Wealth disparity is not relevant to this discussion. It doesn’t say anything about where the bottom tier is.
If we had full UBI, free homes, free food, free healthcare, etc and some small portion of the country were quadrillionaires, we’d have massive wealth disparity and no loss of quality of life.
Wealth is not zero-sum, and the high and low do not necessarily have anything to do with one another.
Bruh, not to shit out an old conservative adage, but that money has to come from somewhere. You’re missing the entire nuances of how the monetary system works, and the whole argument of where the money should come from for these things. A country where wealth disparity is increased because the tax comes from the middle class looks very different from one where it comes from the upper classes and massive corporations.
A country where wealth disparity is increased because the tax comes from the middle class
This also has nothing to do with the money disparity.
Like, I agree with you regarding taxation in broad terms. But the objective reality is the wealth disparity does not have any impact, on its own, on anyone’s individual well-being, the same way me acknowledging that it doesn’t has no bearing on whether or not wealthy people should pay more taxes.
If we cannot discuss things in a real world framework, were basically just writing fan-fiction of reality. That is a MAGA way to create policy, not a real world methodology.
The way you’re trying to frame this is magical thinking where wealth disparity within our society doesn’t come with sets of nuanced issues that don’t directly effect the wellbeing of society as a whole. After a certain rate of wealth disparity, for instance, those with the most can directly control those with the least with any number of creative ways that mostly amount to “I have money so I can buy people.”
From controlling government officials, to controlling individual level situations like law enforcement and judiciary measures so that they can essentially do whatever they want, which is never used for the betterment of others and always to the detriment of the masses. To leave these things out of a conversation about wealth disparity and quality of life is just disingenuous man.
The way you’re trying to frame this is magical thinking where wealth disparity within our society doesn’t come with sets of nuanced issues that don’t directly effect the wellbeing of society as a whole.
This isn’t magical thinking, it’s simply understanding that wealth is not zero-sum.
From controlling government officials, to controlling individual level situations like law enforcement and judiciary measures so that they can essentially do whatever they want, which is never used for the betterment of others and always to the detriment of the masses.
This is indeed bad, but is a measure of the strength of institutions, not wealth disparity. Wealth doesnt win elections on its own - 2012, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 all featured out-spent candidates who won. Trump famously won despite being outspent handily in 2016
I’m genuinely flabbergasted that some people perceive this as some sort of hot take and not just acknowledging the reality at play here.
The rich people who go on TV and say “people don’t want to work for me anymore, that’s why we need to cut benefits” certainly see wealth as zero-sum. They know if we had all those things you listed their business would stop working.
Also this is a question of incentives, not wealth. They believe people who get benefits are incentivized not to work. This has been proven soundly false in recent tests of UBI.
Politicians serve their constituents - they consistently vote in the way their constituents want, and in the last 6 years the Republican Party has been turned inside out by those constituents.
It’s impossible to argue otherwise in the face of the very real power people wield, from primarying their representatives to taking over local school boards.
We can invent billions of dollars to give away during the pandemic, and billions more to give Israel to continue its genocide against Palestinians, but solving student debt or homelessness or universal health care? We don’t have enough money for that!
Nothing. It has everything to do with your comment. This isn’t a “both sides” moment. It may have been in the past but Israel is commiting war crimes at a breathtaking pace now.
Oy. Arguing with nihilists is about as useful as pissing into a black hole. You’ll just get your dick turned into spaghetti for the effort, so why bother?
All I care about is that people can see what kind of mentality pairs with rhetoric like, “They control us!” It’s not a productive, insightful perspective that speaks helplessness into themselves and others.
Because the government has on multiple occasions during my lifetime refused to consider measures with over 90% popular support.
Because they do not serve us as it is written in the Constitution. They serve the wealthy, they bend and scrape and lick their boots, never hold them accountable to the law, and never. Ever. Act against their best interest in any scenario. And the wealthy benefit from the social safety net having a big hole above a pit trap their workers are afraid to fall into.
Our leaders serve the people making noise at the bargaining table. We the people have the most power. We just leave after the first victory. We don’t become educated voters and choose to instead focus on exciting narratives. Elite interests try to affect change and so focus on reality. We the people seem to be after catharsis and so focus on symbolic victories.
But what can you expect from people who constantly tell themselves they have no power? No agency? They don’t conceptualize themselves as being able to affect change and it colors everything they do.
You’re judging the majority of the population without questioning why we feel powerless. The vast majority of news, media, and education we encounter support our oppression.
Just because you’ve been lucky enough to hear the truth and been in the right place emotionally to hear it doesn’t mean you should write everyone who is ignorant as morally inferior.
I’m not judging, I’m curious about why people say this stuff. The way we talk is intimately tied with results. Changing rhetoric is a big step in getting girls to conceptualize themselves as capable of “boy” things. “Chess is for boys.” isn’t just a phrase, it’s like a spell that alters reality. If people can understand how words have power when it comes to women’s opportunites, or minorities taking interest in voting, then they’ll eventually understand that it affects our agency too.
