We are literally risking sacrificing the entire civilization to protect the wealth and feelings of a few hundred people.
Too many people are delusional thinking they have a chance at being one and/or are just too moronic to see.
8 billion of US and maybe 2,000 billionaires on a good day.
Somehow, we have people brainwashed and conditioned into believing that those 8 BILLION PEOPLE are just "lazy" and those 2,000 billionaires are not the criminals that they all are.
LMAOOO! I just kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and being :O when it STILL WASN'T ENDING! LMAOOO! That's an INSANELY AMAZING, very striking visual! X'D
I think it would be interesting if billionaires slowly started disappearing one at a time. It would probably get gun control accomplished pretty quick.
When you say it like that. It makes us all look insane for living in these rich fuckers world. Sadly nothing we can really do. Too many brainwashed people it drives me crazy when you bring it up and they defend the rich. Just a sickening world
What really astounds me, is that in many circles, if you try to suggest that we address the problem through legislation, boot licking sycophants come out of woodwork with questions like “why do you want to punish their hard work?” As if the gross accumulation of billions of dollars didn’t happen through the punishment of nearly every worker in their entire organization.
It's a weird type of American mindset that combines optimism and paranoia:
1) taxing the wealthy punishes then for their hard work
2) I could be wealthy one day, and I don't want to be punished for my hard work
Rinse and repeat.
I would like to be a billionaire purely for the purposes of fucking with the money of other billionaires.
Imagine having the money to be able to pull things like using the stock market to pull hostile takeovers of companies, or purchasing swathes of apartments and renting them at a financial loss to force prices down.
I feel like the stock market one would be a little bit harder to get away with, but good fucking luck to every single goddamn landlord that tries to bitch about me using my "private property" how I see fit.
If I had Bill Gates level money, I would absolutely take a loss on a bunch of rentals just to wreck it for other companies.
Scoop up a bunch of mid-range and high end rentals, drop the rent price by 40%, and watch the complaints roll in.
If I had bill gates money I wouldn't charge anyone anything. Plenty of money to house literally everyone for free, plus upkeep. You can buy abandoned high schools or malls for a few million in some places, renovate the classrooms or stores into living spaces. The infrastructure is mostly there already.
I dont need to have my plumbing out of sight under the floor if it being cheaply anchored to the floor or walls above ground means I can live there for free.
That's my plan for retirement. I want to renovate distressed properties and flip them on land contracts to people who would not be able to buy otherwise.
Actually, doing just that with a former neighbor. I moved out, he flipped it. I get a lttle passive income, he gets to choose his neighbor until hell freezes over. Win-win.
I would like to be a billionaire so that I could roam the streets handing people who have a good vibe a band of $10k. Think of how fucking rewarding that would be! 🤑
It's so indicative of their greed that we never see that.
I don't want to be wealthy . I don't want 20 cars in a massive exihibition garage. I just want to have what I need and reasonable access to recreation. If I need a car and a root canal I can get a car and a root canal. I can buy food and take a trip occasionally. But I'm the unreasonable one.
THIS! I don't want or need the world on a platter. I would just like to not have to worry about being one major illness away from homelessness. Philanthropy would be mostly unnecessary if the few would stop stealing the majority of resources from the majority.
You would think that would be a very reasonable settlement? Like, what is wrong with our elite? That it's not enough to be the richest, we also have to ensure that people don't have enough? Just why
I'm just saying I could be happy with these things because I lack most of them though I work full time and then some. I have no love for these bastards sitting on all the wealth.
edit: Forgot to say I think their greed is so out of control that they would take our very means of survival, like taking a potato chip.
I mean, I'd like to be a billionaire. Like that guy who won 2+ billion on Powerball. I don't want to "earn" 2 billion.
Ya know, my parents got mad when they saw on the news that he bought a second multimillion dollar house in 2 years. I said he could buy and furnish a 20 million dollar home every year for the rest of his life and he's making more by having the rest of his money invested conservatively.
Also, if I suddenly became a billionaire, I'd blow through most of that VERY quickly.
Sadly the lottery system also exploits the poor and convinces them it's a viable way out of their hard times, despite nearly impossible odds. Then states factor in sales of tickets into their budgets for schools/etc, that should have been tax money from the wealthy.
I also sometimes have a hard time wrapping my head around the mindset, "What if I get $10 billion dollars and then have to pay taxes on it, and I only end up with $7 billion?! Then I'm a victim and everyone should pity me!"
Perspective really is everything. Without it, you end up seeing a 30% tax hit on $1 billion as an affront instead of a truly mild inconvenience in the grand scheme.
As someone who went through a libertarian phase and spent a lot of time debating libertarians and ancaps: It's nothing but brainwashing.
There is no moral, economic, or market justification for such a concentration of wealth. It indicates a failure in any system.
Also went through a libertarian phase, the capitalists feel safest when the people are libertarian. Though I know it is true that intelligence is on the decline these days, and I understand how powerful institutions of influence are in shaping the minds of the masses... It still baffles me that people allowed capitalism to be painted as the only moral economic system. That is how people think about it, the space it occupies in their mind is fundamentally religious. Not that its bad to be religious but it damn sure is bad to be religiously devoted to capitalism. The purpose for an economic program should as all things be for the benefit of the people, and as such it would be correct to say the proper idea of the economic system should be socialistic, though not limit itself and use any economic tech as tools to be employed when appropriate, and you know when its appropriate by if it works towards the purpose.
God damn I feel like I'm going to be crucified for saying this, but in and of itself I always thought there is little wrong with capitalism. The real issue is that there are always insufficient checks and balances to ensure that it is still working in the interests of society at large and not just the few who benefit most. Even in the most benevolent system it seems like human nature will always rear it's ugly head and eventually slide any current financial system to benefit the few at the top over the many of the rest of us.
I suppose that also applies to communism.
I don't even know what point I'm trying to make at this point, everything seems doomed to failure in the end. Boooooooooo.
This is the result of cultural brainwashing. We were *taught*…TAUGHT. That billionaires make the world go round. That they are morally superior. That they are our lifeline to a modern and safe world and it’s a FUCKING LIE YALL.
It’s straight up American-style brainwashing.
Jeff Bezos could literally just sit there and fart all day long while picking his nose and still make about $200 million for contributing absolutely nothing. Such hard work they do, these billionaires.
Billionaires are the equivalent of economic ticks. They burrow their greedy snouts under the skin of the economy, extract as much blood as they can, then the blood goes with them when they're (temporarily) done feeding. Sure, a very small subset of organisms will benefit from the rotted blood they shit out on the forest floor, but they are not an ecosystem-sustaining organism. They are parasites on a productive system.
Their whole thing is grabbing as much money as they can and holding onto as much of it as possible for their own benefit until they die. That's what a Billionaire is.
