I wish it was a Gilded Age. At least Rockefeller and Vanderbilt had some fucking taste.
All of this will happen before, and all of it will happen again. Except uglier and dumber.
Partially thanks to media like you, squints eyes fortune.com…
Why don’t they notice they’re killing us all?
They definitely notice, why do you think they’re pushing the birth rate and great replacement theory BS so damn hard? They want everyone young, broke and uneducated so they can keep the grift going.
They’re sociopaths. They don’t care about us.
You think it’s that they don’t notice, and not that that notice, but don’t care?
We have been in a new gilded age since the end of the 90s…
Tax.
Tax them like there is no tomorrow.
Billionaires should simply not exist. Put a cap on total net worth and if you pass that, income tax goes to 100. If your networth goes up anyway because of stocks or whatever, tax that too. Tax stocks, homes, boats, etc.
Enormous wealth should be like the speed of light. The closer you get there, the heavier it becomes to stay there, you need to spend more and more energy to get less and less higher.
This should not be a crazy idea.
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I have been saying something slightly similar, but rather that laws should no longer protect them.
“We’ve decided on one year of really high inflation.”
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they’re so nice, so surely everybody else is too
This right here.
I think many poor people do not realize how deliberately cruel the rich are being. They cannot imagine someone looking at a whiteboard planning debilitating poverty and misery for millions of people. They think that the situation is unfortunate and unavoidable somehow, and not deliberately made.
One of the campa we are in, unless you’re one of the machete holders.
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See you in the news, I guess?
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This violence-against-the-owning class rhetoric is going too far. Killing other humans is never justified. Tax them into oblivion and make them work for a living like the rest of us. There’s a massive difference between having disdain for billionaires and wanting to kill them.
Killing other humans is often justified. For instance, it would be completely justified to kill someone who was in the process of shooting up a school.
In the same way, billionaires are guilty of causing the deaths of millions of people through their hoarding of necessities. Killing the billionaires would allow this wealth to be redistributed, saving potentially millions of lives.
I think the difference is that a school shooter is in the middle of a violent act and is an immediate threat to the lives of anybody around them. Usually the only way to put an end to the harm they’re causing is to meet that violence with the same level of violence. It’s not a just act, it’s a tragedy, but it’s ultimately necessary to prevent further injustice.
Hoarding an incomprehensible amount of resources and lobbying for a system is easier to exploit is amoral and causes harm to our society but it is not a violent act and is not an immediate threat to anybody’s life.
These memes spreading violent rhetoric against a class of people this community is at odds with is starting to feel like other corners of the internet that I don’t want to be involved in.
It absolutely is a violent act. In the same way that locking a person in a cage is a violent act, depriving people of the things they need to live is a violent act.
The fact is, simply asking these people to stop hoarding and polluting is not going to work (duh).
Is there a non-violent solution?
Billionaires own the government and will never allow themselves to be taxed enough to matter.
I’d wager we have a much better shot at passing legislation for a billionaire tax than legalizing murder.
I’d rather not become the monsters just to get rid of the monsters.
Were the people who fought and killed the nazis in WWII monsters? No, they did it to protect humanity. Sociopath billionaires going away is also necessary to protect humanity.
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“Limp wristed”? You sound an awful lot like the fascists that I’m opposed to.
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Apparently you really love murder
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Billionaires have such a heavy say in our government that it will never go that way unless it’s forced.
gilded age
Reforming capitalism will only delay end stage, not prevent it.
Imagine getting something like the early 20th century labor movement going these days. Seems impossible right? We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started? We wasted those lives lost and ruined because we thought capitalism could be salvaged. It is not salvageable.
We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started?
30 years of relative prosperity?
Also, I don’t understand how you think we’d be able to abolish capitalism without much more blood, sweat, and tears than would be spent building a labor movement. I also think that a strong labor movement would be a necessary prerequisite to abolishing capitalism. I don’t see how you build a movement to abolish capitalism with millions of isolated, fractured consumers. By magic? Will AI or crypto solve this? 😄
We have to scare the rich. Organize, agitate, break shit, etc. They have been too successful at dividing us along arbitrary lines. No war but class war. Fight back.
