The rich are so fucking stingy with their money that they have a private island and private city with no septic system and instead want to pump it into the nearby community at the other community’s expense.
Like what the hell is the point of all that money if they are so utterly unwilling to spend any of it?
Next on Ask a Dragon!
How do you think they get rich?
You don’t get rich from being stingy. You get rich by abusing workers.
Beat me to it.
The ultra wealthy have a tendency to just hoard it, accumulating far more than they will even use, and act like that is normal and the purpose of it.
Good time to remind there exist two “models” of economy:
Commodity- Money- Commodity (where money is used for the sole purpose of getting commodities like house, food, clothes, healthcare, …)
Money-Commodity-Money (Where the purpose of money is to turn commodities in more money, so the end goal is getting more money).
The first one is okay. Humans always did it.
The second one is a disease that starter with what we call “nowadays” Capitalism.
I’m saying that because I see on real life a lot of people conflating the two and thinking that “ending capitalism”==“ending comerce/trade/barter” when the truth is that “ending capitalism”==“ending hoarding wealth like a dragon”
They accumulate wealth because it gives them power. Power is what drives their greed. Greed is what is killing our society.
Wealth gives everyone power. The difference is that when most people want to excersise the power their wealth gives them, they do so by exchanging money for goods or services. For instance, I can influence a plumber to fix my toilet by paying them.
Rich people do that too, but with a proportionally tiny amount of money. Most of their influence comes from the fact that they simply own stuff. They don’t need to spend money to pay for entities they own to do what they want. If you own a voting stake in a company, you do not need to spend that stake to influence the company.
Ei seu caralhudo!
Use the original meme of Nazaré Tedesco (Senhora do Destino)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7QA0ogagEc
Or else we will make you come to Brazil and have 100% free healthcare and free public school/grad school!
Also we will make you watch “novelas” (brazilian drama) like Kubanacan and O Beijo do Vampiro!
They say that because when they get more money they can invest it, grow it for later. They ridicule spending it because if you’re able, investment IS the smarter decision, but that assumes all your needs are already met. The Capital class can’t even imagine their needs not being met, only wants that they can afford to wait for.
Conservatives are mad at poor people for uuuh… (checks notes): Using government aid to increase the GDP.
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If you’re into watching someone eat a turd and are willing to pay 100$ for it, then a service worth 100$ was provided in each instance.
But on a more serious note, this argument applies to the GDP in general – it’s not a measure of how happy, how wealthy, or how productive the people of a given nation are. Yet, continuous growth (measured by GDP) seems to have the highest priority among so-called conservatives and neoliberals. At the same time, they’re mad at poor people for increasing the GDP with government aid and don’t see the irony.
The current situation is one I’ve been wracking my brain over for more than a decade.
What happens when there’s no more money to firehose from the poor to the rich. When all the blood is squeezed out of the stone.
By the definition of money, that cannot happen. If all the money is owned by one person, then it is not money. If all of the money is owned by one group of people and another group of people have no access to it, then that will bifurcate the economy between those two groups and the second group will use something else as a substitute. No matter how little people have, there will always be some form of trade and commerce between them. Even North Koreans today (where private trade is largely forbidden) and enslaved Africans in the pre-Civil War US (who for the most part were not legally allowed to own anything) had some form of trade amongst themselves.
Each successive dollar (or euro, pound, yen…) gets successively more difficult to extract because as people have less and less to spend they get tighter and tighter with their spending. Without state intervention, there will always be a floor to how poor you can possibly make someone, because at some point they will realise that breaking the rules and risking the punishment is a better idea than continuing to play by them. And when enough people think this way, well… just ask Louis XVI or Nicholas II how that went.
Even if a communist revolution does not occur, this happens already to a lesser extent in the impoverished areas of cities worldwide, where people would rather turn to crime than work for starvation wages. So if you are someone on the side of the political spectrum which likes to talk against crime and socialism, the policies you should champion are those which prevent the poor from needing to resort to those things (not that any such people are likely to exist on Lemmy).
That’s when we strike with pitchforks.
