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Life During Class Wartime

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Re: Life During Class Wartime

#251

Post by Obscurity4340 »

harimau777 wrote: post #13
tardedmeme wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extreme power inequality seems to be the default state of human society. Power concentrates until it's maximally concentrated, then stays there. Power shakeups seem to usually replace one group of elites with another group of smaller or the same size. Exceptions to this rule come about for specific reasons. Before the industrial revolution, there just wasn't that much power to go around. Everyone was working their la…

That sounds like the same observation that Thomas Jefferson made: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

He always knew just what to say

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#252

Post by pocksuppet »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #45
salawat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you haven't been paying attention to the skyrocketing prices of fuel, food, and healthcare... Or did you just think all those people just above the poverty line disappear when the livable income floor gets hydraulically jacked up?

I'm aware. What I don't see are the millions of dead bodies that hootz says are currently being produced.

They are not all in one place, and their death certificate doesn't say "politics" on it. They are in cemeteries all over the country and died of many different immediate causes.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#253

Post by pocksuppet »

Recurecur wrote: post #197
JuniperMesos wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump was never actually broke, but his popularity comes from the fact that he took a bunch of public political stances that his political opponents refused to take because they genuinely thought those stances were immoral; and then won elections based on those stances because a lot of the electorate also liked them. There isn't actually one monolithic class of billionaires that all share the same interests and want…

“Trump was never actually broke, but his popularity comes from the fact that he took a bunch of public political stances that his political opponents refused to take because they genuinely thought those stances were immoral” Um, no. His popularity comes from a willingness to actually do the things that many other politicians said they were going to do, often while campaigning, and never did.

Like cutting taxes on the rich, and invading Iran.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#254

Post by pocksuppet »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #49
idle_zealot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society. It woul…

> destroying the taxed wealth Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life? Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.

If we did it today the tax would be money. It doesn't make sense for the government to seize 2% of a factory.

I think GP means we could destroy the taxed money, which would benefit everyone by either deflating their savings (the same money is worth more), or allowing more money to be printed for social programs without causing rampant inflation. This is getting pretty close to MMT.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#255

Post by chungusamongus »

actionfromafar wrote: post #215
chungusamongus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing deflation which leads to job losses. If you do nothing else, the policy you're advocating for would lead to a recession, if not a depression.

Yes, but it would be the first recession to hit poor people less I guess

No. It would hit them the hardest.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#256

Post by globalnode »

globalnode wrote: post #165

this sort of article is ragebait for me. i dont understand how as a society we can let this sort of inequality run rampant. i mean i understand the mechanisms ofc but not the apathy. a wealth tax sounds like a great solution. people can still focus on acquiring stuff, we dont have to worry about how they hide the income and the theyll barely notice the tax anyway. then we'll have enough state money to care for these…

sometimes i wonder why i say such things on a venture capitalist forum. i must not like karma lol

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#257

Post by anon84873628 »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #148
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt we will get to the end cause of all the issues in a conversation here, but my understanding is that getting people whatever kind of help they need is vastly easier if they have a roof over their head and a permanent address.

I agree. But one of these 2 people had subsidized housing through the state. It was incredibly cheap rent for the area. Cheaper than any housing can be just from building more. But they still lost the place after a few months because they did not pay rent and instead bought toys and quit their job. They were receiving money from the family, work opportunities from the family, the family walked them through all of the…

It is a type of executive dysfunction or mental illness. They need to be in a conservatorship.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#258

Post by wrqvrwvq »

timbray wrote: post #82
wrqvrwvq wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on t…

I'd like to see a few links to support your assertions in the first paragraph because, with respect, I have not seen evidence which supports them. On the other hand, multiple jurisdictions have run trials of UBI (universal basic income) and unless I misread the reportage, the results have been good.

These kinds of operations are rampant in all cities. There's a line of people to waiting to sell their ebt/stamps.

https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#259

Post by wrqvrwvq »

metabagel wrote: post #133
wrqvrwvq wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on t…

> Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things. There are zero studies which show this.

How would something like this exist at all if it weren't true?

https://x.com/PabloAntonio/status/2051401704395227410#m

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#260

Post by anon84873628 »

pie_flavor wrote: post #144
yabones wrote: post #52

For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had . It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged. I think almost ever…

This sounds completely made up. The medieval taxman has no idea how much gold you have squirreled away, and even finding everyone to tax them was hard enough. Most peasant taxes were based on productive land and observable yields thereof, and the rest were import/export duties. IE income and not wealth, because nobody was stupid enough to implement a negative growth rate until the 21st century (unless they were activ…

Window tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
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