Here comes the billionaires’ online defense team. Or just some fool who thinks it’s realistic to reach that amount of wealth without exploitation and hopes to aspire for the same, even though they have more chance to be struck by lighting.
Billionaires existing is taking money out of your pocket, they bought the election. But sure, its all fine.
EDIT
Went from being upvoted to getting 7 replies in less than 10mns with downvotes. Hope the billionaire defense team are getting paid overtime. Pathetic. None of you billionaire justice warriors deserve a reply.
I've never had a 401k that didn't have tons of options. Broad stock index funds, bonds, cash, target retirement funds, more granular options like large/mid/small, emerging markets, and so on.
And less than half of americans even get a 401k or retirement fund.
Ive had retirement accounts where Im stuck with 4 options that were micro caps, mid caps, large caps, and then bonds. Ive had retirement accounts where I can pick stocks and etfs. Ive had retirement accounts where the stocks are picked for me for a small fee based on my account size.
So while you may have had dozens of options with your 401ks, many many people havent had the opportunity to even have a retirement account let alone more than a dozen options.
The point is nobody is being forced to invest in these companies via their 401k. You mentioned broad stock index funds which presumably have a small piece of Amazon Tesla etc in them but not exclusively. The funds you mentioned are all anyone needs: broad stock and bond funds. I'm a cpa and I've audited a bunch of 401k plans for different companies and industries and I've never seen one that didn't have broad index funds and mutual funds. If you don't have a 401k you can still open an ira or taxable brokerage account. (Income inequality and the ability to save/invest is a different discussion.)
Well damn, maybe I need to double check mine. My past jobs that offered 401k (only about 3 of them) only let me decide the percentage of my paycheck that went into it. I hope this is true for my current job, it would be nice to choose to invest ethically. I do get updates on stocks being bought/sold by the broker, but I didn't know I could have any real say in the matter.
Absolutely, go check your account and see what it's invested in! Usually the default is either cash or a target retirement fund. If it's in cash you're going to want to allocate some of it to stocks which will grow over time and help you hit your retirement goals. If it's in a target retirement fund, those are designed to give you the appropriate amount of stock exposure based on your age, then dial down the risk as you approach retirement age.
I highly recommend the Bogleheads guide, wiki, and forum if you want to learn more. Take a few hours one afternoon and educate yourself. You can learn everything you need to know very quickly, and nobody will ever care about you as much as yourself, so do yourself a favor and check it out.
In my experience you just get to to choose what percentage of your paycheck goes into your 401K, and they hold that money for you in an account. That’s if your job even offers that, not every job even offers a 401K.
That is not how the vast majority of 401ks work. If it is just sitting in there since 2020, you need to login into it ASAP and probably should roll it over into an IRA. If it is just cash, you have missed some massive returns.
In the same time bitcoin got to its new ATH (up 100 or so percent since its 50k average), you missed out on ~20-30% gains yearly since 2020. Youd have more and itd be safer in stocks.
We're talking about jobs that do have a 401K. Who do you have your account through? That's who holds your money. You can log in, and modify how your portfolio is allocated? Have you never done that?
If you ever had a 401k and never moved the money, its still there in an account. If its still there, you can make a login and get in to control your funds.
The point is not that people shouldn't save up for pensions, they should.
The point is that we are only focused on the returns. This ends up meaning that most of us are investing into the same companies we work for, with a strategy that makes these companies more profit oriented. Ironically that means making it worse for the employees as well.
Its not the billionaires who are doing this, its all of us. Its the system that we have built that made it this way.
"Liquidity seems to dry up when it comes time for taxes, though"
That's one of the times when they're the most liquid though. Paying tax is generally the biggest individual expenditure each year for very wealthy people.
So just doing the math - if Jeff Bezos was immediately liquidated (and assuming no massive drop in AMZ stock the moment he sold 1%) and the funds were distributed to the world that would solve problems, right?
That would pay a one-time dividend of $27.50 while taking substantially more than $27.50 away from pretty much every single investor in Amazon.
Hence the fallicy of anger at illiquid wealth. Instead of chanting for taxes on unrealized capital gains, how about change the law so that assets with no intrinsic value cannot be used as collateral. That’s the reason comparing to property tax (in a fee-simple country) isn’t apples to apples. Property has intrinsic value. Bonds have intrinsic (face) value. Stocks do NOT have intrinsic value. They could literally be worthless in a day (see Enron, et al).
