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It could
If it were done right. Just as Communism really really would end poverty and save the world and bring equality for all if juuuust done right.
I gettit, capitalism as done now (especially in the US) is a joke where the rich leech the poor and destroy the world
Tax the shit out of them. Leave capitalism be, but put up taxes in brackets that hits 100% after 10M net worth. This way, you still have the raw resource making power of captialism, but the richest anyone can get is 10 million networth.
Similarly for companies, once they get bigger, taxes go up untill it hits, say, a billion in net worth.
No company shall be too big to fail, too big to not steal, lie, and cheat, too big to be a net positive for humanity
This way governments end up with huge tax incomes. Use that tax for free healthcare for all, same with education, housing, public transportation, all free, even universal income
I think that’ll work a whole lot better than “let’s try communism” which simply won’t happen and it would destroy us all.
Won’t they just pay politicians to make sure this never happens?
Seems to work for the Walmart guys
So for one minute of profit they could pay 350 people $25/h for a full day. 21000 people with a full hours profit!
No, energy sources end poverty. There was plenty of capitalism before even coal, but lots of poverty.
Capitalism can end poverty for sure and was definitely a step up from feudalism… it just happens to also birth a whole slew of contradictions within the social fabric.
Capitalism can end poverty for sure
much in the same way that hand-grenades cure cancer, yes
Trickle down economics … give more money to the ultra rich and eventually some money goes down to the people at the bottom of the economic system
The problem they’ve discovered after 50 years of this system is that there just isn’t enough money in the universe to send to the top and allow enough of it to flow down to the bottom.
A billion dollars only allows a dollar to get to a person living on the street … so we have to send billions, trillions, gajillions of dollars to the super-ultra-giga rich to get enough money to average people.
This is the problem of trickle down economics … we just haven’t given enough money to the top yet
We have to give the rich more! … in order to save the poor … do it for the poor!
This is just patently false. I mean,
The problem they’ve discovered after 50 years of this system is that there just isn’t enough money in the universe to send to the top and allow enough of it to flow down to the bottom.
That couldn’t be less true. No one “discovered” anything. Economists knew this was true 50 years ago. They knew when trickle-down was being developed. It’s actually really obvious, especially if you have any relevant data whatsoever. The ones with scruples pointed it out many times, the ones without hopped on the gravy train.
They have to pour a steady stream of gold coins to the top of a billionaires penthouse to try to fill it enough so that a few coins can fall out and land on the street below
/s /sarcasm /imbeingsarcastic
Wait do people actually claim that?
Like I guess it does, for the rich assholes. But it sure seems to make a lot more for the other people
Libertarians and neoliberals unironically believe that “a rising tide lifts all boats”
A rising tide does lift all boats. Giving all your money to a couple uber rich people is not a rising tide, though.
More like a geyser that lifts just a couple of boats
Libertarians don’t, and it’s one of the few things Neoliberals are actually right about.
“A rising tide lifts all boats” refers to the fact that giving money to the people on the bottom of the financial pyramid who needs it the most will benefit everybody. Unlike just shoveling it at the already rich, which is what capitalism is designed for.
Infuriatingly, almost none of the Dem leadership actually follow through on this mantra with actual policy, beholden to the rich capitalists as they are.
The problem is that more and more people can’t afford a boat anymore.
And even if they could, Neoliberals and fascists have given the rich all of the places where they can use or even place a boat.
Neo liberals believe in trickle down economics though.
Yeah, that’s why I pointed out that they SAY “a rising tide” but very rarely actually act on it when it comes to legislation.
“Centrist” (read: right wing to far right by the standards of democracies in general) politicians are nothing if not hypocrites and lying demagogues 🤷
My coworkers do. Somehow the reason things suck is because of immigrants. Despite being immigrants. It’s the lazy people who don’t work as hard as them. Mathematically removed if you look at how things work. Not to mention that all these systems are artificial … why shouldn’t we build a system that benefits everyone instead of the few?
Probably mathematically regarded
Honestly I drank too many beers tonight … I probably used one of those bad words. I shouldn’t have. Didn’t know they censored as well.
I cannot take seriously any claim of the ultra wealthy “making” x number of dollars per minute/hour/day. That’s just not how wealth works.
it’s a good approximate. the reason their wealth score increases is because there is more wealth in the world being generated to go around. Disproportionately, it’s landing on their already obscene pile, instead of being fairly distributed. And fairly doesn’t necessarily mean everyone gets the same, but everyone actually profits from it.
I get it, you have no concept of economics and refuse to learn.
I agree entirely. The rich don’t “make” any money. They siphon it from the poor.
if I had a pile of gold, it would increase in value without taking from anyone. Generalized statements don’t help your agenda when it’s generalizing hatred towards others.
I don’t get it. If you have a pile of gold and there are no other people involved, how does its value change?
the supply of gold is relatively unchanging (new mines are rarely built) but the demand increases
OK. So more people are buying it and they are paying more. How can they afford to do this?
This is whats called a breakdown… if their yearly income is X, then you can find out what their hourly and daily incomes are through rather basic math.
Most of these memes simply take a net worth a divide it by 365 or whatever.
The ultra wealthy don’t have a set yearly income in the same way we all do.
I’m sure explaining the shell game the rich play is really comforting and helpful for the starving masses. /s
That’s just not how wealth works.
Would you expand on that, in the context of previous replies that point out that this is meant as a simplified analogy of the value of one’s own time?
How does wealth work? This is not a loaded question.
I think my point isn’t being well taken, or perhaps I phrased it incorrectly. I certainly agree with the sentiment that wealth disparity is maybe the biggest problem we face.
The vast vast vast majority of the wealth of the uber wealthy come from the assets they own. If they can be said to “make” money over the course of the year, it’s as a result of those assets increasing in value and not directly tied to the “work” they put in.
My problem with these comparisons are two-fold. One, they usually conflate an individuals net worth with income. If Elon has 365 billion dollars, he doesn’t “make” 1 billion per day. Two, phrasing it as “making” “per hour” implies their income is tied to the hours they work, and that’s just not true. It puts value on their labor I think isn’t justified.
It puts value on their labor I think isn’t justified.
I think it’s more just to make it seem even remotely understandable for our brains, as most of our class has a notion of hourly work and knows the value of their hourly work. And we don’t even do it 247, unlike the rich bastards who “never clock out” so to speak. So it’s just there to make our brains grasp just how massive the disparity is.
This is always a good reminder; “Wealth, shown to scale”. Give it a scroll. Or a hundred. And you still won’t make it even halfway.
Why not? If contractors can earn a “per hour” wage why can’t the uber wealthy?
Umm, what? That’s exactly how it works.
That’s not what you were told, sure. Maybe time to shed some of that naivete, though.
I don’t mean it as acceptance of the massive wealth disparity, about which I agree fully.
I meant that “per hour” implies a wage paid by somebody/ some company, and the uber wealthy don’t really collect a wage.
It’s fair enough to say that a person’s wealth went up *x *last year, or y the year before that. But whatever the increase (or decrease) in net worth was, it’s not dependent on the number of hours they worked in the same way it does with a wage.
If I said: “Same
They must be lying by a factor of 10, no! A factor of 100! Orders of magnitude!”
Ah now in this case it don’t matter much, number is still beyond our ability to intensely grok it
Epic profits should get taxpayers off the hook every time. That’s a wildly leftist and a wildly MAGA take!