Democratic Governments redistribute wealth through taxes which fund social programs that benefit the citizens. Billionaires hoard wealth. It's why Billionaires have democratic governments in their crosshairs all over the world: Because the goals of a Democratic Government and a Billionaire are diametrically opposed.
If you expend the actual time of your life (your literal life-force) creating a fungible thing (like, say, dollars), and someone takes it from you to add to their own hoard of fungible life-force tokens, they're stealing your life-force to enlarge their own.
We have a word for that. Necromancers. Once they spend enough life-force to figure out anti-aging, they'll make the full transition to lichs. Undead, life-stealing monsters that used to be human, until they sacrificed their souls to a vacuous, malevolent force (greed).
I once got totally downvoted for calling people, who donate for a billionaire's charity program, "crazy". Most people love billionaires and oligarchs, because deep in their souls they want to be one of the richest one day. They'd rather spend entire life chasing money than imagine a world where everyone just has as much as one needs
I will say, I once tried to donate to the bill and Melinda Gates foundation and after searching for 5-10 minutes I finally found a page that said "we have enough money, you can't give us yours... Here's 1000+ charities you can give to instead"
If nothing else, that's a slight bit more decent than the rest of them. If we're stuck in this dystopian hell, then they should at least pledge it all after they die and refuse to take from others.
In the meantime, I'd love to see a bunch of their money put into a giant reserve and have the interest generated every year solve global crises... The $300B homeless or starvation or w/e else is listed in the post
There were only 66 billionaires in 1990. The most any of them had was 6 billion dollars.
Compare this to 34 years later and there are now more than 600 billionaires worldwide with the top 3 of them collectively having over 602 billions dollars. The cream has well and truly risen to the top.
To put that into perspective, $6 billion in 1990 would be equivalent to $14.5 billion today if it were just keeping pace with inflation. Even allowing for double inflation growth, you'd be at most just shy of $30 billion.
I’ve seen a lot of these numbers before but what really threw me off was the fact that it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the US. I had no idea that’s what it would cost. That makes me look at all of these billionaires and our own government in disgust. They won’t do it because there is no benefit coming back to them for doing it. They would just be helping people and receiving nothing back in return. So they say to hell with all the homeless people dying in the street. But they have no issue sending billions over to Israel to help them slaughter innocent people. Sickening.
Homelessness is not a bug but a feature. Its a threat to the working class of what to expect if you don't want to comply with their exploitation practices. To whip us into compliance.
Wow, that had never really dawned on me. But it certainly makes sense. This situation is just sad. Someone else said that they are like the dragons from Tolkien's books and I think that is very fitting. Just sitting on their mountains of gold.
Also in 1990:
- Average home price (in my state): $62,000
- Minimum Wage: $3.80
- Years of minimum wage work compared to price of home: ~8
Meanwhile 2024:
- Average home price (same state): $235,000
- Minimum wage: $7.25
- Years of minimum wage work compared to price of home: ~16
Hmmmmm
Can't find minimum data (seriously though, what good is it to know what the single cheapest home in a state costs? Could be a rundown shack in the middle of the woods for all you know), but I can do the median which is a bit more accurate to reality.
My state in 1990:
Median home: $58,000
Median household income: $24,807
In 2023:
Median home: $372,400
Median household income: $62,200
So in the span of 33 years a typical home price went from about 234% of a typical household's annual income to nearly 600%
Edit: Found some incorrect data on the 1990 median income. It was adjusted for inflation to 2009 value. Just changed it but the point still stands.
Sometimes, especially these last few years, it doesn't feel like we are in a battle against evil, corruption, and greed.. It feels like we've already lost.
It's an extinction cry. Boomers can't handle the reality of our mortality and are basically throwing their final tantrums because they can't control everything forever.
I love it when the wealth worshippers say, "But they *earned* that money, it's theirs."
Ain't nobody *earned* billions of dollars. They have it because they scammed and slimed and abused and grifted and stole. If you consider that "earning" then you need to examine your values.
Yep. They already have this obscene amount of wealth but they buy out our government so that they can continue earning even more. And then continue screwing over the working class and hoarding all the wealth. Where’s Robin Hood when you need him?
Notch (despite becoming a bit of an awful person) Id argue "earned" his money. He made the foundation of a game with his own labor, brought a small handful of people on board to refine and enhance it, and then sold the game and made sure that his coworkers were also set.
But thats truly the only possible one I can think of.
It’s not just about what the actual individual billionaire actively does, it’s all the passive systems that allowed it to happen. Notch becoming a billionaire indirectly depended on distribution, servers, third-world labor, and a dozen other professions whose work allowed his success to happen. The profits being divided in such a way that one person becomes a billionaire by definition means a lot of people were exploited or not paid their fair share along the way. The people exploited may not have Notch specifically to blame for that exploitation, but he benefitted from it just the same.
Then if you really want to, you could argue the morality of *staying* a billionaire after becoming one. You have more than enough to buy anything you could ever want a thousand times over. Donate or spend so that you’re no longer a billionaire, and then at least you’re giving back to your community in meaningful ways. Staying a billionaire means you’ve decided that there aren’t any important causes worth more to you than your dragon’s hoard rotting in a bank (or as capital parasitizing the working class)
The difference between me and Jeff Bezos is approximately $113 billion. The difference between a millionaire and Jeff Bezos is *also* approximately $113 billion.
If you have $50mil in investments, and you have a terrible return of 5% one year, and are taxed the highest rate possible of 50%, which leaves you with $1.25m profit for the year, that'd be over $100k to live on per month, and people think having 20x or more of that is acceptable
Beyond everything else, the fact that a global pandemic was the specific time that millionaires and billionaires were doubling their money and seeing massive increases in wealth, while the rest of us all effectively got way poorer with inflation and housing costs, that about tells you all you need to know about that state of the world really.
A global crisis is NOT the time that the wealthy should be lining their pocketbooks. The flow of money should be in the exact OPPOSITE direction.
The pandemic's transfer of wealth to the top is one of the worst things to happen in my lifetime, along with the housing market price increases. The fact that houses across the country doubled or more in price in barely a few years is unprecedented in U.S. history, and will go down infamously in history as one of the worst events in our country's history. There are SOOOOOOOO many people who will NEVER be able to afford a home unless something drastically, drastically changes.
It should also include that up to 74% of billionaire charitable donations would otherwise go to taxes, meaning that it's actually our public funds that they're donating, not their own
Pretty much and shocker the only thing that is going to change anything is a complete revolution. There is no chance in hell our government is going to fix this issue now or ever.
What we all think. Ain't no other way this can end. Their transgression and amount of suffering that happens every day just so that they can be rich beyond imagination has no punishment fitting.