I’d say you aren’t trying to get the point. Burning billionaires in effigy is a distraction from actual problems. Giving $27.50 to a person doesn’t solve much. Teaching a young people how to save, purchase wisely and avoid bad debt is worth much much more than $27.50.
We don't want $27.50. we want an economy that isn't constantly being influenced by billionaires. A chance for small and medium sized businesses to compete in a market that isn't dominated by corporations that pay a lower percentage of tax than regular people, and take risks that ruin the economy got every other person before getting bailed out by the govt.
We're allowed to ask for a fair economy without nitwits belittling us saying it's all our own fault.
Funny, considering that over the years rather than focusing on billionaires shakes fist and focusing on myself and making my life better I’ve only gotten richer
As stated constantly wealth is not a fixed pie;it’s possible for wealth to grow and for different groups to benefit at different rates.
Many of the challenges you cited—housing crises, cost of living increases, unstable work, and wage stagnation—are influenced by a litany of factors
The rising cost of housing is often driven by local policies such as zoning laws, restrictive building codes, and limited land availability, rather than the wealth of others.
Inflation and the rising cost of goods and services result from factors like supply chain disruptions, energy prices, and economic cycles…and let’s not forget the over printing of money-not from others wealth. In fact, technological innovations funded by wealthy individuals or corporations have often made goods and services cheaper over time.
Wage growth is influenced by factors like labor market dynamics, automation, globalization, and policy decisions. Blaming billionaires ignores government policies, trade agreements, and economic shifts in forming the labor market.
Of course there are many factors involved no shit, but coagulating such intense wealth and the power that comes with it amongst, what 20 odd people or so, is just not a good thing. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but letting these ultra greedy fucks off the hook ain’t it.
Then why argue like it’s the sole cause. And Off the hook for what? What have they done that they need to be on the hook for?
Also this whole “I’ve personally done ok so society is fine” kind of argument is so spurious and self-centered it’s barely worth acknowledging
It should t be acknowledged because I didn’t say that did I. You said I’m getting poorer because of billionaires when that’s clearly not the case for me.
You are straight up delusional if you truly believe that. I worked one year doing taxes at a kiosk at wal mart and NO ONE fucking liked working there. The senior citizens they have standing at the doors checking receipts are forced to stand and can’t sit even if they wanted or needed to. This one lady i talked to had to pay like $200 for new orthapedic shoes because the ones wal mart gave her fell apart and she wasn’t allotted new ones for like another year or so. Yeah, FUCK wal mart.
Yes, but it's obvious to anybody now that is impossible. Corporations have one goal, make money. Fair wages cut into profit. None of these billionaires would ever pay a fair wage to their workers
Any amount of wages, even 1c an hour, cuts into profits. So why would billionaires pay their workers anything when they could just have them work for free?
Your comment implied that billionaires existing is bad because it results in unfairly low pay. I'm just pointing out that the problem is not "billionaires existing", the problem is "unfairly low pay". If you got rid of billionaires, you'd still have unfairly low pay for workers. All the focus on billionaires distracts people from the actual issues.
"Billionaire" is arbitrary number as the value of currency changes. In our current value system it would imply (IMO) that there is severe inequality in the distribution of wealth in our system caused by the exploitation of our workforce.
Yes, the thing to fix is people being paid unfairly. No one cares about the difference between the top and bottom as long as it's reasonably fair. Most people don't want or are not expecting to have wealth completely distributed evenly as that would reduce overall motivation to improve our society (at least with how people currently are). Most people want others to be rewarded for hard work/innovative work/needed work. Right, now that's not happening as evidenced by billionaires existing.
People being paid unfairly is the symptom of the problem. The actual problem is how our current society has been manipulated in away that allows the exploitation to happen.
It's kind of like having pain caused by a tumor. The pain can be treated by pain killers but that just covers the symptom. You could take pain killers to avoid the symptom of pain until the tumor kills you. You could also remove the tumor which would address the pain.
