That's why they're trying to take power. Billionaires would rather destroy the world and drive all life to extinction than to give up their private jets and yachts.
The worst part is--it's really not. These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system's worst distribution issues. Their biggest hardship could be dealing with not being The Guy With The Biggest Number when they go to their rich guy parties.
Personally I'm in favor of making them destitute and/or imprisoning them, but going that far really isn't strictly necessary.
These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system’s worst distribution issues.
UBI actually makes billionaires richer, even with higher taxes. Money trickles back up to them. The problem with UBI is that it redistributes power, and the powerful want all of their power. Wealth "needs" to buy power.
Protectionism. Musk stands to gain a ton if there's less competition from imported EVs, and that's true for a lot of other products that American companies make. If you can just throw a few million at a presidential campaign and essentially guarantee your competitors will have a 10-60% disadvantage, those few millions can turn into billions in profit.
On paper, the goal seems to be to spur companies to return to the US, but I think the net impact will be higher prices for Americans and reduced trade w/ other countries due to retaliatory tariffs.
Honestly, aggressive climate change would have a similar short-term impact, even if the net result is good, which is a large part of the reason we don't do aggressive changes like this.
That said, I'm not convinced the net result is good, so we'll instead have short-term suffering followed by longer-term suffering, all for a bit of protectionism for American businesses (which will probably leave them worse off in the long run anyway).
Shut up, shut up, shut up please just shtfu already elon. How are people like him and bezos controlling the world? I swear we celebrate and praise mediocre morons in the US.
As a nation we have lost 30 years of progress because we give the loudest most idiotic people to ever live a platform to spew their collective nonsense. Take me back to 2010 where the internet was still fun and not just some massive propaganda machine for the uber wealthy and political nut jobs
But without capitalism we wouldn't have (insert something that has nothing to do with capitalism but that I completely attribute to it). And that would mean no trade.
He's never going to shut up. But people keep amplifying his pathetic voice by sharing what he says. There's a very large group of society that needs to stop sharing outrage fodder.
81-89. I don't think Reagan's presidency or party really explains it, because we see it rise shortly and then fall, both during Bill Clinton's presidency (93-2001). So George H.W. Bush raised taxes during his term, and then Clinton cut them again, but did so while balancing the budget (Clinton ran a surplus).
Reagan certainly slashed taxes, but so did Clinton, and to a similar degree.
Add this to the news that Mike Johnson said they will end Obamacare and I can't believe anyone would vote for Trump. He's going to raise your costs, reduce government services, kill healthcare as we know it, the list goes on and on.
There is no middle class. There are workers and owners. If you own real estate and stonks you are still a worker unless you can live off of just investments. This is designed to corrupt and neuter you. You have enough skin in the game of the owners to not want to oppose them, but not enough to actually be them. Unless you hope to retire, at which point you make the transition from working class to owning class, but only at the end of your life, if you even make it that far, and often owning very little.
It is designed. Being forced to buy real estate or stonks to save for retirement is a relatively recent policy, created by Richard Nixon, around the same time as deunionization that was also on purpose.
Having a comfortable retirement has already been tied to the value of stocks going up. And a while back republicans wanted to do the same to social security.
I read recently "On Freedom" by Timothy Snyder and he mentions that. Billionaires are sucking or wealth and when we suffer, we are told that this is temporary and toward a greater good (which never comes).
Sadly it is successful and a lot of Americans believe that.
It opened my eyes seeing how we are set up to fight each other (blaming minorities) while oligarchs are making our lives more miserable by hoarding country's wealth.
He is, though he's wrong about Trump's plans being anything beneficial in the long term. But even what he's saying about any part of it being harmful is a contradiction of Trump's claims about the economy
I only heard the clip from here.. but it sounded like he said for long term prosperity, not necessary.
I assume what he was saying is that people will suffer while we force the market to move into isolation.
What he doesn't want to admit to the populous is that to have long term benefits of cheap labor, you have to have cheap labor.
So either you have that by being richer than other countries and outsourcing the labor, or isolating the country and subjugating a portion of the population so much that they are the cheap labor. That portion... Isn't going to be small if it's going to be able to provide everything for the rich who blast through resources like crazy.
Bro we couldn't even get people to wear masks and get free tests and vaccines without triggering white outrage, how you think actual financial hardship is going to go over with these people?
They'll scream for blood, but it won't be the blood of billionaires.