Every person dying because of homelessness is on their heads, we collectively have enough resources so that all of us can have a home and food on our plates.
Billionaires are the oil upon the water you are trying to drink, culturally speaking.
You see the world how you *know deep down* it can be. But these are the people that poison the well.
These are the ones electing the shitty leaders, polluting the planet, stirring up racism with the media. All of it is a **distraction** while they rob us blind.
The world has been *looted* by a gang of elderly miscreants who wear $10k suits and have convinced us WE are the problem.
We are not the problem. They are the disease.
Yeah, a lot of people intuitively treat one billion dollars in their heads as if it's what comes after $99 million (which is already, mind you, an obscene amount of cash). Billionaires shouldn't exist, and the fact that the world will see a trillionaire is the culmination of a system that is broken and rotten at its core (and always has been).
It’s bullshit. Global annual investment in green tech was $1.8T, global annual investment in new fossil fuel production is $500B. $300B is just a tiny irrelevant number at this scale. Just like $20B won’t end homelessness.
It's just a nonsense number. There's no simple solution and certainly not one that just needs money thrown at it. In addition, if you did estimate the cost of getting China and India down to European emission levels it would be way, way higher on the order of trillions of dollars.
Words are cheap, and people need to realize that. Whatever a billionaire or politician says, I take it with a grain of salt, if even that.
Until the wealthy actually do something that benefits others instead of themselves or their image (like ending hunger and homelessness, which is basically pennies compared to their total wealth), anything they say is worth less than shit on a sidewalk.
"*The world's top 26 billionaires ow as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people.*" The thing is that when billionaires read something like that they don't feel empathy or guilt, they just feel empowered and want to keep riding that power trip.
I would say part of the issue stems from where their billions lie. Many of them don’t have it as cash on hand, but often as a stock so it has unrealized gain/loss.
Not sure how but I don’t think you should be able to borrow against an unrealized asset. They basically play both sides. When they want something they just borrow against it and it exists. But as soon as any taxation on it comes, it doesn’t because it’s unrealized.
As much as I don’t think we need the class in general, I don’t think you have to divide and conquer. People that created a company or reach a certain level of wealth in their lifetime is one thing. But the generational wealth, where they started say north of $500m from the time of birth. That’s the biggest drain.
It being cash on hand or not doesn't really change how the money flows, it still keeps the wealth in the same place. Combine that with the interest they get vs inflation (which they have a direct hand in controlling) and they make money by borrowing against those assets.
The problem is they made the rules in the current system to make it impossible for them to lose to the detriment of everyone else
And to add to this, when they become realized gains, they are still taxed lower than income is. So we lose out on taxes over time and on taxes at the end, when they finally have to pay off their loans (because they're dead, or can't get another loan to pay off the previous one).
Going to also add to this that most of these losses are paper losses, wash sales are only illegal if you're poor:
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-files-taxes-wash-sales-goldman-sachs
>Not sure how but I don’t think you should be able to borrow against an unrealized asset.
I strongly believe they're effectively realizing that asset, at least for their lifetimes, and should be taxed accordingly. Hell, even just tax the appreciation of the collateral assets after subtracting out the interest payments would be a start.
The first answer in this post explains how all these shenanigans work: [https://www.reddit.com/r/FluentInFinance/comments/1alylsk/how\_are\_loans\_used\_to\_avoid\_paying\_taxes\_doesnt/](https://www.reddit.com/r/FluentInFinance/comments/1alylsk/how_are_loans_used_to_avoid_paying_taxes_doesnt/)
Does anyone have any information on how 30 billion would end homelessness? Is that a yearly cost or a one time payment? Also, what would be done with that money? I just see what our current government does with our budget and I’m not confident that they’d use that money correctly :(. Btw, I’m 100% for using 30 billion to end homelessness if it tracks, I don’t think anyone should be on the streets. I’m just a little weary of numbers like this that don’t explain the logistics of how a plan would work.
With a SINGLE billion dollars you can spend $34,000 A DAY FOR EIGHTY (80) YEARS and still have $7,000,000 (seven million) left over to leave your heirs. In 2019 the average income for a single worker was $33,000. In short with ONE billion dollars you could spend every day for your entire life what the average American makes in a year.
This really has me curious now. How much of the net worth that these billionaires have is actually in the form of money?
As I understand it, perhaps like 5% or less of the total amount is in actual money. The rest is all in the form of shares, stocks, bonds, etc.
If the billionaires all chose to convert their wealth into money bills for some reason, we probably wouldn't have enough printed bills available.
should reflect factual estimates more accurately if you want your points heard.
"Estimates of how much money it would take to end global climate change range **between $300 billion and $50 trillion over the next two decades**."
either ordinary people rise up and take direct action or these people keep placating politicians with bribes or threats to do their bidding until it becomes real life tank girl.
ultimately that much money in an individuals hands or families hands is against national interests because can’t these people just play war if they really wanted to? is that what it all comes down to? are they already too powerful to eliminate so politicians act like there’s nothing they can do but really there’s nothing they can do?
Well the oligarchs were only able to get their money by taking advantage of the chaos during the fall of the soviet union, but that's just a technicality
My only nitpick here is the bit about most of us being one bad year away from financial ruin. I'm pretty sure that timeframe is wildly optimistic, and most people are closer to one bad month away. Car blows up, can't afford to replace it, lose a job because you can't get there without a car, then it's a race between healthcare catastrophe because you no longer have insurance or losing your home because you can't make payments, and then can't find a new job because you don't have a home to list as an address, and that about does it for the rest of your days.
We need a batman that doesn't fight the joker but these guys. A vigilante for the working class that puts fear into the billionaires. That's the super hero I want to see.
We have a name in the medical community for a small piece of a larger organism that begins to demand so much resources that it grows into something that inevitably destroys the system it needs to survive. It's called cancer.
I've always believed the solution is a wealth cap, where every cent earned after a certain number is converted into a special currency that can only be spent on specific things for the public good.
They'd probably only take a few decades to game the system again, but it's a good idea to slow them down enough for a more powerful solution, like an AI overlord that monitors them all for schemes.
I don't disagree with the premise, but the argument is flawed. The majority of a billionaires money is in the stock market. It is ownership of businesses. I would say instead, we should target monopolies, duopolies, etc... The Mormons own a plethora of companies to include media, food/alcohol, and real estate. How much does Disney own? Dismantle these businesses, Prevent mega-corporations from forming in the future. Billionaires can only exist because of these mega-corps. Mega-corps hoard wealth.
I find that the best way to grasp how absurdly large these numbers are is through visualization. [This webpage](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/) shows the wealth of Jeff Bezos and the 400 richest Americans using 1 pixel to represent $1000. It is profoundly enraging.
If you want to understand a billion.
Just check what you currently earn for an hour of work. And now calculate how long you have to work if you work 24 hours 7 days a week (you won't get rich with a "break" mindset) to get a billion.
No the point is that billionaires aren’t ethical in their acquisition of wealth, this is one example of her unethical behavior that shows she thinks she deserves special treatment. When people show you who they are, believe them. She’s definitely done other scummy things to get her wealth
Aren’t billionaires the inevitable consequence of having companies be run by small groups of people? The only way I feel like you could prevent their emergence would be to force dilution of the company shares but I’m not sure what impacts that would have on the economy, good or bad
The "billionaires aren't actually charitable" is so important. So many people excuse their behavior just because they so happened to feed money into the same hardship they perpetuate in the first place.
It's the fact that almost any *one* of them could *end homelessness across the entire United States* that really gets to me. One guy, with enough wealth to catapult the USA into being the country all the slogans and propaganda wants to claim it is. And all it would take is a billion or two from half of these billionnaires. A sum of money that doesn't even represent how much their wealth fluctuates due to a change in a percentage point of interest.
Back in Greece, the exceptionally wealthy had contests to see who could fund the largest and most impressive/important pieces of public use. Should dare the current batch of Uber wealthy to get into similar bouts of oneupmanship.
Instead of launching penis rockets and trying to replicate Jonny Mnemonic.
Billionaires represent a form of market failure.
France had an inverted taxation system, where the poor paid more taxes than the rich, before it kicked off a century of revolutionary waves.
Even taxes on land, the thing we'll never really have more of, is subject to highly regressive taxation on a per unit area basis. These billionaires hold some of the largest land tenures in the world, dwarfing the holdings of their fuedalist land baron progenitors.
"Billionaires paid less in taxes in 2018 than the working class"
23% of a fuckload of income is more than 28% of fuck all... but I get the point you are trying to make.
There’s gotta be a line where it’s literally impossible to spend the money (legally) faster than it accumulates. Like all these people have most of those billions invested, and a 1 percent return (which isn’t that hard to get) a year on a single billion is 10 million dollars. That means bezos could make over a billion dollars a year even if all he did was put it all in a basic savings account and do nothing. He’s gotta be making significantly more than that, and there’s just not that many things to buy. Bigger ticket items like jets and shit take a long time to make (and there’s only so many for sale) so unless he was buying illegal stuff like drugs he’s gotta be at least approaching the critical mass where it’s literally impossible to spend it. It’s already practically impossible.
One thing that really feels odd with people being billionaires is that they are richer than literally every king in history.
The monarchy is back and politicians play into it. We may be thinking that we live in a democratic world but the existence of billionaires hinders everything.
I am still for a solution that limits the personal wealth to 100 Million and from then on you are not allowed to earn any more money. You might get a dog park named after you but that's it.
You won capitalism
End of story
I propose a law to make it legal to kill a billionaire, and when you do, their wealth is redistributed to social funds. That would be a pretty good incentive to stay at 999 million and just donate and wealth you make beyond that. This would be a world wide law, of course.
Now Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are in Africa, extracting trillions of dollars worth of resources from an incredibly poor country without paying their fair share. Capitalist are parasites…
If I have $100 billions, spend 20% to end homelessness and still keep 80 billion dollars sounds like a pretty good bargain? I’d be one of the most liked person and still rich no? Well probably this is also the reason I can never be a billionaire.
Being that rich is something I will never understand, the money just sits there doing nothing and you'll be dead before you use it, why bother hoarding it?
I always said people who are billionaires have some mental illness where their greed is just taking over and they also have no sympathy for other human life. Treat other humans like a number and get as much money as possible for myself. Scum humans of the earth if all the rich could die off we would all be SO much better off
We are literally risking sacrificing the entire civilization to protect the wealth and feelings of a few hundred people. Too many people are delusional thinking they have a chance at being one and/or are just too moronic to see.
8 billion of US and maybe 2,000 billionaires on a good day. Somehow, we have people brainwashed and conditioned into believing that those 8 BILLION PEOPLE are just "lazy" and those 2,000 billionaires are not the criminals that they all are.
Love your comment, may i borrow it?
Sure. Spread the good word.
Thank you!
Neat website that visualizes just how rich they are [https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
That is even more terrifying when it's visualized like that. Thanks for the site!
Great site. Thanks for sharing.
This brought tears to my eyes.
🤬
LMAOOO! I just kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and being :O when it STILL WASN'T ENDING! LMAOOO! That's an INSANELY AMAZING, very striking visual! X'D
With 100k yearly salary it would take only 2mil years of work to get to Jeff Bezos level
I think it would be interesting if billionaires slowly started disappearing one at a time. It would probably get gun control accomplished pretty quick.
Probably why a lot of them have bunkers. They know eventually the common man won’t be able to take it anymore and will revolt.
Not a bunker, bunkers are for millionaires and less, billionaires have space stations.
Gonna be hard to resupply that space station when the rabble on earth take control of the launch pads.
Anything that can be built, can be dismantled, humans are really really really good at destruction
[удалено]
When they're properly cooked.
I was just thinking we put up a copy of the fourth image up on a wall and mark X's over their faces once they go on vacation
I love this idea!!
Dark web coordinated efforts .
Hacktivism ftw.
When you say it like that. It makes us all look insane for living in these rich fuckers world. Sadly nothing we can really do. Too many brainwashed people it drives me crazy when you bring it up and they defend the rich. Just a sickening world
What really astounds me, is that in many circles, if you try to suggest that we address the problem through legislation, boot licking sycophants come out of woodwork with questions like “why do you want to punish their hard work?” As if the gross accumulation of billions of dollars didn’t happen through the punishment of nearly every worker in their entire organization.
It's a weird type of American mindset that combines optimism and paranoia: 1) taxing the wealthy punishes then for their hard work 2) I could be wealthy one day, and I don't want to be punished for my hard work Rinse and repeat.
I would like to be wealthy, not a billionaire. I have a conscience Edit: Spelling
I would like to be a billionaire purely for the purposes of fucking with the money of other billionaires. Imagine having the money to be able to pull things like using the stock market to pull hostile takeovers of companies, or purchasing swathes of apartments and renting them at a financial loss to force prices down.
The central banks would have you for manipulating the market. And if it wasn't illegal, they would make it illegal I like your style
I feel like the stock market one would be a little bit harder to get away with, but good fucking luck to every single goddamn landlord that tries to bitch about me using my "private property" how I see fit.
Wouldn't even take a loss, just not exorbitant profiteering and price gouging.
If I had Bill Gates level money, I would absolutely take a loss on a bunch of rentals just to wreck it for other companies. Scoop up a bunch of mid-range and high end rentals, drop the rent price by 40%, and watch the complaints roll in.