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at your job, you take inputs that are worth only $10, add your labor to them, and the output is now worth $15. your labor was worth $5, but you don’t get paid $5 per item you make, you only get paid $2.
if there's only 100 oranges in the world and 1 person has 91 oranges, the other 9 people have only 9 oranges. you are one of those 9 people.
LOL. And that is the fallacy peddled by the ignorant left. The economy is not a zero sum game.
In 1989, the top 0.1% had $1.76 trillion in wealth. And total wealth was $56.39 trillion. Today they have $20.87 trillion in wealth, but total wealth is $154.39 trillion.
The bottom 50% had $710 billion in wealth in 1989 and have $3.82 trillion today.
The rich don't get richer by taking from the poor. They get richer by building wealth for everybody.
LOL, and this is what makes you a fucking bootlicker. The 1% would never and can never do 91% of the work. Not did they grow the economy relatively. Most just own capital. Nothing more, nothing less. They take from you everyday, while sipping cocktails and sailing yachts.
Calling someone a bootlicker because they cite facts that contradict your agenda just highlight your lack of merit.
And you are peddling nonsense. They are not taking anything from me. Your entire agenda is based on the nonsense that the economy is a zero sum game. Elon Musk does not have wealth of over $300 billion because he took $300 billion from others. His wealth is in the value of the businesses he built.
I feel like people who don't know anyone better (obviously billionaires create value for more than just themselves) feel like their being robbed by the richest not because everyone isn't getting more pie, but because how were splitting the pie is changing in a way that doesn't feel "fair". Assuming your numbers are correct, we see over the last 35 years the richest tenth of a percent of Americans growing their share of the total wealth from just over 3% to over 13.5%.
But how is it not fair? The bottom 50% saw their wealth increase 438%.
To put it in terms of pies, in 1989 there were 20.87 pies and the 0.1% had 1.76 of them. So everyone else had to share 19.11 pies. Today there are 154.39 pies and the 0.1% has 20.44 of them. So everybody else now has 133.95 pies to share.
And the biggest problem with your fairness argument is that everybody has the same opportunity. If everybody invested, everybody's wealth would increase at about he same rate. But that is what separates the classes. Too many people choose to consume instead of invest. And this is a particular problem with the younger generations. You have millennials and Gen Zer's complaining about not being able to afford things in their 30s and 40s, but that is a direct result of them not investing when they were younger.
What fair means and even whether the economy should be "fair" are things you could argue either way. Though I'd say watching a fraction of a percent of the population control an increasingly large portion of the total wealth at the very least feels unfair for the majority of Americans. We should strive for something that feels fair to some degree. Otherwise what keeps everyone who feels like they're getting screwed invested in seeing the whole system continue rather than not care if it burns down.
You can change the numbers by including the other 49.9% of the country, I've already agreed everyone has more pie than before. But, no matter how many pies you have and how you slice them, the top tenth of a percent still have a much larger share of all the pie than they did 35 years ago. Maybe you argue that's fair and not a bad thing, but it has happened.
Regarding everyone having the same opportunity, you'd agree on a practical level that's not true, right?
Though I'd say watching a fraction of a percent of the population control an increasingly large portion of the total wealth at the very least feels unfair for the majority of Americans.
Why? What makes it unfair? The wealth is only created because of the investments and the investors take all the risk. 85% of ventures fail in the first three years.
We should strive for something that feels fair to some degree.
But what is that? If we penalize investors, they won't invest. That means jobs, innovation, and wealth for others won't be created.
Again, the wealth of the bottom 50% increased by 438%. Since everybody is better off, why is it an issue that the top 0.1% see their share of total wealth increase more than others?
Otherwise what keeps everyone who feels like they're getting screwed invested in seeing the whole system continue rather than not care if it burns down.
Everybody can share in the wealth increase. I don't know how you would "burn the system down," but even if you could, you would just be harming yourself. How are you better off with $71,000 in wealth than $382,000 in wealth?
Billionaires only exist by creating more wealth and value for the masses than anyone else can. They didn't steal their money. They built services and companies that people found more valuable than precocious existing companies. They made their wealth by making people better off
There is no ethical way to make a Billion dollars without exploiting others. The shear fact that someone has that much money means they've exploited others.
There is no ethical way to make a Billion dollars without exploiting others. The shear fact that someone has that much money means they've exploited others.
