Mathematically, I think it's hard for people to truly understand the obscene wealth that some people have accumulated. 100 billion doesn't sound that different than 100 million.
100 million is magnitudes closer to ZERO than it is to 100 billion.
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is roughly 1 billion.
~~No. It’s a thousand. Which is closer to zero than a billion.~~
Edit: You’re talking absolute values so the difference is 999 million.
While I was talking ratios hence the ratio being 1:1000. My bad.
It's the best way I've found to illustrate to regular people how fucking massive the wealth accumulation is.
Imagine life was a game. You lived for 2025 years. You worked 260 days / year. You made the median US salary.
You would need to relive that process 3,145 times to match an Oligarch.
That amount of wealth is unethical while humanity suffers. No one can really fathom “1b dollars.”
Without spending
.................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... ....................................................................................................
This represents 1 Billion.
Each dot . represents 1 Million.
Now for the question: how many hours a day would you work to get more dots if you already had one Billion?
That would be in equity, not in cash, but it would mean each person would have secure housing, a secure retirement, reliable transportation, and reliable healthcare
Imagine how much less stressful life would be if the average person didn’t have to worry about paying rent and whether or not they will retire at the end of their life.
I work in mental health and I guarantee you a lot of mental illness is not “mental illness” but resource management issues masquerading as such
Imagine how much less stressful life would be if the average person didn’t have to worry about paying rent and whether or not they will retire at the end of their life.
"That sounds horrible, we can't make money in those conditions" is what the people standing in the way would say.
I dont want the money evenly distributed anymore. Now I want things to change entirely.
I don't want their capital. I want their heads.
Eat the rich, embrace socialism, basically become a millionaire at some point
Vs whatever the fuck Reagan's neoliberalism has got you
But the consequences - how we tell who is elite vs who is not? /S
Hmmm . . . as a lump sum the market would then react and everything would cost 1 million dollars. Money isn't real. Food, Land, and property are.
I think money's value is directly tied to its velocity of trade vs the scarcity of the item it's being traded for.
However
IMO: What you are owed is 500,000$ worth of government services per person. The costs of things like public education, infrastructure, healthcare , social security and other social services should be covered by this.
This is what they want to take from you.
No one said it would be 500k in money/cash. It could very well be real estate, gold, shares, bonds, or a mix thereof.
Upvote to the moon. Lots of leftists seem to intellectually understand that money is a fiction that's sometimes useful, but are bad at putting that into practice.
I'll stick my neck out on something here: this includes donating to individual people in Gaza, even if they're coming to you from a verified source on Blue Sky. Yes, a kilo of flour might cost $600. Giving someone $600 to buy flour might feed that family, but there's some other family who isn't getting that flour. You're just choosing who starves today. The fundamental issue is that there isn't enough flour or any other food. There is no way to solve that by donating to individuals. It can only be solved by telling the government of Israel to go fuck itself.
Doing it over world wealth/population (454385÷8.2) gives 55,412 USD per capita, which tell how skewed is wealth in the US.
If we could figure out how to distribute food efficiently and how to build housing units efficiently -- in the sense of actually getting that done -- $55k ought to be a perfectly acceptable amount of money for everyone.
We already have that figured out, we can supply food and housing to anywhere in the world.
We don't because capitalism.
I just want billionaires and churches to pay their fair share and end citizens united. That's a great start
Wealth inequality is our #1 issue in the world, and the root of all our other issues, climate change, politics, all issues. But y'all understand money doesn't work like the meme, right?
Tried explaining this to my stoner friend back in the 90s. Mike was appalled that the government shredded worn out bills. "Man! They could just give that to people like us!"
OK Mike, you understand that the US government could give each one of $1,000,000, today? And you know I charge $20 to mow a lawn? If we both had a million bucks, I wouldn't mow your lawn for $20. I'd want $20,000. I already have a million simoleans, what's $20?! "You could still get a righteous meal at McDonald's!"
If we all woke up with $417,465 tomorrow, we would instantly be broke. As dad used to say, "If getting money was easy, it wouldn't be money." We obviously need to tilt the table, radically, but just smearing all the money around is a childish idea.
Call me a downer, but I don't see any hope of clawing anything back from the rich short of guillotines. Every one of our institutions is bought and paid for, and that's still not enough. They rape us more everyday and demand yet more. (Call me bitter. Lowe's is pulling this shit on me daily. Stock must have gone down a nickle.)
It's not like the best way to do wealth redistribution is to just give the lump sum to every person. A significantly better way is to fund public goods: such as public infrastructure, universal healthcare, mass transit, social housing, public education, subsidies for healthy food, expanded protections for workers, and UBI to assist everyone's cost of living. Jobs would focus on the quality of their output over the overexploitation of the workers.
It says wealth, not money. Redistribution would not look like printing dollars, it would be ownership of 471k worth of assets and securities.
We don't need to redistribute any wealth. We only need to disappear the wealth of the billionaires, and the billionaires themselves just to be sure they do not rise again.
So if that's the median, you need about half a million to be considered "Middle class" now?
Looks at housing prices... Yeah, sounds about right.
I'm curious to know, if the wealth was redistributed like this, but with no modifications to the underlying system, how long before the existing Pareto-style distribution returns?
If 20 strangers get 1/20 of a 10 million dollar mansion what do they do? The most anyone could pay for it is $500,000.
Everyone is on here talking about how this would cause inflation, but I don’t think it would. A vast majority of this value is not in cash but in stocks bonds and property. I am more sure how you would divide up who gets apples shares and who gets 5% of their neighbors $600,000 home. But even if you were able, what is sure is that most people would want to convert their stock/bonds/property to cash so they can eat. Only problem is that no one in America would have any cash to buy up the assets. So in a market full of sellers and no buyers the value of everything will plummet.
I think there's a lot of distraction discussing the particulars of this hypothetical, when it's clear that it couldn't work that way in practice.
It's really only helpful to illustrate the equity imbalance and just how much equity is in the system that most people don't see.
To be honest we could use a little deflation right about now.
$400 million would allow me to build a tiny house completely off grid with all the equipment I'd need to grow vegetables in a remote location for the rest of my life... The other $398 would go to helping anyone and everyone.
Misread the amount but leaving up as a reminder of my idiocy.
Sorry, you only get $400 thousand, not $400 million.
Geeze... I really can't read today.
To be fair, you could do that on 400k if you’re willing to be very frugal and handy.
I mean I know lots of people in the US who survive on 10k a year.
each person would have that exactly once... over time the concentration would happen again
I need these statistics for other countries. Especially Germany. We seem to struggle to understand it as well.
People skeeting stuff.
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