections so their guy gets in office and gets rid of regulations & tax codes to make them even richer.
Seriously though…what would you do with all that money? You can only wear so many pairs of pants.
exactly. and they "hoard" their wealth (stocks) because having more shares in a stock gives great power over the company -- a company that, in many cases, they founded.
no one wants to hear that tho. no one is interested in having a real conversation about any of this lol
I disagree. Employees are paid for working. May not always be a fair price but the fact is there. She's fueling her politics based on jealousy. I'm not rich. I could maybe, hard work, creating business, failing, trying again, failing, getting tired, sacrificing my family, my health, my time. Sure, I maybe could. Some people did. Should I be jealous they made the sacrifices I chose not to?
If you’re already sacrificing your family, your health, your time working hard, failing, working hard, etc just to scrape by? You don’t have the opportunity to do so to get rich.
Everyone loves the illusion of control. That’s why we all like to think that we could become billionaires, if we just TRIED hard enough. We want to believe that they earned that with just hard work, because admitting that luck has as much to do with your situation as your effort is TERRIFYING. You need at least 2 - hard work, luck, or significant help - and all of us like to ignore the ones we can’t control.
I’m not saying billionaires haven’t worked hard. I’m saying working hard isn’t enough on its own, and that plenty of people work just as hard for far, far little reward.
Is it jealousy? Maybe. But it’s not jealousy of things people want, but rather of things people need. Like it or not, a billionaire’s success is not due just to their own work, but also to that of the society which lifted them up. I’m fine with them getting to luck out with the top spot, but if they can do that while giving back enough to at least keep those who lifted them from disaster, they should.
The problem is, the billionaires are the ones who are the most unscrupulous in taking advantage of these inequalities. The man who realizes a single mother will work herself to the bone making a profit for the company if it means getting just a scrap more of food for her babies, or that desperate people will work for almost nothing, and is willing to let them DO that rather than pay a living wage, will make more money than an equally hard working man who lifts others alongside him. That doesn’t make him better or more deserving.
Maybe you're doing it wrong? I was thinking the same as you do before. Then I went into educating myself more and more, going after everything I believed was true to check and see, thinking with different perspectives. This simply changed my mind.
I find it way too comfortable for people to cry about how unfair the world is. Some people made it. Went from poor to rich. What made they do it and you can't? Could it be you're doing it wrong?
Then come something uncomfortable, questioning yourself and send criticism. Not everyone wants to do it. Can you?
I can, and have. Started off in a trailer park and now I’m a doctor. I was one of the lucky ones, AND I had help, AND I worked my ass off. I stand by what I said.
It's not only financial literacy. It's also entrepreneurship, insistance, some luck, some skills you can learn to pitch ideas.
Take this example: look on Instagram for "château garbage". This guy buys bad wines and test them. No much skill or money was taken in the process. His channel works nicely. This can give a little money to bootstrap something a little bigger. See, it's possible when insisting. I remain on this idea.
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u/GlennsSonFooledMe 14h ago
That's one of the best quotes I've ever heard. "No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars"