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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: 1) by khallow on Friday October 30 2020, @10:17PM
I grant that distinction. I even grant that the presence of bad and stupid choices doesn't imply that someone will always make those bad and stupid choices.
I don't grant that taking money from the rich to poor, just because, somehow fixes that. First, when the tools are in place for wealth transfer, the state is much better at reverse robin hood - taking from the poor and giving to the rich. It's easier since the poor don't have elaborate defenses against taxation and the kickbacks are better.
Second, the wealth taken was being used to generate more wealth and to employ lots of people: investment, wages, etc. For example, the present richest person in the world [wikipedia.org](excluding state actors like King Saud) is Jeff Bezos who has a networth valued in the recent past at $113 billion. Most of that wealth comes from Amazon which presently employs a million employees. So Bezos not only has wealth that is three orders of magnitude above the mentioned $100 million cap, but employs a million people in the process.
That's the huge fallacy with only looking at wealth as something to spend. Here, it also employs vast numbers of people and creates a huge amount of infrastructure that hundreds of millions of people use every day. Given that wealth to someone who doesn't employ people and create infrastructure, means you are likely to get less of both.
The third point is that a majority of the poor are behaviorally poor which is the problem we're discussing here. Give them money even on a permanent, continuing basis, they will burn through it, and remain just as poor as before, possibly with more serious problems than before (such as higher recreational drug consumption or higher debt).
Now, if you can combine that wealth transfer with some way to effectively improve the recipients so that they permanently stay out of the poverty trap, that would something worth considering. But I have yet to hear anything like that in this thread.