The rich are so fucking stingy with their money that they have a private island and private city with no septic system and instead want to pump it into the nearby community at the other community’s expense.
Like what the hell is the point of all that money if they are so utterly unwilling to spend any of it?
How do you think they get rich?
Next on Ask a Dragon!
The ultra wealthy have a tendency to just hoard it, accumulating far more than they will even use, and act like that is normal and the purpose of it.
you’re supposed to put it into shady cryptocurrencies. that’s your money making money for you, homeless people haven’t unlocked nft strats yet
The current situation is one I’ve been wracking my brain over for more than a decade.
What happens when there’s no more money to firehose from the poor to the rich. When all the blood is squeezed out of the stone.
By the definition of money, that cannot happen. If all the money is owned by one person, then it is not money. If all of the money is owned by one group of people and another group of people have no access to it, then that will bifurcate the economy between those two groups and the second group will use something else as a substitute. No matter how little people have, there will always be some form of trade and commerce between them. Even North Koreans today (where private trade is largely forbidden) and enslaved Africans in the pre-Civil War US (who for the most part were not legally allowed to own anything) had some form of trade amongst themselves.
Each successive dollar (or euro, pound, yen…) gets successively more difficult to extract because as people have less and less to spend they get tighter and tighter with their spending. Without state intervention, there will always be a floor to how poor you can possibly make someone, because at some point they will realise that breaking the rules and risking the punishment is a better idea than continuing to play by them. And when enough people think this way, well… just ask Louis XVI or Nicholas II how that went.
Even if a communist revolution does not occur, this happens already to a lesser extent in the impoverished areas of cities worldwide, where people would rather turn to crime than work for starvation wages. So if you are someone on the side of the political spectrum which likes to talk against crime and socialism, the policies you should champion are those which prevent the poor from needing to resort to those things (not that any such people are likely to exist on Lemmy).
Neo-feudalism. People who don’t live off of investments (i.e., most of us) need to sell our labor to buy the necessities of life. Once the rich own everything and everyone else is poor, we will continue to sell our labor to pay off debts and make the lives of the wealthy comfortable in new and innovative ways.
You give billions of credit to rich people companies and create inflation. Companies go bankrupt, they create new companies and the process repeats. You stand no chance.
Conservatives are mad at poor people for uuuh… (checks notes): Using government aid to increase the GDP.
GDP isn’t inherently a useful measure for this though. If I pay you 100$ to eat a dog turd, then you pay me 100$ to eat the next dog turd we see. We created 200$ worth of GDP and ate two dog turds. Yet neither of us profited in any way.
Cool, so be super responsible on their part instead. If they can’t be trusted to save up themselves, do the saving up of all the money yourself, o wise conservative. And let’s put all that money in a trust fund for them and just give them the dividends. Let’s call those dividends a “Universal Basic Dividend”.
Stimulating the economy baby
Their argument for not paying taxes is old. And boring.
They explicitly don’t want it but the right thing to do would be to spend some money on the means of production.
Create a cooperative and start accumulating capital for the proletarians.
How dare those communist scum create a small business, and become independent of welfare! Steaming
“they’ll just spend it on drugs and drinking”
That’s all I was going to spend it on…
(Paraphrased from Steve Hughes)
My favorite story was when a Karen told someone to not give money to the homeless man because he was going to use it to buy drugs and the man just that, “That’s what i was going to spend it on anyway.”
Among economists, this is actually a solid consensus and why many of them are in favor of policies that benefit the less wealthy parts of society. Politicians who oppose these policies often do so against scientific consensus.
more importantly, it’s not just scientific consensus. Remember that trump voters don’t care about the science. they care about the economy. You have to make it about the economy.
Hoarding money and never spending it is good for the economy… Somehow, give me a minute I need to see what Fox news says so I can just repeat that.
Fox news would probably say that consumerism is foolish anyways and needs to stop (because it’s gluttony or sth), while we should all glorify the leaders who were wise enough in the past to invest their wealth.
Lol it’s not about economy
The irony here is that GDP is a measure of how much money is spent, so yeah, giving money to people more likely to spend it increases GDP more then giving it to people who will put it in a bank.
Is this true? I know there has been research on the consensus among climate scientists (Oreskes, 2004), is there something similar for economists?