They own the largest communication networks across the globe, both traditional and digital. They have access to the most cutting edge AI technology that's fast becoming indistinguishable from reality. They're cooperating with the man in charge of the most elaborate troll farm ever created.
They'll use that power to keep breeding angry, violent reactionaries who blame minorities and swallow whatever their cult leader tells them to. But that will be rookie shit a decade from now. Forget social media sock puppets, our entire chain of knowledge is about to be undermined. Bullshit, agenda pushing academic papers will be published, filled with bullshit, agenda pushing statistics, fawned over by bullshit, agenda pushing media and cited in bullshit, agenda pushing books. It will spew out at a rate far faster than anyone can possibly debunk and even if they try, they're indistinguishable from the AI-powered, sock puppet "experts" they're arguing with.
Laws, regulations and life-altering punishments are the only way to stop them so they're working hard to ensure that never happens.
This is why i think there's still such a strong push for AI from the major tech companies--it's not just about developing a product for consumers to use--it's a product to use against consumers too
It will be a beautiful necessary. Everyone will love the carnage. We will destroy America bigly. Like never before. The radical left democrats will hate it, but it will be glorious. Trust me.
As much as you possibly can. Remember that in a neoliberal utopia, each week you'd bring tens of thousands of dollars in for a company, be compensated with minimum wage and then hand those wages straight back to the nearest billionaire in exchange for food and shelter. If you have any money left at the end of the week, that's abhorrent to them.
It's only going to be temporary though, see.. we starve everyone for 30 years as we force ourselves into isolation, then those who are left.. wait, who's left, we killed the work force.
They are pro free-market, so long as the market is contained and controlled in every measure by themselves. Okay so maybe not free, maybe more of an enslaved market. They are going to need to shop that name, stick with calling it what it isn't for now, free
What's up with upper class trying to destroy middle class all the time? Are middle class a threat to them? Has to be, otherwise this wouldn't matter.
Make things hard for billionaires and spread their wealth amongst the lower class to start evening shit out. Who tf needs almost a trillion unspendable dollars?
There's no such thing as the middle class. You either own means of production, you sell your labour to those who do, or you belong to the criminal class that doesn't contribute to the growth of capital. The middle class is a fairy tale capitalists tell us to keep us in the labour class instead of the far more sensible criminal class.
I always wanted to ask this so might as well now, feel free to answer if you want: what are the means of production? In $cureent_year, that is.
We are not in 1870 Germany. We don't all work in huge factories owned by Rockefellers. I work in IT. My means of production is a laptop. I do own a few. I sell my labor to whoever needs IT services. Am I a capitalist or a communist? In the past I work for a big company and used their laptop. Was I being exploited?
The painter that is coming to fix my walls owns his ladder and spraygun. I assume he bought the paint with his own money. I don't know about the van, he might own it too. He sells his labor to me, who don't own anything of his. Is he a capitalist?
Decimation of the middle class is a natural tendency of capitalism, but politically its highly desirable to have a middle class. So the middle class in a highly capitalist society ends up being somewhat precarious. Billionaires aren't attacking the middle classes more than laboring classes, but the "answer" to almost every problem caused by overproduction bubbles is to somehow suppress wages. The government, which needs a strong middle class for political stability, now has to find a way to lower wages or ,in the case of business owning/managing middle class, make new capital investment difficult. There are different kind of middle class, so there are different ways of accomplishing this. But as a result, middle class people are class conscious to the extent that they feel always threatened, but often aren't able to link it to the economic system, or if so then they might not be able to link global economic problems to the actions that actually caused the problems.
Capitalism is a system that rewards sociopathic behavior, so sociopaths with no empathy or investment in anything other than themselves naturally rise to the top.
The oligarchs who control our nation are all mentally ill narcissistic sociopaths who don't care what happens to the country or to humanity or the earth after they're gone. Life to them is a story where they're the main character and everyone else is an expendable NPC.
This is why capitalism is considered unsustainable to anyone other than those who idolize the oligarchs and wish to become one themselves. This is why hierarchy and class is something we should be trying to eliminate from society, not lean into even further. When human ego and individualism is allowed to be the cornerstone of human society, it is a matter of when, not if, that society eventually crumbles to the long term effects of wealth inequality.
Anyone that actually cares about the economy would see that every time the republicans get in they fuck it, and every time the democrats get in they fix it.
But they don't care about reality, only their feelings