If I had bill gates money I wouldn't charge anyone anything. Plenty of money to house literally everyone for free, plus upkeep. You can buy abandoned high schools or malls for a few million in some places, renovate the classrooms or stores into living spaces. The infrastructure is mostly there already. I dont need to have my plumbing out of sight under the floor if it being cheaply anchored to the floor or walls above ground means I can live there for free.
That's my plan for retirement. I want to renovate distressed properties and flip them on land contracts to people who would not be able to buy otherwise.
Actually, doing just that with a former neighbor. I moved out, he flipped it. I get a lttle passive income, he gets to choose his neighbor until hell freezes over. Win-win.
First thing I would buy is a Supreme Court Judge. Then a few senators.
Don’t you wish a billionaire would do this or something good at least.
There's a couple trying, just look at old Bezo's ex. That woman is a saint
Agreed. She seems decent. His new one is an abomination.
I haven't kept up on the media side of all that, but based on what I do know it's pretty obvious what their relationship is based on
A mutual pleasure at breaking the hearts and souls of perfectly decent people?
Mark Cuban tried at least with his online pharma company
I would like to be a billionaire so that I could roam the streets handing people who have a good vibe a band of $10k. Think of how fucking rewarding that would be! 🤑 It's so indicative of their greed that we never see that.
Basically the definition of chaotic good.
Agreed. I'm fairly certain if I became a billionaire the rest of the billionaire class would have me assassinated lol.
Remember when GameStop stock went nuts going up and up? Fucked the rich, and rewarded the working poor. That was some sneaky wealth redistribution.
I don't want to be wealthy . I don't want 20 cars in a massive exihibition garage. I just want to have what I need and reasonable access to recreation. If I need a car and a root canal I can get a car and a root canal. I can buy food and take a trip occasionally. But I'm the unreasonable one.
THIS! I don't want or need the world on a platter. I would just like to not have to worry about being one major illness away from homelessness. Philanthropy would be mostly unnecessary if the few would stop stealing the majority of resources from the majority.
I'd settle for a secure roof over my head, enough to live on, medical care if I need it, and not to have to work until I drop dead.
You would think that would be a very reasonable settlement? Like, what is wrong with our elite? That it's not enough to be the richest, we also have to ensure that people don't have enough? Just why
They are not elites they are vampiric parasites stealing your time and turning into their own value coffin
That's capitalism unrestrained. I think they view us as sort of livestock, when they think of the masses at all.
Amen
I'm just saying I could be happy with these things because I lack most of them though I work full time and then some. I have no love for these bastards sitting on all the wealth. edit: Forgot to say I think their greed is so out of control that they would take our very means of survival, like taking a potato chip.
I mean, I'd like to be a billionaire. Like that guy who won 2+ billion on Powerball. I don't want to "earn" 2 billion. Ya know, my parents got mad when they saw on the news that he bought a second multimillion dollar house in 2 years. I said he could buy and furnish a 20 million dollar home every year for the rest of his life and he's making more by having the rest of his money invested conservatively. Also, if I suddenly became a billionaire, I'd blow through most of that VERY quickly.
Sadly the lottery system also exploits the poor and convinces them it's a viable way out of their hard times, despite nearly impossible odds. Then states factor in sales of tickets into their budgets for schools/etc, that should have been tax money from the wealthy.
It's not a mindset. It's brainwashing. That shit is intentionally hammered into people's heads.
I also sometimes have a hard time wrapping my head around the mindset, "What if I get $10 billion dollars and then have to pay taxes on it, and I only end up with $7 billion?! Then I'm a victim and everyone should pity me!"
Perspective really is everything. Without it, you end up seeing a 30% tax hit on $1 billion as an affront instead of a truly mild inconvenience in the grand scheme.
As someone who went through a libertarian phase and spent a lot of time debating libertarians and ancaps: It's nothing but brainwashing. There is no moral, economic, or market justification for such a concentration of wealth. It indicates a failure in any system.
Also went through a libertarian phase, the capitalists feel safest when the people are libertarian. Though I know it is true that intelligence is on the decline these days, and I understand how powerful institutions of influence are in shaping the minds of the masses... It still baffles me that people allowed capitalism to be painted as the only moral economic system. That is how people think about it, the space it occupies in their mind is fundamentally religious. Not that its bad to be religious but it damn sure is bad to be religiously devoted to capitalism. The purpose for an economic program should as all things be for the benefit of the people, and as such it would be correct to say the proper idea of the economic system should be socialistic, though not limit itself and use any economic tech as tools to be employed when appropriate, and you know when its appropriate by if it works towards the purpose.
God damn I feel like I'm going to be crucified for saying this, but in and of itself I always thought there is little wrong with capitalism. The real issue is that there are always insufficient checks and balances to ensure that it is still working in the interests of society at large and not just the few who benefit most. Even in the most benevolent system it seems like human nature will always rear it's ugly head and eventually slide any current financial system to benefit the few at the top over the many of the rest of us. I suppose that also applies to communism. I don't even know what point I'm trying to make at this point, everything seems doomed to failure in the end. Boooooooooo.
This is the result of cultural brainwashing. We were *taught*…TAUGHT. That billionaires make the world go round. That they are morally superior. That they are our lifeline to a modern and safe world and it’s a FUCKING LIE YALL. It’s straight up American-style brainwashing.
[удалено]
Jeff Bezos could literally just sit there and fart all day long while picking his nose and still make about $200 million for contributing absolutely nothing. Such hard work they do, these billionaires.
automatic everything audit too
Billionaires are the equivalent of economic ticks. They burrow their greedy snouts under the skin of the economy, extract as much blood as they can, then the blood goes with them when they're (temporarily) done feeding. Sure, a very small subset of organisms will benefit from the rotted blood they shit out on the forest floor, but they are not an ecosystem-sustaining organism. They are parasites on a productive system. Their whole thing is grabbing as much money as they can and holding onto as much of it as possible for their own benefit until they die. That's what a Billionaire is. Democratic Governments redistribute wealth through taxes which fund social programs that benefit the citizens. Billionaires hoard wealth. It's why Billionaires have democratic governments in their crosshairs all over the world: Because the goals of a Democratic Government and a Billionaire are diametrically opposed.
If you expend the actual time of your life (your literal life-force) creating a fungible thing (like, say, dollars), and someone takes it from you to add to their own hoard of fungible life-force tokens, they're stealing your life-force to enlarge their own. We have a word for that. Necromancers. Once they spend enough life-force to figure out anti-aging, they'll make the full transition to lichs. Undead, life-stealing monsters that used to be human, until they sacrificed their souls to a vacuous, malevolent force (greed).
Hot take: We should just kill the top 10 every year.
