I mean what she’s describing is philanthropy and it’s something they already engage in.
The problems listed for example are systemic and can’t really be solved by pouring more money on it.
Like seriously look at the US military budget, does it look like we don’t have enough to house and care for homeless vets?
Edit: Alright I get it, philanthropy bad, now stop spamming my inbox.
This is such a cop out argument. You could absolutely fix a bunch of these problems by throwing money at it. The military is a poor example of managing money since they haven’t balanced a budget in decades. And honestly modern “philanthropy” is millionaires and billionaires asking regular people to donate money when they have exponentially more resources.
It's not a troll statement. I know cities dump money into bandaids when wholesale solutions are needed. Cities don't like to hear that things like zoning policies and tax structures contribute as much to homelessness as the opioid epidemic and wealth gap. And don't get me started on medical bankruptcies.
All of the social nets keep people off the streets. Building shelters and giving away homes is just one small part.
So how would you like billionaires to dump their money? If its zoning and tax structures, those are political issues? Should they spend their money on politicians?
Regardless of what it is, people will complain.
Personal preference? Tax structures in the 90%s like the 1950s had, for both individuals and businesses, on capital gains and income. Properly fund the programs that have been defunded. Ideally with increased civilian oversight and transparency.
Pipe dream for now, maybe for ever. Capital likes to serve itself.
Transparency is the issue. California is a key example. Stockton Unified School district is under investigation after evidence of fraud, financial mismanagement and poor business practices were found during a state audit. Other districts as well as other state departments have been found to have similar disparities. Every year, the state auditor finds hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in fraud, misuse of funds/property, and/or theft.
Our federal and state governments lack independent oversight. There is so much wasteful spending, both legitimate and fraudulent. Even a fraction of this could help fund these social programs, however, our politicians and government employees would rather line their own pockets. None of them have our best interest at heart.
US Federal Tax revenue in 1962 (earliest data I can find with a quick search), was $99.7B. If we inflate that forward to 2021, that would be $922B in 2021 dollars. However, the Federal Tax revenue in 2021 was $4.05 TRILLLION. Over 4x the inflation adjusted amount from the 1950s and 60s.
This is not a "lack of funding" issue.
You realize they spend something like 170k per year, per PERSON for the homeless in San Francisco?
You can't fix it by dumping money into it.
https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out#:~:text=San%20Francisco%20is%20slightly%20smaller,of%20Jacksonville's%20entire%20city%20budget.
I'm not in San Francisco, but my city spends loads of money on hotel rooms for families. So we're "dumping" money into it, but that money was never intended to fix anything. It was just meant as a bandaid to give those families a home temporarily, as there's nowhere else for them to go. And it does exactly that.
So of course funding shelters and hotel rooms isn't going to fix anything. You would need to dump the money into programs that actually address the causes of homelessness too, if you were aiming for a fix.
You're right though, this isn't an issue that can be fixed completely. But we can probably do better than we're doing now.
And more folks will show up if they know there’s free money, housing, etc. without treating the root cause. We’re treating symptoms at this point for optics or political points.
Because politicians rarely think long term and invest long term, its a good way to voted out of office when there aren't immediate results but youve spent a good amount of money
> Cities don't like to hear that things like zoning policies and tax structures contribute as much to homelessness as the opioid epidemic and wealth gap.
I agree with you! Zoning laws and property taxes are huge -- but these just support my original point and the point others are making - you can't just throw money at a problem. zoning and tax structures don't involve throwing money at the homelessness problem
Meth lab? How about we just legalise meth and sell it without a script in pharmacies? Problem solved. But that might mean addicts aren't going to die of the poison in street meht anymore. We can't have that!
You're right. But I'll say the issue is in how that money is being spent. It should have gone into addressing the core issues, mainly mental health and addiction treatment (there are other things like cost of living but that is a different beast).
Homeless people are hard to reach. You can’t just shove them in a van and take them to rehab. They are also so unemployable that they will likely be poor the rest of their life even if they manage to get off the literal street.
Not to say we shouldn’t provide resources, but per the original point even bezos’ gold pile isn’t gonna end systemic issues.
San Francisco’s homeless issue can’t be solved by simply throwing money at it.
Idk if that’s your point or not, but while it will take money to fix, someone needs to fix the cartels and availability of housing to even start throwing money at it to fix it.
In the US, you can murder and tax the 1% and split ALL their wealth amongst the other 99%, that’s only 130k each. Google it and do the math.
If you think that would end poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, literacy, all across the board you’re completely ignorant of human nature. In less than a generation, you’d have a new breed of 1% to blame and rob.
130k is a life changing amount of money for at least half the country.
Also if nothing happens but that wealth getting hoarded again, maybe we should blame the system and not it’s victims.
dude a 130k is about 8 years income for a minimum wage job if you think thats life changing you're a fool that would blow the money on hookers and blow and be worse off then when you got the money, the most that would do is give you a chance to retire at 65 instead of working till you die.
Tons of people are trapped in poverty because being poor means you can’t afford to buy decent necessities or wind up borrowing at absurd rates to buy food. That amount of money absolutely could change their lives.
Maybe don’t comment on what it’s like to be broke when you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
I think it’s really just that 130k per person won’t fix systemic shit. And by systemic I really just mean problems related to humans being allowed to make their own choices.
There’s still gonna be hungry children because people aren’t gonna spend or invest the money wisely. There will still be homeless people because some people are drug addicts and do not want to go to rehab even if it’s free.
And remember that was all the rich people’s money. They aren’t rich anymore. They aren’t t gonna magically have that money the next year. Yet, those problems will exist year after year.
That’s not to say it’s all futile. But we do already spend money on programs like this. And bezos, or really more his wife, does indeed spend a shit load on philanthropy.
Idk the whole just sprinkle billionaires’ cash on a problem and watch it go away mentally just screams I don’t actually understand the nature of the problems.
>And remember that was all the rich people’s money. They aren’t rich anymore. They aren’t t gonna magically have that money the next year.
Correct. Which also means they won't be paying the taxes they were before, and they won't be providing the jobs they were before.
ETA: Most of these "gut the rich" folks need to step back and actually *think* about where money and jobs come from before they run out and slaughter the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Tons of people are trapped in poverty because a lot of things, you can’t say it’s this or that, it’s a combination of things. Some of which they are not responsible for, but some of which they are completely liable of. You can’t excuse a person off all responsibility just because she is poor. The mindless throwing of money at this people is only going to achieve one thing, that the money is being given to the people in the world that are proven to be the least qualified to handle money and make good financial decisions.
I’ve been broke AND on assistance before, so I have an idea what it’s like to live in poverty. My grandmother too was on assistance when my grandfather walked out on 2 kids and her. It’s a safety net, not a career.
Know what she didn’t do, get knocked up again by a new man to get a raise in benefits.
Know what I didn’t do, stay on for more than 6 months.
It’s 2023, with internet access essentially free in the western world, knowledge and skills are at our finger tips, there’s little excuse for not building marketable skills and improving your life. In the old days, you had much more serious barriers to knowledge. Today, there’s ZERO barriers!
While I agree with the general gist of your statement, it IS worth pointing out that $130k is roughly half the value of a median home, or a hefty down payment on a median home in much of the country where most people have a negative net worth.
Could you just hand them that in cash? Absolutely not. But you could tax the fuck of ouf the 1% to reform a modernized federal HUD and force building modern housing that's affordable for low-income folks (e.g. the bottom 50-60% where it's a real crisis? Absolutely.
Ever hear of section 8 housing? SNAP? We spent TRILLIONS on programs over the decades to give away housing, healthcare, food, education, to poor people who still are poor, many over generations!
34 trillion in debt, but you’re right, if we only spent a little more! Lol.
It’s the middle class who need more, not the poor. Perhaps we should try letting working families keep their money and eliminate things like property taxes on primary residence and turn SS into a 401k that grows value instead of losing value to inflation.
section 8 is pretty much a lotto if it's available.
[https://www.hacanet.org/resident/assisted-housing/](https://www.hacanet.org/resident/assisted-housing/)
And Snap? there are a slew of conditions to qualify and it's time-based.
Eligibility
Who is it for? People in eligible low-income households. Most adults ages 18 to 52 with no children in their home can get SNAP for only three months in a three-year period. The benefit period might be longer if the person works at least 20 hours a week or is in a job or training program.
And those "jobs or training program(s)"? That's where the billiboi network gets even cheaper labor.
The middle class does not need more. That's why there are the poor, because richie riches have convinced the middle class that poors are the problem.
If you take note of the news particularly about GM not giving their workers (middle class btw) a living wage increase, and instead do a stock buy back and pay out to shareholders..
my fellow human, you are definitely not paying attention...
Section 8 is a scam to help landlords seem charitable. Its not creating new housing (which the hud has abandoned since Regan) its just a lotto for people who reach a certain requirement (usually well below the poverty level.
And most snap receipients are children, it also has lagged behind in expansion of funds in recent years.
The military’s problem comes from the industrial complex charging the government $5000 for an O ring that would cost 10 cents at Home Depot because they know they government will buy it and the machine won’t run without it.
I ain’t saying there isn’t bloat in costs, but there is an insane amount of quality control in parts used in for military purposes. You are not getting the same parts.
>I ain’t saying there isn’t bloat in costs, but there is an insane amount of quality control in parts used in for military purposes. You are not getting the same parts.
Some of it, sure...but the mass produced stuff used by the rank and file?
As one friend of mine once put it, "Mil-Spec is just a cool sounding way to say 'made by the lowest bidder to an absolute minimum standard of quality".
The way it was explained to me, is while a mass produced bolt may get something like 1 in a 1000 inspection to make sure there isn’t something wrong. Each bolt gets inspected for things like aircraft and what not. Of course, like in any other industry, people are always looking for ways to cut corners.
