World's richest 1% gained $40 tn in a decade: Oxfam
The world's richest one percent increased their fortunes by a total of $42 trillion over the past decade, Oxfam said Thursday, ahead of a G20 summit in Brazil where taxing the super-rich tops the agenda.
Bet they would taste delicious in a stew.
It would have a very rich flavor.
See, people keep saying to "eat the rich." I say "beat the rich." Not only is it more satisfying, you can do it repeatedly. You can only eat them once.
The post above this one in All for me is the one about a guy inviting women back to his place for delicious stew. Now I want to know what the secret ingredient is.
That is exactly why I was thinking about stew
I found the guy!
But a B-List actor told me it would trickle down half a century ago, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt and maybe we'll catch a dribble
And he was right. You get a trickle down. He didn't mention the industrial strength wealth pump going up with the business end stuck in your wallet.
The reason billionaires exist is because people like you and me are overcharged for everything we purchase so they can accumulate the surplus.
The reason why we don't do anything about it is because we evaluate that we get good value for our money in most situations.
What is that evaluation based on? Our past experiences...
But the only experiences we have to evaluate what our money is worth is us being charged enough that the rich people at the top accumulate an unreasonable amount of wealth.
We never have an experience where those leeches at the top aren't present to artificially inflate the price of things so we can actually realize how much we're supposed to be able to get for our money!
Overcharged and underpaid. They're dipping from both ends.
And we are paying taxes. The only money they give to the government is directly to the pockets of judges and politicians to make decisions against our best interest and to make them richer.
Temu opened my eyes.
8$ for 4 sponges at Target, no more for me.
6 for 75ct. Eurocent, so in USD it's a whopping 81ct. Tax inclusive. Available in both scratchy and gentle.
If supermarkets get away with charging those kinds of prices there's two things to do: a) Raid each and every HQ to see whether you can nail them for collusion, b) price controls.
Just imagine the housing market...
Its a built in feedback loop. Under capitalism, resources are distributed based on capital. But capital is a resource. So its naturally going to concentrate.
We need hard caps on wealth
Not sure how you achieve that in a world with multiple nations though. Capital is naturally pretty mobile.
I was asking myself, how much money do you need to have, to be in the top 1%?
So for context, according to this article, you are in the top 1% worldwide, if your net worth is above ~872'000.-, that is 19 million US Americans.
With 94'000.- you are in the top 10%
What if your net worth is -$50,000? Asking for a friend...
The top 10% includes the majority of people in the western world. We have been lied to by the select few above us that we have more in common with them than we do with the bottom 90% in the rest of the world.
In terms of lifestyle we definitely do. To go from a retail worker living in a typical US apartment to a jet-setting billionaire with a superyacht is a big jump in quality of life but it’s FAR less than going from a dirt-floored shack in central Africa to the apartment in the US.
Both the retail worker and the billionaire can enjoy healthy food, clean drinking water, access to medicine, electricity, a shower any time, a smartphone with unlimited data, a home PC with unlimited internet, Netflix, Amazon, Uber Eats... These are all luxuries beyond what even a king from two centuries ago could dream of, and they’re available to anyone on a minimum wage retail job and a bit of budgeting skills.
Meanwhile the poor shack-dweller faces unimaginable grinding poverty, no running water, no medicine, rampant disease, war, slavery (conflict minerals) and prostitution.
The problem with billionaires isn’t how luxurious their yachts are. It’s how much power their wealth gives them and how unaccountable they are for it. Heck, you can probably see posts on Lemmy every day about the stuff Elon Musk is doing.
Right. I wish they would start using the more accurate figure of .01% for articles like this. The 1%-.011% are successful upper class households, none of which are Billionaires. The .01% is all the billionaires.
Twitter mob: Protect rich minority at all cost! Feed the billioners!
The rich are the most oppressed minority! /s
Richard Nixon's head : I promise to cut taxes for the rich and use the poor as a cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel!
[audience applauds]
Philip J. Fry : That'll show those poor!
Turanga Leela : You're not rich!
Philip J. Fry : But someday I might be rich, and people like me better watch their step!
