Had a friend in the day named Mike. Mike was horrified when he found out the government burned worn out bills.
“We should be giving that money to poor people!” By which Mike meant “ME!”
“So Mike, do you realize the government could easily print $1,000,000 for every citizen and just give it to us?”
“Fuck yeah man! Why don’t they do that?”
“I mow lawns for a living, $20 a pop (this was 90’s money and I was cheap). If I had a million and you had a million, everybody had a million, fuck I want with $20?! Now it’s $20,000 to even consider mowing your yard.”
Mike did not see the problem with this because my original price, $20, would still buy me a McDonalds meal. Mike was dumber than a rock.
Tax the snot out them and spread it to the public good, but it’s childish thinking 2 billion people would suddenly not be poor.
Define “suddenly”.
Even if takes 10 years, that’s pretty fucking fast on a historical timescale, being just around an eight of a humans lifespan.
Even if it takes 50 it’d still be pretty fucking fast in historical terms.
And even if it helps just one person right now, it’d be worth it, because the billionaire’s don’t have the right to hog all the resources.
Here’s an amazing idea… how about we unite against the government and demand it stop spending our cot damn fkin money and especially stealing our money and exporting it to chit hole nations?
How about we do THAT first.
No… I have a feeling OP is a bootlicking government slave. Hey OP, for how long has your union forced you to vote democrat/marxist?
Amazing… so Lemmy users love government and love the way it spends us into further debt.
Got it.
Yes, that’s true. There’s the door if you don’t like it.
“How about we do THAT first.”
Why not do both? Why make it an OR decission
Tax the rich and push for government reform.
So give me exactly what your criteria are on “shithole nations”.
Also, our entire aid spending is less than 1% of our budget normally.
All of them. Especially those who claim they don’t need America, yet beg for our money whenever they need it.
It doesn’t matter the amount we give to other nations. We, the citizens of this country, need it. That’s not even including the spending our government does for stupid researches… like animals on cocaine and how they behave. WTF?
The government would just put that money into defense spending.
What a weird defeatist thought. We’re already in lala-land with 5% tax added, albeit measly, on the ruling class. So, why not lala all the way to a positive use of it?
The first article linked in this article is the original, and better.
And then some tax haven country will offer a tiny tax of 0.01% on a super specific kind of “investment”, just to ensure its local lawyers and accountants stay employed by offering “investment consultancy” services to the rich.
Good luck with it. You may need to use shotguns. The rich bastards in power will never agree to party with any money that they aren’t literally forced to.
But they worked so haaaaaard exploiting the labor of thousands of other humans to enrich themselves specifically!
It would be so unfair to punish the success the global owner class created all by themselves that had nothing to do with access to their society’s commons like functioning utilities and roads, legal mechanisms for business disputes, and publically educated, pre-literate labor pools to draw and directly profit from but should never have to fund commensurate with the immoral levels of wealth it most certainly didn’t facilitate them acquiring!
Wouldn’t a just, compassionate society do the only fair thing and just let the worst off human beings and citizens of our respective societies die in the streets horribly of exposure and law enforcement brutality for the crime of not producing value well enough for our beloved job creators?
👏🏽
ithankyou
None of that will go to people in poverty, that’s the problem
I hear you, and it’s tragic that the fight doesn’t end with taxation but with its application and every politician wants to give it to their affluent bribers in some form.
That said, capital at the level of the owners is an expression of power, power to keep the world rigged, buy governments/regulators, protect monopolies, etc.
If that money was somehow (im not holding by breath) taxed/confiscated from the world’s immoral owner class, transferred into paper currency and incinerated, it would still be a good day because the power dynamic between them the 10s of thousands of sociopath owner families, and us the billions, would still be measurably improved.
Cool. How about 80 to 90%?
The 90% tax rate is the gold standard and we go even further.
eh they will just open more charities and funnel their wealth there and still use their money to push agendas
We’ll be taxing billionaires heavily in the US next year if Biden wins in the fall.
B-b-but Biden hasn’t done anything!
You’re right in this case. He has to wait for Trump’s tax plan to end before his can go into effect. Trump’s tax breaks for the working class ended in 2022, but the breaks for the wealthy don’t expire until 2025. Tax proposals have to meet budget requirements, and someone had to pay for those breaks for the wealthy and corporations.
One thing expiring for the middle class is the home office deduction. Up until Trump’s 2018 tax changes, W-2 employees could take the deduction, but that changed to contractors only until 2025. Who would have thought that in between those two years, we’d have a pandemic that moved a lot of people into work from home? It’s something that a lot of people got swiped away from them and they don’t even know it.
Funny how those dates timed out, almost like they wanted taxes in the working class to go up during a potential democrat presidency. Hmm.
He won’t. The Heritage Foundation’s long game has finally come to fruition. The SCOTUS is bought and paid for. Bribes of politicians are perfectly legal. They’ve already won. It’s all downhill from here. Leave the US while you can. As soon as my Mom dies, which will be very soon, I’m checking out. I’ve lived 53 years, long enough, and I’m not married, no kids. I won’t live in the United Reich of America.
interesting that you think anywhere is safe if the US actually collapses.
If we switched to eating billionaires instead of eating beef for one day that would solve world hunger indefinitely, food for thought
You do realize that their money doesn’t go back into the economy when they die, right? They have living wills. It just makes someone else a billionaire. It’s not like you can kill a billionaire and all their money spews out like Sonic the Hedgehog’s rings.
You don’t eat them to liberate their money. You eat them to show others of their kind what happens to those who hoard wealth away from the needy.
And that compels their peers to be charitable to the murderous cannibals how?
Perhaps a slight aversion to being the 2nd course.
You just keep eating the heirs until it all ‘trickles down’, you see.
Sounds to me like it’s a well stocked food supply then.
Or it’s a funny thing to write that distracts us from actionable solutions.
Billionaire day repeats anytime someone crosses over the threshold
Don’t worry. We’ll make it a “Family Dinner” 🤫🔪
I’m sure the contingency is eating the inheritors until no one is left. It’s billionaires all the way down!
I’m a big fan of veal, so eat their children first.
Dark.
Just the way I like my baby meat.
Tax on the wealthy sounds good but the money would never trickle down to the people who need it. It’ll find it’s way to the coffers of people in power and even back to the same pockets from which it came from. We’d have to establish a completely open system showing what goes in and where it goes to and proper accountability. No contractor waste. This system is unheard of and thus wouldn’t happen
You mean government?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned observing bureaucracy in action is that trickle down corruption is very much a thing and whatever theoretical sum is achieved, the end sum reaching where it needs to go is quite often less than half of the initial funds.
When it comes to money, it’s dirty all the way down, not just the top.