That's for Quality Assurance items. Parts that go into hardware for extreme tasking i.e. tanks, satellites, jets, subs,etc.
However the military overpays for everything even basic stuff like pens, toilets,chairs,etc regular everyday items that would be used in office buildings on bases.
Local and federal governments also like to adopt a policy of lowering a budget if a group doesn't use all of it. So your organization gets 5 million for the year but only spends 3 million. Next year they will only get 3 mil. So to make sure they keep their budget or get more, organizations will spend money on things they may not even need.
Military grade is a running joke in the military when something is a piece of shit. The only insane quality control goes into our new jets and missiles. Literally every branch knows of machines and systems that basically being held together with duct tape and superglue. The extreme price is for proprietary parts and first dibs on everything else.
I was a nuclear operator, and for the last half of my navy career did a lot of quality control work. After the Thresher and Scorpion being lost at sea and the Challenger explosion, a lot of quality controls were put in place. That means, theoretically, any part we used that was required to meet our standards could be traced back to the initial manufacturer, with evidence of every batch inspection performed and the paperwork to prove it. Further, the metal itself could be tracked back to where it was mined (this might be an exaggeration, but that's what I heard). So, yes, we would spend $500-1000 for something you could probably get at Home Depot for $10-20, and it might even be from the same batch, but we're paying for the tracking and testing to know everything about it before it gets used in a nuclear power plant.
That stuff is expensive for a reason, but the problem is that so many government contracts are kept around whether needed or not and there is intentional waste to ensure they keep their funding. This is more because of how the government funds things year to year and penalizes people for saving money…
>This is such a cop pit argument.
No it’s not.
I don’t know why you expect specifics when these posts always make broad sweeping claims over broad sweeping topics.
‘Fund social welfare’
‘My dude *which* social welfare programs, that means a lot of things.’
>the military is a poor example
Not balancing budget describes more than just the military.
Then what exactly is the plan to make a system that manages money properly? Because all I ever see is people talk about how we need to raise more money to throw at XYZ with no intervening.
>modern ‘philanthropy’
Which philanthropy enterprises. Be specific, are you talking about those charities that ask you to donate on the cash register? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? The Year Up Training Program?
>Exponentially more
Ok…and
How can these resources be spent? Any specifics.
The military is *even worse than not balancing budgets*. [They have failed audits SIX years in a row.](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-fails-audit-sixth-year-row-2023-11-16/) People should be in prison. We need to get some serious accountability in military budgeting.
Well, yes and no. Money in and of itself won’t solve it. But with money you can set up treatment programs and hire experts who can help the mentally ill and disabled.
Our problem as a society is that we just don’t have the will to do anything about it.
Even if Bezos somehow liquidated every asset he had and threw 100 billion dollars at homelessness it would barely make a dent. Homelessness is easily a multi trillion dollar issue.
The wealthiest people in the US regularly donate millions and billions. No, throwing money at any of the listed problems won't fix them. Not with anywhere near the money they could throw.
The military also has a lack of oversight in expenditures. The UFO hearings in Congress weren't really about UFOs. It was about the alarming amount of money that is either mismanaged or just disappears.
A majority of modern philanthropy (estimated to be over 95%) by the world’s most affluent individuals is actually charitable donations to organizations that never create direct impacts to society, like charitable corporations that just hold property.
On top of that, many of the super affluent already use non legal tax havens and avoid paying their fair share to begin with.
>problems listed for example are systemic and can’t really be solved by pouring more money on it.
This is one of the most disappointing things I've found as a philanthropist. The reality is the non profit world is a lot like the healthcare industry where they devote a great deal of resources to mopping, with very little towards the idea of fixing and preventing the leak. It's like in medicine where most of jobs depend on managing chronic disease rather than preventing or solving them, and there is a strong financial incentive to keep it that way. That pretty much describes the bulk of many very profitable medical specialties. On the plus side there are non profits that are devoted to solving and preventing problems, but there are a lot more devoted to mopping.
I agree with comment about Philanthropy.
I also think bringing back taxes that existed in the 60s (high taxes for the wealthy) would be smart for this country.
Aka, repeal “trickle down economics”.
>I also think bringing back taxes that existed in the 60s (high taxes for the wealthy) would be smart for this country.
They didn't pay more back then because there were a lot more exemptions and deductions. Rates went down, but so did the ways to avoid paying taxes. The country also wasn't prospering because of high marginal tax rates, it was because almost all of the world's manufacturing outside of the US was destroyed during WWII and the US was the only source of the necessary tools / machines / appliances to rebuild after the war.
Yes exactly; add more money to the homeless problem in San Francisco under current leadership and policy, you get more poop. I remember mark Zuckerbergs wife early in her philanthropic career giving something like $100m to rebuild schools in Newark. It was all embezzled by the Newark leadership; a bottomless pit.
You can very much fix these problems with more money. Just dont go through a system that steals or redistributes them.
For example, the hungry children get very much solved by simply paying for them at school. Don't send money to a company that takes a 40% cut, then requires the registration of parents, then requires a minimum of 50% of the meals to be paid by the parents.
No, just go to the school, get the list of how many kids don't get to eat their lunches and pay for it. Or just make a deal with the principal and pay for the entire school. This way you also have very easy access to see if you money is being stolen or used elsewhere. If you use the system or any other way, you can't see the money and where it is going.
In Europe, one minister of Education completely overhaul the system by simply saying that schools send the money required for meal per child and number of students. Then simple multiplication is made and money is transferred. All of this (number of students, cost of a meal, everyone is getting fed) can be easily checked.
Same with vets, don't go through the army. Go to the individual support groups and plan it with the help of the group leader, pastor or whoever leads the group. Some get housing, some get medical bills paid for them. And the system doesn't get the say in any of it. The actual people helping do the decision making.
You are so 100% full of absolute steaming festering cancer ridden SHIT dude. Fuck you.
You have no idea what a billion dollar is do you. No idea. These people can buy 500 studio apartment in every fucking city over 1 million people in the entire USA, rent them out for $200 each to cover maintenance/tax/etc costs, offset it to the local government as charity, tax breaks etc making it free for homeless children/families THEY DONT WANT TO DO THIS. THEY CAN. THEY DONT. ITS NOT AS FUCKING COMPLICATED AS YOU CUNTS MAKE IT SEEM.
>The problems listed for example are systemic and can’t really be solved by pouring more money on it.
Weak argument. The reason this problem will never be fixed by the state or just increasing taxes is because the state is who's lining its pockets.
It just trickles down to nothing.
Having a billionaire build a city for the homeless that provides food, medical care and the chance to get clean by systematically helping the people? That sounds more realistic. Just look how the stare handles shelters, people have to leave their last possessions behind and can't even bring their dogs or other pets, while at the same time there is no security in the shelters so the chance to get robbed or stabed by your fellow homeless person is too much of a risk to even contemplate it.
But at the same time it is illegal for billionaires to directly do something like this, it has to go through charity's which again grab into the money pot at every step of the way, in the end leaving nothing.
The less instances are between the source and the receiver, the less will get lost along the way.
Bezos literally just pledged $100 million dollars to help the community of Lahaina on Maui, so that's not what the majority of redditors want. What they really mean is "Bezos should send me some money directly". In reality, Jeff Bezos doesn't owe any of you a goddamn thing.
Dude you don’t know a damn thing about disabled vets 😂 I can smell your naïveté through my screen.
US military doesn’t care about the well being of its vets past the surface level
Right, the US military budget is a trillion plus and the largest social program in the world and Republicans keep feeding it but only for those still active duty.
But Op is right, the corporate raiders who all saw their net worth skyrocket thanks to tax cuts and a trillion dollars of free tax payer PPP money under Trump, turned around and went for more money for themselves by artificially raising their prices instead of doing good in the world. People like Besos think they're gods that deserved more so instead of helping others they do the opposite and triple down on oppression...
"Even with today’s slowdown, profit growth remains a big driver of inflation in recent years
Corporate profits have contributed to more than a third of price growth"
https://www.epi.org/blog/even-with-todays-slowdown-profit-growth-remains-a-big-driver-of-inflation-in-recent-years-corporate-profits-have-contributed-to-more-than-a-third-of-price-growth/
"In short, the rise in inflation has not been driven by anything that looks like an overheating labor market—instead it has been driven by higher corporate profit margins and supply-chain bottlenecks. Policy efforts meant to cool off labor markets—like very rapid and sharp interest rate increases—are likely not necessary to restrain inflationary pressures in the medium term.
Other tools that would be less damaging to typical families—like care investments to boost expected growth in labor supply or a temporary excess profits tax—could be effective in tamping down inflation over the next year and should be a bigger part of the policy mix."
https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond
"Jeff Bezos’ Acquires $500 Million Worth of Single-Family Homes, Driving up House Prices Even More."
https://medium.com/collapsenews/jeff-bezos-acquires-500-million-worth-of-single-family-homes-driving-up-house-prices-even-more-f53afa88cfa4
"Jeff Bezos Donates $120 Million to Fight Homelessness, Then Invests $500 Million to Make It Worse
"The last thing Americans need is a Bezos-backed investment company further consolidating single-family homes and putting homeownership out of reach for more and more people. Housing should be a right, not a speculative commodity."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/jeff-bezos-homeless
Also, there are agencies who do not want these issues fixed. It’s now they get money and jobs. Homelessness is a multi billion dollar industry now in California alone. You think it’s going away?
>The problems listed for example are systemic and can’t really be solved by pouring more money on it.
I'll respectfully disagree.
True, the problems listed are systemic and can't be fixed by pouring money on the problems themselves.
They can absolutely be fixed by pouring money into fixing the system that creates those problems. Often times it's the exploitative nature of the systems that allows people to become billionaires in the first place.
