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Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

cardsagainsthumanityredistributesyourwealth.com

131–140 of 200 posts

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When everything is going to shit, people are in the hospital and you barely have enough food stamps to feed your kids ... You can go to a movie. Are you going to really fault someone for that, or taking their partner to a restaurant, using what little they have, to just try and forget how bad things are for a few hours?! It's not like they can just stop being poor.

I don't begrudge anybody their small pleasures in life. I also think they can do what they want with their money. But, when the topic of wealth redistribution comes up I do start to have a lot more questions about what people want to do with the money. After all, it's not their money. They didn't earn it. Somebody else did. I think it's pretty fair to at least have the conversation. I absolutely hate the "helpless po…

For very poor people, just having more money can often make a huge difference in their lives:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/08/23/214210692/the-...

There's actually a mounting volume of convincing evidence that cash grants to poor people are much more effective than random charity programs of equivalent value. Because poor people often know what they need more than some paper pusher in a faraway city.

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#132
post #66
post #31

Oh hey, on top of the prevalent skepticism and detractions in the current discussion, I'll just throw out that, on its own, this is objectively a Good Thing. I won't dismiss the fact that this is good PR for CAH, but it is still morally-motivated positive impact for some fixed number of people. A company took some profit they had and exceptionally distributed to some of their less fortunate customers. Don't immediate…

Their whole schtick is that they did some private charity work and it went great so FUCK DRUMPF AND FUCK CAPITALISM . And you’re asking people not to talk about the main point of their shtick? I won’t argue what they did isn’t good but literally thousands of charities do this every day.

I guess I'm coming from: I feel like we're in a relatively cushy bubble so maybe let's talk bubble-external impact?

I think this is a good thing that a private company is doing. They're benefitting from PR, but they're also using their stance on the capital and renown front to make a statement that it's cool to help out people who need help. Oh and also they're using their own cash to do that.

They didn't say fuck anyone and they didn't say fuck capitalism.

If anything, they're optimizing for capitalism: "people who care about the emotional plight of individuals in need would probably react positively to us publicly helping them out... and be more likely to buy our product."

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#133

Literally every single poor person pictured is obese. That baby is almost certainly going to be overweight in a few years. I'm amazed this isn't a bigger issue politically. Nutrition is a huge driver of health inequality. In 50 years the obesity rate has quadrupled. A return to the eating habits of the 1960s is perhaps the greatest possible welfare achievement right now (in the US), with impact far larger than univer…

To fix poverty among the poor, you'll have to do a whole lot more than just convince them to eat healthy: 1) Healthy food where I live is much more expensive than unhealthy food. I get that in SF and NYC, it's possible to buy such food at Asian grocers for a reasonable cost, but not everyone is fortunate enough to have an Asian grocer on their corner. So they'll need more money. 2) On a related note, many poor neighb…

Re #2:

You are talking about so called food deserts. There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of this hypothesis. Here is a good academic article that is representative:

http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2015/10/26/if-you-build-it-th...

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#134
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Thanks for responding! I'll admit I was dismissive in my attempt at brevity so thank you for challenging me. I didn't intend to shut down discussion. I was countering the flood of commentary around what I perceived as issues ancillary to the actual topic. On the topic of scalability, I might been too dismissive, but I'd rather focus on the positivity of the topic as a whole, lamoon its impact, even if localized,…

> I didn't intend to shut down discussion. I was countering the flood of commentary around what I perceived as issues ancillary to the actual topic. I interpreted GPs comment as an indictment of NH's policy of banning political news items, not as blaming you for shutting down the current discussion.

I interpreted it as "don't shut down discussion with low effort comments like 'it doesn't scale'".

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#135
post #44
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$15 is a roughly a single meal. Are we suggesting that $15 spent towards entertainment is exceptional or excessive for anyone below middle-class, ? If that's true, than surely we're worse off than we're all aware of.

If $1000 is life changing money for you, you have no business spending $15 on a lottery ticket, unless you are terrible at managing money, which might have something more to do with their situation more than living in the richest nation on Earth.

Thanks for the input!

I realize I didn't clarify explicitly. While I'd agree that a one-time $15 gamble would be an irrationally exorbitant expense if it was in place of a family meal, I think we're talking about different things.

Even if "poor people" were <$1000 away from financial ruin, $15 towards a reusable entertainment asset is quite different than $15 towards one-off lottery tickets.

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#136
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're casting so much judgement here. Anyone can spend money on whatever they choose, just like the recipients can spend the $1000 however they like. We have no business criticizing these people.

If Cards Against Humanity is going to demand wealth redistribution to support these people, you're goddamn right I can judge the financial choices of their champions.

Hi.

The "wealth distribution" is entirely at CAH's expense. They only surfaced that language because they made a point of communicating to the non-recipients that they wouldn't be receiving anything on top of their original contract (of getting the game for cash, which they totally got).

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#137
post #125

Much better than digging a hole in the ground or buying up property along the border.

I'll agree on the hole-in-the-ground schtick which I guess I attribute to a social experiment. As far as the border property, I wish more people of consequential power/capital would follow their lead and buy up border property. The wall is preposterous and any form of resistance is credible in my eyes.

What's preposterous about the wall? It's not useful but plenty of far more expensive government projects are useless (e.g. Joint Strike Fighter etc.) But I see people opposing the wall more than the Joint Strike Fighter.

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#138
It's great they are giving away money, but they are also stressing a political agenda that doesn't make any sense. First, they are advocating for a fixed tax regardless of wealth, but not taxing the poorest 7%, then giving money to the poorest 0.07%. The Republican tax plan they hate so much still severely taxes the rich, basically doesn't tax the bottom 45% at all[1], and actually gives money back to a much higher percentage of working poor with children who can actually end up getting paid by the government instead of owing taxes. What does Cards Against Humanity have against poor people that they have chosen to benefit the rich so much compared to the federal tax system?

Ok sarcasm aside, does CAH seriously want Donald Trump et al to decide what to do with more of their money? Tax cuts equal more money for you to decide what to do with instead of the people in charge of the government. They could send 1,000's of needy people $1,000 checks each year with the money they will save in corporate taxes. And they can choose where that money goes! And if there are tax cuts at all they will benefit the wealthy, because the wealthy pay all the taxes. According to the IRS, in 2015 the top 50% of earners paid 97.17% of Federal income taxes, the top 30% of earners pay almost 89.82% of Federal income taxes.[2]

1: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-fed... - new tax plan cuts taxes at all income brackets, so this number will only go up

2: (xls download) https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/15in03etr.xls linking source: https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-inco...

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#139
Consider for a moment the following: What if poor people are poor, because they spend all their money? Not one of those testimonials said, "I will put this money away for a rainy day" or "I'm putting this in my retirement fund."

You're never too poor to save.

Edit:

Give a man a fish, or teach him how to fish. Walmart is arguably doing more good by teaching the poor how to save

https://www.npr.org/2016/11/25/503316517/wal-marts-unconvent...

I'm not mad, but whoever downvoted this post is a "give a man a fish" sort of person.

Re: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth

#140
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poorest countries all have something in common, which is overpopulation. It seems as if the poorest have enough offspring so that they are always on the edge of starvation. I wonder if by giving them additional money, so they can have more kids, and even cause a greater strain on the local environment, have we actually done a good thing? If there is an overpopulation of deer, we don't put big buckets of feed in t…

Education and better healthcare are correlated with lower birthrates. Charity is very much better than doing nothing.

It can't be that simple...
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