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There’s like 600k people dying of cancer at any given time, and seperately theres only like 800 billionaires who are probably somewhat directly responsible for their cancer and lack of access to medical care. If I had a bucket list bc I was dying of cancer, I know what would be on it.
Terms of enrampagement
Did you see Regis this morning?
Can we continue with the trend and start having unions “talk” to the CEOs? 👀
Very simply. Raise their taxes.
Less simply. Remove the cap on social security tax. Tax long term capital gains beyond a certain amount as regular income. Put the top rate income tax closer to 90%. Fix the god damn estate tax situation. Why on god’s green earth do the children of Sam Walton occupy so much space on the Forbes 400.
Or we could abolish the employer-employee contract and mandate that all firms be worker coops, so that no one could appropriate the positive and negative fruits of other people’s labor
France will review your company’s ledger if you want to fire people en masse. If you can afford to keep them you can’t fire them
I mean, I guess, but why complicate this stuff. We already have the systems and administration to do taxes. We could break up monopolies and enforce the laws we already have.
I’d keep it real real simple for folks. We should stop letting corporations and their owner class privatize the gains and stick the rest of society with the losses. Take the 2008 fiasco, if we are bailing out a bunch of companies we should be bailing out a bunch of home owners.
Hence the rising fascism. The corporate class knows the only way to get the common people to continue to support them is through scaremongering about imagined threats.
This is exactly what workers mean when they say the stock market isn’t the economy.
Yeah but their entire retirement is based on it!
Their entire retirement is held hostage by it. Fixed it for ya.
Such an insidious way of keeping workers complicit in our capitalist hellscape.
Oof, somehow this escaped me, even though I participate, while hating it, and thinking at least a bit about that fact along the way. The thing doesn’t have to even be deliberate if it’s effective - accidentally-discovered techniques often work as well as planned/sought ones.
By which I mean, of course this situation is not some deliberate “super-rich cabal” silly scenario, but damn if the levers don’t work exactly that way. My and my family’s future well-being, as a strictly mandatory goal to pursue, is turned into fuel for a machine I hate (contributing to 401k), and the hope I’ve been soft-coerced into is a hope that the hateful thing spits out enough at the end for me to keep:
- a roof over our heads, not otherwise guaranteed nor likely
- continued medical care through life post-employability, not otherwise guaranteed, only somewhat likely (Medicare)
- the limited dignity of dying with some care, but true misery along the way, as it is for almost anyone who doesn’t “luck into” a sudden end…again, not otherwise guaranteed, nor fucking likely (end of life care is an absolute disaster in this country)
The folks with the resources and “character” to enjoy, exploit, and move stocks love this. The new yachts we buy them, ridiculous “homes”, and the unbelievably fresh new whatever’s on their idiot status comparison instruments are never-before-seen and even more egregiously wasteful than their awful rivals’.
The folks doing less well than me? I mean we don’t even hear their misery, except in limited outbursts at strange times in retail and food industry settings or other such. The folks actually working themselves to death, SO many of us, are too fucking busy to even properly cry out.
Lol, you think we’ll be able to retire 😂
I’ve lucked out and tracking to retire at 60 but my grandfather has been retired about as long as I’ve been alive (55).
I’m 30 next month, I joined the military right out of high school, and I specifically remember them teaching us a bit about 401k’s because of our ability to participate in TSP.
The instructor very clearly told us, the average American needs $1 million in their retirement account when they to to retire to live comfortably. Not extravagantly, comfortably.
Just a couple weeks ago I saw an article saying the average American now needs $2 million in their retirement account to be to retire comfortably, and this is assuming they don’t have a mortgage payment, etc.
So in 11 years, the amount needed to retire comfortably has doubled, and yet my wages haven’t doubled… Minimum wage hasn’t increased in decades, sure they’re talking about $15/hr now, but that should’ve been 10 years ago. With inflation, minimum wage should be around $26/hr, yet even in my blue state, it’s like $15.60/hr or something, it’s barely over $15.
