existential screaming (--)
ever feel like the solutions to some of the world's problems have been easier and more obvious than ever before but you want to fucking scream in people's faces for outright refusing to start working on them
like gee, a bunch of rich white dudes who openly contempt the rest of society hold pretty much all the money and power in the world but noooooooo, clearly the REAL problem is people who are different from you who are just trying to fucking live, right?
existential screaming, continued (--)
"but how do we pay for all this?!" I don't know, maybe we actually make the rich contribute their fucking part in society???
"but the economy!" isn't a fucking excuse; economics is nothing more than an abstraction of the cycle of goods and resources through society. that shit is people's decisions all the way down, cut the bullshit and can -clearly- see a small group of rich folks hogging everything at the expense of the world as a whole
existential screaming, continued (--)
@Thaminga i was literally thinking about this today
let's say "we're going to eliminate poverty in america by taking $5 from people who can afford it and give it to people below poverty"
$5 per person who can spare $5. Let's look at if we can eliminate poverty doing this:
Let's break this down:
existential screaming, continued (--)
@Thaminga 249,485,228 18+ people in 2013
73,579,424 < 18 people
~45,000,000 people below poverty line in 2013
Let''s just take a ballpark and say "80% of the adult population not below the poverty line can afford $5", so we collect $5 from 199,588,182 people,
which amounts to $997,940,910 or $22 per person in poverty
This is a gross underestimate because of wealth distribution and so on but I know a lot of people for whom $22 is life and death
existential screaming, continued (--)
@Thaminga this is all really handwavey math but like.... i don't think eliminating suffering in the USA is beyond our means, rich people just don't want to lift a finger and we suffer by and wide from "disaffected millionaire syndrome" and yea....
existential screaming, continued (--)
@Thaminga anyway sorry to hijack your thread i was literally just thinking about this and i really wish people cared a lot more than they do
existential screaming, continued (--)
@vahnj now imagine how much we could get done if we upped this to 1% of the wealth from the people making above median income going to everyone below that
94.7 billion - 2.5% = $92,332,500,000 divided across 124,742,614 people = $740.18 per person, and that's -just 1%- from people who can easily afford to lose so, so much more
existential screaming, continued (--)
@Thaminga i'd love to see how much total $ is reported for all folks below the poverty line so we can get a hard read on how much $ we would actually have to raise in order to raise them to the bar tbh. would be a real interesting number.
existential screaming, continued (--)
@vahnj oh yeah, my numbers were for all adults in the bottom 50% which absolutely includes people who can keep themselves up just fine
existential screaming, continued (--)
@Thaminga And that's just breaking this down for state-decided "poverty lines", which are probably underrepresentative of how much a person needs anyway
Couple this with the fact that the government could do more for making affordable housing for below-the-line folks bc bulk management and purchasing of resources is way cheaper than trying for individuals and you have a lot of ways to reduce poverty just by taking a small amount of $ from ppl who can spare.