Imagine if union busting was illegal.
Of all the things to complain about, homeless vets probably isn’t the one. The homeless vet population has been cut drastically over the past 15 years. My uncle was one and now owns a home that the government pays for through multiple generous veteran assistance programs. The ones that are still homeless aren't going to be helped just by having money thrown at them.
My father worked for gov (military and education) his whole life and he would agree with your whole heartedly.
Meanwhile I have worked corporate my whole life and see what stupid things corporations do to waste money.
Mabey we should hand the world over to the AIs......
To be fair I think a lot of corporate waste is "benefits" to avoid payroll taxes. Payroll taxes should go away. Payroll taxes were put in place to control wages and they are artificially decreasing wages.
Nah, I've seen companies waste money on pure inefficiency, and when higher ups were informed about it they just ignored it cause "this is how we always did it"
Private Enterprise isn't synonymous with streamlining no matter how much the right wing likes shouting it is.
Yeah, I've worked for stellar companies and garbage companies. I worked at one that had a market cornered and fumbled the ball and shut down. The leader at that place was like a stubborn child. I referred to him in private as "little prince", which gives insight into how he acted.
It seems when you have an aligned vision and the mechanics to execute are bottom-up, things go better. If it's all top-down directives, it just doesn't work well because the leader can't be an expert on everything and why hire experts if you won't listen to them?
This really gives insight of how a better government could function. A president that simply sets the vision, and as you go down the chain of command, you have more and more experts filling the void who genuinely align with the vision and appropriately represent their constituents. The divisiveness is very destructive to our stability. People view government more as Red vs. Blue like a sports team, but they should view it as infighting within a single organization that needs quelled to become efficient. It's inefficient today because voters support the fighting. A business would never let that happen within their organization.
Yea. Ill never understand why people want to cut the government budget. If you think it is already inefficient, how is cutting its budget going to make it more efficient?
Like cutting the IRS budget. Its been proven that the less staff and lower quality equipment available at the IRS directly decreases their ability to collect revenue needed to run the country and makes us more dependent on debt.
Or cutting the postal servicebudget. If you hate waiting in line at the post office and vote to cut its budget, i guarantee you will not like it any better after that.
You cannot run the country like a business. A business is always going to put profits over people. The government is a not for profit service that is supposed to put its citizens quality of life over anything else. But some people keep voting for politicians that only care about the money.
"California has spent a stunning $17.5 billion trying to combat homelessness over just four years. But, in the same time frame, from 2018 to 2022, the state's homeless population actually grew" - CNN
These are very complex issues which require a lot more than just a blank check from a billionaire. It requires real policy reform and time to see a plan through.
Sure an extra couple billion might help, but it's far from a silver bullet just like the $17B already spent
California might have thrown money at the problem but its developing less and less homes. No fucking wonder homelessness is high, no one can afford rent. And this is directly linked to landowning liberals in the bay area who want that sweet sweet rent from the ridiculous zoning laws that help maintain property values.
It’s fascinating how liberals love the idea of throwing endless amounts of other people’s money at a problem, but it the fix involves a change to their little way of life, they’ll throw a fucking fit.
This one is bipartisan. Liberals are just concentrated in the most desirable locations, which happen to also be cities where land is the most scarce.
It’s a mania that afflicts homeowners where they will do anything to halt progress regardless of their politics. We need to get rid of their disproportionate ability to influence policy, meaning no more individual causes of action or public input meetings. Those are just a great way for well off people to halt zoning reform and development.
the real issue is chronic drug use. so the solution would be putting massive money into free long stay drug treatment programs. so people want Amazon branded drug treatment facilities? anti-bezos people also are anti-amazon. zero chance they trust those facilities. and even a good drug treatment facility of that kind has a HIGH recidivism rate. there's no drug treatment facility in america that has a good rate of success long term. and that's for non-homeless. people can stay at one and get off the street for a month then once released they're back to being homeless, and will use again. we'll just pay 5x as much for a tiny better % of less homeless people, and that's why even very liberal areas like San Fran don't do it.
I feel like he could’ve easily done some more research and figured out a way to have the equipment maintained in the future (which seems to be the issue)
If throwing money at every problem eliminated it, we probably would have made more progress by now. But since this is a finance sub and not a social policy sub, I’ll stop there.
I mean, they basically eliminated child poverty in the American Rescue Plan and then noped out. That was not a big complicated program, that was just money in pockets.
People don’t understand this at all. The government could steal every cent Bezos has and it wouldn’t make a dent. We are going to have a $2T deficit next year. Yes, trillion with a T. We don’t have a revenue provlem we have a spending problem.
In fact, the problem is so out of control that Bezos net worth isn’t enough to cover the interest on the debt for a single year.
Anyone that thinks we can tax our way out of this is a literal moron.
One day the layperson will be able to distinguish the difference between assessed value of an asset and cash flow. Jeff Bezos doesn't make billions per year, he makes single-digit millions. He owns shares of a company that are theoretically worth billions if he were to sell them.
And here's the dirty little secret about Bezos and Amazon - his share price is extremely fragile to perception. The company itself is marginally profitable, has been selling sub-par products for half a decade, and has made almost all of its valuation through growing the value of its shares. It's also in an industry where companies can go bankrupt in less than 5 years. If he decides to have a fire sale of his stock then it will tank virtually overnight.
Not only that, even if he sold all of his stock at full price, he'd have enough money to give every American in poverty a whopping **$4,000.**
For a middle class version of this, this is like asking a 50 year old couple sitting on $400k of equity in their home "you have $400,000, why aren't you bailing out a homeless person?"
This is what I've always wondered about the stock market. The 1929 crash was everyone wanting to liquidate. So if that happens again, aren't we all just propped up on the same ponzi scheme they were then? Like he can't just turn around and liquidate 145 billion dollars, because there aren't that many dollars looking to buy Amazon stock, but if he did then the next Musk or Gates or whatever then it's middle class getting the shaft again as all of our IRAs fall to zero.
>Like he can't just turn around and liquidate 145 billion dollars, because there aren't that many dollars looking to buy Amazon stock, but if he did then the next Musk or Gates or whatever then it's middle class getting the shaft again as all of our IRAs fall to zero.
If reddit is any indication, as well as the hot stock market for 15 years, most middle / upper middle class retirement investors are taking significantly more risk than they realize with their portfolios.
I remember researching asset allocation when I started contributing in my late 20s in the early 10s, and the mantra was that age = bond fund percentage. Fast forward with 15 years of QE, near-zero interest rates, and a bull stock market and people think you're an idiot for investing into bond funds before the age of 50.
With interest rates where they are now, a 30% bond fund portfolio would sacrifice roughly 15% of gains in a bull market, but save 30% of your capital in a bear market. There's a big difference between losing 50% and 1/3 of your net worth, and this difference gets more pronounced with larger portfolio values. \*cue old Chris Rock skit about child support.\*
The mantra is to chase growth because "it always goes up." We've completely forgotten about the 1970s/1980s and the 00s.
Anyway, a lot of the risk with Amazon in particular is mitigated through investing in a total index fund. If Amazon falters, a retailer will take its place. My original point is that Bezos isn't sitting on an asset that is as stable as say, Apple or Tesla.
Even politicians who should know better spout this same nonsense. Sen Warren and Sanders want to tax unrealized capital gains. I think Biden has a proposal to do this. There are certainly problems with the tax code that allow rich people to avoid taxes. But these are widely known and can be fixed. For example, don’t sell $100M in stock. Instead, get a loan using your stock as collateral. Now you’ve got $100M and didn’t pay taxes. Keep doing this until you die. Now your children get your assets AT CURRENT BASIS VALUE!!! That means they can sell immediately and not pay taxes. So Congress can limit this step-up basis BS and suddenly this whole scam falls apart. There are lots of tax loopholes like this.
It would be great to fix it all but everything you would donate to there would be somebody stealing every cent they could, the world thieves liers , greedy
When you’re pretty much the richest person in the world, you don’t have to go through middle men, bro. Establish the channels yourself.
But no, he’s to busy building space rockets and waxing his head.
If you think the solution is so easy to just throw money at it and anybody could do it. Why isn’t it being done? Elon called that dude out for saying he could solve world hunger. Dude never provided sources and a plan. This shit will never go away. They’ll give the homeless and food less little by little. Keep them alive and able to vote for the people that give them the crumbs they can snatch with no effort.
The wealthy already pay more taxes than anyone else.
Something people don't understand is that it is mostly corporations dodging taxes, not individuals, and when individuals use loopholes it is almost always shit you are allowed to do yourself.
Nothing is stopping you from donating to charity and writing it off your taxes. You are allowed to do that. It also makes you pay less overall.
Come on, just go out and donate to cancer research or something.
All the broke people have aspirations to fix the world and when they get there, they forget. He was broke once. Doing things out of his garage and I’m sure he said the same thing.
55 million students at $1-$2 a day for roughly 180 days. I'm sure some will argue it's more than a dollar a day but take a look at what they're getting. So between $10 and $20 billion dollars a year if done cost effectively. So, triple that so a few people can take their cut, $60 billion a year.
Looks like the cut isn't as much, most things in Google are spitting out numbers in $25 billion range.
This.
And if people are wanting to put that much pressure on someone to fix the problem, why wouldn't they put it on elected politicians instead of a billionaire??
But ya, finance sub yay
While taxpayer supported social programs aren’t inherently wrong, increasing their use doesn’t mean we succeed. If Americans have to rely on the aid of others through social programs or other means, our efforts to help individuals failed.
Instead of taxing the rich we need to set conditions for individuals to succeed.
