How many more years of these news stories do I have to read before we actually do something about this?
I’m so fucking sick of this happening constantly.
The sad thing is we’ll keep reading stories like this until we die. I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel and I’m tired of being that guy talking about this issue.
we die
Or they do. This level of wealth inequality is a new phenomenon, and it is already showing how great it goes, with fascism and other fringe ideologies on the rise.
The chance that Trump or a similar idiot being elected and turning dictator is a possibility in the US is a direct consequence of these fuckwits gutting society itself. It is very well possible that these guys will either become sock puppets of a Trump-like figure, and keep some of their wealth in exchange for losing all of their power, or commit grisly murder-suicides of their whole family in droves like in Russia.
They either don’t see or don’t care that they are cutting down the branch that they (and everyone else) are sitting on.
We have to stop voting for rich or wanna-be-rich business people. It’s the only way. Combined votes for the best of the worst to eliminate the tyrants, then vote out the wealth focused. Can’t believe that’s the situation we are in.
Voting alone will not get us out of this situation. Maybe implementing rank choice of voting might do it. I just don’t see good solutions because the politicians were all about sold anyway it doesn’t matter which one gets voted in, voters never get the final say.
There’s very little we can do. Even the ‘eat the rich’ idea isn’t very viable since they can hide in their nuclear war protection bunkers surrounded by armed security.
Cool they can be buried in their tombs and we can just get back to ignoring their existence. Sounds like a win actually.
Sure, after their security people slaughter everyone who sends them in there. Are you willing to face down a bunch of machine guns fired by well-trained mercenaries in heavy armor? Do you think Zuckerberg has any less in his Hawaii survival bunker?
Why do we need in their bunker? Seriously let’s just scare them in there watch them seal the doors and then push a boulder onto their vents and doorways.
Boom modern pharaohs buried with all their wealth and followers and then we can just garden up here. Why do we need anything in their bunker unless they end their world with themselves in which case ok it’s all over.
I see nothing wrong with the wealthy locking themselves in a box in the ground and leaving the whole world to the rest of us.
I’m just worried about who they’ll kill on their way to the box.
No need, we live in an era of drone warfare. Human soldiers aren’t even in the top 50% of most effective combat units anymore. Armed security is all good and well but a machinegun emplacement isn’t going to do a whole lot about 500 incoming quadcopters carrying thermite payloads. You don’t even need to destroy the whole bunker, just the entrance, then roll up a couple of Caterpillars and put them under a 12 foot dirt hill. And if the drones don’t cut it, say the compound has EM shielding of some sort that causes them to stop functioning (a feature that many modern actual militaries don’t even have), a private plane shoveling a couple hundred pounds of explosives out of its cargo storage from cruising altitude would probably be a suitable replacement.
No compound of any sort is infinitely defensible from superior numbers. Zuck/Musk/Bezos/Etc may be rich but their reach is not limitless. Just like how civilians aren’t going to want to rush down a mercenary emplacement, pretty soon all the available mercenary forces are going to be thinking twice about signing on to defend a compound where disposable drones like to drop random pipe bombs from the sky every other day.
In an end of the world scenario, where safety exists only inside the bunkers, the bunkers will fall, and swiftly. In a scenario where safety does exist outside the bunkers but everything generally sucks, and the Rich inside the bunkers are still able to be seen or have news posted about them, the bunkers will fall eventually. In a scenario where the Rich disappear into the bunkers and are never heard from again, fuck 'em, mission accomplished, we don’t even need to raid the tombs.
Forever. If people haven’t figured it out by now, they never will.
The economy is a fucking joke.
always has been
And yet the majority of Trump voters will cite it as the reason they’re voting for him.
People are unredeemingly stupid.
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The problem is a good economy means the rich get richer and a bad economy means poor people lose their jobs.
This mindset right here is the problem.
No, that is not what a good economy means. That is what you’ve been conditioned to believe is a good economy. That there’s just nothing we can do, and if we want to be anything but poor and homeless, then that means we have to let billionaires (and soon trillionaires) exploit us, and that just isn’t true.
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It’s put very simply here:
The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $869bn (£681.5bn) since 2020, while the world’s poorest 60% – almost 5 billion people – have lost money.
… the world’s billionaires were $3.3tn (£2.6tn) richer than in 2020, and their wealth had grown three times faster than the rate of inflation.
Divided you beg - the Republican way. United you bargain - the Democrats way. Keep voting Republican and keep making the rich richer.
It will trickle down any moment now. Any moment.
Something d-o-o economics. Voo-doo economics.
Frye… Frye… Frye…
Taxes or guillotines. Pick one.
Guillotines and then tax the next ones.
Why not both?
Because if we have to break out the guillotine then the redistribution is gonna happen a lot faster than taxes…
It would just go to their next of kin. You’d have to set up a guillotine slaughter house with a conveyor belt
I fail to see any problem with this.
kicks French Revolution under the rug
This is such a good visualization of big numbers and big bank accounts.
