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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: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 30 2020, @11:54PM
Whew, DannyB, your journal entry sparked a heck of a discussion.
There are a ton of reasons for poverty. Some of it is "fools and their money are soon parted", and some of it is that the playing field really isn't level, not even close.
Plenty of folks are jealous and spiteful of anyone who enjoys a bit of success. A poor person who wins the lottery soon finds their life is utterly changed, and not all for the better. There absolutely is discrimination against the rich. It's the sort of discrimination that arouses zero sympathy for the targets, for obvious reasons. And certainly, the ones who cheated their way to wealth deserve no sympathy. The more foolish among the rich act superior, making it impossible for most to feel for them.
There is also discrimination against the successful, and the smart. Smart people who start poor are more likely to succeed and become, if not rich, at least fairly safe from want, and everyone knows it. Almost every nerd has experienced harassment from jealous classmates. Physical Education is all too easily warped into payback time, the golden opportunity to humiliate the nerds.
A successful society needs to moderate this conflict. One big thing we've tried is raising everyone, by ensuring a good education for all, at least through high school. After that, though, wealth becomes an outsized factor in who learns and who does not, try though we might to level the differences with scholarships and grants and such like piecemeal approaches. In my case, the scholarship approach failed me. I had the best scholarship, but it required that I maintain a 3.5 GPA, and little did I know that the department in which I enrolled had the worst graduation rate and lowest grades of them all. In that department, no one had a 3.5. So I lost the scholarship. And once lost, there was no getting it back, even if I did somehow improve my GPA to 3.5. In short, that scholarship was bait to rope the student in, then once committed, the school was only too pleased to withdraw it for poor grades. I can't call that serious aid for the needy student, not with it set up to fail like that. I would have changed schools, but they had another hold, the fact that a transfer would cost me half my credit hours thanks to schools refusing to honor one another's courses.
What private schools all too often really are, is a means for the wealthy to maintain their upper class status across the generations. Rich kids get the best education money can buy, but they don't appreciate education in itself. To many of them, education is only a tool, to be used along with any other available tool, such as bribery and corruption of our politicians, to stay on top. Some of the rich brats are so warped that they hate education, and everything to do with it, including teachers and scientists, even as they use their superiority in it to aid them in staying on top of the dung heap. It's not too different from the 9/11 perpetrators wanting only to learn how to fly passenger jet planes, but not how to land them.