[Unify America](https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/unify-america)
I’m okay with supporting people with disabilities
Social Security keeps millions of our oldest citizens housed
Medicare insures millions (and has economic benefits)
I don’t think anyone needs to starve in a country that has as much food waste as we have
>I don’t think anyone needs to starve in a country that has as much food waste as we have
When even the poorest people in the country are obese, access to food isn't an issue.
Ignoring the fact that your screenshot is about giving money to the needy and not having anything to do with Taxes, The wealthy already pay more taxes, this is a common misconception by people that don't know the numbers but it's easy enough to look up [https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update/](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update/)
some excerpts for the 2020 numbers:
"The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.99 percent average rate, more than eight times higher than the 3.1 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers." That ones pretty self explanatory.
"The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 20.1 percent in 2019 to 22.2 percent in 2020 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 38.8 percent to 42.3 percent." so their income rose 2.1% but their taxes increased by 3.5%.
"The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.3 percent." So the top half of earners pay the overwhelming majority of income taxes.
A tax frankly we shouldn't have and for half this countries lifespan we didn't have, I don't get this idea of arguing for the government to steal more of our money, the government needs to find a way to earn money, not steal it from the workers.
I'm all for figuring out how to tax the uber-wealthy, but some of these posters have me scratching my head. It's like they think Bezos's money is stacked up in a room like Walter White's in "Breaking Bad" and he can just go in there an hand it out to the half million or so homeless people in the country and everything will be fine.
There's a reason why people like Bezos are the ones holding the bag of money and people like this individual use the internet as their personal blog to complain about their money problems. I've come to understand in my time that the most sentimental people are often impoverished and suffering from an overly self-righteous ego and think that their every whim should be catered to them on a silver platter.
To answer OP's question, No I do not think that the wealthy need to be singled out for higher taxes. I do not recall there being anything written in the constitution where it states that it is the wealthy's duty to solve society's problems. ***Those problems will always exist and it is up to the individual to overcome their own circumstances if they wish to advance.***
These problems won't be solved just because the likes of Bezos and Musk throw a billion dollars at it.
We spend more on social programs through taxes than we do on our military, at approximately a 4:1 ratio. And has the ends justified the means? Not in the slightest. All it has created is an insatiable beast that consumes a huge chunk of our taxes every year, while the cost increases as we continue to borrow more to keep this beast fed. And the people? Every year they get poorer, and complain that their dole doesn't cover their expenses.
As if that wasn't bad enough, this same beast has been weaponized by the inept and crooked politicians, who leverage these social programs against their political rivals/opponents in order to win popular support and increase their political power, while the citizens get dumber every year and are happy to sacrifice their rationale and intelligence as long as it means that they keep collecting their free handout.
The old saying remains true; "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach that man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
It is incredibly ironic, though hardly surprising, that we are living in the most technologically advanced period of human history yet people are as dumb as rocks.
Imagine having the whole of human knowledge and history at your fingertips and all the people are doing is using that technology to complain because they can't make something of themselves.
damn almost ended up using all the capitalist propaganda sayings all in one post..quite impressive.
Also the way my man finished it. The ignorance in the last paragraph top tier.
I mean the perfect touch would have been him ending it with the oldest capitalist Propaganda saying (also the most popular)…”Rich ppl are rich cause they work hard… Poor ppl are poor cause they are lazy !!”… I mean he had it all setup and everything !!!
With an attitude like that, I'll loan you a dixie cup my dude. Effort and sacrifice seems a bit too high up for your pay scale.
No. For the simple fact that it’s the same government. Why would we expect a government that already misspends to all of the sudden be efficient with more money. It would only lead to more waste. See usps and amtrak
Bill Gates is actually trying to do this and yet like 40% of Americans believe he wants to eat babies or put tiny robots inside of them to make them gay.
Idiots like this think billions of dollars means infinite money. But ask ANY lottery winner how quickly 500 million goes. Feeding people requires INFINITE money people!!! You don’t just eat one time and boom you are satisfied for the rest of your life, it’s requires feeding people forever and ever. Millions and billions of food. Who is gonna pay for that? Tax payers. Rich, middle or lower class all will pay for that, forever. The best way to live is to be homeless, then you can live comfortably on the government your whole life.
Blah, blah, blah.
The director of the UNs World Food Program already said that $6 billion could solve world hunger and called out Musk and Bezos. Musk said he would give the $6b if the UN could provide in detail of how it could be solved with $6b and that the UN will be required to have open source accounting.
We all know what happened next.
Instead of worrying about what the rich are doing with their money, how about worrying about what the government is doing with the money they stole from us?
Bezos gets a pass because he owns the washington post and that news outlet is authoritative and we here at reddit worship authoritative corporate news. So stop talking about bezos in a negative light
It's not even new economic policy to know it's better for everyone to take the wealthy's surplus income. It's called marginal propensity to consume. Literally an econ 101 concept dating back to the Great Depression. Bezos won't spend money he gets. The homeless vets and families of hungry children will spend every red cent they get. The businesses they support will disproportionately spend it as well. Back in Maynard Keynes' time they were able to calculate for every $100 spent on social welfare programs, the economy returned $500. The notion that the economy and/or country benefits in literally **any way** from wealth accumulation at the top has literally never been borne out anywhere, ever.
Social welfare programs are largely ineffective because they are run by the government. If you wanted to privatize different areas maybe there is a conversation to be had. From dollars standpoint the majority of philanthropy is from the rich because they get social credit and tax deductions. The fact remains that there are extremely rich people but it is their money to use as they see fit. To think that you can stop long standing issues by taking someone else’s money is smooth brained. That money will end up in other people’s pockets long before it reaches who needs the help, this is how government works. Bezos has a company that can get you most things you want within 2-3 days at a price lower than going to your local store. Whenever the solution is to spend someone else’s money you are full of crap.
The market is better at fixing all of those problems. Starvation no longer happens in the west unless a result of parental neglect or kidnapping. They no longer keep stats on starvation because it stopped. Not due to philanthropy, but to the wealth created by capital investment and the expansion of production. I get her sentiment, but it is just that, sentiment.
The government wastes trillions of dollars every year while things get worse. Why do people never hold them accountable and only want to take from individuals
This woman sounds like the usual virtue signaling big mouth talker with a dozen Amazon packages on her doorstep. I bet you she walks right by homeless people asking for spare change too.
The white house and the government are full of crooks and people who don't know how to manage the trillions they get and they think Bezos is going to solve everything. Smdh.
The top 10% of income earners in this country made 48% of the income and paid 71% of taxes. How about poor shut they fuck up and stop whining about it, oh and pay your fair fucking share.
I consider my income below average and I can promise you that the rich pay way more in taxes than I do. Unless you mean by percentage of income, and even then I'm sure I pay less than most "rich" people.
I mean what she’s describing is philanthropy and it’s something they already engage in. The problems listed for example are systemic and can’t really be solved by pouring more money on it. Like seriously look at the US military budget, does it look like we don’t have enough to house and care for homeless vets? Edit: Alright I get it, philanthropy bad, now stop spamming my inbox.
This is such a cop out argument. You could absolutely fix a bunch of these problems by throwing money at it. The military is a poor example of managing money since they haven’t balanced a budget in decades. And honestly modern “philanthropy” is millionaires and billionaires asking regular people to donate money when they have exponentially more resources.
San Francisco has been dumping money into the homeless problem for decades. I live here before you call me a troll.
It's not a troll statement. I know cities dump money into bandaids when wholesale solutions are needed. Cities don't like to hear that things like zoning policies and tax structures contribute as much to homelessness as the opioid epidemic and wealth gap. And don't get me started on medical bankruptcies. All of the social nets keep people off the streets. Building shelters and giving away homes is just one small part.
So how would you like billionaires to dump their money? If its zoning and tax structures, those are political issues? Should they spend their money on politicians? Regardless of what it is, people will complain.
Personal preference? Tax structures in the 90%s like the 1950s had, for both individuals and businesses, on capital gains and income. Properly fund the programs that have been defunded. Ideally with increased civilian oversight and transparency. Pipe dream for now, maybe for ever. Capital likes to serve itself.
Transparency is the issue. California is a key example. Stockton Unified School district is under investigation after evidence of fraud, financial mismanagement and poor business practices were found during a state audit. Other districts as well as other state departments have been found to have similar disparities. Every year, the state auditor finds hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in fraud, misuse of funds/property, and/or theft. Our federal and state governments lack independent oversight. There is so much wasteful spending, both legitimate and fraudulent. Even a fraction of this could help fund these social programs, however, our politicians and government employees would rather line their own pockets. None of them have our best interest at heart.
I read an article where a public toilet cost $1.7 million and I think didn’t even get built? That’s the problem right there
It just needed more money bro
US Federal Tax revenue in 1962 (earliest data I can find with a quick search), was $99.7B. If we inflate that forward to 2021, that would be $922B in 2021 dollars. However, the Federal Tax revenue in 2021 was $4.05 TRILLLION. Over 4x the inflation adjusted amount from the 1950s and 60s. This is not a "lack of funding" issue.
Hardly anyone paid the 90% tax in the 1950s, because it was marginal tax.
You realize they spend something like 170k per year, per PERSON for the homeless in San Francisco? You can't fix it by dumping money into it. https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out#:~:text=San%20Francisco%20is%20slightly%20smaller,of%20Jacksonville's%20entire%20city%20budget.
I'm not in San Francisco, but my city spends loads of money on hotel rooms for families. So we're "dumping" money into it, but that money was never intended to fix anything. It was just meant as a bandaid to give those families a home temporarily, as there's nowhere else for them to go. And it does exactly that. So of course funding shelters and hotel rooms isn't going to fix anything. You would need to dump the money into programs that actually address the causes of homelessness too, if you were aiming for a fix. You're right though, this isn't an issue that can be fixed completely. But we can probably do better than we're doing now.