Nah but it's the poor woman and child fleeing crime & poverty from south of the border who is the problem!!! /s
what are they going to do with all that money?
hint:
This is old data. The well of souls being hoarded is inconceivable.
buy more private jets?
Slavery & Slaughter
Spaaaace! So much space. Gotta see it all.
Scrooge McDuck ass economy
I think the idea of cryptocurrency is funny, since it's just "I'm not playing your make believe money anymore, so we'll pay our own make believe money since you are obviously rigging the system". Kinda makes sense if adoption keeps up and the planet isn't on fire
Thing is, the poor aren’t running bitcoin miner farms. Crypto doesn’t change anything but traceability of the funds, letting the rich get even richer.
That's a common misconception. Most cryptocurrencies (except XMR) actually increase the traceability of funds compared to traditional payments. Bitcoin really isn't that great for privacy as some crypto enthousiasts say. It's one of those ridicolous "advantages" that prove that most are just hypemen with no idea about how it actually works.
</rant>
It doesn't solve any of this. The people who invented BTC did not understand whay money is and how it works. Especially how it's created. If we lived in a world with BTC alone and we've reached the point where no more BTC can be created while the world economy was growing, we'd keep creating money by reducing prices and using smaller fractions of BTC to pay them. Of course all of this would be much less practical than adding more units of BTC so if the world lived in this universe, a consensus would be reached to amend BTC to allow for further expansion of the BTC supply. And this doesn't even touch the ability to create money via debt which doesn't even require a currency.
BTW I'm not saying crypto is useless. I think BTC for example will be with us for the foreseeable future but it would likely always be used as an intermediate currency that is then converted to one fiat or another through a floating exchange rate. The exchange rate would take care of the inherent problem I described.
I think the creators had some knowledge of how currency worked, since there has been movements to make digital money in the cryptopunk scene for 20+ years before BTC. Also, you don't need a degree to be an economist, a library card works just as good
Having a fixed supply might reduce astronomical debts but still allow for smaller debts or ones that are collateralized. But yeah, day to day life would be drastically different. No credit cards for sure, but also no compound interest, because can't have compounding interest on anything with a fixed supply or it will acquire all of the resource (or at least attempt to)
But the ultra rich are actually playing with that too and fucking over every single person that invests thinking they're going to be 'financially free'
Adoption will never happen because block chains are shit at everything except being a Blockchain.
Let's fix the system we've got instead of inventing a new one that's worse in basically every way.
It's never enough.
Makes me hungry.
The Tax Reform Act of 1986 was the top domestic priority of President Reagan's second term. The act lowered federal income tax rates, decreasing the number of tax brackets and reducing the top tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent.
Name and shame: Ronald Reagan
Not good to see but not a giant shock.
That's only like a half million each...
Taxes won’t fixe this, but an 18th century invention might.
As long as the rich have the means of wealth generation they will always come ahead no matter how much you tax them. They will always buy back the system. Now if those means were somehow communalized then things could change once and for all.
Le capitalisme
This is a completely meaningless figure...
I really hate when articles come out with this kind of data. Huge numbers like this without any context just mean nothing. Ok, 42 trillion$, how much money did they already have? How much percent did their fortunes increase? Is that more or less than inflation?
It's just a meaningless huge number that has no intention other than to shock, certainly not to inform or they would have given actually useful numbers that would actually let you have an idea whether it's that bad or not...
I hate that people keep falling for nonsens like this.... Just post a huge number without any context or any other numbers needed to be able to make sense of it, and everyone is like "omfgwtfbbq, this is SOOOO bad"! Is it? It's perfectly possible that this isn't even enough to keep up with inflation, and they're technically poorer, probably not, but we'll never know from this useless article...
Your right. We need names & addresses.
Ah yes, i can't critisize such stupid articles without opposing their message... I'd love more equality, and agree that something should be done about it.
I just would love to see actually useful numbers that mean something when we make a fuss about it rather than useless info like this that is meaningless.
How you interpreted my message as bootlicking is beyond me, but i guess you're a youngling that interprets any critique as an attack?