It’s also a good way to really see the bull shit argument that it’s unfair to tax the wealthy at a higher rate. Even if they get taxed at 90% (which I don’t think will happen in my lifetime) they still will have enough money for them and their decedents to live a lavish lifestyle. And that extra money could really make America into the country that it pretends to be.
Also, the “taxed at 90%” is a red herring too, since that’s not how progressive tax brackets work. Nobody’s effective tax rate would be close to 90%, even if we raised the top marginal rate to nearly 100%.
If tax brackets were sensibly set, with a >90% rate for the top bracket, these people would still be very wealthy but the amount given to tax would be almost all of their wealth, since the highest tax bracket would kick in just a few pixels into the giant boxes on that diagram. And there would be nothing wrong with that.
Right. If they were sensible. But I’m OK with taking it one step at a time and ease into it so it doesn’t immediately get shut down.
That’s why taxing net worth is our next step. Make it a sigmoid curve that starts out at $10M and hits 100% taxation at $100M.
And yes, plenty of things can be “valued”. The Insurance industry has plenty of experience at this, as do branches of the government that estimate property values so cities can levy property taxes, and banks that extend loans to billionaires on the basis of securities being held.
If companies can attach dollar values to the lives that they destroyed due to OSHA/labour violations, then a taxable value can be assigned to pretty much anything a card-carrying member or the Parasite Class might own, or holds through a shell corp, holding company, or trust.
But, they would really hate it.
This is from 2021 so remember that the biggest boxes there need to be twice as big now. Your box, however, is the same size or smaller.
That makes me infurious rex.
And just think that the article said this decade we’re expecting to have our first trillionaire. That’d be a hell of a lot more scrolling.
People think for some reason working themselves to death will move them upwards. Fuck this stupid system.
What about those that are being forcefully coerced into doing so? I’m broke, and I’ll be working until the day I die, but it sure as hell isn’t because I want to.
That is understandable. I meant mostly people who say you can grind your way out of poverty through hardwork. Like work-life balance isn’t important.
I’m sure electing a billionaire will fix things right up in the US.
No actual billionaires are in the election.
How about we stop calling it their fucking money. It’s inconceivable that someone can look at what has got to be at least 50% of all wealth ever made by humankind and say, “this is mine and just mine”. That isn’t what sane rational people think
Having that amount of money makes you lose all rational thinking my dude.
Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg
Coincidentally, those same 5 are 2024’s “who’s who of sociopathic shitheads”, a title they’ve earned with lifetimes of dedication to the craft
Kill them.
fuck capitalism
Wait Musk is still such a strong first place? I thought with twitter bombing, people starting to dislike Tesla, general weird behavior, he was losing quite a bit? I’m probably way out of touch but isn’t someone catching uo to him?
That’s the neat part. When you’re rich you can make as many mistakes as you want, and you’ll still be rich.
Yep money keeps making money
Lost more money than anyone ever has ever and is still the richest human alive. Howzat for fucked
They don’t even lose money. Those huge figures that keep changing are literally imaginary. For example, let’s say I have company and I make it publicly traded. I keep 100 shares and sell 100 shares for a dollar each. some guy buys 1 then sells it to someone else for $10. Now I have $1000 because each share is valued at $10 now. A few days later some other guys sells his 1 share for $5. Now I have $500 and I’ve lost half my money overnight. And during all this up 1000% down 50% advanture only $115 changed hands. There has never been a 1000 or even 500 dolars.
If I wanted to sell. my 100 shares when it was 10 a piece I wouldn’t be able to do so, because as soon as I start selling shares on mass it would lose its value. But I can show it as collateral and get credit from a bank. I didn’t create any value but now I have lots of cash. The more I think about it the more pissed of I get.
Tesla shares constitute something like 70% of Elon’s total fortune. Twitter is overall not that relevant for his big picture wealth, and weird behavior even less so.
At the moment Tesla’s stock price is in decline because of competition from China and the overall EV market not growing as fast, so Bezos or somebody else could indeed overtake Musk in the near term. But this could easily change again next month, the stock market is fickle.
It so cool that you can buy your way into an existing company that already had talent and an idea, and then become among the richest people in the world…
Wait sorry, Hard Work™©® yeah… That’s what he did… Hard Work…
Oh there was hard work involved. His daddy’s emerald mine money worked very hard to get him where he is. And the slaves in those mines worked very hard to build daddy’s money.
Rich assets grow exponentially. They will exceed government budgets if they haven’t yet. Then, they will have far bigger budget than governments.
Maybe the world will all become North Korea.
Just capitalism working as intended, nothing to see here, please keep walking.
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That took a second, good one, lol
You guys ready to eat em yet?
space billionaires. well defined, much more fun.
Yes, but I wouldn’t eat a rich person. All the chemicals and drugs in the meat. Gross. We need to just cull the rich.
Eat the rich
