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If you bring up UBI, or other reforms, you'll inevitably get someone who brings up: "voting yourself someone else's money".
You could convince me, except that things have gotten to an absurd state.
I look at some graphs of wealth inequality and it is unimaginably shocking. I never dreamed it could be this bad. More than 50% of the US wealth is owned by 5% of the people. [1] 35% is owned by only 1% of the population.
This image from this article also tells the story.
I'm not going to argue how accurate those numbers are. Rather, I will extrapolate the trend.
Let's continue the current trend to its logical absurd conclusion. The entire planet is owned by one single person. You (and everyone else) are one of the wage slaves in the bottom 99.99999999 % of the population (at least 8 decimal places). [7.5 billion people, minus that one person who owns everything, then divided by 7.5 billion people.]
Naturally, we should respect property ownership. Somehow this one person deserves and "earned" the wealth of the entire planet through his hard and diligent efforts and deserves to own everything and everyone. It is absurd on its face.
At this logical endpoint, it clearly seems that the rest of the planet should seize the wealth of the one person.
Wealth transfer has already happened. And is still happening. Republicans are just fine with this as long as it is all trickling upward.
Yes, "voting yourself someone else's money" involves taking away some of the absurd amounts of wealth hoarded up by a few. Amounts of individual wealth that one person couldn't spend in a lifetime; then leaves to others, who themselves can't spend it in their lifetime.
Not as a proposal, but just to make a point, hypothetically, if all of these people who exceed this threshold had their net worth capped at $100 Million, they would still be just fine. Yes, really! They would still live in fabulous homes, drive fabulous cars, and eat whatever they wanted, travel wherever and whenever they wanted -- for the rest of their natural lives.
In case my "one man owns the world" didn't get the idea across, I'll be more blunt. Any time too few people have owned way, way too much, and too many had nothing, there is always an uprising. I'm not proposing an uprising. I'm merely warning it is inevitable. Hopefully not in my lifetime. Maybe it would be better to solve this peacefully where the wealthiest, while heavily taxed, still end up, after taxes, fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of most everyone else. I'm not proposing reducing all the rich people's wealth to some cap. Just that they should pay their fair share. Why are they the ones who get the tax cuts?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday October 27 2020, @11:09PM
Fallacy of relative privation. In a developed nation with as much wealth as we have, NO ONE should be having trouble getting food. And I mean *food,* not processed foil-wrapped packets of high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated palm oil slathered onto compressed potato dust.
I have been homeless and destitute enough to have to eat from trash cans, and this when I do not and never did drink, smoke, gamble, do drugs, etc; it came entirely from just being fucking poor. So to hear this shit from you really rankles. I am hoping this new SCOTUS "justice" blows away all the programs people your age and older rely on, so you can have a taste--pardon the choice of words!--of this sort of thing. It would serve you precisely right, and after all, it would only be a consequence of you getting your supposed "originalist" (you gullible fucking rube...) on the Court!
The fallacy of relative privation I mentioned above, explicitly spelled out, is "if anyone else anywhere any*when* ever had it worse than you, you don't get to complain." It's complete bullshit, and I think somewhere deep down a little part of even *you* knows it's complete bullshit. Pull the jackboot out of your mouth, open your eyes, and get wise to what's been happening in this country since Reagan was elected.