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Having a billion dollars is absurd
- Thread starter banshee150
- Start date
But stockpiling these huge amounts of money when it could be used to help so many is evil IMO. I don't care about people having more money than me. I've met plenty of people that have a lot more money than me, lots of my friends do. I hold no animosity towards them.
The problem is the scale of the wealth. This isn't people with a few million dollars or even 10s of millions. These are people that are so rich you could take 99% of their money and they would still be rich beyond your wildest dreams. They're sitting around with hoards of money whilst others suffer.
Because wealth inequality is the greatest problem that the world faces today.
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This is one of the major obstacles in trying to reduce income inequality. This isn't a personal thing. I don't care that people have a lot of money. What I care about are the huge levels of inequality and the mass amount of suffering that causes. If we didn't have people living in poverty and literally dying from being poor I wouldn't care how much money people have. But right now we live in a world where even in rich countries you have huge amounts of people suffering due to the huge inequalities of society.
That's before you even consider things like the impact people like this could have on an issue like climate change. They have the wealth to change the world without impacting their way of life and instead do nothing (or close enough to that anyway).
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Because having so much money is downright evil. You can have your 5 or 10 million, but for god's sake, leave the rest to society as a good citizen to help its ills.
Dude, way more than that. Don't forget that most of that billion will be making money in interest and investments during those years.
Because some here don't like it when someone has more money than them.
I think this number is missing a decimal point
edit: nope that's right. jfc
More realistically 50% when its over 5 and then 75% when its over 20. But TBH I think they would still find a way around it.
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He is including stock fluctuations and how Bezos ended up going up and passing Billy on his way to the top. On the same token, if we consider what his wife got recently as well as the peak high of 170 billion last year, he actually lost quite a bit of money there.
My partner likes to binge trash tv from her youth and is recently going through Gossip Girl (fuck that show and its premise, btw). I told her I'd be down with a reboot if it were a one-season show set during the French Revolution and followed these "fabulously wealthy" socialites right up to their respective moments at the guillotine.
Thirsty for blood or thirsty for wealth equity?
If you think posts like the one you quoted are embarrassing and ill informed, then please illustrate why you think so.
To give the coming mob a moments pause to rethink their course of action because you were "one of the good ones", thereby giving you precious extra seconds to make it to your panic room/doomsday bunker and hope you wait it out and still emerge disgustingly wealthy.
People are rightfully obsessed with gross wealth inequality.
Thirsty for blood or thirsty for wealth equity?
If you think posts like the one you quoted are embarrassing and ill informed, then please illustrate why you think so.
To give the coming mob a moments pause to rethink their course of action because you were "one of the good ones", thereby giving you precious extra seconds to make it to your panic room/doomsday bunker and hope you wait it out and still emerge disgustingly wealthy.
People are rightfully obsessed with gross wealth inequality.
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It will be the case 50 years from now too, since it's absolutely true
Nah, this is evil.
Besides, you get taxed on money you make not on money you already have. AKA, too late.
"This forum" is obsessed with injustice, it just happens that one of the biggest injustices of our modern era involves the distribution of wealth among people.
No, this is "evil".
I just don't understand this level of callousness and short-sightedness sometimes. Because I don't think that there can be a person alive who thinks that wealth exists in a vacuum.
Where do you draw the line? To some people in certain parts of the world, you probably live like a king. Is what you are doing disgusting considering they have nothing? Or is it someone that's a little bit richer than you? Or someone a little bit richer than them? How do you determine who gets that money? What happens when they squander it? What happens when they spend it all on things they don't need? What happens when they are broke again after that?
Some of these guys kinda have no choice, don't they? Like in order to not be a billionaire, bezos would have to give p controlling interest in Amazon. That doesn't seem fair either. Does owning a billion dollar company count as the net worth people are talking about here?
Not that bezos couldn't just make up some rules where he maintains 1% of the stock and still controls the company.
Not that bezos couldn't just make up some rules where he maintains 1% of the stock and still controls the company.
It's funny how in those 50 years it's literally and demonstrably been happening.
"This forum" is obsessed with injustice, it just happens that one of the biggest injustices of our modern era involves the distribution of wealth among people.
No, this is "evil".
Your argument supports the fact that everyone should have access to Affordable Health Care. I'm not sure how that also dictates no one should be able to have a certain threshold of assets.
Because it's the concentration of assets that enables lobbying groups and wealthy individuals to undermine universal healthcare and also jack up insulin prices at the same time. The two are part of the same problem.
In our world, wealth is socio-political power, and concentration of wealth is concentration of socio-political power, and concentration of socio-political power is intrinsically anti-democratic and anti-humanitarian.
When every billionaire out there built their fortunes without leaving a pile of bodies along the way, they can keep their billions. I don't know how many existing billionaires qualify for that, though, if any.
There's really no policy that's too draconian for dealing with billionaires. Making them pay taxes would be a start. Eating them is fine, too. There's only 600 of them in the US. I could list them out in a few posts.
