The existence of a trillionaire nearly guarantees that poverty is never going anywhere
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
398 points (97.4% liked)
News
23367 readers
3891 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That’s what people don’t seem to get: you can’t have extreme rich without having extreme poor. That’s a baked-in side effect of our current strain of capitalism.
“We can’t not have poverty, it’s just not biblical”
-paraphrasing this one idiot nationalist christian whose slimy name escapes me atm
load more comments
(1 replies)
We need to build a parallel economy the rich are banned from.
We need to change this reality to that same end
load more comments
(3 replies)
I highly doubt that poverty will ever be eradicated, unless we do something like shoot billionaires into the sun once they reach a billion.
"Congratulations on reaching a billion dollars! Here is your reward, a one way trip to the Sun!"
Getting to the sun is actually really, really hard since you have to decrease orbital velocity by a ton. I think guillotines are a much more economical solution.
With that being said, I'm still onboard with giving it a shot in the name of science.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Should just cap out. Like once you get to a certain point the rest of that money is a tax rate of 100% then that money goes into making things better for everyone or a ubi
We used to basically have that
Nah, I'd rather see something like:
"Congratulation, we have noticed that you are only earning money as a way to get a better highscore, this means that you gathering further wealth for your own sake is pointless.
This means that any further wealth you gather will be sent to the usefull projects and organizations where it can do the most good.
But don't worry, your wealth highscore will still be recorded as normal.
By reaching this milestone you can take pride in knowing that you have done amazingly well, and as a mark of this milestone, you will get a statue of yourself in the 'Hall of financial heroes' to truly know that you are a great person."
No need to waste their skills by killing them, just let them keep working doing what they love, but have their work benefit society instead of lining their own pockets.
You obviously need to stroke their ego and play them up as much as possible, but that is a small price to pay to keep the money train going into society.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Poverty will never be eradicated, what kind of nonsense is that? The poverty is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
So eliminate capitalism=eliminate poverty
Easy peasy
Right, I’m sure there’s actually plans to eradicate poverty… more likely there’s plans to eradicate the impoverished.
The current system we operate in requires poverty to function. It requires people to be desperate so that they work for the oligarchs and, it requires the absolute destitute to exist to serve as a warning to the masses. If poverty didn’t exist our capitalist world would simply create it.
The Nature of Capitalism
These countries are not under developed, they’re over exploited.
Truth
load more comments
(2 replies)
The means to solve it almost overnight are there. Homelessness and such are political choices more than anything.
If a dollar was deposited into you account every SECOND, it would take approximately 32 years to get to just one billion dollars.
Elon Musk has 180! And he's the SECOND richest guy on Earth. The richest being Bernard Arnault at 211!!!
It's absolutely grotesque to be this filthy rich.
Also, inb4 "It'S pApEr VaLuE, nOt ReAl MoNeY iN tHe BaNk". Who cares? You could sell it all and become an international hero by ending all famine, bringing healthcare to everyone and giving shelter to everyone who needs it.
To add to this, don't forget they can borrow against this paper value. Since it's a loan, they don't pay taxes on it.
Even better - it's a debt. It lowers their income to below 0. It's a tax break.
I just had to do the math. If Jesus rose from the dead but then continued living as an immortal zombie, and he managed to squirrel away $250,000 a day, every day without spending a dime, he would just about have as much money as Elon Musk by now.
It only makes sense that we collectively eat the first trillionaire.
Tbh I'd guess that it's unlikely that we'll have a trillionaires at all. Hiding wealth will become easier and easier and I don't think anyone wants that rep in "eat the billionaires" sort of public climate.
I agree about hiding wealth and all that, but is the public climate actually "eat the billionaires?" Because I basically only see that in left-wing spaces. Normies still seem to be doing a ton of boot licking tbh. I do live in a pretty conservative area though so maybe that's biased?
Speaking anecdotally, I'm pretty sure you're right on that one. In my circle of (millenial / lefty) friends it's basically seen as common sense. Among the average person I interact with, however, such as at work, it's seen as a fringe idea. And I'm not even advocating for eating them in the revolutionary sense - just taxing the rich in a way that doesn't allow any one person/family to horde egregious amounts of wealth to the point that they can unduly influence society with their power.
And I'm not even advocating for eating them in the revolutionary sense
I really thought you were going to go with "but in a culinary sense".
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Poverty will never be eradicated. At no point in human civilization have we managed to eliminate poverty, and as long as there are rich people needing to extract maximum profits from fellow humans there will always be poor people.
load more comments
(1 replies)
229 years from now is gonna be some kind of mad max bullshit.
Speaking hypothetically here, what if millions of people just decided that they weren't to go going to give money to rich people and then those people decided to go to that rich person's house. Could the problem be fixed quickly this way?
If even 10-20% of the workforce just refused to go to work until {list of demands} were met, most businesses and politicians would cave within days/weeks.
This is why it's important for capitalism to perpetuate poverty. If the majority had ample savings and were able to survive for months without a paycheque, they would be able to enact change comparatively easily and painlessly, they would be able to refuse and quit shit jobs, they would have time to invest in grass roots movements, campaigns, and protests.
229 years sounds too optimistic to me. I don't count on poverty ever being eradicated
Sweet, I could be a trillonaire by the time poverty will be eradicated. All I have to do is save $498,500 every single hour until then.
We have far greater productivity than at any other point in human history and we still have tons of poverty, even in places like the EU and US. I believe we have the capability but not the willingness. Who's to say we'll ever have the willingness.
We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas
The kicker is this:
We use World Bank data27 to calculate the time needed to reduce (to below 1%) poverty at $6.85 a day. This is the higher of the three global poverty lines used by the World Bank; it is used because we believe it gives the most accurate picture of the numbers of people globally living in poverty.
I sure as hell could not survive on $6 a day - and we can talk about purchasing power, but resources have international trade prices and you're priced out of those resources if you're poor because of pecuniary externalities. At the current rate of wealth inequality growth, it will probably take so many years it might as well be "forever" to eradicate actual poverty and not the "at least you're not a slave" poverty definition they're using.
(note: I skimmed through it, so I could have missed something crucial)
But, in 229 years, will a Trillionaire be classed as Poverty?
That 229 figure is bullshit. Either all the impoverished will perish, be killed, or move underground into a less opulent/more satisfying culture where rat burgers reign supreme well before then or the real number is "fuck off you poor piece of trash."
At least we will know who to kill.
Hehe capitalism am I right guys?
Step 1: eat the rich
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: I didn't think this far ahead
There are literal stacks of left wing literature about steps 2 and 3. Our problem is debating which of the five hundred paths to take is best, not finding just one.
Eating the rich woild be good regardless of anything we do afterwards, they are rich in potassium and other nutrients so I suggest we proceed with the dinner party
view more: next ›