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This reminds me of a government scheme some ten years ago or so. Workfair it was called, or something.
In short, someone claiming job seekers allowance would be required to work something like 10 hours a week for a company such as Tesco, or Poundland in order to be eligible for their welfare payments. On the face of it, fair enough. The person gets some work experience and the possibility of being hired.
Except all it really did was provide free labour to companies whose profits were in the billions. And that labour was paid by the tax payer.
And no one in the government at the time either saw how bad that might look, or more likely, cared.
I still think about that.
And the Walton family sponsored the no kings protest!
That’s a somewhat misleading summary
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-walmart-heiress-nyt-protest-ad/
While Walton inherited a 1.9% stake in Walmart following her husband’s 2005 death, according to Forbes, a spokesperson for Walmart told Snopes via email that Walton has no involvement in the business.
Tell that to her 20b net worth
That’s irrelevant to the point that “The walton family sponsored” is misleading when it looks like it was just one person who’s only a member of the family by marriage, with no current involvement in the business, and when walmart itself explicitly distanced itself from her on this topic.
I literally didn’t say Walmart did I?
You said “Walton family”, which is technically correct but misleading because it’s only one person. The statement made by walmart is more representative of the family majority.
Yes split hairs to defend the billionaires
You could admit you weren’t entirely correct. It’s okay.
And you’re doing the work of billionaires here by discouraging people from protesting.
All those ‘protests’ are coordinated by the oligarchy as pressure release values because they know the public is at a tipping point for rejecting both right wing parties and their policies, preventing organic protests from rising and creating a threat to their existence. They allow voters to blow some steam while giving the illusion they are participating in democracy.
“All civil unrest is actually corporate psyops” is certainly a take.
If that’s what you took out of my comment, you need to reevaluate it. Need. He’s no King protests are neutering actual protest
They unironically live in NWA and refuse to acknowledge the humor. They’re not human.
I verified the number because it doesn’t sound quite right. Walmart makes profit of roughly $20B yearly, per day that is $55M, the family owns around half.
So they make like $25M per day.
That is still insane amount of money, and probably also they do some tricks to lower the profit and hide the money through some loopholes, like all the millionaires/billionaires.
Nobody needs that kind of money, so they should be taxed like hell, but not in this world
but not in this world
That is until people take measures into their own hands
It could
If it were done right. Just as Communism really really would end poverty and save the world and bring equality for all if juuuust done right.
I gettit, capitalism as done now (especially in the US) is a joke where the rich leech the poor and destroy the world
Tax the shit out of them. Leave capitalism be, but put up taxes in brackets that hits 100% after 10M net worth. This way, you still have the raw resource making power of captialism, but the richest anyone can get is 10 million networth.
Similarly for companies, once they get bigger, taxes go up untill it hits, say, a billion in net worth.
No company shall be too big to fail, too big to not steal, lie, and cheat, too big to be a net positive for humanity
This way governments end up with huge tax incomes. Use that tax for free healthcare for all, same with education, housing, public transportation, all free, even universal income
I think that’ll work a whole lot better than “let’s try communism” which simply won’t happen and it would destroy us all.
You’re confusing capitalism and commerce.
It could
If it were done right. Just as Communism really really would end poverty and save the world and bring equality for all if juuuust done right.
Yeah! All it takes is a fundamental change in human nature where we eradicate greed. Funnily enough, that one little trick fixes both Capitalism AND Communism and allows us to finally reach utopia.
Communism really really would end poverty
Name communism that didn’t significantly reduced poverty
What I hear out of all that is I don’t mind the exploitive nature of capitalism as long as it doesn’t exploit me.
All those words and you could have just said I don’t understand socialism or communism
Won’t they just pay politicians to make sure this never happens?
Aren’t they already doing that?
Aren’t they the politicians?
Seems to work for the Walmart guys
So for one minute of profit they could pay 350 people $25/h for a full day. 21000 people with a full hours profit!
Capitalism can end poverty for sure and was definitely a step up from feudalism… it just happens to also birth a whole slew of contradictions within the social fabric.
Capitalism can end poverty for sure
much in the same way that hand-grenades cure cancer, yes
Hey, curing cancer and surviving cancer are two different things.
No, energy sources end poverty. There was plenty of capitalism before even coal, but lots of poverty.
I cannot take seriously any claim of the ultra wealthy “making” x number of dollars per minute/hour/day. That’s just not how wealth works.
it’s a good approximate. the reason their wealth score increases is because there is more wealth in the world being generated to go around. Disproportionately, it’s landing on their already obscene pile, instead of being fairly distributed. And fairly doesn’t necessarily mean everyone gets the same, but everyone actually profits from it.
I get it, you have no concept of economics and refuse to learn.
I agree entirely. The rich don’t “make” any money. They siphon it from the poor.
if I had a pile of gold, it would increase in value without taking from anyone. Generalized statements don’t help your agenda when it’s generalizing hatred towards others.
Not true at all. The increase in the value of gold happens because of the decrease in the value of money. You are taking from people who don’t have extra wealth to keep lying around, and have to earn and spend cash to survive.
I don’t get it. If you have a pile of gold and there are no other people involved, how does its value change?
the supply of gold is relatively unchanging (new mines are rarely built) but the demand increases
OK. So more people are buying it and they are paying more. How can they afford to do this?
That’s just not how wealth works.
Would you expand on that, in the context of previous replies that point out that this is meant as a simplified analogy of the value of one’s own time?
How does wealth work? This is not a loaded question.
I think my point isn’t being well taken, or perhaps I phrased it incorrectly. I certainly agree with the sentiment that wealth disparity is maybe the biggest problem we face.