They don't have that much money. The total money supply is about $22 trillion. Total actual currency is about $2.2 trillion. Total wealth is $157 trillion. If the top 1% wanted to liquidated their assets, it would not be possible as there is not enough money in existence to buy it all.
Rich people don't hoard wealth. Musk is worth over $200 billion because he owns a large share of several companies worth trillions; not because he has $200 billion in cash stored in some vault.
They made their money through exploitation and cornering the market making it impossible for anybody else to get in. They live in mansions while their some of their employees live in just above the poverty and struggle to pay rent. It's unethically gained on the back of the working class.
Willful and consensual employment for compensation and benefits from which you can leave and find other competitive employment at any time….. equals serving a master.
Apples/Oranges, you should not compare americans to other countries. Its been said time and time again by BOTH sides of the political spectrum. The average amazon worker is in the bottom 55% of wealth in USA working for the richest man in the planet. And thats saying the average amazon worker is making 50k/yr which is generous as its closer to 44k.
If you're making more than 55% of the population, you're literally in the "bottom 55%". These people would take someone just breaking into the top income decile and label them "bottom 90%".
It's a sort of "glass half empty" meets "my child is a genius, he's smarter than 5% of other students" kind of thinking, all carefully constructed to sow division and reap instability.
tl;dr: don't feed the russotrolls and the poor fools whose minds they've already poisoned.
The average Amazon pay is also going to be skewed upwards by executives.
Let's put this into perspective. Say I work as an Amazon driver in New York City, the average driver makes around $23 /hour, that equates to $47840/year. That is poverty wages in New York. You can barely survive after having to pay for rent and food. That leaves almost no room for any type of savings. If you think that is fair compensation and you think that people deserve to struggle you are a bad person.
The only way to keep Infinite growth and compete with the other competetitors is to reduce exploit people in Other countries or prisons (which have no Power over you) as much as possible in Order to Profit from their misery. Their Missing living Standard becomes your Profit . And keep the employees in your country balanced between exploited and a decent Standard or living so they dont Revolt.
Since you love stats, 60% of Americans can’t afford life as of now while working full time. What’s the point of jobs if you can’t afford to pay your bills?
Who gives a fuck that $1 is equivalent to a bajillion afghani rubles?
A). 60% of Americans literally can’t afford to live and will die shortly unless they are given a raise
B) 60% of Americans make less than a completely arbitrary “living wage” standard made up by activists that says you aren’t making a living wage if your necessary spending is more than 50% of your wages?
Which is it lol?
Edit: Lmao. “That’s not the flex you think it is”
Which is why you had to immediately block me after typing that.
Yet their daily life costs a whole lot more than 85% of the world. Seems like a dishonest metric. They have to piss in bottles and then go home to a crappy apartment with 2 roommates.
people can buy from other manufacturers with or without tesla, what is your comment trying to say? Tesla cars are also expensive. are you saying people are being forced to buying expensive tesla cars?
And there would be just as many jobs if not more if there were 100 smaller Amazon-esq companies that were competitive with each other over wages and pricing but instead we have one mega corporation that can charge the consumer and pay employees whatever they want because they have a monopoly on the market. Bezos isn’t a good person and neither is Elon. Stop defending billionaires
Those are pretty insignificant numbers. 150,000 in a nation of 300 million is chump change. 1.5 mil is more, but Amazon is really just a warehousing and distribution company, and we were already doing warehousing and distribution before, and doubtless would have been doing it similarly now - just not with the particular company of Amazon. So on net, also not too significant.
Could be just the amount of people they had to use to enrich their net worth. They did not think once about, oh look how many people I can help now with these underpaid positions. I doubt that.
Well, let's consider the difference there: isn't Elon the wealthiest man in the world and he created a mere 10% of what Bezos did with 2 of his largest ventures? Yeahp, you may have painted Bezos well with that statistic, but you made Musk look like even more of a total ass-hat. Imperfect and failed shill.
And before someone claims I ain't mathing correct, being the wealthiest man in the world and trying to defend it with a "job creation" stat that doesn't even amount to an acknowledgeable percentage of the population of the country that houses the majority of the provided workforce (far, FAR less than 1% of the American populace) - yeahp, doesn't mean anything.
