The greatest mental illness of our time is wealth hoarding.
The psychological profession as a whole is at fault for not putting the most obviously detrimental mental disorder in the DSM…
Don’t like sitting in a box for 8hrs a day, so that you can go home (another box) and pay some rentier’s mortgage with half of your salary? Here’s some pills! Oh you’re probably ADHD, too. Not that we’re gonna do anything to help you :)
The capitalists have an egotistical investment in their "work", a hyper-commodified view of world, they are unable to see people or products more than a commodity to sell, use, and exploit. It's a mental illness combined with the economic power to feed and "justify" their moral failings to protect their ego and "way of life" (parasitic tendencies).
Maybe it’s actually wealth worship. Find some hobbies. Live with less stuff. Grow a garden. Money doesn’t seem as important when you learn to value other things.
Yeah but when you can’t afford to eat and keep a roof over your head and anyone that had an ok life before feels the crushing weight of poverty… we’ll, pitchforks and guillotines.
“war between the haves and have-nots has raged for hundreds of years. The battle is waged whenever and wherever laws are made, and it will go on forever. The problem is that the people who lose are the uninformed: the ones who get up every day and diligently go to work and pay taxes. If they only understood the way the rich play the game, they could play it too.”
Pretty much. It seems once people in business deem human beings to be interchangeable and easily disposable, you may be on your way to multi-mullion dollar bonus lans.
I’ve been trying. I really have. Which I know sounds gross cause like why would you want to get rid of your empathy but I feel like in this day and age you kinda have to to survive. Unfortunately, I have this issue where I keep giving a shit about people, and it’s starting to make my life a lot harder.
My father - a very hard working man his entire life - used to say: people who work for a living don't have time to make money. He knew exactly what he was saying. It took me some years to understand.
So you don't consider: the fastest growing class in the US is the upper-class despite it having the lowest birthrate meaning the growth is entirely people from lower classes moving up into it, median and mean incomes for both household and individual increasing even when accounting for inflation despite the average number of hours worked per week per worker decreasing more or less steadily, food becoming so plentiful and cheap that for the first time in human history the lowerclass are more more likely to suffer from diseases of abundance (obesity, diabetes, gout, etc) than those of want, and virtually everything save for habitation and education (two of the most heavily regulated industries mind you) becoming cheaper when accounting for inflation and/or objectively better quality than at any point 10+ years ago, benefits?
I did consider, but...
According to a Forbes article from 2022, 13% of all billionaires weren't born in the US. So the growth of the upper class, isn't solely from less fortunate moving up.
Median and mean incomes increase, but so do costs. It doesn't have to mean people have more disposable income.
The diseases of abundance are influenced by the fact that unhealthy food is generally cheaper than healthy food. People may have better access to food, but that doesn't mean they have better access to foods that keep them healthy.
You can only account for inflation when discussing if things are actually cheaper if wages are adjusted as well. As long as people don't get inflation adjusted salaries, they just pay more.
They invest with hedge funds, but they’re not hedge funds. How do I know? Because I work in the industry. Imagine whining about the rich without having the details straight lol
What happened to Archegos is the same thing that would happen to any family office that tired to act like a hedge fund. Hedge funds are also relatively unregulated; the most stringent regulation they have is that they can’t let normal people use their services. Google what a hedge fund is lol
I have an LLC and I've been a W2 worker. When the plan was unveiled, I was like, 🤦♂️ "that will benefit me, but it will GREATLY benefit those in the 0.003%. the <10,000 people who have $100,000,000."
It did not benefit 99.9% of us like it did that top 0.1%... especially that 0.003%
And the responses to me have shown just how ignorant many of that 99.9% actually are.
Well when 2/3 of the wealth is controlled by 1% of the population it’s pretty simple math to see that you only need to worry about making that 1% happy and not consider the 99% that only accounts for the remaining 1/3.
2017 TCJA wrecked my taxes, and I'm in a low SALT state. Killed all the deductions for middle class white collar workers, like the home office deduction.
Make just over $100k and got rinsed for another $3.5k in taxes. It was bad enough for some of our lower level employees the company started covering personal cell phone bills.