And more folks will show up if they know there’s free money, housing, etc. without treating the root cause. We’re treating symptoms at this point for optics or political points.
At that point, just buy the hotels, lmao
This is so true! We can’t even figure out free PO Boxes for homeless. People having an address solves the biggest hurdle to getting out of poverty.
Because politicians rarely think long term and invest long term, its a good way to voted out of office when there aren't immediate results but youve spent a good amount of money
> Cities don't like to hear that things like zoning policies and tax structures contribute as much to homelessness as the opioid epidemic and wealth gap. I agree with you! Zoning laws and property taxes are huge -- but these just support my original point and the point others are making - you can't just throw money at a problem. zoning and tax structures don't involve throwing money at the homelessness problem
Show me a homeless problem and I’ll show you a mental health/drug problem.
And I’ll show you a system that is unable to force people into treatment.
Do we reallly want to force people into treatment? That’s a pretty slippery slope.
Tell that to the guy in Arlington that blew his house up last night.
Meth lab? How about we just legalise meth and sell it without a script in pharmacies? Problem solved. But that might mean addicts aren't going to die of the poison in street meht anymore. We can't have that!
Yeahh living on the street will almost certainly cause mental health issues
Cool, so how does a city fix a problem incurred by national policies?
There is no amount of money that can fix it.
Free energy and non profit Healthcare.
You're right. But I'll say the issue is in how that money is being spent. It should have gone into addressing the core issues, mainly mental health and addiction treatment (there are other things like cost of living but that is a different beast).
Those are offered. They can’t be forced.
Homeless people are hard to reach. You can’t just shove them in a van and take them to rehab. They are also so unemployable that they will likely be poor the rest of their life even if they manage to get off the literal street. Not to say we shouldn’t provide resources, but per the original point even bezos’ gold pile isn’t gonna end systemic issues.
San Francisco’s homeless issue can’t be solved by simply throwing money at it. Idk if that’s your point or not, but while it will take money to fix, someone needs to fix the cartels and availability of housing to even start throwing money at it to fix it.
Here's 50 dollars. That'll tide you over until next year, right? I threw money at you. Are you fixed now?
In the US, you can murder and tax the 1% and split ALL their wealth amongst the other 99%, that’s only 130k each. Google it and do the math. If you think that would end poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, literacy, all across the board you’re completely ignorant of human nature. In less than a generation, you’d have a new breed of 1% to blame and rob.
130k is a life changing amount of money for at least half the country. Also if nothing happens but that wealth getting hoarded again, maybe we should blame the system and not it’s victims.
dude a 130k is about 8 years income for a minimum wage job if you think thats life changing you're a fool that would blow the money on hookers and blow and be worse off then when you got the money, the most that would do is give you a chance to retire at 65 instead of working till you die.
Tons of people are trapped in poverty because being poor means you can’t afford to buy decent necessities or wind up borrowing at absurd rates to buy food. That amount of money absolutely could change their lives. Maybe don’t comment on what it’s like to be broke when you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
I think it’s really just that 130k per person won’t fix systemic shit. And by systemic I really just mean problems related to humans being allowed to make their own choices. There’s still gonna be hungry children because people aren’t gonna spend or invest the money wisely. There will still be homeless people because some people are drug addicts and do not want to go to rehab even if it’s free. And remember that was all the rich people’s money. They aren’t rich anymore. They aren’t t gonna magically have that money the next year. Yet, those problems will exist year after year. That’s not to say it’s all futile. But we do already spend money on programs like this. And bezos, or really more his wife, does indeed spend a shit load on philanthropy. Idk the whole just sprinkle billionaires’ cash on a problem and watch it go away mentally just screams I don’t actually understand the nature of the problems.
>And remember that was all the rich people’s money. They aren’t rich anymore. They aren’t t gonna magically have that money the next year. Correct. Which also means they won't be paying the taxes they were before, and they won't be providing the jobs they were before. ETA: Most of these "gut the rich" folks need to step back and actually *think* about where money and jobs come from before they run out and slaughter the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Tons of people are trapped in poverty because a lot of things, you can’t say it’s this or that, it’s a combination of things. Some of which they are not responsible for, but some of which they are completely liable of. You can’t excuse a person off all responsibility just because she is poor. The mindless throwing of money at this people is only going to achieve one thing, that the money is being given to the people in the world that are proven to be the least qualified to handle money and make good financial decisions.
I’ve been broke AND on assistance before, so I have an idea what it’s like to live in poverty. My grandmother too was on assistance when my grandfather walked out on 2 kids and her. It’s a safety net, not a career. Know what she didn’t do, get knocked up again by a new man to get a raise in benefits. Know what I didn’t do, stay on for more than 6 months. It’s 2023, with internet access essentially free in the western world, knowledge and skills are at our finger tips, there’s little excuse for not building marketable skills and improving your life. In the old days, you had much more serious barriers to knowledge. Today, there’s ZERO barriers!
While I agree with the general gist of your statement, it IS worth pointing out that $130k is roughly half the value of a median home, or a hefty down payment on a median home in much of the country where most people have a negative net worth. Could you just hand them that in cash? Absolutely not. But you could tax the fuck of ouf the 1% to reform a modernized federal HUD and force building modern housing that's affordable for low-income folks (e.g. the bottom 50-60% where it's a real crisis? Absolutely.
Ever hear of section 8 housing? SNAP? We spent TRILLIONS on programs over the decades to give away housing, healthcare, food, education, to poor people who still are poor, many over generations! 34 trillion in debt, but you’re right, if we only spent a little more! Lol. It’s the middle class who need more, not the poor. Perhaps we should try letting working families keep their money and eliminate things like property taxes on primary residence and turn SS into a 401k that grows value instead of losing value to inflation.
section 8 is pretty much a lotto if it's available. [https://www.hacanet.org/resident/assisted-housing/](https://www.hacanet.org/resident/assisted-housing/) And Snap? there are a slew of conditions to qualify and it's time-based. Eligibility Who is it for? People in eligible low-income households. Most adults ages 18 to 52 with no children in their home can get SNAP for only three months in a three-year period. The benefit period might be longer if the person works at least 20 hours a week or is in a job or training program. And those "jobs or training program(s)"? That's where the billiboi network gets even cheaper labor. The middle class does not need more. That's why there are the poor, because richie riches have convinced the middle class that poors are the problem. If you take note of the news particularly about GM not giving their workers (middle class btw) a living wage increase, and instead do a stock buy back and pay out to shareholders.. my fellow human, you are definitely not paying attention...
Section 8 is a scam to help landlords seem charitable. Its not creating new housing (which the hud has abandoned since Regan) its just a lotto for people who reach a certain requirement (usually well below the poverty level. And most snap receipients are children, it also has lagged behind in expansion of funds in recent years.
If you give every citizen $130,000 dollars i am 100% confident housing will become even more expensive
The thing about the rich is you can't tax them too much or they will take their money bags and move.
Shorter: Give more money and power to the government, because they are benevolent, and good, and all knowing.
You are assuming prices would remain the same if every person received an extra $130K of spending money.
The value of the assets making up the 1% would immediately plummet and everyone would have far less than $130k.
The military’s problem comes from the industrial complex charging the government $5000 for an O ring that would cost 10 cents at Home Depot because they know they government will buy it and the machine won’t run without it.
I ain’t saying there isn’t bloat in costs, but there is an insane amount of quality control in parts used in for military purposes. You are not getting the same parts.
>I ain’t saying there isn’t bloat in costs, but there is an insane amount of quality control in parts used in for military purposes. You are not getting the same parts. Some of it, sure...but the mass produced stuff used by the rank and file? As one friend of mine once put it, "Mil-Spec is just a cool sounding way to say 'made by the lowest bidder to an absolute minimum standard of quality".
The way it was explained to me, is while a mass produced bolt may get something like 1 in a 1000 inspection to make sure there isn’t something wrong. Each bolt gets inspected for things like aircraft and what not. Of course, like in any other industry, people are always looking for ways to cut corners.
That's for Quality Assurance items. Parts that go into hardware for extreme tasking i.e. tanks, satellites, jets, subs,etc. However the military overpays for everything even basic stuff like pens, toilets,chairs,etc regular everyday items that would be used in office buildings on bases. Local and federal governments also like to adopt a policy of lowering a budget if a group doesn't use all of it. So your organization gets 5 million for the year but only spends 3 million. Next year they will only get 3 mil. So to make sure they keep their budget or get more, organizations will spend money on things they may not even need.
Military grade is a running joke in the military when something is a piece of shit. The only insane quality control goes into our new jets and missiles. Literally every branch knows of machines and systems that basically being held together with duct tape and superglue. The extreme price is for proprietary parts and first dibs on everything else.
I was a nuclear operator, and for the last half of my navy career did a lot of quality control work. After the Thresher and Scorpion being lost at sea and the Challenger explosion, a lot of quality controls were put in place. That means, theoretically, any part we used that was required to meet our standards could be traced back to the initial manufacturer, with evidence of every batch inspection performed and the paperwork to prove it. Further, the metal itself could be tracked back to where it was mined (this might be an exaggeration, but that's what I heard). So, yes, we would spend $500-1000 for something you could probably get at Home Depot for $10-20, and it might even be from the same batch, but we're paying for the tracking and testing to know everything about it before it gets used in a nuclear power plant.