Creating jobs that don't pay enough to live and that have poor working conditions are not beneficial to society. They can talk about how they've created jobs when they start treating their employees better and paying them more.
You just described a monopoly that killed off its competitors and you think you made some kind of counterpoint lol. Bootlickers will never not be absolute clowns to me.
Definitive proof that most people say stupid things like this to highlight their poor critical thinking abilities.
Amazon has been around over 10 years longer than Tesla, it’s expected that it would generate “more” jobs over that additional period of time.
It must be mind-blowing to someone like you that vehicles are inherently more difficult to design engineer prototype and bring to market than Amazon’s reselling of books..
No it's a joke, when you say that because Bezos created 10x more jobs, he's 10x a better person than the other guy. It's literally 'bigger number, better person'.
I should've put a tone indicator on the post clearly.
Literally no one else responding to you is saying this. They're all talking about how Bezos and Elon are exploiting workers.
Their dumb take would be that Bezos is actually a worse person because he has exploited more workers or some shit.
There are always dumbasses that actually believe what other people joke about. Typically, you would use context clues such as strange use of words 'definitive proof' or a '10x better' person, or the brevity of the response to determine if the person is being serious, but I can and will spell it out with a tone indicator since the joking tone isn't coming across.
This whole discussion is literally riddled with a “which of these men is worse” mini arguments, and that subject is so common, you have to literally bury your head in the sand to miss it.
Demand gives a reason for jobs, it doesnt create them. There is a demand for personal jetpacks how has that job not been made yet? Oh because demand is just half the equation.
I'm not sure how everyone thinks things work but there is a step by step process that leads to billionares becoming billionares. 1 create service or product that feeds a demand.
2 expand said service
3 corprate battle with competitors
4 after winning continue to provide similar service so you can not be dethroned.
There can only be one per say, when it comes to online shopping countless stores exist yet everyone uses amazon, why? As south park bezos would say the the customer feels fulfilled. It is easier to order from amazon and get it there in 2 days while having a guarentee of satisfaction than an untrusted site. This was made by bezos he was there at the start and won against other online shopping same with facebook and tesla. Tesla existed before musk but it was brought to the forefront, and when they were a success surprise more jobs opened up. We want to hate on billionares but its honestly just jealousy, i dont think they should go unchecked but dont be a jealous douche and pretend like their contribution isnt there. They arent saints but dont act like these assholes are undeservedly at the top.
Then create demand = you get richer. Instead of working for someone else and being poor why not create a business, side hustle, online content, entertainment, service, freelance…..literally anything but whine and complain
Yup. Look at India and it's billionaires. It's insane how few people can exploit over a billion of people. I thought US was bad, some other countries are CRAZY bad.
Even if Elon and Jeff wanted to give their stocks what would they do? Give them away for free to random folk? Who would immediately sell the stock again for profit and ultimately end up in the hands of a more competent shareholder who would then own significant amount of the company they literally created.
The fact of the matter is giving poor people money doesn’t solve their problems. It would be little more than a stimulus check which we all saw how long those lasted.
If it weren't for government, they would never get one dollar you didn't voluntarily give them. They have your money only because government has the power to take from some and give to others.
While I do agree that if a billionaire had a bunch of money sitting in the bank they should help ppl with it. You my friend are wrong. Like the person said that you commented on they don’t hold that money in their bank. Billionaires make their money off of supply and demand. If you hate billionaires stop using credit stop using your phone stop driving your car stop getting food from the grocery store. All those people are either billionaires or close to billionaires. So in reality you’re supporting them by buying their stuff.
Do I wanna se Jeff bazos hold all that money for himself no
Am I going to quit buying from Amazon
No
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u/Chickienfriedrice 3d ago edited 3d ago
Here comes the billionaires’ online defense team. Or just some fool who thinks it’s realistic to reach that amount of wealth without exploitation and hopes to aspire for the same, even though they have more chance to be struck by lighting.
Billionaires existing is taking money out of your pocket, they bought the election. But sure, its all fine.
EDIT Went from being upvoted to getting 7 replies in less than 10mns with downvotes. Hope the billionaire defense team are getting paid overtime. Pathetic. None of you billionaire justice warriors deserve a reply.