It’s not really a consensus, it drives higher inflation (people are spending more) and a lot of stimulus vs tight purse economics are just doing the opposite of what they did in response to the last crash
What I think they are talking about is UBI which in limited pilot projects haven’t impacted inflation
The real benefit of uplifting the poor is that it creates a safer society for everyone and faster innovation in that society because people have time/money to do things. When flying was in it’s infancy a lot of farmers in the US had hobby planes and gliding/eventually flying was built off being accessible. Aviation laws get in the way but it’s completely foreign to think of some poor farmer in rural USA being a hobby pilot today
The thing about UBI is that it doesn’t really lend itself well to limited pilots. Being both “Universal” and “Limited” doesn’t make much sense. So it’s really hard to assert evidence one way or the other about what that would look like in full.
There are some “accidental” universal income scenarios like the Alaska permanent fund, but they fall short of being even "basic " income.
So you have some means tested experiments where a small selection of people get a limited term benefit among a broader population that didn’t. In those scenarios the people seem to make the most of the opportunity, using that relief to prepare themselves for a more viable living after the benefit wears out. It certainly shows that people well tend to be more responsible than conservatives assume given a chance, but doesn’t show what happens to the economy when all the participants assume that basic level of income, e.g so the rents just go up and erase the benefit and everything is at the same level.
I’ve seen some assert that more regulated basic needs would be better. If you just throw UBI and let free market reign, the businesses may ruin it. Public housing, healthcare, and basic food might do wonders more good at long as the government responsibiliy manages it instead of letting the businesses just do their thing…
Oh, I agree that those policies work, for sure. I’m just interested in the statement that a “solid consensus” of economists agree - that seems unlikely to me.
The consensus is strong with regards to the question “What happens with money that you give to poor people?” and naturally becomes less strong with regards to specific effects on the economy or what policies to implement. But most economists would agree that stuff like food stamps or certain types of tax credits or (conditional) transfer payments geared towards very low-income households are often a net positive because of the immediate spending and investment in human capital. The downside is of course that these programs typically increase inflation. I don’t think the consensus is anywhere near as strong as the one about climate (but few are).
Right, but I’m asking where you’re getting your evidence for this consensus.
Your suppose to shove the money to the closest representatives asshole.
We’re in one of the richest countries in the world and the minimum wage is lower now than it was thirty-five years ago.
There are homeless people everywhere…
This homeless guy asked me for money the other day.
I was about to give it to him and then I thought he’s just going to use it on drugs or alcohol.
And then I thought: “That’s what I’m going to use it on!”
“Why am I judging this poor bastard?”
People love to judge homeless guys.
Like if you give him the money he’s just going to waste it. He’s going to waste the money.
Well, he lives in a box, what do you want him to do? Save it up and buy a wall unit?
Take a little run to the store for a throw rug and a CD rack?
He’s homeless!
I walked behind this guy the other day. A homeless guy asked him for money.
He looks right at the homeless guy and goes: “Why don’t you go get a job, you bum?”
People always say that to homeless guys, “Get a job”, like it’s always that easy.
This homeless guy was wearing his underwear outside his pants.
I’m guessing his resume ain’t all up to date.
I’m predicting some problems during the interview process.
I’m pretty sure even McDonald’s has a “Underwear Go Inside The Pants” policy.
Not that they enforce it really strictly, but technically, I’m sure it is on the books.
I’m also very tired of people saying that pan handlers are all millionaires because they heard or read some anecdote somewhere.
Like yeah I’m sure there are scammer pan handlers, but even in that 0.0001% case it’s because begging for money is easier or better than getting a job.
I recall a time back around 2008 or 2009, when my smartest coworker left Fox News on in the breakroom. (He knew better than to trust their bias, but we had few channels available and he just wanted to hear the news.) My stupidest coworker walked through the breakroom, heard some news about “Obama giving away cars to poor people” and came back into the lab ranting and raving about it.
I had a talk with that smart coworker and gently asked him not to leave that channel on again, because some of the people we work with are highly suggestable. Just then, the stupid coworker came into the room to rant the news at him.
He instantly understood.
Fox News has been a plague on our society for almost 30 years. I’m so sick of its existence.
Steve Hughes?
what do you want him to do?
Use it for food.
It’s weird to give someone money and care what they do with it unless you’re expecting them to pay you back someday. You’re giving it away, so it’s expendable to you, and you’ll probably never interact with the person again, so it’s odd to care about the specifics beyond “I hope this helps.”
You’ll never give them enough money to actually change their situation, and that’s not your fault but it’s also not your problem, it’s theirs. If they think they need a cigarette more than a sandwich, who am I to tell them they are wrong? It’s their money now, not mine.
It’s their money now, not mine.
And until I give it away, it’s mine, not theirs. Who are you to tell me I’m wrong for how I decide who to give it away to or not?