Mega-corps like Amazon should also be dealt with.
We as a society decide it. That's the whole purpose of a decent taxation system. The result of your post are a bunch of silly what ifs that just dodge the issue and I don't get why people defend the obscenely rich people in our society.
Mega-corps exist due to people's laziness and the desire for simplicity.
Once upon a time, you had the grocery store, the toy store, the tv/electronics store, and the music store.
As time went on, those were mostly replaced with supermarkets as people wanted one-stop shopping.
Then, the internet came and people started to purchase stuff online. Amazon rightly saw that people would eventually prefer to buy from one place and become a general online retailer from its humble beginnings as an online bookstore. In the process of scaling up, Amazon saw an opportunity to allow others to use their technology infrastructure in order to build their own services at scale.
So like I said reality is mega-corps profit by people's innate laziness.
When things get too complicated to keep up with, people will fall to less moral ways of getting simplicity(see the rise of piracy as more and more competitors to Netflix rise up)
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You draw the line at the point where common sense reigns supreme. Its really not that difficult. There is no need to start defining what's rich and whats not rich when its painfully obvious that having many millions or billions is definitely far too much that a person needs. They can divest a lot of that money to other people and these people would be massively better off as a result (whether its in a third world or first world country) without it hurting the multi-millionaire/billionaire in any noticeable way but allowing others to literally survive.
I fully admit that I am a socialist/communist/whatever "ism" you would to ascribe to me, but I think that everyone should have a home and be able to afford the bare minimum without having to necessarily even work for it. That's just basic societal decency.
Look at the state of the world. We cannot possibly afford the rich, but we can implement a Universal Basic Income as a start, house people, give them the help they need (even if they don't want to help themselves).
Prisoners in any country would live better than some of the people who are either unemployed, underemployed and/or homeless out there and yet we pay more than 30k to house people who commit heavy crimes, supply them with a roof over their heads, meals, etc and we can't do the same with people who are genuinely struggling (whether through fault of their own or not).
No one can possibly defend another vacation house, yacht, or whatever other luxury when your fellow men and women are dying on the streets or are one step away from doing so (lets face it, we are far more likely to become homeless than hit the paydirt).
So if you want to draw a line, then make it a healthy environment and a house, free healthcare, education and work that doesn't take over your entire life 5 days a week for 8 hours and time to enjoy life until robots take over and no one would have to work again.
As things are, the world is full of utterly disgusting people in power and after climate change, the Mad Max post-apocalypse scenarios wouldn't be much worse than the shit we are experiencing now.
They kept telling me that for 20 years, that the riches were at fault, that they have the ultimate truth.
Socialism crashed and burned first with the whole fucking country.
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Socialism never crashed and burned anywhere because it was never attempted properly because the rich fucks in charge of capitalism always ended up in charge of the transition which always failed because of it. It doesn't help that US embargoes and invades every country that wants to transition to keep its imperial status at bay.
Even having a few million dollars is pretty absurd when you stop and think about it. At that point, even some relatively safe stock market investing will allow you to earn as much or more money a year than most full time jobs, and the more money you have, the crazier it get's. It's basically like having cheat codes, and the richer you are, the more cheat codes you get access to.
Here's where I personally draw the "line", I don't think it's the best line, but it's the one that works for me.
The line is needs and sustainability, with sustainability coming first. Does someone need $1 billion to live to live? No. Does a diabetic need insulin to live? Yes. Therefore, we should turn those billions into insulin, whether by price regulation, production of generics, just taxing it and buying the shit, or whatever. These are implementation details, and there's an infinite number of potential implementations. The root of the problem however comes down to satisfying needs.
But so long as billionaires exist alongside people who can't afford insulin, or other medications, the system is broken. Repeat for other necessities such as food, housing, etc. Soon, within the next 10-20 years, we will need to figure out how we're going to divide freshwater and I hope I won't have to argue that people having freshwater is more important than Nestle's profits.
The line is needs and sustainability, with sustainability coming first. Does someone need $1 billion to live to live? No. Does a diabetic need insulin to live? Yes. Therefore, we should turn those billions into insulin, whether by price regulation, production of generics, just taxing it and buying the shit, or whatever. These are implementation details, and there's an infinite number of potential implementations. The root of the problem however comes down to satisfying needs.
But so long as billionaires exist alongside people who can't afford insulin, or other medications, the system is broken. Repeat for other necessities such as food, housing, etc. Soon, within the next 10-20 years, we will need to figure out how we're going to divide freshwater and I hope I won't have to argue that people having freshwater is more important than Nestle's profits.
Someone who is a Billionaire's is like activating God mode in a video game. You cheated your way to win
Lord knows.
I doubt many billionaires even "have" a billion dollars.
Maybe a salarycap type tax helps with this. Your companies value really never goes over x because we don't allow anything to be worth more than x.
That sounds like it would probably destroy the world economy even worse.