Well they got tanks :/
Neo-feudalism. People who don’t live off of investments (i.e., most of us) need to sell our labor to buy the necessities of life. Once the rich own everything and everyone else is poor, we will continue to sell our labor to pay off debts and make the lives of the wealthy comfortable in new and innovative ways.
You give billions of credit to rich people companies and create inflation. Companies go bankrupt, they create new companies and the process repeats. You stand no chance.
you’re supposed to put it into shady cryptocurrencies. that’s your money making money for you, homeless people haven’t unlocked nft strats yet
Cool, so be super responsible on their part instead. If they can’t be trusted to save up themselves, do the saving up of all the money yourself, o wise conservative. And let’s put all that money in a trust fund for them and just give them the dividends. Let’s call those dividends a “Universal Basic Dividend”.
Stimulating the economy baby
Their argument for not paying taxes is old. And boring.
My friend’s dad once told me that studies have shown that if you give $1,000,000 to someone without money and the same to a rich person that almost all the money will be gone from the poor person and will have increased when left with the rich person, because poor people don’t know how to manage money and that’s why they’re poor.
My reaction was shock followed by, “it costs more than half a million dollars to pull someone out of poverty??? And won’t putting a million dollars in the bank almost always gain interest? I wonder why people without money don’t know how to put their money in the bank instead of starving!!”
It’s also been known by economists for time immemorial that the best way to improve the economy is to give money to poor people, nothing else required. Literally just giving poor people money to spend skyrockets the velocity of money, whereas the hoarders just put it in an account to do nothing but gain interest.
It’s not a fair comparison. Someone in poverty will use that million in order to lift themselves out of material poverty. Which means they will pay off debts, buy property, pay college tuition for themselves and/or their descendants, possibly start a business, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t think of. That would easily cost half a million. Someone who’s already rich will already have all that.
Because your dad is wrong.
Many of the UBI-type (universal basic income) studies show that most people continue to work and in many cases they are able to increase their income from work in short order.
Turns out relief from chronic money stress liberates mental resources that increase personal resilience and that translates into better employment for many.
Has there ever been a UBI study that lasted the person’s entire life?
Not that I can find. I volunteer if any scientists want to conduct one, though.
Not that I’m aware of, just because studies haven’t even been considered for long enough to have lasted any entire lifetime, to my knowledge.
However, a many have been going for decades at this point, and there’s some great summaries of the findings over these expansive timeframes from the Stanford Basic Income Lab where they have a map and many other resources.
The conclusions seem to remain consistent, across studies lasting anywhere from one-time payments, to months, years, or decades, and I think that the conclusions, while not set in stone, seem to be quite comprehensively backed up to the point that if they were deployed at a larger scale, it would probably show similar outcomes.
I believe Alaska has some sort of ubi. Maybe start there.
Gosh, I don’t know. Not a domain expert, just an avid reader of primary studies on subjects I like.
It would surprise me, but I bet there are other studies you could with post-hoc data analysis, perhaps on lifetime outcomes of people who receive only a small income from a trust over a long period, like people with a moderately prosperous grandparent who put together a meager trust for them.
I know a couple of people with such a situation. They could definitely make much different life choices, even in one case where the trust paid out about the same as the take home pay from a job in retail.
I feel confident predicting that a broader survey of such folks would show vastly different life outcomes, professional attainment, marriage stability etc. when compared to people who started out without that.
It’s sort of obvious but you have to beat people over their heads with data before concepts even get widely considered.
Of course they would fare vastly better. You could work an actual retail job and have double the income. You could be a festival weenie for four years, get therapy, figure out your shit, and network with the better off festival weenies. The point being the universe of realistic and attainable life paths expands greatly with even small amounts of basic income, being able to say no to a bad deal is huge.
Which is why we will need to implement global reforms against extreme wealth. Social mobility scares the hell out of billionaires.
My dad is dead, tyvm. He was pretty sure he wasn’t having a heart attack, so you’re right that he was wrong.
But also my friend’s dad is wrong about a lot of stuff, including when his son’s and I are being sarcastic by saying “thanks Obama,” and that it’s an invitation for him to shit on social safety nets.
It’s stupid in even more ways. The economy needs people to buy things to keep going and allow people like your friend’s dad to have jobs and act condescending to people who don’t have jobs.
