this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all. In the long run some businesses like the Healthcare companies will suffer and have to downsize, but it's always been absolutely astonishing to me that a company like Tesla, IBM, Boeing, Walmart or other mega-companies close plants or stores and send tens of thousands of people into joblessness and poverty nobody bats an eye.
The moment we talk about actions that might impact the insurance empires suddenly we have to all worry about the workers and all the businesses that are connected to the insurance company and so on.
There is literally nothing that stops someone starting a business from organizing it as a worker co-op.
That's what I'm sayin.
While there is a list of cooperatives with varying degrees of worker-ownership and company profit, what usually stops them is the allure of money and how a business owner can easily embrace the long-standing culture of becoming a micro-baron and controlling the flow of wealth without any worry of repercussion or losses.
Let's talk about just one of these, "guaranteed income". What annual amount do you think we as a country can afford to give everyone in the US?
Edit: The fact that I have negative points for asking a simple question is a textbook example of ideologues' hostility to even the slightest bit of what one would strain to even call 'dissent'. Pitiful.
How about we take all the money that we've been using to bail out corporations along with removing loopholes that allow corporations and the ultra rich to barely pay any taxes, if any.
Also, read up on Modern Monetary Theory. The finances of the federal government cannot be calculated the same way as household finances.
Also also as well in addition, as for the amount, UBI should be a livable income without a job to pay for all necessities, and jobs should be supplimental income for luxuries.
I'm going to take the rage bait on this one, in hopes that you're not trolling:
No. It's stuff like this, which makes several of your comments here earning downvotes.
If it were "a simple question" you wouldn't whine about getting downvotes. The fact, that you care about votes here and in this context at all is a sign of your "ideologues' hostility" towards contrary opinions. If it were "a simpue question" you wouldn't be so condescending to call downvotes "ideologues' hostility" or "pitiful".
Your "simple question" can still be suggestive and carry a message which clearly show that your intentions are not to neutrally ask a question but to challenge the readers and the common opinion found among them. Given this context, such questions can even seem ridiculuous to ask at all, as the amount of wealth accumulated by wealthy people is insane. (See for example this one of many illustrations: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ ) In other words: your question seems a bit like rage bait.
Combined with your other comments here, a clear picture cristallises about your opinion on this topic, which further hardens, that it's not just "a simple question".
It's totally fine for me and probably a lot of other users here if you've got a different opinion. If people disagree with you or don't like it, you get downvotes. That's the way of Lemmy. Heck, I'll probably earn a downvote from you. Do I care? No. Not really. Of course it would be nice if we could agree. But I accept that you probably won't like what I've written here and that you're giving me a downvote for that. It's an expression of your opinion. And that's ok.
If you were about to get banned for your "simple question", or your question got removed, then we could talk again about hostility. Until then it's political discourse. Isn't democracy beautiful? ;)
Well let's see. In October of 2023 there were 735 billionaires in the US. Assuming each had only $1B and could make an average of 8% on that money (the stock market averages 10%) and we taxed them the equivalent of 6 of that percent, giving all of that to say the lowest income people in the US (so no overhead here to distribute it), the money could provide 735,000 people with a salary of $60k/year. They would still be billionaires drawing a salary of only $20m/year each. So three quarters of a million people, could have the average yearly income in the US and it would only mildly inconvenience 735 people.
Knowing that many billionaires have more than just one billion dollars and that other high earners, say people with $100m or more significantly outnumber them imagine how many people could share the prosperity. I didn't do that math but probably 3-5 million people I guess and it barely even effects the ultra wealthy.
The actual wealth of a billionaire is absolutely staggering.
Okay, so assuming the top end of your guesstimate of 5 million...so, the other 335 million people get a middle finger, or what?
"Guaranteed income" for 1.4% of the population, at most. Not quite how I'd define it.
But fuck the back of the napkin math, we've got solid numbers out there to use. The total net worth of all the billionaires in the US is about $5.2 trillion. And I'll use your 6% that's $312 billion a year. Now let's also make the massive assumption (in your favor) that we can wave a magic wand and convert that net worth directly into exactly that much cash, which you obviously never could in real life.
So, $312 billion a year. Spread evenly, that's literally less than $1,000 per person. Less than the stimulus we got during Covid, and you won't find anyone who claims they went from poor to not poor after getting that stimulus.
I find this ironic, since you seem not to understand just how little it actually is, compared to what the government already spends, and among a population of 340 million people.