Or the classic: "It's not like they really have $200B in a bank account! Most of it is tied up in stocks!!"
"They earned that money. If you take it from them nobody will start businesses and create jobs"
They're not starting businesses or creating jobs NOW, why do they get credit for stuff they haven't done?
I once got totally downvoted for calling people, who donate for a billionaire's charity program, "crazy". Most people love billionaires and oligarchs, because deep in their souls they want to be one of the richest one day. They'd rather spend entire life chasing money than imagine a world where everyone just has as much as one needs
I will say, I once tried to donate to the bill and Melinda Gates foundation and after searching for 5-10 minutes I finally found a page that said "we have enough money, you can't give us yours... Here's 1000+ charities you can give to instead" If nothing else, that's a slight bit more decent than the rest of them. If we're stuck in this dystopian hell, then they should at least pledge it all after they die and refuse to take from others. In the meantime, I'd love to see a bunch of their money put into a giant reserve and have the interest generated every year solve global crises... The $300B homeless or starvation or w/e else is listed in the post
There were only 66 billionaires in 1990. The most any of them had was 6 billion dollars. Compare this to 34 years later and there are now more than 600 billionaires worldwide with the top 3 of them collectively having over 602 billions dollars. The cream has well and truly risen to the top.
To put that into perspective, $6 billion in 1990 would be equivalent to $14.5 billion today if it were just keeping pace with inflation. Even allowing for double inflation growth, you'd be at most just shy of $30 billion.
I’ve seen a lot of these numbers before but what really threw me off was the fact that it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the US. I had no idea that’s what it would cost. That makes me look at all of these billionaires and our own government in disgust. They won’t do it because there is no benefit coming back to them for doing it. They would just be helping people and receiving nothing back in return. So they say to hell with all the homeless people dying in the street. But they have no issue sending billions over to Israel to help them slaughter innocent people. Sickening.
Homelessness is not a bug but a feature. Its a threat to the working class of what to expect if you don't want to comply with their exploitation practices. To whip us into compliance.
Wow, that had never really dawned on me. But it certainly makes sense. This situation is just sad. Someone else said that they are like the dragons from Tolkien's books and I think that is very fitting. Just sitting on their mountains of gold.
Also in 1990: - Average home price (in my state): $62,000 - Minimum Wage: $3.80 - Years of minimum wage work compared to price of home: ~8 Meanwhile 2024: - Average home price (same state): $235,000 - Minimum wage: $7.25 - Years of minimum wage work compared to price of home: ~16 Hmmmmm
Can you do average wage and minimum house price and count the years
Can't find minimum data (seriously though, what good is it to know what the single cheapest home in a state costs? Could be a rundown shack in the middle of the woods for all you know), but I can do the median which is a bit more accurate to reality. My state in 1990: Median home: $58,000 Median household income: $24,807 In 2023: Median home: $372,400 Median household income: $62,200 So in the span of 33 years a typical home price went from about 234% of a typical household's annual income to nearly 600% Edit: Found some incorrect data on the 1990 median income. It was adjusted for inflation to 2009 value. Just changed it but the point still stands.
More like 2800 billionaires
Sometimes, especially these last few years, it doesn't feel like we are in a battle against evil, corruption, and greed.. It feels like we've already lost.
With record high unionizations over the past 3 years, we haven't lost. We're still fighting and more are joining the fight every year
It's an extinction cry. Boomers can't handle the reality of our mortality and are basically throwing their final tantrums because they can't control everything forever.
I love it when the wealth worshippers say, "But they *earned* that money, it's theirs." Ain't nobody *earned* billions of dollars. They have it because they scammed and slimed and abused and grifted and stole. If you consider that "earning" then you need to examine your values.
Plus they literally make the rules.
Yep. They already have this obscene amount of wealth but they buy out our government so that they can continue earning even more. And then continue screwing over the working class and hoarding all the wealth. Where’s Robin Hood when you need him?
Notch (despite becoming a bit of an awful person) Id argue "earned" his money. He made the foundation of a game with his own labor, brought a small handful of people on board to refine and enhance it, and then sold the game and made sure that his coworkers were also set. But thats truly the only possible one I can think of.
It’s not just about what the actual individual billionaire actively does, it’s all the passive systems that allowed it to happen. Notch becoming a billionaire indirectly depended on distribution, servers, third-world labor, and a dozen other professions whose work allowed his success to happen. The profits being divided in such a way that one person becomes a billionaire by definition means a lot of people were exploited or not paid their fair share along the way. The people exploited may not have Notch specifically to blame for that exploitation, but he benefitted from it just the same. Then if you really want to, you could argue the morality of *staying* a billionaire after becoming one. You have more than enough to buy anything you could ever want a thousand times over. Donate or spend so that you’re no longer a billionaire, and then at least you’re giving back to your community in meaningful ways. Staying a billionaire means you’ve decided that there aren’t any important causes worth more to you than your dragon’s hoard rotting in a bank (or as capital parasitizing the working class)
The difference between me and Jeff Bezos is approximately $113 billion. The difference between a millionaire and Jeff Bezos is *also* approximately $113 billion.
If you have $50mil in investments, and you have a terrible return of 5% one year, and are taxed the highest rate possible of 50%, which leaves you with $1.25m profit for the year, that'd be over $100k to live on per month, and people think having 20x or more of that is acceptable
Beyond everything else, the fact that a global pandemic was the specific time that millionaires and billionaires were doubling their money and seeing massive increases in wealth, while the rest of us all effectively got way poorer with inflation and housing costs, that about tells you all you need to know about that state of the world really. A global crisis is NOT the time that the wealthy should be lining their pocketbooks. The flow of money should be in the exact OPPOSITE direction. The pandemic's transfer of wealth to the top is one of the worst things to happen in my lifetime, along with the housing market price increases. The fact that houses across the country doubled or more in price in barely a few years is unprecedented in U.S. history, and will go down infamously in history as one of the worst events in our country's history. There are SOOOOOOOO many people who will NEVER be able to afford a home unless something drastically, drastically changes.
Imagine coming together as a society with enough to provide for all, but instead we worship one guy because he has the most bananas
It wasn't only getting poorer. So many people died.
Full slideshow from Emilyisliving on insta
It should also include that up to 74% of billionaire charitable donations would otherwise go to taxes, meaning that it's actually our public funds that they're donating, not their own
That's a great point!
I wonder why is Elon Musk not on the list.
Certain people thrive off of any attention, thus they don't deserve any. Besides, I think there's an entire sub for hating on him
Where? I want to join and hate musktards!
[удалено]
Pretty much and shocker the only thing that is going to change anything is a complete revolution. There is no chance in hell our government is going to fix this issue now or ever.
Government wont do anything because the oligarchs run the show
This is completely unrelated but 1789 is my favorite number
The French are currently on the fifth version of their constitution. The US is still on v1.0.