Considering the military budget is now up to 1.2 trillion a year and we pay for other country’s wars, the government clearly exists to make warmongers wealthier.
Homeowners pulling the ladder up after them is the single largest driver of our housing crisis. You literally cannot build more housing in the areas we most need it, due to regulations pushed for, and at times written by, local homeowners.
Yes. They didn’t even start doing that until the investment became worth it.
NIMBYism is the cause of this problem. We need to build for density, change property tax laws where they’ve been rigged, and encourage building wherever possible.
I would be on the same page as you except Biden tried to take a victory lap on the economy. We’re in the backlash of that right now. You can tell because they’re scrambling to look like they’re lowering prices on anything they can.
Homelessness is a very complex issue encompassing things like mental health and climate change. The president has no direct control over rent prices, they may be able to influence them to a degree, but that’s all. This is an integral part of late-stage capitalism. People in need are being left behind because America is filled with greed. One of the many things to help alleviate this would be the construction of subsidized dense housing in areas with high levels of amenities.
Reminder that the both the Mormon & Catholic "Churches" could feed, house & clothe every single homeless person in the USA indefinitely & it would only cost them a fraction of their net worth.
They had rather sit on their wealth like the Dragon though, regardless of the punishments for that described in their "Bible".
That's how you know they don't really believe in their own bullshit.
There’s an often cited figure that it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness. As best as I can find, that figure is taken from an interview in 2012 with Mark Johnson who was with the dept of housing and urban development at the time, he wasn’t directly quoted in the interview, it wasn’t an official statement from the department, and by his own admission it was a rough estimate, I’m also not clear if that’s a global figure or specifically for the US, though I suspect it’s for just the US.
The wealth of churches can be a bit hard to quantify, between cash, investments, real estate, artwork, etc. across multiple countries and various legal entities, but either organization is worth, at the low end, easily 10s of billions of dollars, and possibly hundreds (I tend to see estimates for the Mormons somewhere between $100-200 billion) and in the case of the Catholic Church, they are almost definitely sitting on some properties and artifacts that could only be valued as “priceless,” if the Pope, hypothetically, decided to sell off the entirety of Vatican City, how would the value even be determined for that?
So if we assume that 20 billion estimate is good, either church could handle it pretty easily.
That figure is over a decade old at this point though and so likely outdated (if it ever was accurate at all, which is questionable at best,) I’m seeing other sources saying that the true price to end homelessness would be at least $300 billion at the low end.
Which, again, may possibly be within either or both church’s ability to pay for out of pocket depending on how they use their assets, but even if it’s not, they could certainly put a very good dent in the problem.
You could also quibble about what it means to end homelessness and the appropriate ways to go about doing so.
So in short, they could maybe do it, but at the very least they could certainly afford to do a lot more than they are.
It’s unacceptable that they’re the only ones who are officially exempt.
Kind of seems like the person you’re replying to is well-aware of that, and when they said “Churches need to pay taxes,” they didn’t mean it as “churches are currently legally obligated to pay taxes” but rather “churches paying taxes is something that needs to happen.”
Not quite. Churches are exempt from many taxes, but not all, as a part of the separation of church and state.
Churches do need to pay their share of FICA, Social Security, and other income-related taxes. Clergy are also required to pay income taxes, though they are permitted some tax-exempt benefits, most notably church-provided housing.
That being said, I’d completely agree with removing tax-exempt status from churches that breach the separation of church and state, beginning with those that outright tell their members who to vote for.
I’m far less worried about churches paying sales, property, and income taxes than people making tens of billions of dollars a year.
We’ll get WAY MORE social benefit out of properly taxing the ultra-ultra rich than we will out of the hundreds of thousands of mini-churches who have volunteer receptionists twice a week or even the few hundred mega churches with jet-setting pastors.
Turn your ire on the bigotry and hypocrisy of a church that attempts to profess love and hate at the same time and out of the same mouth to your heart’s content, but when it comes to money, we need to deal with the robber barons. They’re the ones causing the economic problem.
Pretty sure it’s not that simple. They have projects all over the planet, and administrators that need their cut. Also need church renovations so that people feel their church is fancier than their own homes.
The largest share of identification is “independent”, but in the last 30 years, in presidential elections, generally voters have leaned slightly toward the Democratic candidate. statista.com/…/share-electoral-popular-votes-each…
You could also do some analysis on total votes by candidate and control for total voting population, but I’m on my phone and don’t feel like doing that much work.
There have been many spans of time when Democrats had enough control of government to push through what they profress. They don’t use those opportunities.
Not arguing that the two parties are the same. They are better than the Republicans by far, but the Democrats are still not our friends. They either need to be destroyed or changed.
Since Eugene McCarthy, to the Rainbow Coalition, and then the campaigns of Kuccinch and then Bernie working inside has not worked. Of course, neither has working outside.
I keep having to read the dumb narrative that le atheism would fix everything here on Lemmy and everything is the fault of religion but the atheist institutions are doing just as little if not less than the religious ones.