Throw in the recent news about the inevitable and quickly approaching AMOC collapse and the climate hellscape that’s going to come with it… Our futures were robbed from us for profit, and even if I started making triple what I make now, I’ll never be able to retire, nor do I even have a retirement account anymore (I cashed mine out to help me during some really rough financial times right after the pandemic, y’know, when the government told the average American to go fuck themselves). And I was one of the few among my friends who even had one.
So, like many people around my age, my retirement will either be societal collapse in the next couple decades, or a bullet to the head (if I could even afford the bullet) as I die in old age, homeless, while we probably have six trillionaires at that point.
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we’ve got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
An ever growing number of working poor who need two paychecks to live
Sounds like Tsarist Russia, with no single royal family to execute.
Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.
So we’ve got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.
An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege
I mean this simply cannot be true.
If everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, then in order for the “number of millionaires” to be “ever dwindling” we would need not only a housing shortage, but an eroding quantity of housing or a drastic drop in home ownership rates. Neither is happening. The home ownership rate in 2024 is 65.8% according to this site: https://www.simplyinsurance.com/how-many-homeowners-in-the-us/ which puts us at a much improved rate of ownership from when the housing crash happened in 2008, when we were running somewhere in the low 60s.
So not everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, or millionaires numbers aren’t dwindling. It simply cannot be the case that what you’re saying here is all true.
Anyone? There are lots of houses worth less than $1,000,000. Sure, by the time a mortgage is paid off and you fully own the house yourself a person should also have some savings, but I certainly wouldn’t expect that to be universal.
My house is now worth a bit over $350,000. And although that is less then $1,000,000 I bought it at $185,000 (and had to use every penny saved to get a down payment) just a decade ago. Even in my small rural town I currently could not afford to buy the house I live in, I doubt this will improve in time.
I might not be a millionaire, but I would guess I am now in a smaller class of people that owns where they sleep. And if the market keeps doing whats its doing I might be a millionaire in time (this is not overall a good thing).
Plus the bank owns any house with a mortgage. It’s not your house until it’s paid off. Can’t be a millionaire with $400,000 in assets and $375,000 in debt.
I am not sure you understand how a mortgage works. Why would I have $375,000 on a mortgage for a house I bought for $185,000 over a decade ago?
The bank “owns” only what is owning on the mortgage with the property and buildings on it as collateral. Even if I stopped paying all together (for some reason) the bank does not want the house, they want the money and will force a sale though foreclosure.
The issue is that we now have two “classes” of non rich people, those that spend money on rent (a cost without equity) and those like me ether old enough or lucky enough to have a mortgage where the money we spend on a mortgage (reducing that debit) is not wasted and the value of our homes keeps going up.
Wasn’t speaking to your specific home value. I was adding to the point that every homeowner is not a millionaire.
If someone has a house worth $350,000 but they’ve only paid off $50,000 from the principal, then they aren’t worth $350,000. I’d argue they’re not even worth $300,000.
Miss a few payments, and they lose the house plus whatever payments they’d already made. That’s not personal wealth. We’re just living in the bank’s house until it’s paid off and the deed gets transferred.
Not essentially, we are. Soon we will have great depression 2.0
That is an impressive typo
Profits shouldn’t exist. They should be required to put that money back into the company and take a salary for themselves. Idk how this works with shareholders but they can get fucked for all I care at this point.
We used to have progressive income taxes that did this.
Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk pulled them because “trickle down, a rising tide lifts all boats, thousand points of light, blah blah blah”
A rising tide lifts all boats has always struck me as a strange metaphor for them to use. To me that conjures up thoughts of welfare, UBI, irreducible minimums, safety nets, etc. It seems like a great metaphor for the opposite of what they’re using it for.
Companies need shareholders to get off the ground, and you don’t have to be rich to be a shareholder. That’s the whole idea… otherwise only the mega rich have the capital to start businesses.
Paying C-suites this much is just idiotic though. I own a few stocks, and seeing some of the companies pay executives and upper management so much to feud and slowly destroy companies makes me sick. It is not what anyone sane wants unless they’re parasitic daytraders or drinking the corporate kool-aid.
Greedy capitalism is the problem, but it’s also a culture problem, I think.
The way you fix this is with higher, and enforced, corporate taxes. If the corporation doesn’t keep the money anyways, they flow it back in.