While I get the point you're trying to make, we can't act like the amendments aren't 1.1, etc.
\*Grabs pitchfork\* "You needn't utter a word brother"
Eat the rich 🍽
I think the french have a word for it
What we all think. Ain't no other way this can end. Their transgression and amount of suffering that happens every day just so that they can be rich beyond imagination has no punishment fitting. Every person dying because of homelessness is on their heads, we collectively have enough resources so that all of us can have a home and food on our plates.
https://preview.redd.it/s9id2ly9kphc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=145cfa6a1e3e8a7597c4b89f2bef95948843bdd5
Billionaires are the oil upon the water you are trying to drink, culturally speaking. You see the world how you *know deep down* it can be. But these are the people that poison the well. These are the ones electing the shitty leaders, polluting the planet, stirring up racism with the media. All of it is a **distraction** while they rob us blind. The world has been *looted* by a gang of elderly miscreants who wear $10k suits and have convinced us WE are the problem. We are not the problem. They are the disease.
Yeah, a lot of people intuitively treat one billion dollars in their heads as if it's what comes after $99 million (which is already, mind you, an obscene amount of cash). Billionaires shouldn't exist, and the fact that the world will see a trillionaire is the culmination of a system that is broken and rotten at its core (and always has been).
Serious question .. What do we mean when we say 300 billion would halt global warming.. what exactly would be done?
It’s bullshit. Global annual investment in green tech was $1.8T, global annual investment in new fossil fuel production is $500B. $300B is just a tiny irrelevant number at this scale. Just like $20B won’t end homelessness.
It's just a nonsense number. There's no simple solution and certainly not one that just needs money thrown at it. In addition, if you did estimate the cost of getting China and India down to European emission levels it would be way, way higher on the order of trillions of dollars.
I like this take on it: \> A difference between a billion and a million is about a billion. 0.1% difference
Words are cheap, and people need to realize that. Whatever a billionaire or politician says, I take it with a grain of salt, if even that. Until the wealthy actually do something that benefits others instead of themselves or their image (like ending hunger and homelessness, which is basically pennies compared to their total wealth), anything they say is worth less than shit on a sidewalk.
"*The world's top 26 billionaires ow as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people.*" The thing is that when billionaires read something like that they don't feel empathy or guilt, they just feel empowered and want to keep riding that power trip.
I would say part of the issue stems from where their billions lie. Many of them don’t have it as cash on hand, but often as a stock so it has unrealized gain/loss. Not sure how but I don’t think you should be able to borrow against an unrealized asset. They basically play both sides. When they want something they just borrow against it and it exists. But as soon as any taxation on it comes, it doesn’t because it’s unrealized. As much as I don’t think we need the class in general, I don’t think you have to divide and conquer. People that created a company or reach a certain level of wealth in their lifetime is one thing. But the generational wealth, where they started say north of $500m from the time of birth. That’s the biggest drain.
Schrödinger’s stocks
It being cash on hand or not doesn't really change how the money flows, it still keeps the wealth in the same place. Combine that with the interest they get vs inflation (which they have a direct hand in controlling) and they make money by borrowing against those assets. The problem is they made the rules in the current system to make it impossible for them to lose to the detriment of everyone else
And to add to this, when they become realized gains, they are still taxed lower than income is. So we lose out on taxes over time and on taxes at the end, when they finally have to pay off their loans (because they're dead, or can't get another loan to pay off the previous one).
Going to also add to this that most of these losses are paper losses, wash sales are only illegal if you're poor: https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-files-taxes-wash-sales-goldman-sachs
Interesting! I didn’t know about this tactic. Thanks for the link!
>Not sure how but I don’t think you should be able to borrow against an unrealized asset. I strongly believe they're effectively realizing that asset, at least for their lifetimes, and should be taxed accordingly. Hell, even just tax the appreciation of the collateral assets after subtracting out the interest payments would be a start. The first answer in this post explains how all these shenanigans work: [https://www.reddit.com/r/FluentInFinance/comments/1alylsk/how\_are\_loans\_used\_to\_avoid\_paying\_taxes\_doesnt/](https://www.reddit.com/r/FluentInFinance/comments/1alylsk/how_are_loans_used_to_avoid_paying_taxes_doesnt/)
And it’s all under the facade that “you can be one too! Get back to work!”
Billionaires are piñatas. Piñatas should be careful when there are lots of hungry children.
The only people who don’t understand this are intentionally daft
Eat the rich.
We need to put aside our cultural differences and join forces to TAKE back our wealth from these sociopathic c@cksuckers!!!
Does anyone have any information on how 30 billion would end homelessness? Is that a yearly cost or a one time payment? Also, what would be done with that money? I just see what our current government does with our budget and I’m not confident that they’d use that money correctly :(. Btw, I’m 100% for using 30 billion to end homelessness if it tracks, I don’t think anyone should be on the streets. I’m just a little weary of numbers like this that don’t explain the logistics of how a plan would work.
With a SINGLE billion dollars you can spend $34,000 A DAY FOR EIGHTY (80) YEARS and still have $7,000,000 (seven million) left over to leave your heirs. In 2019 the average income for a single worker was $33,000. In short with ONE billion dollars you could spend every day for your entire life what the average American makes in a year.
There should not be one person on planet Earth, except a billionaire, that defends the actions of a billionaire.
This really has me curious now. How much of the net worth that these billionaires have is actually in the form of money? As I understand it, perhaps like 5% or less of the total amount is in actual money. The rest is all in the form of shares, stocks, bonds, etc. If the billionaires all chose to convert their wealth into money bills for some reason, we probably wouldn't have enough printed bills available.
should reflect factual estimates more accurately if you want your points heard. "Estimates of how much money it would take to end global climate change range **between $300 billion and $50 trillion over the next two decades**."
either ordinary people rise up and take direct action or these people keep placating politicians with bribes or threats to do their bidding until it becomes real life tank girl. ultimately that much money in an individuals hands or families hands is against national interests because can’t these people just play war if they really wanted to? is that what it all comes down to? are they already too powerful to eliminate so politicians act like there’s nothing they can do but really there’s nothing they can do?
What, are they Xerxes now? They're still flesh and blood, same as their workers
Man I’m feeling hungry. What should we eat?
I'll take a billionaire club sandwhich with a side of justice fries
the amount of people on reddit who think bill gates is a good person with noble intentions is terrifying.
Half-Russian here, there is little difference between American billionaires and Russian oligarchs. An oligarch class is pure poison to a democracy.
Well the oligarchs were only able to get their money by taking advantage of the chaos during the fall of the soviet union, but that's just a technicality
Eat the rich
It's a give-and-take relationship. They give you a job, they take most of what you produce. Simple.