Did you know the US spends about $1.2 trillion a year on welfare already? The above amount is about a quarter of that; even if we abandon the idea of "guaranteed income" completely and just used this hypothetical amount as additional welfare for the poor, their benefit amount would increase by 25% on average. Do you think anyone who is impoverished is going to be lifted out of poverty with that?
Billionaires are a boogeyman. They're not the source of poverty, and they literally don't have enough to forcibly push the poor out of poverty, regardless of whether you try it by 'skimming' off their average wealth appreciation, or if you take it all at once.
If half of the energy complaining about billionaires was put into reducing single parenthood, and all of the other things that we know have a DIRECT correlation, with poverty, WAY more poor would be not only lifted up, but with the right tools and education, they'd STAY up, on their own.
I think you missed the point. First, the back of the napkin exercise I conducted was merely to point out just how big of an impact can be had without even hardly inconveniencing just a handful of people. The people I was referring to, would still have a billion dollars and a 20 million dollar a year income from interest. Second, not ever person in the US is poor. We don't have to raise every single person in America out of poverty. Third, I Believe billionaires ARE the source of poverty. Fourth, I Believe you were off by three orders of magnitude. Six percent of 5.2 trillion dollars is actually $312 billion dollars, not million dollars. Fifth, I'm not suggesting that billionaires can just be taxed to the point that they alone can provide a salary to every person in America. What I'm suggesting, is if a system existed that was even slightly fair, billionaires wouldn't exist and hopefully neither would the working poor.
Which is to say, no real impact at all. There are 340 million of us, a plan that can potentially help less than 2% of them is no plan at all.
So you're not talking about UBI, but just another welfare program.
I redirect you to where I pointed out that the amount of yearly aid your plan produces is nothing compared to the $1.2 TRILLION the US already spends on welfare. It is completely naive to think that a slight increase in welfare spending is going to create the kind of change you're claiming it would.
You can believe it all you want, but the evidence simply does not support that conclusion. Go look up how many inflation-adjusted billionaires there were in the world a century ago compared to today, then go compare the incidence of global poverty back then to today, too. It's literally an inverse correlation.
My mistake, will correct my comment, but the point still stands, because $1000 isn't anything resembling life-changing money, either.
Not only can they exist, but it is literally inevitable, and moreso with each passing day, especially as the global population increases, more and more technology becomes more scalable, new technologies emerge, and more and more economy is globalized.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth today. One piece of software that catches on can produce $1 billion in profit in just a handful of years. OnlyFans was founded in 2016, less than a decade ago, and SIX years later, in 2022, it was valued at not $1 billion, but $18 billion.
Long-term poverty literally cannot be solved with an injection of funds alone--this is a very superficial take. The vast majority of poor people who win lotteries of multi-million amounts that can easily make one 'set for life', are broke again in just a few years. And you better believe government welfare isn't giving any poor person tens of millions of dollars.
On the other hand, simply being raised by two parents instead of one, makes a person up to FIVE TIMES less likely to be impoverished long-term in adulthood. If we reduced the single parenthood incidence by even just 5%, we'd reduce long-term poverty to a degree even completely liquidating all billionaires would not accomplish.
Billionaires are largely a boogeyman, and time and effort and resources spent complaining about them, if applied to creating the changes that we DO empirically know actually lift people out of poverty, would do a hell of a lot more good. That's what frustrates me.
Hating the rich is not the same as loving the poor.
It's ridiculous to try to pin someone down on this. I am an American citizen asking that my tax money, which I pay a helluva lot, go into helping people and giving us all more opportunities as individuals, I am fully aware that something like UBI will come with a huge bag of other issues and necessary regulations and safeguards to guarantee that it actually goes into helping people stay in their homes and fed, but that is still the direction that we and all developed nations should be pushing towards.
I am not designing policy, I am asking the people who's salary I pay to design policy so that that we put money directly towards the issues and people who need it. I won't even read any "wELL aKsHulLy" arguments how great everything really is and how we're all just lazy, entitled peasants who need to know our place. I won't and the harder you jackoffs push the message that it's our fault we get laid off, have medical emergencies, health issues and lowered wages, the harder I will advocate and vote for ANY kind of socialist policies and candidates. I am absolutely enraged how easily the general public has become distracted with cultural conflict while ignoring the inequality that is making people so unhappy to begin with.