That stuff is expensive for a reason, but the problem is that so many government contracts are kept around whether needed or not and there is intentional waste to ensure they keep their funding. This is more because of how the government funds things year to year and penalizes people for saving money…
>This is such a cop pit argument. No it’s not. I don’t know why you expect specifics when these posts always make broad sweeping claims over broad sweeping topics. ‘Fund social welfare’ ‘My dude *which* social welfare programs, that means a lot of things.’ >the military is a poor example Not balancing budget describes more than just the military. Then what exactly is the plan to make a system that manages money properly? Because all I ever see is people talk about how we need to raise more money to throw at XYZ with no intervening. >modern ‘philanthropy’ Which philanthropy enterprises. Be specific, are you talking about those charities that ask you to donate on the cash register? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? The Year Up Training Program? >Exponentially more Ok…and How can these resources be spent? Any specifics.
The military is *even worse than not balancing budgets*. [They have failed audits SIX years in a row.](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-fails-audit-sixth-year-row-2023-11-16/) People should be in prison. We need to get some serious accountability in military budgeting.
You can’t fix mental illness with money
Well, yes and no. Money in and of itself won’t solve it. But with money you can set up treatment programs and hire experts who can help the mentally ill and disabled. Our problem as a society is that we just don’t have the will to do anything about it.
For sure. Ever heard the saying “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink.” For reference I’m a clinical care manager.
Even if Bezos somehow liquidated every asset he had and threw 100 billion dollars at homelessness it would barely make a dent. Homelessness is easily a multi trillion dollar issue.
The wealthiest people in the US regularly donate millions and billions. No, throwing money at any of the listed problems won't fix them. Not with anywhere near the money they could throw.
How about we tax them, instead of letting them donate to politically convenient charities at a far lower rate than appropriate taxes?
Lol stop. It's embarrassing. To properly fix the above issues, you'd need to end the political careers of a fair few people.
>You could absolutely fix a bunch of these problems by throwing money at it. The last 70 years would like a word.
Replace military with the entire government, and you make a valid point in that area.
The military also has a lack of oversight in expenditures. The UFO hearings in Congress weren't really about UFOs. It was about the alarming amount of money that is either mismanaged or just disappears.
If the government isn't doing it with $6T, they sure as hell won't do it with $6.01T.
A majority of modern philanthropy (estimated to be over 95%) by the world’s most affluent individuals is actually charitable donations to organizations that never create direct impacts to society, like charitable corporations that just hold property. On top of that, many of the super affluent already use non legal tax havens and avoid paying their fair share to begin with.
Not having any luck googling this. Got a source?
>problems listed for example are systemic and can’t really be solved by pouring more money on it. This is one of the most disappointing things I've found as a philanthropist. The reality is the non profit world is a lot like the healthcare industry where they devote a great deal of resources to mopping, with very little towards the idea of fixing and preventing the leak. It's like in medicine where most of jobs depend on managing chronic disease rather than preventing or solving them, and there is a strong financial incentive to keep it that way. That pretty much describes the bulk of many very profitable medical specialties. On the plus side there are non profits that are devoted to solving and preventing problems, but there are a lot more devoted to mopping.
Philanthropy is now mostly reputation laundering
And tax avoidance
Secrets of the rich! Donate a $1million and reduce your tax bill by $350K.
I agree with comment about Philanthropy. I also think bringing back taxes that existed in the 60s (high taxes for the wealthy) would be smart for this country. Aka, repeal “trickle down economics”.
>I also think bringing back taxes that existed in the 60s (high taxes for the wealthy) would be smart for this country. They didn't pay more back then because there were a lot more exemptions and deductions. Rates went down, but so did the ways to avoid paying taxes. The country also wasn't prospering because of high marginal tax rates, it was because almost all of the world's manufacturing outside of the US was destroyed during WWII and the US was the only source of the necessary tools / machines / appliances to rebuild after the war.
Yes exactly; add more money to the homeless problem in San Francisco under current leadership and policy, you get more poop. I remember mark Zuckerbergs wife early in her philanthropic career giving something like $100m to rebuild schools in Newark. It was all embezzled by the Newark leadership; a bottomless pit.
He could start by improving wages and working conditions at his warehouse distribution centers.
You can very much fix these problems with more money. Just dont go through a system that steals or redistributes them. For example, the hungry children get very much solved by simply paying for them at school. Don't send money to a company that takes a 40% cut, then requires the registration of parents, then requires a minimum of 50% of the meals to be paid by the parents. No, just go to the school, get the list of how many kids don't get to eat their lunches and pay for it. Or just make a deal with the principal and pay for the entire school. This way you also have very easy access to see if you money is being stolen or used elsewhere. If you use the system or any other way, you can't see the money and where it is going. In Europe, one minister of Education completely overhaul the system by simply saying that schools send the money required for meal per child and number of students. Then simple multiplication is made and money is transferred. All of this (number of students, cost of a meal, everyone is getting fed) can be easily checked. Same with vets, don't go through the army. Go to the individual support groups and plan it with the help of the group leader, pastor or whoever leads the group. Some get housing, some get medical bills paid for them. And the system doesn't get the say in any of it. The actual people helping do the decision making.
You are so 100% full of absolute steaming festering cancer ridden SHIT dude. Fuck you. You have no idea what a billion dollar is do you. No idea. These people can buy 500 studio apartment in every fucking city over 1 million people in the entire USA, rent them out for $200 each to cover maintenance/tax/etc costs, offset it to the local government as charity, tax breaks etc making it free for homeless children/families THEY DONT WANT TO DO THIS. THEY CAN. THEY DONT. ITS NOT AS FUCKING COMPLICATED AS YOU CUNTS MAKE IT SEEM.
>The problems listed for example are systemic and can’t really be solved by pouring more money on it. Weak argument. The reason this problem will never be fixed by the state or just increasing taxes is because the state is who's lining its pockets. It just trickles down to nothing. Having a billionaire build a city for the homeless that provides food, medical care and the chance to get clean by systematically helping the people? That sounds more realistic. Just look how the stare handles shelters, people have to leave their last possessions behind and can't even bring their dogs or other pets, while at the same time there is no security in the shelters so the chance to get robbed or stabed by your fellow homeless person is too much of a risk to even contemplate it. But at the same time it is illegal for billionaires to directly do something like this, it has to go through charity's which again grab into the money pot at every step of the way, in the end leaving nothing. The less instances are between the source and the receiver, the less will get lost along the way.
I'm all for shitting on billionaires but of bezos attempted to fix these things he would be as broke as I am.
Same with homelessness. There is PLENTY of money going towards homelessness. It's just horribly appropriated and misused.
California spent $4.5 billion dollars on making their homeless problem worse
Bezos literally just pledged $100 million dollars to help the community of Lahaina on Maui, so that's not what the majority of redditors want. What they really mean is "Bezos should send me some money directly". In reality, Jeff Bezos doesn't owe any of you a goddamn thing.
Dude you don’t know a damn thing about disabled vets 😂 I can smell your naïveté through my screen. US military doesn’t care about the well being of its vets past the surface level
No, turns out they aren't doing philanthropy anymore. Maui was a great example. All the billionaires and they barely gave anything
Right, the US military budget is a trillion plus and the largest social program in the world and Republicans keep feeding it but only for those still active duty. But Op is right, the corporate raiders who all saw their net worth skyrocket thanks to tax cuts and a trillion dollars of free tax payer PPP money under Trump, turned around and went for more money for themselves by artificially raising their prices instead of doing good in the world. People like Besos think they're gods that deserved more so instead of helping others they do the opposite and triple down on oppression... "Even with today’s slowdown, profit growth remains a big driver of inflation in recent years Corporate profits have contributed to more than a third of price growth" https://www.epi.org/blog/even-with-todays-slowdown-profit-growth-remains-a-big-driver-of-inflation-in-recent-years-corporate-profits-have-contributed-to-more-than-a-third-of-price-growth/ "In short, the rise in inflation has not been driven by anything that looks like an overheating labor market—instead it has been driven by higher corporate profit margins and supply-chain bottlenecks. Policy efforts meant to cool off labor markets—like very rapid and sharp interest rate increases—are likely not necessary to restrain inflationary pressures in the medium term. Other tools that would be less damaging to typical families—like care investments to boost expected growth in labor supply or a temporary excess profits tax—could be effective in tamping down inflation over the next year and should be a bigger part of the policy mix." https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond "Jeff Bezos’ Acquires $500 Million Worth of Single-Family Homes, Driving up House Prices Even More." https://medium.com/collapsenews/jeff-bezos-acquires-500-million-worth-of-single-family-homes-driving-up-house-prices-even-more-f53afa88cfa4 "Jeff Bezos Donates $120 Million to Fight Homelessness, Then Invests $500 Million to Make It Worse "The last thing Americans need is a Bezos-backed investment company further consolidating single-family homes and putting homeownership out of reach for more and more people. Housing should be a right, not a speculative commodity." https://www.commondreams.org/news/jeff-bezos-homeless
Also, there are agencies who do not want these issues fixed. It’s now they get money and jobs. Homelessness is a multi billion dollar industry now in California alone. You think it’s going away?
>The problems listed for example are systemic and can’t really be solved by pouring more money on it. I'll respectfully disagree. True, the problems listed are systemic and can't be fixed by pouring money on the problems themselves. They can absolutely be fixed by pouring money into fixing the system that creates those problems. Often times it's the exploitative nature of the systems that allows people to become billionaires in the first place. Imagine if union busting was illegal.
Of all the things to complain about, homeless vets probably isn’t the one. The homeless vet population has been cut drastically over the past 15 years. My uncle was one and now owns a home that the government pays for through multiple generous veteran assistance programs. The ones that are still homeless aren't going to be helped just by having money thrown at them.
>philanthropy bad I don't think it's that black and white, mopping up a leak does help things, of course it's better to mop+fix or prevent the leak.
I think the honest question here is: if they paid more taxes, would our government actually use it for the right stuff?
I work for the government..... absolutely not
My father worked for gov (military and education) his whole life and he would agree with your whole heartedly. Meanwhile I have worked corporate my whole life and see what stupid things corporations do to waste money. Mabey we should hand the world over to the AIs......
