461–470 of 528 posts
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It’s sad to see people in the thread conflate capitalist greed with the “Protestant work ethic.” Despite the popularity of prosperity gospel teaching in the US, Jesus’ actual teachings clearly condemn greed and oppression of those who have less. A work ethic is still valuable, because goods have to be produced, but the reason we can’t solve worldwide poverty by just writing a check is that oppressive leaders at some…
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> In the end of the day, all that outcry about capitalism is the classic "I made the wrong decisions and I want society to bail me out of them". What's the point of society if not being a buffer for bad individual decisions? If I can't count on y'all when I'm down, why should I help y'all when I'm up?
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No. This is what capitalists want you to believe. The truth is that we are all subsiziding the capital gains of the wealthiest 2%. You could easily pay for generous social security programs by taxing property and capital more (as opposed to labor). But the ultra-wealthy point at the weakest and poorest and tell the average worker "look, they're coming for your house and your humble savings!". This is a very deliberat…
Have you looked at wealth distribution or do you just read social media headlines and comments all day? https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr... See that 50-90% and 90-99%? That's where all the money is. Moreover, the top 1% have tons of assets, but not much actual money. Any "evening out" will come mostly from the 50-99% class. If you want to see a crack in the echochamber, ask yourself why no…
The point is that the top 1% can be taxed more heavily, not that they own the majority of wealth.
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I see, so you are suggesting making black markets appear. Good, I see you studied economic history a lot... There is no way around this, believe me. Not sure why you call pigs to people producing actually. That is how things end up working. Not waiting for people to produce fornyou while you insult them amd try to set infinite restrictions until they do what you want... which by the way looks to me like modern slaver…
Just as an aside, I suspect the last line had an implied "/s". If so, I think they really should have included it.
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> In the end of the day, all that outcry about capitalism is the classic "I made the wrong decisions and I want society to bail me out of them". What's the point of society if not being a buffer for bad individual decisions? If I can't count on y'all when I'm down, why should I help y'all when I'm up?
Sounds like a very selfish viewpoint.
But if not that, then what's the point of society?
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Pensions probably ought to be reduced/readjusted in accordance with life time expectancy, or some other maths that actually ends up in the green somehow while still allowing those who cannot take care of themselves to live a decent life. I've seen enough rich pensioners (my own grandmother among them...) to come to that conclusion. The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeche…
The US healthcare system is incredible compared to socialized systems if you can afford it. That's at least part of the reason it represents 17% of GDP. The same procedure I needed had a 2 day wait time in the US and a 10 month wait time in Canada.
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Have you looked at wealth distribution or do you just read social media headlines and comments all day? https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr... See that 50-90% and 90-99%? That's where all the money is. Moreover, the top 1% have tons of assets, but not much actual money. Any "evening out" will come mostly from the 50-99% class. If you want to see a crack in the echochamber, ask yourself why no…
That data is published quite often, no conspiracy here. The point is that the top 1% can be taxed more heavily, not that they own the majority of wealth.
Think about it: to pay for this tax, the rich will need to sell their assets. Who is going to buy those assets? What impact would that have on the asset price?
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Pensions probably ought to be reduced/readjusted in accordance with life time expectancy, or some other maths that actually ends up in the green somehow while still allowing those who cannot take care of themselves to live a decent life. I've seen enough rich pensioners (my own grandmother among them...) to come to that conclusion. The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeche…
The US healthcare system is incredible compared to socialized systems if you can afford it. That's at least part of the reason it represents 17% of GDP. The same procedure I needed had a 2 day wait time in the US and a 10 month wait time in Canada.
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Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything import…
A billionaire makes more like a thousand times what a normal working stiff makes in a lifetime, not a million times.
Being a billionaire is understood as having a net worth of $1 bi, so we ought to compare the net worth of the median someone at retirement. If that someone are Americans, that's $200k, so 5k times. If it's the world at large, that's roughly $10k,so 100k times. If we consider the billionaires at the top of the ladder, it surpasses 1M times.
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Social security taxes explicitly pay for the current generation of retirees. it's not a pyramid scheme (how would that even make any sense?). The "trust fund" is running out of money but that could easily be solved if we were willing to tax the rich, corporate profits, and capital gains, at higher rates or more aggressively (that is not allowing corporations to escape tax so easily). Or we could continue to fund it a…
I think the person you were responding to meant ponzi scheme, not pyramid scheme. The first sentence from Wikipedia sounds quite similar to SS > A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors Just replace investors with tax payers.