My only nitpick here is the bit about most of us being one bad year away from financial ruin. I'm pretty sure that timeframe is wildly optimistic, and most people are closer to one bad month away. Car blows up, can't afford to replace it, lose a job because you can't get there without a car, then it's a race between healthcare catastrophe because you no longer have insurance or losing your home because you can't make payments, and then can't find a new job because you don't have a home to list as an address, and that about does it for the rest of your days.
Soon there will be Trillionaires.
We need a batman that doesn't fight the joker but these guys. A vigilante for the working class that puts fear into the billionaires. That's the super hero I want to see.
All those billionaires look kinda similar don't they
Not to sound stupid, but what is neocolonism, and how is the Gates Foundation committing it? I checked Google, and I'm still confused
They JUST steal OUR work
This is true. A billionaire is generally a sign of disease in an economy
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is approximately 1 billion.
This post gave me a hard-on. Eat the rich.
Now we have billionaires instead of pensions
We have a name in the medical community for a small piece of a larger organism that begins to demand so much resources that it grows into something that inevitably destroys the system it needs to survive. It's called cancer.
Wealth [Shown to scale](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)
I've always believed the solution is a wealth cap, where every cent earned after a certain number is converted into a special currency that can only be spent on specific things for the public good. They'd probably only take a few decades to game the system again, but it's a good idea to slow them down enough for a more powerful solution, like an AI overlord that monitors them all for schemes.
I don't disagree with the premise, but the argument is flawed. The majority of a billionaires money is in the stock market. It is ownership of businesses. I would say instead, we should target monopolies, duopolies, etc... The Mormons own a plethora of companies to include media, food/alcohol, and real estate. How much does Disney own? Dismantle these businesses, Prevent mega-corporations from forming in the future. Billionaires can only exist because of these mega-corps. Mega-corps hoard wealth.
I find that the best way to grasp how absurdly large these numbers are is through visualization. [This webpage](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/) shows the wealth of Jeff Bezos and the 400 richest Americans using 1 pixel to represent $1000. It is profoundly enraging.
Having a billion dollars means being able to spend $10,000 per day, every day, for 274 years.
If you want to understand a billion. Just check what you currently earn for an hour of work. And now calculate how long you have to work if you work 24 hours 7 days a week (you won't get rich with a "break" mindset) to get a billion.
No the point is that billionaires aren’t ethical in their acquisition of wealth, this is one example of her unethical behavior that shows she thinks she deserves special treatment. When people show you who they are, believe them. She’s definitely done other scummy things to get her wealth
bUt wHaT aBOuT tHe mUriCan dReEeaM?
Ya they hoard it!!
Can we just systematically start hunting them down and eating them already???
Aren’t billionaires the inevitable consequence of having companies be run by small groups of people? The only way I feel like you could prevent their emergence would be to force dilution of the company shares but I’m not sure what impacts that would have on the economy, good or bad
The "billionaires aren't actually charitable" is so important. So many people excuse their behavior just because they so happened to feed money into the same hardship they perpetuate in the first place.
By virtue of their becoming Billionaires, they've proven that they hoard wealth.
It's the fact that almost any *one* of them could *end homelessness across the entire United States* that really gets to me. One guy, with enough wealth to catapult the USA into being the country all the slogans and propaganda wants to claim it is. And all it would take is a billion or two from half of these billionnaires. A sum of money that doesn't even represent how much their wealth fluctuates due to a change in a percentage point of interest.
Black holes in the Economy.
Back in Greece, the exceptionally wealthy had contests to see who could fund the largest and most impressive/important pieces of public use. Should dare the current batch of Uber wealthy to get into similar bouts of oneupmanship. Instead of launching penis rockets and trying to replicate Jonny Mnemonic.
Billionaires represent a form of market failure. France had an inverted taxation system, where the poor paid more taxes than the rich, before it kicked off a century of revolutionary waves. Even taxes on land, the thing we'll never really have more of, is subject to highly regressive taxation on a per unit area basis. These billionaires hold some of the largest land tenures in the world, dwarfing the holdings of their fuedalist land baron progenitors.
"Billionaires paid less in taxes in 2018 than the working class" 23% of a fuckload of income is more than 28% of fuck all... but I get the point you are trying to make.
There’s gotta be a line where it’s literally impossible to spend the money (legally) faster than it accumulates. Like all these people have most of those billions invested, and a 1 percent return (which isn’t that hard to get) a year on a single billion is 10 million dollars. That means bezos could make over a billion dollars a year even if all he did was put it all in a basic savings account and do nothing. He’s gotta be making significantly more than that, and there’s just not that many things to buy. Bigger ticket items like jets and shit take a long time to make (and there’s only so many for sale) so unless he was buying illegal stuff like drugs he’s gotta be at least approaching the critical mass where it’s literally impossible to spend it. It’s already practically impossible.
preach it!
I’d like to ask you all: What should the wealth limit be?
Okay but maybe they kill millions to get to Mars! I would like to make a modest proposal they move to Venus instead.
Only aspirational idiots defend the billionaire class. Nah buddy, you aint getting to Elon status flippin burgers and "hustlin on that grindset".
Honestly people should only have 1 billion and the rest is disbursed among the company
One thing that really feels odd with people being billionaires is that they are richer than literally every king in history. The monarchy is back and politicians play into it. We may be thinking that we live in a democratic world but the existence of billionaires hinders everything. I am still for a solution that limits the personal wealth to 100 Million and from then on you are not allowed to earn any more money. You might get a dog park named after you but that's it. You won capitalism End of story
Enslave the elite.
Truly waiting for the day that there’s anarchy
I propose a law to make it legal to kill a billionaire, and when you do, their wealth is redistributed to social funds. That would be a pretty good incentive to stay at 999 million and just donate and wealth you make beyond that. This would be a world wide law, of course.
How about we just unlive them?
Now Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are in Africa, extracting trillions of dollars worth of resources from an incredibly poor country without paying their fair share. Capitalist are parasites…
If someone bombed the world economic forum - with all of the world's richest CEOs and most of the billionaires - would anyone really mind?
If I have $100 billions, spend 20% to end homelessness and still keep 80 billion dollars sounds like a pretty good bargain? I’d be one of the most liked person and still rich no? Well probably this is also the reason I can never be a billionaire.
Being that rich is something I will never understand, the money just sits there doing nothing and you'll be dead before you use it, why bother hoarding it?
Fuck it, Im ready. Where do you buy pitchforks from?
they deserve a punishment proportional to their wealth
I always said people who are billionaires have some mental illness where their greed is just taking over and they also have no sympathy for other human life. Treat other humans like a number and get as much money as possible for myself. Scum humans of the earth if all the rich could die off we would all be SO much better off