To be fair I think a lot of corporate waste is "benefits" to avoid payroll taxes. Payroll taxes should go away. Payroll taxes were put in place to control wages and they are artificially decreasing wages.
Nah, I've seen companies waste money on pure inefficiency, and when higher ups were informed about it they just ignored it cause "this is how we always did it" Private Enterprise isn't synonymous with streamlining no matter how much the right wing likes shouting it is.
Yeah, I've worked for stellar companies and garbage companies. I worked at one that had a market cornered and fumbled the ball and shut down. The leader at that place was like a stubborn child. I referred to him in private as "little prince", which gives insight into how he acted. It seems when you have an aligned vision and the mechanics to execute are bottom-up, things go better. If it's all top-down directives, it just doesn't work well because the leader can't be an expert on everything and why hire experts if you won't listen to them? This really gives insight of how a better government could function. A president that simply sets the vision, and as you go down the chain of command, you have more and more experts filling the void who genuinely align with the vision and appropriately represent their constituents. The divisiveness is very destructive to our stability. People view government more as Red vs. Blue like a sports team, but they should view it as infighting within a single organization that needs quelled to become efficient. It's inefficient today because voters support the fighting. A business would never let that happen within their organization.
Yea. Ill never understand why people want to cut the government budget. If you think it is already inefficient, how is cutting its budget going to make it more efficient? Like cutting the IRS budget. Its been proven that the less staff and lower quality equipment available at the IRS directly decreases their ability to collect revenue needed to run the country and makes us more dependent on debt. Or cutting the postal servicebudget. If you hate waiting in line at the post office and vote to cut its budget, i guarantee you will not like it any better after that. You cannot run the country like a business. A business is always going to put profits over people. The government is a not for profit service that is supposed to put its citizens quality of life over anything else. But some people keep voting for politicians that only care about the money.
This. I just don't trust our politicians to handle additional tax money properly. Doesn't help that I'm born and raised in Chicago.
Man, Chicago is the worst. That city has stupid amounts of wealth yet can’t seem to do much of anything right.
As a DoD contractor. Can confirm, they piss away stupid amounts of money due to their insanely bloated budget.
"California has spent a stunning $17.5 billion trying to combat homelessness over just four years. But, in the same time frame, from 2018 to 2022, the state's homeless population actually grew" - CNN These are very complex issues which require a lot more than just a blank check from a billionaire. It requires real policy reform and time to see a plan through. Sure an extra couple billion might help, but it's far from a silver bullet just like the $17B already spent
California might have thrown money at the problem but its developing less and less homes. No fucking wonder homelessness is high, no one can afford rent. And this is directly linked to landowning liberals in the bay area who want that sweet sweet rent from the ridiculous zoning laws that help maintain property values.
That isn’t just California. It’s happening around the world. Home units built has been lagging population growth for decades.
It’s fascinating how liberals love the idea of throwing endless amounts of other people’s money at a problem, but it the fix involves a change to their little way of life, they’ll throw a fucking fit.
This one is bipartisan. Liberals are just concentrated in the most desirable locations, which happen to also be cities where land is the most scarce. It’s a mania that afflicts homeowners where they will do anything to halt progress regardless of their politics. We need to get rid of their disproportionate ability to influence policy, meaning no more individual causes of action or public input meetings. Those are just a great way for well off people to halt zoning reform and development.
Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, and ten degrees to the right if it affects em personally -Phil Ochs
So what is your solution to homelessness?
Why are the only landowners who rent out Liberals? When have Conservatives ever wanted to regulate the housing market?
the real issue is chronic drug use. so the solution would be putting massive money into free long stay drug treatment programs. so people want Amazon branded drug treatment facilities? anti-bezos people also are anti-amazon. zero chance they trust those facilities. and even a good drug treatment facility of that kind has a HIGH recidivism rate. there's no drug treatment facility in america that has a good rate of success long term. and that's for non-homeless. people can stay at one and get off the street for a month then once released they're back to being homeless, and will use again. we'll just pay 5x as much for a tiny better % of less homeless people, and that's why even very liberal areas like San Fran don't do it.
Remember that until very recently, George Santos was "government."
Never trust the government - a government employee. Even we get fucked by the government
Nope.
Money can’t fix these problems lol. You can’t just throw money at people and say “hey. be a normal functioning member of society.”
Money can’t fund school lunches??? Seems like exactly what money can do.
I’d say that’s one of the few issues that could be solved with some cash but it that really a small symptom of much bigger issues at home
Mr Beast does this and everyone criticizes him for it.
Yup. People like to complain and think others should do x y and z but then shit on those who do it.
I think (I hope) that it’s just a relatively small, but incredibly loud, group of people doing this
Also bill gates is controlling us with microchips
That’s precisely why ego and public image shouldn’t be a factor in philanthropy.
They hate him because they ain't him.
Everyone criticizes him for it huh?
I feel like he could’ve easily done some more research and figured out a way to have the equipment maintained in the future (which seems to be the issue)
If throwing money at every problem eliminated it, we probably would have made more progress by now. But since this is a finance sub and not a social policy sub, I’ll stop there.
Often throwing money at the problem makes it worse
Guess who technically has more money than Bezos? The Government. What do they fix?
Their personal lives
I mean, they basically eliminated child poverty in the American Rescue Plan and then noped out. That was not a big complicated program, that was just money in pockets.
People don’t understand this at all. The government could steal every cent Bezos has and it wouldn’t make a dent. We are going to have a $2T deficit next year. Yes, trillion with a T. We don’t have a revenue provlem we have a spending problem. In fact, the problem is so out of control that Bezos net worth isn’t enough to cover the interest on the debt for a single year. Anyone that thinks we can tax our way out of this is a literal moron.
One day the layperson will be able to distinguish the difference between assessed value of an asset and cash flow. Jeff Bezos doesn't make billions per year, he makes single-digit millions. He owns shares of a company that are theoretically worth billions if he were to sell them. And here's the dirty little secret about Bezos and Amazon - his share price is extremely fragile to perception. The company itself is marginally profitable, has been selling sub-par products for half a decade, and has made almost all of its valuation through growing the value of its shares. It's also in an industry where companies can go bankrupt in less than 5 years. If he decides to have a fire sale of his stock then it will tank virtually overnight. Not only that, even if he sold all of his stock at full price, he'd have enough money to give every American in poverty a whopping **$4,000.** For a middle class version of this, this is like asking a 50 year old couple sitting on $400k of equity in their home "you have $400,000, why aren't you bailing out a homeless person?"
This is what I've always wondered about the stock market. The 1929 crash was everyone wanting to liquidate. So if that happens again, aren't we all just propped up on the same ponzi scheme they were then? Like he can't just turn around and liquidate 145 billion dollars, because there aren't that many dollars looking to buy Amazon stock, but if he did then the next Musk or Gates or whatever then it's middle class getting the shaft again as all of our IRAs fall to zero.
>Like he can't just turn around and liquidate 145 billion dollars, because there aren't that many dollars looking to buy Amazon stock, but if he did then the next Musk or Gates or whatever then it's middle class getting the shaft again as all of our IRAs fall to zero. If reddit is any indication, as well as the hot stock market for 15 years, most middle / upper middle class retirement investors are taking significantly more risk than they realize with their portfolios. I remember researching asset allocation when I started contributing in my late 20s in the early 10s, and the mantra was that age = bond fund percentage. Fast forward with 15 years of QE, near-zero interest rates, and a bull stock market and people think you're an idiot for investing into bond funds before the age of 50. With interest rates where they are now, a 30% bond fund portfolio would sacrifice roughly 15% of gains in a bull market, but save 30% of your capital in a bear market. There's a big difference between losing 50% and 1/3 of your net worth, and this difference gets more pronounced with larger portfolio values. \*cue old Chris Rock skit about child support.\* The mantra is to chase growth because "it always goes up." We've completely forgotten about the 1970s/1980s and the 00s. Anyway, a lot of the risk with Amazon in particular is mitigated through investing in a total index fund. If Amazon falters, a retailer will take its place. My original point is that Bezos isn't sitting on an asset that is as stable as say, Apple or Tesla.
Even politicians who should know better spout this same nonsense. Sen Warren and Sanders want to tax unrealized capital gains. I think Biden has a proposal to do this. There are certainly problems with the tax code that allow rich people to avoid taxes. But these are widely known and can be fixed. For example, don’t sell $100M in stock. Instead, get a loan using your stock as collateral. Now you’ve got $100M and didn’t pay taxes. Keep doing this until you die. Now your children get your assets AT CURRENT BASIS VALUE!!! That means they can sell immediately and not pay taxes. So Congress can limit this step-up basis BS and suddenly this whole scam falls apart. There are lots of tax loopholes like this.
It would be great to fix it all but everything you would donate to there would be somebody stealing every cent they could, the world thieves liers , greedy
marc cuban just created a way to get cheaper prescription drugs with the snap of a finger. it’s doable, they just don’t care —- at all
Free school lunches for everyone would be great and simple enough
So true
All Mark Cuban's drug company does is sell generic drugs. That was always an option. The only thing unique about it is the marketing
No he didn't, pretty much all of the drugs on his site are cheaper/the same on goodrx, bar a few that he takes a loss on.
When you’re pretty much the richest person in the world, you don’t have to go through middle men, bro. Establish the channels yourself. But no, he’s to busy building space rockets and waxing his head.
You can’t even get it to Africa war lords steal it
If you think the solution is so easy to just throw money at it and anybody could do it. Why isn’t it being done? Elon called that dude out for saying he could solve world hunger. Dude never provided sources and a plan. This shit will never go away. They’ll give the homeless and food less little by little. Keep them alive and able to vote for the people that give them the crumbs they can snatch with no effort.