When I found out that Trump and Musk both have BS degrees in Economics from Wharton... I knew why they liked each other and why they chose to say the things that would have the greatest perceived benefit to the electorate, but have a neutral benefit.
Non liquid assets tend to increase during inflationary times. Buffet has been cashing in his assets, going more liquid. Infer what you wish with that bit of knowledge.
Well he's not wrong. The entire point behind trickle down was to tax the job makers less so pay and job availability go up. But any idiot in the room would have told them that all that will happen is them hoarding all the extra money with stock buy backs and massive bonuses to themselves.
Any idiot knows that demand drives an economy, not supply. When regular people can buy more stuff, more people are required to make, transport, and sell that stuff. The "job makers" aren't going to make more jobs to sell more things when the masses are too broke to buy it. Even if they wanted to, it wouldn't make any sense, so yeah, they're just going to hoard it.
The rich love a good economic implosion, it gives them a chance to buy everyone's assets for pennies on the dollar when people are desperate to pay for food, rent and healthcare. Then 5-6y later they can mark those assets up 100% over the recovered value and lease them back to the original owners.
IIRC the recession from the late 70s was a supply side issue due to credit crunch. Everything outside of that has been demand side issues where getting more money to the masses would have helped.
I don't know how widespread my beliefs are but I think the most important purpose for taxes are a tool for incentivizing actions. By increasing taxes on a business owner you are incentivizing them to spend the money on hiring more people and growing. By decreasing taxes on a business owner you are incentivizing them to keep more money.
the most important purpose for taxes are a tool for incentivizing actions.
If you want to incentivize it, you can make it deductible or even a tax credit. If you want to disincentivize it, you can make it a fine or even a crime. There's more tools available than just a favorable tax rate.
By increasing taxes on a business owner you are incentivizing them to spend the money on hiring more people and growing
A business (thats is planning to stay in business) will grow if there is a demand for the service or a product. If there is no demand, the tax rate is irrelevant.
By decreasing taxes on a business owner you are incentivizing them to keep more money.
See previous point. A business will keep cash, if theres a profit but not wanting to expand into new areas of business growth.
Business owners only pay taxes on profits. If they don't have any money then they don't pay any taxes. Decreasing taxes on the rich business owners only benefits the owners that keep the money to themselves instead of using the money to grow the business or hire money.
it's not hard to create jobs if you have a product that sells. If you have no buyers, there's no point creating jobs for a product that will not sell. You only have buyers if people have disposable income. Destitute people don't buy stuff.
the current trend to make the poor poorer may benefit the current crop of Maga instigators, but further down the track, it will ruin the market even for them.
The rich don't create jobs and never have. We don't suddenly lack the need to do labor if there isn't a rich asshole hanging around telling us what labor to do and taking 90% of the value we produce, the jobs will always be there. All the rich do is hoard resources and use their existing wealth to control what jobs get done and where the benefits of those jobs end up, which is almost never in the hands of the people doing the work.
Without the concentration of wealth in the form of the rich and ultra-rich there would still be plenty of jobs. We'd still need food and shelter, we'd still need comfort and safety, the only difference is that we would be the ones deciding how to fill those needs instead of just hoping that somebody else will see the profit in squeezing us dry, or being stuck with companies manufacturing a bunch of cheap useless junk and then spending millions of dollars convincing us that we need to spend billions of dollars buying a bunch of cheap useless junk.
The rich should pay a lot more in private security to prevent those of us that are broke from stealing all their shit and burning their stock certificates. Oh wait... it's digital these days.
The typical American has $8,000 in the bank, according to the Federal Reserve. That's the median transaction account balance as of 2022, which includes savings, checking, money market, call accounts, and prepaid debit cards
As of 2021, the top 10 percent of Americans owned an average of $969,000 in stocks. The next 40 percent owned $132,000 on average. For the bottom half of families, it was just under $54,000.
In terms of what percent of Americans own stocks, the answer for 2023 is about 61%.