I was talking about the hypothetical scenario where you gave it to them and were miffed it didn’t go towards food, so I agree 100% with what you’re saying. Don’t give your money away if you can’t afford to let someone else do what they want with it.
A lot of people don’t mind giving someone something they need without placing conditions on it. But it’s okay to be different.
I agree I have no say in what they do with the money, only whether I choose to give it to them or not.
Have you considered that if you really want homeless people to have food, you can just buy them food?
Yes, and when they get mad and say they want money (which has happened more than once), you know what they were going to use it for.
If a random guy on the street offered you a sandwich, would you eat it? Why not, you like to save money, right? What’s the problem, I’m a nice guy trying to help you here.
I offered to buy them food. I’m not sure why you thought I’d just buy some first without making sure they wanted it.
That’s fair. It’s their body, you have no say in what they do with it ;)
Nope, only in what I choose to do or not do to help them destroy it.
Boil it, mash it, stick it in a stew.
My friend’s dad once told me that studies have shown that if you give $1,000,000 to someone without money and the same to a rich person that almost all the money will be gone from the poor person and will have increased when left with the rich person, because poor people don’t know how to manage money and that’s why they’re poor.
My reaction was shock followed by, “it costs more than half a million dollars to pull someone out of poverty??? And won’t putting a million dollars in the bank almost always gain interest? I wonder why people without money don’t know how to put their money in the bank instead of starving!!”
It’s also been known by economists for time immemorial that the best way to improve the economy is to give money to poor people, nothing else required. Literally just giving poor people money to spend skyrockets the velocity of money, whereas the hoarders just put it in an account to do nothing but gain interest.
It’s not a fair comparison. Someone in poverty will use that million in order to lift themselves out of material poverty. Which means they will pay off debts, buy property, pay college tuition for themselves and/or their descendants, possibly start a business, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t think of. That would easily cost half a million. Someone who’s already rich will already have all that.
Because your dad is wrong.
Many of the UBI-type (universal basic income) studies show that most people continue to work and in many cases they are able to increase their income from work in short order.
Turns out relief from chronic money stress liberates mental resources that increase personal resilience and that translates into better employment for many.
My dad is dead, tyvm. He was pretty sure he wasn’t having a heart attack, so you’re right that he was wrong.
But also my friend’s dad is wrong about a lot of stuff, including when his son’s and I are being sarcastic by saying “thanks Obama,” and that it’s an invitation for him to shit on social safety nets.
Has there ever been a UBI study that lasted the person’s entire life?
Not that I can find. I volunteer if any scientists want to conduct one, though.
Not that I’m aware of, just because studies haven’t even been considered for long enough to have lasted any entire lifetime, to my knowledge.
However, a many have been going for decades at this point, and there’s some great summaries of the findings over these expansive timeframes from the Stanford Basic Income Lab where they have a map and many other resources.
The conclusions seem to remain consistent, across studies lasting anywhere from one-time payments, to months, years, or decades, and I think that the conclusions, while not set in stone, seem to be quite comprehensively backed up to the point that if they were deployed at a larger scale, it would probably show similar outcomes.
I believe Alaska has some sort of ubi. Maybe start there.
Gosh, I don’t know. Not a domain expert, just an avid reader of primary studies on subjects I like.
It would surprise me, but I bet there are other studies you could with post-hoc data analysis, perhaps on lifetime outcomes of people who receive only a small income from a trust over a long period, like people with a moderately prosperous grandparent who put together a meager trust for them.
I know a couple of people with such a situation. They could definitely make much different life choices, even in one case where the trust paid out about the same as the take home pay from a job in retail.
I feel confident predicting that a broader survey of such folks would show vastly different life outcomes, professional attainment, marriage stability etc. when compared to people who started out without that.
It’s sort of obvious but you have to beat people over their heads with data before concepts even get widely considered.
Of course they would fare vastly better. You could work an actual retail job and have double the income. You could be a festival weenie for four years, get therapy, figure out your shit, and network with the better off festival weenies. The point being the universe of realistic and attainable life paths expands greatly with even small amounts of basic income, being able to say no to a bad deal is huge.
Which is why we will need to implement global reforms against extreme wealth. Social mobility scares the hell out of billionaires.
It’s stupid in even more ways. The economy needs people to buy things to keep going and allow people like your friend’s dad to have jobs and act condescending to people who don’t have jobs.
So if everybody was “smart” like that theoretical rich person and kept all their money, there wouldn’t be an economy for them to leech passive income from.
Nuh uh. The economy needs billionaires to peepee money on me.
If you water a dying plant, it will drink. It’s almost like people without enough money need it for something