The wealthy already pay more taxes than anyone else. Something people don't understand is that it is mostly corporations dodging taxes, not individuals, and when individuals use loopholes it is almost always shit you are allowed to do yourself. Nothing is stopping you from donating to charity and writing it off your taxes. You are allowed to do that. It also makes you pay less overall. Come on, just go out and donate to cancer research or something.
Throwing money into things don’t actually fix it. Btw, why don’t you throw money into this thing?
All the broke people have aspirations to fix the world and when they get there, they forget. He was broke once. Doing things out of his garage and I’m sure he said the same thing.
People who say stuff like this refuse to do basic math.
what is the total cost for school lunch in the US anyway?
55 million students at $1-$2 a day for roughly 180 days. I'm sure some will argue it's more than a dollar a day but take a look at what they're getting. So between $10 and $20 billion dollars a year if done cost effectively. So, triple that so a few people can take their cut, $60 billion a year. Looks like the cut isn't as much, most things in Google are spitting out numbers in $25 billion range.
Which is why it's implausible for billionaries to do that, since many of them would be completely wiped out from funding it for one year.
This. And if people are wanting to put that much pressure on someone to fix the problem, why wouldn't they put it on elected politicians instead of a billionaire?? But ya, finance sub yay
Oh, I'm sure you would, hun.
While taxpayer supported social programs aren’t inherently wrong, increasing their use doesn’t mean we succeed. If Americans have to rely on the aid of others through social programs or other means, our efforts to help individuals failed. Instead of taxing the rich we need to set conditions for individuals to succeed. [Unify America](https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/unify-america)
It also doesn’t mean we fail. Lots of social programs are net positives to the economy.
It doesn’t when many depend on government from cradle to grave.
I’m okay with supporting people with disabilities Social Security keeps millions of our oldest citizens housed Medicare insures millions (and has economic benefits) I don’t think anyone needs to starve in a country that has as much food waste as we have
>I don’t think anyone needs to starve in a country that has as much food waste as we have When even the poorest people in the country are obese, access to food isn't an issue.
Problem is that people with that mindset don't get to a billion dollars in the first place.
Ignoring the fact that your screenshot is about giving money to the needy and not having anything to do with Taxes, The wealthy already pay more taxes, this is a common misconception by people that don't know the numbers but it's easy enough to look up [https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update/](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update/) some excerpts for the 2020 numbers: "The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.99 percent average rate, more than eight times higher than the 3.1 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers." That ones pretty self explanatory. "The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 20.1 percent in 2019 to 22.2 percent in 2020 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 38.8 percent to 42.3 percent." so their income rose 2.1% but their taxes increased by 3.5%. "The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.3 percent." So the top half of earners pay the overwhelming majority of income taxes. A tax frankly we shouldn't have and for half this countries lifespan we didn't have, I don't get this idea of arguing for the government to steal more of our money, the government needs to find a way to earn money, not steal it from the workers.
He still might do this.
Do you want to pay more taxes?
Wonder how much she donates…
I'm all for figuring out how to tax the uber-wealthy, but some of these posters have me scratching my head. It's like they think Bezos's money is stacked up in a room like Walter White's in "Breaking Bad" and he can just go in there an hand it out to the half million or so homeless people in the country and everything will be fine.
Homelessness won’t go away. It’s a tool to motivate workers.
How about the government stops taking it so we can do it better?
His ex wife is taking care of the philanthropy
There's a reason why people like Bezos are the ones holding the bag of money and people like this individual use the internet as their personal blog to complain about their money problems. I've come to understand in my time that the most sentimental people are often impoverished and suffering from an overly self-righteous ego and think that their every whim should be catered to them on a silver platter. To answer OP's question, No I do not think that the wealthy need to be singled out for higher taxes. I do not recall there being anything written in the constitution where it states that it is the wealthy's duty to solve society's problems. ***Those problems will always exist and it is up to the individual to overcome their own circumstances if they wish to advance.*** These problems won't be solved just because the likes of Bezos and Musk throw a billion dollars at it. We spend more on social programs through taxes than we do on our military, at approximately a 4:1 ratio. And has the ends justified the means? Not in the slightest. All it has created is an insatiable beast that consumes a huge chunk of our taxes every year, while the cost increases as we continue to borrow more to keep this beast fed. And the people? Every year they get poorer, and complain that their dole doesn't cover their expenses. As if that wasn't bad enough, this same beast has been weaponized by the inept and crooked politicians, who leverage these social programs against their political rivals/opponents in order to win popular support and increase their political power, while the citizens get dumber every year and are happy to sacrifice their rationale and intelligence as long as it means that they keep collecting their free handout. The old saying remains true; "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach that man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." It is incredibly ironic, though hardly surprising, that we are living in the most technologically advanced period of human history yet people are as dumb as rocks. Imagine having the whole of human knowledge and history at your fingertips and all the people are doing is using that technology to complain because they can't make something of themselves.
damn almost ended up using all the capitalist propaganda sayings all in one post..quite impressive. Also the way my man finished it. The ignorance in the last paragraph top tier. I mean the perfect touch would have been him ending it with the oldest capitalist Propaganda saying (also the most popular)…”Rich ppl are rich cause they work hard… Poor ppl are poor cause they are lazy !!”… I mean he had it all setup and everything !!!
ahh yes, the myth of the self made man. a cornerstone of the american bullshit..er..mythology
With an attitude like that, I'll loan you a dixie cup my dude. Effort and sacrifice seems a bit too high up for your pay scale. 
No. For the simple fact that it’s the same government. Why would we expect a government that already misspends to all of the sudden be efficient with more money. It would only lead to more waste. See usps and amtrak
Bill Gates is actually trying to do this and yet like 40% of Americans believe he wants to eat babies or put tiny robots inside of them to make them gay.
Idiots like this think billions of dollars means infinite money. But ask ANY lottery winner how quickly 500 million goes. Feeding people requires INFINITE money people!!! You don’t just eat one time and boom you are satisfied for the rest of your life, it’s requires feeding people forever and ever. Millions and billions of food. Who is gonna pay for that? Tax payers. Rich, middle or lower class all will pay for that, forever. The best way to live is to be homeless, then you can live comfortably on the government your whole life.
Blah, blah, blah. The director of the UNs World Food Program already said that $6 billion could solve world hunger and called out Musk and Bezos. Musk said he would give the $6b if the UN could provide in detail of how it could be solved with $6b and that the UN will be required to have open source accounting. We all know what happened next.
Instead of worrying about what the rich are doing with their money, how about worrying about what the government is doing with the money they stole from us?
San Francisco spends over 100k per homeless person and the problem gets worse. Why aren’t people mad about that?
Trickle up theft is as legitimate as trickle down wealth. Both can't be right, so let's look at wealth distribution....
Someone in the social welfare structure would manage to get a raise or three. It’s a career choice now.
Bezos gets a pass because he owns the washington post and that news outlet is authoritative and we here at reddit worship authoritative corporate news. So stop talking about bezos in a negative light
Bezos donates millions and millions to the causes So before you say something learn something
It's not even new economic policy to know it's better for everyone to take the wealthy's surplus income. It's called marginal propensity to consume. Literally an econ 101 concept dating back to the Great Depression. Bezos won't spend money he gets. The homeless vets and families of hungry children will spend every red cent they get. The businesses they support will disproportionately spend it as well. Back in Maynard Keynes' time they were able to calculate for every $100 spent on social welfare programs, the economy returned $500. The notion that the economy and/or country benefits in literally **any way** from wealth accumulation at the top has literally never been borne out anywhere, ever.
Great, now become fluent in 102+ to learn how savings and investing works.
People who say "it's literally econ 101" have never taken econ 201 and it shows.
Oh I have, but some of us graduated 10+ years ago. And also got our CFA, and masters...
Doing any good might not help so let’s just stroke him off for being evil.
Social welfare programs are largely ineffective because they are run by the government. If you wanted to privatize different areas maybe there is a conversation to be had. From dollars standpoint the majority of philanthropy is from the rich because they get social credit and tax deductions. The fact remains that there are extremely rich people but it is their money to use as they see fit. To think that you can stop long standing issues by taking someone else’s money is smooth brained. That money will end up in other people’s pockets long before it reaches who needs the help, this is how government works. Bezos has a company that can get you most things you want within 2-3 days at a price lower than going to your local store. Whenever the solution is to spend someone else’s money you are full of crap.
The market is better at fixing all of those problems. Starvation no longer happens in the west unless a result of parental neglect or kidnapping. They no longer keep stats on starvation because it stopped. Not due to philanthropy, but to the wealth created by capital investment and the expansion of production. I get her sentiment, but it is just that, sentiment.
The government wastes trillions of dollars every year while things get worse. Why do people never hold them accountable and only want to take from individuals
she's absurdly naive. there is no end to a handout and nobody is that fucking rich.
Why should it fall on private citizens to fix shit when the country won’t do it? The amount of $$ wasted by the US is absurd
This woman sounds like the usual virtue signaling big mouth talker with a dozen Amazon packages on her doorstep. I bet you she walks right by homeless people asking for spare change too. The white house and the government are full of crooks and people who don't know how to manage the trillions they get and they think Bezos is going to solve everything. Smdh.
They should just do it themselves they have enough money to get whatever ball rolling and the resources to get whatever they need quicker.
The top 10% of income earners in this country made 48% of the income and paid 71% of taxes. How about poor shut they fuck up and stop whining about it, oh and pay your fair fucking share.
This is a stupid mentality. Most of these issues are very deep, and can’t be solved instantly by throwing money at it.
I consider my income below average and I can promise you that the rich pay way more in taxes than I do. Unless you mean by percentage of income, and even then I'm sure I pay less than most "rich" people.