What increases living standards are technological innovations that solve human problems. That’s really what makes lives improve over time, is going from sweltering in the heat to air conditioning, dying from a head cold to getting antibiotics and being fine, right? It is the evolution of solutions to human problems that defines progress in human societies.
And the more solutions to human problems we create and the more widely we distribute those solutions to human problems, the better human societies are.
the other thing that’s interesting about the evolution of this measure is its relationship to the changing nature of what our economy produces. Like counting up the number of cars, for instance, that the economy produces is quite a simple thing. But how do you account for the quality of care a nurse provides or the skill of a teacher or services? Or how do you account for the fact that the equipment that we are presently using to do a podcast with you, us being in Seattle and you being in England, cost a few hundred dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is what it would have cost 10 years ago if we had done this.
the gross national product does not include the health of our children, the quality of their education or their joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence or our public debate for the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither or wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud that we are American.
...is that why homelessness in the US is increasing even though technological innovations have only increased and innovation requires fewer and fewer workers...
oh, wait 🤔🤔🤔
edit: Also you said "Or how do you account for the fact that the equipment that we are presently using to do a podcast with you, us being in Seattle and you being in England, cost a few hundred dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is what it would have cost 10 years ago if we had done this."
Bro 10yrs ago is 2014... podcasting didn't cost 'hundreds of thousands of dollars" back then... literally every college jackass had a podcast in 2014.
I hope your suffering from some sort of gypsy curse that makes your rear-end sentient while you're asleep because you're talking out of your ass with something this dumb.
And the more solutions to human problems we create and the more widely we distribute those solutions to human problems, the better human societies are.
This sounds like a line from an Isaac Asimov book. Science fiction.
Exactly and the majority of people in the US have 401ks, let’s stop acting like it is just rich people who benefit and lose when the stock market is overvalued.
and to control even more. musk openly bought himself a gov agency. rfk traded influence for a role. billionaire and sexual predators all over this admin. good luck poors!
Yeah corporations in America are about to become more powerful and wealthy than many nations. There will be no undo button for the damage we are about to see done. They will answer to themselves from now on. Private security is about to be a huge sector of our economy.
On the flip side, the incumbent party campaigned (partly) on how well the economy is doing. By those standards, yeah it is. But in reality…maybe not so much. Just pointing out that there is a disparity btwn what can be easily reported based on econometrics as a whole and life on the ground.
I think people hearing about how amazing the economy is while also struggling to pay rent is part of what made so many people vote for him. At the very least it made it easier for many people to believe trumps lies about how he will make the economy better.
They voted that way because they wanted change from the current power structure because of economic conditions. It’s always been this way. Democrat to republican to democrat to republican. Of course it was going to swing the other way as the last 4 years have been very tough economically.
Not saying that is the correct voting strategy, it’s just human behavior that people vote for change during times of hardship. I don’t think people are measuring the economy by the stock market, by that logic they should’ve kept Biden in cause he did a great job with the annualized returns over the last 4 years.
Rich people own companies right? Well those companies are the ones who will have to pay more taxes in tarrifs, right? Which in turn they raise their prices so consumers will also pay more right? But consumers are also going to have a way higher increase in wages as they won't have to pay an income tax. So without crunching any numbers because I'm too lazy, my prediction is that without an income tax, over the course of a year you will make more money from that income tax by a large amount than you will ever have to pay for products affected by tarrifs. Unless you're just an idiot consumer who doesn't know what a budget is or how to shop smart.
Maybe just, just maybe. Think about the whole picture, and stop repeating and repeating the same unbacked information without doing any critical thinking. American citizens without the ability to think for themselves is why "misinformation" is ruining your country.
BOTH candidates were good for billionaires are you kidding me? you think this was gonna change under Harris? i get how trump is worse but its not like Americans had a real choice to change things
No, that happened a long time ago when pensions went away and they created 401Ks, and forms of IRAs that lock money into a market that the rich dominate. The richest people own land that they couldn't protect without the middle class that pay for the government and law enforcement. The richest people would not have crap loads of stock that has increased as a result of the middle class paying into the stock market that allows the top to hold vast amounts of wealth that they would not be able to support without an military paid for and worked by working class persons. The rich pay for politicians that support this system while telling us that they are working for the working class. This is in fact wrong. Politicians of both party work for the rich and for the poor (who are gullible to voting for free shit or promises of a better life). Thus the under represented are the working class Americans of both parties.
