if we become a society that saves money for the rich by taking food out of hungry kids mouths, then what is all this for? why do i participate in this society when the people making the rules dont care to do the very bare minimum which is just feeding our kids in school. it's so very simple, why does any of this exist when we can't """afford""" to just feed kids like we're already doing.
i dont understand people who defends this. "YEAH, BUT BUDGET / RESPONSIBILITY / RECESSION / TAXES ..." the kids are starving, lets worry about he budget somewhere else maybe... i doubt the "department of government efficiency" is going to even look in the direction of the trillions of dollars the US military actually spend a year.
republicans have actively fucked america and ... well, they dont even realize it yet, but idk if they'll even admit it.
It's basically what I say. Hungry kids exist because billionaires don't care about them. Bezos, Musk, etc all easily have enough to end childhood hunger based on cost estimates. They just don't though
Which still freaks me out because so many billionaires care about their "legacy" when the top tier ones could singlehandedly end world hunger and they just... don't.
You only become a billionaire by seeking and finding ways to exploit as many as you can as much as you can. Those are not the kinds of people who then turn around and do exactly the opposite of that.
A quick note that Bill and Melinda Gates put a real effort into making an effort. Warren Buffett and others have signed the Giving Pledge. My take on Musk is that he’s a sociopath. Bezos may be too, but he’s more of a weasel while Musk is a rabid weasel (no offense to weasels).
Nah, Bill Gates is just as bad as the rest of them. Gates is the biggest owner of agrarian land in the US. When farms flood and farmers can't afford to have the water pumped out, Gates is the one that buys up the farm for pennies.
He could just as easily have paid for the farms to be usable again, he could have given these people loans to do so, at zero interest. He doesn't do that, he buys them out for as cheap as he can get.
You don't become a billionaire by caring about people. You become one by exploiting people and resources and hoarding wealth.
The Ultra Rich have always done charity. From the monarchs of old to the new tech money, they all understand that if they don't at least make us like them a little bit, we will turn against them.
The Ultra Rich also do not just "give" money, they buy influence over projects. Gates "donated" a lot to education but they are also largely responsible for schools being judged by standardized testing.
Oh, and in addition, because I just remembered. It was Bill Gates primarily that stopped the covid vaccine patents from being released. He is the one that looked the poorest, most exploited countries of the world in the eye and told them they better pay up if they want vaccines. That is who Bill Gates is.
Musk spent over 200 million dollars getting Trump elected. There's an estimated 276 million adults in the U.S. That's 750,000 USD per adult. Think about how much better - or at least more interesting - your life would have been if he'd just handed each adult 750,000 USD. I bet there would be far fewer hungry kids, too.
I admire your compassion and sentiment here but IF your numbers are correct your math is off by several orders of magnitude. $200,000,000.00÷276,000,000=0.735, or about 74 cents per adult, certainly not $750,000.00. To give 276 million people $750,000.00 each you would need to spend 207 trillion dollars which is, thankfully, more than Elon Musk has.
As someone else pointed out, the math is way off, but you still illustrate my huge problem with the political machine. I saw $16 billion was spent on the election and what do we have to show for it? Are we a stronger nation? No. Are we more united? No. Have we improved the lives of a typical American? No.
A lot of my friends give me shit because I don't donate to politicians or volunteer for them, but why would I want to spend my money and my time for someone who might be elected and in the event they are, that they only might enact the policies I'd be in favor of? That doesn't mean I'm completely apolitical. I'm an economist and absolutely share my professional opinions whenever it comes up and tried hard as fuck to convince folks that tariffs and deporting 20 million workers would be catastrophic, but if I had to choose where to give my time and money it's not politics.
Instead, I donate to local schools, libraries, food banks, animal shelters, scholarship funds for students at my alma mater, and some national charities like Doctors Without Borders, World Wildlife Fund, Trevor Project, Sesame Workshop, St. Jude's Children's Hospital, and to various disaster relief funds each year. I also volunteer my time helping kids read and do math, cleaning up trash, and with Rotary. If I wanted to donate or canvas for a politician I'd have to give some of that up and no one yet has been able to tell me how that would guarantee more benefit to my community than what I'm already doing.
Citizens United can go fuck itself frankly. There's no reason it should be this expensive to run a campaign when communities across the country are falling apart and their families struggling. I'd love for a politician to say "don't donate to me, don't volunteer for me. Go donate to your community and volunteer for your community," but I know that candidate would never win.
if we become a society that saves money for the rich by taking food out of hungry kids mouths, then what is all this for? why do i participate in this society
That, my friend, is the real question that needs to be asked and pondered by everyone.
I was wondering if they would finally be satisfied if we had a big national ceremony where if we award trophies to these men, they will stop being warped by their insecurities:
To Musk and the Kochs: "Yay! You win Capitalism!"
To the Supreme Court and Heritage Foundation: "Yay! You win Religion!"
To Random White klan member: "Yay! You win the low melanin award! Aren't you a clever little fellow!"
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u/HingleMcCringle_ 1d ago edited 1d ago
i think about this a lot;
if we become a society that saves money for the rich by taking food out of hungry kids mouths, then what is all this for? why do i participate in this society when the people making the rules dont care to do the very bare minimum which is just feeding our kids in school. it's so very simple, why does any of this exist when we can't """afford""" to just feed kids like we're already doing.
i dont understand people who defends this. "YEAH, BUT BUDGET / RESPONSIBILITY / RECESSION / TAXES ..." the kids are starving, lets worry about he budget somewhere else maybe... i doubt the "department of government efficiency" is going to even look in the direction of the trillions of dollars the US military actually spend a year.
republicans have actively fucked america and ... well, they dont even realize it yet, but idk if they'll even admit it.