So if everybody was “smart” like that theoretical rich person and kept all their money, there wouldn’t be an economy for them to leech passive income from.
Nuh uh. The economy needs billionaires to peepee money on me.
If you water a dying plant, it will drink. It’s almost like people without enough money need it for something
Among economists, this is actually a solid consensus and why many of them are in favor of policies that benefit the less wealthy parts of society. Politicians who oppose these policies often do so against scientific consensus.
more importantly, it’s not just scientific consensus. Remember that trump voters don’t care about the science. they care about the economy. You have to make it about the economy.
Hoarding money and never spending it is good for the economy… Somehow, give me a minute I need to see what Fox news says so I can just repeat that.
Fox news would probably say that consumerism is foolish anyways and needs to stop (because it’s gluttony or sth), while we should all glorify the leaders who were wise enough in the past to invest their wealth.
Is this true? I know there has been research on the consensus among climate scientists (Oreskes, 2004), is there something similar for economists?
It’s not really a consensus, it drives higher inflation (people are spending more) and a lot of stimulus vs tight purse economics are just doing the opposite of what they did in response to the last crash
What I think they are talking about is UBI which in limited pilot projects haven’t impacted inflation
The real benefit of uplifting the poor is that it creates a safer society for everyone and faster innovation in that society because people have time/money to do things. When flying was in it’s infancy a lot of farmers in the US had hobby planes and gliding/eventually flying was built off being accessible. Aviation laws get in the way but it’s completely foreign to think of some poor farmer in rural USA being a hobby pilot today
The thing about UBI is that it doesn’t really lend itself well to limited pilots. Being both “Universal” and “Limited” doesn’t make much sense. So it’s really hard to assert evidence one way or the other about what that would look like in full.
There are some “accidental” universal income scenarios like the Alaska permanent fund, but they fall short of being even "basic " income.
So you have some means tested experiments where a small selection of people get a limited term benefit among a broader population that didn’t. In those scenarios the people seem to make the most of the opportunity, using that relief to prepare themselves for a more viable living after the benefit wears out. It certainly shows that people well tend to be more responsible than conservatives assume given a chance, but doesn’t show what happens to the economy when all the participants assume that basic level of income, e.g so the rents just go up and erase the benefit and everything is at the same level.
I’ve seen some assert that more regulated basic needs would be better. If you just throw UBI and let free market reign, the businesses may ruin it. Public housing, healthcare, and basic food might do wonders more good at long as the government responsibiliy manages it instead of letting the businesses just do their thing…
Oh, I agree that those policies work, for sure. I’m just interested in the statement that a “solid consensus” of economists agree - that seems unlikely to me.
The consensus is strong with regards to the question “What happens with money that you give to poor people?” and naturally becomes less strong with regards to specific effects on the economy or what policies to implement. But most economists would agree that stuff like food stamps or certain types of tax credits or (conditional) transfer payments geared towards very low-income households are often a net positive because of the immediate spending and investment in human capital. The downside is of course that these programs typically increase inflation. I don’t think the consensus is anywhere near as strong as the one about climate (but few are).
Right, but I’m asking where you’re getting your evidence for this consensus.
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I agreed! We can’t just give them things, they won’t be poor anymore! What’s next, taxing the rich?
Upvoting not for the political meme but to encourage the spread of She-ra content
Man I got a few episodes into that and it already felt formulaic…
And I could never get used to people, even villains, using the word “Princesses” as some entity of fear and cautious reverence.
It is pretty formulaic for the most part (it does have some more nuanced and unusual dynamics later on )but I still enjoyed it. It’s like a Saturday morning cartoon you would watch while eating cereal as a kid. It’s just a cozy, chill sort of show you can watch when you feel like some nostalgic, cheesy, easy watching. It takes me back to a simpler time, if that simpler time was more also more culturally progressive, and that’s very comforting.
“they’ll just spend it on drugs and drinking”
That’s all I was going to spend it on…
(Paraphrased from Steve Hughes)
My favorite story was when a Karen told someone to not give money to the homeless man because he was going to use it to buy drugs and the man just that, “That’s what i was going to spend it on anyway.”