The vast vast vast majority of the wealth of the uber wealthy come from the assets they own. If they can be said to “make” money over the course of the year, it’s as a result of those assets increasing in value and not directly tied to the “work” they put in.
My problem with these comparisons are two-fold. One, they usually conflate an individuals net worth with income. If Elon has 365 billion dollars, he doesn’t “make” 1 billion per day. Two, phrasing it as “making” “per hour” implies their income is tied to the hours they work, and that’s just not true. It puts value on their labor I think isn’t justified.
It puts value on their labor I think isn’t justified.
I think it’s more just to make it seem even remotely understandable for our brains, as most of our class has a notion of hourly work and knows the value of their hourly work. And we don’t even do it 247, unlike the rich bastards who “never clock out” so to speak. So it’s just there to make our brains grasp just how massive the disparity is.
This is always a good reminder; “Wealth, shown to scale”. Give it a scroll. Or a hundred. And you still won’t make it even halfway.
If I said: “Same
They must be lying by a factor of 10, no! A factor of 100! Orders of magnitude!”
Ah now in this case it don’t matter much, number is still beyond our ability to intensely grok it
Epic profits should get taxpayers off the hook every time. That’s a wildly leftist and a wildly MAGA take!
I’m sure explaining the shell game the rich play is really comforting and helpful for the starving masses. /s
This is whats called a breakdown… if their yearly income is X, then you can find out what their hourly and daily incomes are through rather basic math.
Most of these memes simply take a net worth a divide it by 365 or whatever.
Umm, what? That’s exactly how it works.
That’s not what you were told, sure. Maybe time to shed some of that naivete, though.
I don’t mean it as acceptance of the massive wealth disparity, about which I agree fully.
I meant that “per hour” implies a wage paid by somebody/ some company, and the uber wealthy don’t really collect a wage.
It’s fair enough to say that a person’s wealth went up *x *last year, or y the year before that. But whatever the increase (or decrease) in net worth was, it’s not dependent on the number of hours they worked in the same way it does with a wage.
Why not? If contractors can earn a “per hour” wage why can’t the uber wealthy?
Trickle down economics … give more money to the ultra rich and eventually some money goes down to the people at the bottom of the economic system
The problem they’ve discovered after 50 years of this system is that there just isn’t enough money in the universe to send to the top and allow enough of it to flow down to the bottom.
A billion dollars only allows a dollar to get to a person living on the street … so we have to send billions, trillions, gajillions of dollars to the super-ultra-giga rich to get enough money to average people.
This is the problem of trickle down economics … we just haven’t given enough money to the top yet
We have to give the rich more! … in order to save the poor … do it for the poor!
This is just patently false. I mean,
The problem they’ve discovered after 50 years of this system is that there just isn’t enough money in the universe to send to the top and allow enough of it to flow down to the bottom.
That couldn’t be less true. No one “discovered” anything. Economists knew this was true 50 years ago. They knew when trickle-down was being developed. It’s actually really obvious, especially if you have any relevant data whatsoever. The ones with scruples pointed it out many times, the ones without hopped on the gravy train.
I agree with you, but they knew this more then 50 years ago.
They have to pour a steady stream of gold coins to the top of a billionaires penthouse to try to fill it enough so that a few coins can fall out and land on the street below
/s /sarcasm /imbeingsarcastic
Wait do people actually claim that?
Like I guess it does, for the rich assholes. But it sure seems to make a lot more for the other people
My coworkers do. Somehow the reason things suck is because of immigrants. Despite being immigrants. It’s the lazy people who don’t work as hard as them. Mathematically removed if you look at how things work. Not to mention that all these systems are artificial … why shouldn’t we build a system that benefits everyone instead of the few?
Probably mathematically regarded
Honestly I drank too many beers tonight … I probably used one of those bad words. I shouldn’t have. Didn’t know they censored as well.
Libertarians and neoliberals unironically believe that “a rising tide lifts all boats”
I heard that recently and thought to myself ‘yea I don’t have a fucking boat’ and realized that is the true meaning of this phrase. People who own boats already are gonna do great. People who don’t will drown.
A rising tide does lift all boats. Giving all your money to a couple uber rich people is not a rising tide, though.
I agree that a literal rising tide does lift all the boats at port but that trite little saying is used to justify trickle-down economics and neoliberalism at every turn
Literally it isn’t and you, and maybe the handful of liars using it for that purpose, just flat-out do not understand the saying.
A rising tide lifting all boats is specifically about how helping the bottom helps everyone. It is so astronomically far from the concept of trickle-down economics.
This is kinda a weird argument we’re having but I’ve literally heard this argument “from the pulpit” in multiple college econ classes, perhaps your experience is different.
I think if we were assessing whether this analogy is fit for purpose then you would have to say that it only makes sense if all the ‘boats’ are always at the same level which is the case for real boats on a real tide
The boats, no matter the size, will all be raised by a rising tide.
That is a true statement about boats (that are still floating)
More like a geyser that lifts just a couple of boats
Libertarians don’t, and it’s one of the few things Neoliberals are actually right about.
“A rising tide lifts all boats” refers to the fact that giving money to the people on the bottom of the financial pyramid who needs it the most will benefit everybody. Unlike just shoveling it at the already rich, which is what capitalism is designed for.
Infuriatingly, almost none of the Dem leadership actually follow through on this mantra with actual policy, beholden to the rich capitalists as they are.
The problem is that more and more people can’t afford a boat anymore.
And even if they could, Neoliberals and fascists have given the rich all of the places where they can use or even place a boat.
Neo liberals believe in trickle down economics though.
Yeah, that’s why I pointed out that they SAY “a rising tide” but very rarely actually act on it when it comes to legislation.
“Centrist” (read: right wing to far right by the standards of democracies in general) politicians are nothing if not hypocrites and lying demagogues 🤷
