One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

Did they get it solely from their hard work or a large amount of luck/exploitation was involved? It is a rhetorical question, because of course the only right answer is the latter. The reality is that across all ages, you could never get there just by hard work.

I have a very fitting example in my family: my great-uncle/aunt were hardworking people and extremely thrifty (not to stay stingy, but to be fair they grew up in war time when everything was in short supply). Yet after 42 years of stable hard-working career and 33 years of confortable retirement pension (over the median salary for the area); the total of their assets doesn't even cross the million euros mark.

In a way they could have much more if they had put their capital to work, but since they were simple blue-collar workers, they did not, and what they end up with is just the result of their labour (and social system). This amount could just about pay for the adult life of a single person at minimum wage and you could barely fund a small/medium business acquisition. There are many businesses in the area that sell their assets for much more than that, and you would still need to exploit it to get anything; which is exactly where we started: make other people work to make you money, and give them less for their labour than you make exploiting the assets.

It took them over 75 years to accumulate all that, anyone getting that much cash earlier in life either inherited it or got lucky another way (did something that somehow got valuation way over the actual labor cost, which is basically the case for all early tech stuff).

The shareholders didn't fund jack shit, they took some money from someone else and used it as leverage to exploit the labor of other people, it's simple as that. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

is it due to capitalism? is it just the technological progress fairy? (maybe the fairy is more attracted to the smell of capitalist pigs?)

it's not capitalism's fault that people are extremely bad at coordination problems (it's Mr. Moloch's fault obviously, who poisons people's minds with shortsightedness!)

it's not capitalism's fault that people choose to block densification of cities, higher taxes, welfare reforms, or that people vote based on their xenophobia.

It is not. If you go and work for a corporation and they pay you a salary without a flat tax, they don't know what your tax rate will be. It depends on whether you do any work for someone else, or sell any property with a taxable gain, or have any tax deductions, all of which change your taxable income and therefore your tax rate, so now you have to keep track of all of them.

With a flat tax the rate is always the same, so your employer withholds the tax from your paycheck, the seller of some deductible product simply doesn't pay tax on it to begin with, and there is no individualized calculation to do because the rate for each thing is always the same and known ahead of time.

> No it's a flat system with a $12k UBI. The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire is the same in your system because it's flat.

The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire are as much the same in the existing system. Someone who makes $5 million currently pays ~36% compared to someone who makes $5 billion who pays ~37% (because the highest bracket is 37%).

> A million of income would pay 29.64%, a billion of income 29.99%. That's literally less progressive than those incomes would pay today.

That has nothing to do with the mechanism, it's just because the example rate was 30% instead of 37%. You can make it arbitrarily more or less progressive by changing the flat rate and the amount of the UBI.

But also notice that you wouldn't need tax rates to be as high, because in a simpler system less of the money would be wasted on administrative overhead or arbitrary constraints on what the poor can do with the money which causes it not to go as far for them. And they would spend less time doing benefits paperwork which they could instead spend doing work that earns money, or use the time for DIY instead of paying someone else to do things they didn't have time to do. Allowing everyone -- including them -- to pay lower tax rates from the increase in efficiency.

Sure sounds like an attack on my character...

You didn't clarify what kind of minimum wage you're talking about, and I pointed out that you're mistaken regarding state minimum wages.