You can go ahead and reply with your chart that is somehow supposed to make me feel better. I'm sure it will really improve all of our situations.
Yes I am defensive, any reply pointing that it will get blocked before reading.
I disagree; not when you're claiming that it, along with several other expensive things, could be done "RIGHT NOW" as if they're so obviously doable that only literal malice/stupidity is preventing them from happening.
I've crunched the numbers on UBI, and have pretty solidly established the conclusion that it's simply not feasible currently, from a purely pragmatic perspective. It's just too expensive. So when that extremely bold claim was made, yes, I had to know how you figured it was so easy, especially as just one of a group of other massive changes. I didn't even take into account any of the logistics, and asked only for the figure and where the money to pay that figure was going to come from. I'll be honest, given the research I'd already done, I was expecting either a very paltry annual figure, or a plan to pay for it that literally assumed more available funds than there actually are. But I was open to being wrong, and hearing a proposal (not that I was expecting a white paper or something, but at least an overall 'plan') that at least sounded somewhat feasible.
Believe me, I wasn't happy to learn how ridiculously expensive UBI would be in the US, and I calculated based on paying out a measly $10,000 a year, and only to citizens of working age. Even that costs trillions annually...
But I digress...if you don't have any idea how we could actually provide any given amount of "guaranteed income" to the populace, (I even left it open for you to define the amount everyone gets!), then don't frame it like this effortlessly-achievable goal. You should have expected some amount of pushback for talking about it like 'obviously we can do this, there's no good reason we can't start doing it "RIGHT NOW"'.
Does the above really sound so "ridiculous"?
P.S. You really made a whole heap of assumptions about me and where I'm coming from, in your comment. You should try not to do that.
I stopped reading at the obvious "I crunched the numbers" bullshit, I made assumptions about you because I am not a child I can smell bullshit. I'm not an economist but I can tell when someone else is dumber than rock and lying like a snake. I too can quote corporate propaganda that sounds smart to stupid people. It's sure amazing that something as complicated and multi-dimensional as this topic can just be fucking CRUNCHED by losers on the internet. Wow, I had no idea it was this simple.
I stopped reading there because I don't like people who try to confuse issues and shoot down attempts at things we can do to make the world better. You're arguing from a place of selfish needs and I don't care. You can reply if you think anyone is reading down this far, it won't be me.
Wouldn't be hard to do. Imagine we're talking $1000/month (so $12000/year) UBI being delivered to every adult US citizen (part of what makes UBI UBI is that it is universal, everyone gets it). Let's also imagine that the administrative costs of doing this are 0, to make the math simpler. There are roughly 258 million adults in the US.
258,000,000 times 12,000 = 3,096,000,000,000 or 3 trillion, 96 billion dollars in funding needed per year to pay for the disbursements (again assuming no administrative costs at all. That's the amount you'd need to raise in additional revenue as a starting point to fund the program, and it's something like half the size of the entire US budget or about a tenth of the current total US debt if you prefer. Some of that is going to cycle back into tax revenue, some you could get by taxing the super wealthy, some more will come from the economic activity created as a consequence that will cycle that money around a few times, but it's a big amount of revenue to generate from...somewhere and adding an additional 3 trillion of debt every year beyond the current debt spending isn't really sustainable.
??? It was very simple. I chose a deliberately-small-for-the-sake-of-argument annual figure of $10,000 UBI, learned how name working age people there are in the US (bit over 200 million), and multiplied.
The fact that even a measly $10k UBI, an amount that obviously wouldn't be enough to replace the systems we presently have in place, would cost several trillions a year, made it clear that any amount of real UBI that actually could offer someone who isn't working some semblance of financial peace of mind, was not realistically affordable, as things are now.
The point is that if it's that daunting, even before you take into account all of the complexities that come with it, then obviously it's not going to be easier after you do a full-on approach.
There's a reason no UBI proposal ever made for the US has ever survived even the slightest scrutiny of feasibility. If you've seen one that has, please feel free to enlighten us all.
Your entire comment is the equivalent of you reacting to someone saying "no matter how strong you are, you simply can't hit the moon with a thrown rock" with all sorts of angry, smug whining about how they're full of shit and "lying like a snake" because they didn't talk about any of the physics such a prospect would entail. As if it takes a physics background to realize that's impossible.
I know my example is simplistic; that's the fucking point, lmao. You're mad that I left out variables that would make the goal even harder to achieve, goofball. Holy shit lol