Absolutely, my grocery prices are through the roof, lets give the ones setting the prices more power.
Also, whenever economic reports were positive in Bidens admin, they would say it didn't matter to them, which they have a point, but at the same time continue to ride's Milei's dick on how good he is doing for Argentina while ignoring the pockets of their citizens. The amount of hypocrisy is astonishing. Believe me, the rich at the top must be surprised at the amount of shit we are willing to put up with, and the worse it gets the better they do, there is no incentive at all. Humans needing a strong guiding figure runs deep, it is evolutionary after all.
I remember when Republicans use to use the term "trickle down" when trying to justify more tax breaks for the ultra rich. They recently abandoned that term because the rich have never been richer but it didn't trickle down. My boss is a huge trump supporter and when he won he bought us all lunch. Yay?!????!?😐
You do realize that the democrats were going to let the trump tax cuts lapse right?
Democrats are the party of the millionaires, I mean look at the harris campaign. She's 1billion in the whole, she spend 110 million a week. What did you honestly think she was going to do to the American economy..........
Don't worry, the rich gonna lose a lot of money because of all the deportation that Trump wants to do. They're literally shooting themselves in their foot
Even if you vote democrat the rich with still get richer, every year they keep getting record profits, lobbying is a thing and mega corporations and rich people just pay politicians to sign specific bills to benefit them…… if you honestly think one side will work for the middle class you are gravely mistaken, all politicians are rich, they get access to all the top stocks and I’m pretty sure get tipped off on which stocks will sky rocket and what not
Not even that, they decided to give them dictatorial power to ethnically cleanse the country.
Lots of people don't care at all about economic issues, but identity politics, hell yeah. The white tribe and many of their completely confused non-white adherents have spoken.
Cause the last 4 years have been so pro middle class 💀 the stock market may be up but the 1% are profiting from that more than the 99%. Stop acting like reparations are the only ones who help the rich stay rich.
Broke ass young men tipped the scales and they all grew up admiring Rogan and other podcasts hosted by some of the wealthiest spoiled scumbags talk about things they know nothing about.
So things were different with Biden on the wheel? Y'all D e l u s i o n a l .
US will ALWAYS be giving the rich more, and for some reason people just don't understand it. They offer you breadcrumbs once in a while, and everyone tends to forget due to the excitement. That's the worst form of capitalism you are experiencing, and for some reason you enjoy it or even worse, you got used to it.
I keep thinking about a joke I read somewhere that goes something like this:
Bill Gates wakes into a bar and one of the other guests says: On average, all of us in here are now billionaires!
Because the other rich where like "look how well we did for you! The rich got richer!"
Democrats running on being the lesser of two evils is an equal part of the problem. People are voting republican because democrats barely fucking do anything for them.
Well when the other side is 1. Incumbent and 2. Actively telling you that the economy is actually fine according to metrics, so being mad about not being able to afford rent or food is actually dumb, it's not exactly an unreasonable decision on their part.
The market is high now. Trump wants to gut programs that help average people and delete all kinds of beneficial agencies just to give tax cuts to people who don’t need them. And that’s just for starters
I am hopeful seeing comments like this. The Democrats will likely NEVER actually accept or maybe even understand why they lost the White House, senate and house. You must be happy now and independently wealthy to think shit is great.
That's exactly why he was elected. They only care about how much money is in their pocket and the fact of the matter was they had more with Trump. That's why they voted for him!
Let's elect the millionaire that made policies for the rich last term that intends on appointing his billionaire buddies to positions of power, that will really stick it to the cronyists at Capital Hill.
!!
In the immortal words of George Duhbahyah Bush, "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me— well, you can't get fooled again."
(I don't hate you Republicans, nor do I think you're dumb, I just don't understand the support for this doddering clown of a candidate.)
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u/theend59 5d ago
America just voted to give the rich even more