I don’t think that’s what is happening at all. We don’t need to imagine some vast and ridiculously improbable media conspiracy to explain this seeming disconnect. What I imagine is really happening is that the tools that economists and by extension the media use to gauge the health of the economy are no longer (if they ever were) calibrated to accurately reflect the lived experience of many/most Americans.
This is by far the simplest explanation.
The idea that this is somehow a conspiracy is simply an example of poor media literacy. It doesn’t work like that at all.
It’s cute that you appear to imagine that anyone gets rich through journalism. No one goes into journalism because they want to get rich.
Journalism is probably the lowest paid “profession” there is because it’s highly competitive and in recent decades the bottom has entirely fallen out of local news organizations due to the Internet having destroyed their revenue streams.
Overwhelmingly people go into journalism because they want to make a difference, not because they want to get rich. If you want to get rich you go into finance or a STEM field or go to law school.
This idea of yours, that journalists use their own economic conditions when reporting on the economy is also objectively absurd.
To the contrary, they report what the economists and financial market experts are saying. Again, this “gaslighting” notion of yours makes no sense inasmuch as it implies something very like a conspiracy or a collective understanding that the truth is to be misrepresented.
This makes no sense in the reality that is competitive reporting in which one is rewarded for reporting “scoops” in terms of breaking news. Again, it just shows how illiterate you and many others are when it comes to understanding what actually happens in newsrooms.
While it makes sense to imagine that traditional economic indicators aren’t necessarily indicative of the lived experience of average citizens, it makes zero sense to imagine that the highly competitive news media is somehow in collusion to present an inaccurate picture of the economy.
That’s just plain stupid.
Source; I have a degree in journalism together with decades in the news business. It’s actually pretty difficult for me to emphasize how wrong-headed you are on this.
Few seem to care…including those who will one day be there themselves.
What are those of us who care supposed to be doing?
Amidst deciding which bills get paid each paycheck, trying to find nutritional variety out of food banks (canned fish intake should ideally be less than 10 cans a month per person, for example, and even rinsing canned vegetables/beans isn’t doing wonders for sodium intake compared to fresh), trying to decide which medical and dental issues we can afford to address and which just get to be endured, and watching debt go to collections because food, insurance, automobile fuel, home energy, rent, and everything related to cars has gone up, what are we supposed to be doing?
In what way can we unite as a people and fix this?
I could not comment as I do not know you, but many people choose nice things like bigger cars, new phone, alcohol and such over quality food. Some however are in a place that they are trapped and have no choice and for those people I have no advice other than to really make some noise and vote accordingly if you are in a country you can.
I keep seeing this argument. I see a metric funckton of new construction and they are ALL 400k+ which is a lot for our smaller/mid city. Existing inventory is averaging the same.
Yes some construction happens. It’s still profitable in some cases, especially when the target market is the richest segments of society.
But there could be so much more. They could build two houses on each of those plots of land, and maybe each house is only $250k but you’ve managed to get $500k of real estate out of the same plot of land which (as any good capitalist will tell you) is better than $400k of real estate.
But you can’t do that. Density restrictions. Zoning laws that are way too narrowly defined, ie bloated, and have long since surpassed the “Don’t boil horse carcasses next to a daycare” sort of scenario by which zoning laws are explained in our history books.
Instead of just protecting public health zoning’s now also protecting people’s views, protecting people’s lawns, protecting people’s resale value on their homes.
Like, oh your view of Mt Shasta got blocked by an apartment building? Gee that sucks but it also doesn’t suck that five hundred new apartments are on the market now, weakening the monopoly some local cartel has on pricing and slowing the rise of rent prices.
We have a sort of overton window in terms of how much construction is “a little” and how much is “a fuckton”. Living our lives in this kind of supply crackdown has calibrated our sense of how much construction is a fuckton.
Just imagine that construction you’re seeing … but twice as tall. Perfectly conceivable, even financially favorable to the people who would make it happen, but literally not allowed.
This is an excellent and erudite comment. I’m curious what industry you work in. And did you make up “Don’t boil horse carcasses next to a daycare”? Because I’m fucking keeping it, funniest shit I’ve read all day. Keep it up mate
44% of single family homes were purchased by private equity in 2023. Some analysts expect institutional investors to control 40% of the SFH rental market by 2030.
And when are the American people going to demand an end to this shit? They represented less than 3% of sfh ownership in 2012. How long until everyone must rent? How long until people are forced to sell due to taxes driving them out of ownership due to inflated pricing from these ghouls?
While I’m not 100% about it, Prop 13 in California has some good effects.
People shouldn’t be tax hiked out of their living quarters. I think most states should have something similar and limit it to only the property you reside in so that property taxes are predictable instead of the incalculable beast they are today in most areas.
But unemployment is at the lowest ever! We added 200.000 jobs. There was only a soft recession. Line goes up, and just in time for something important. What a coincidence. The economy is so great and we’re back in the bull market!
Lol presonal accountability? Over a quarter are children. And the rest, a majority have mental and physical disabilities. Studies show around 40% to 60% have jobs. Very few are homeless by choice.
Don’t forget, Biden never wanted to give Covid relief checks either, it was only the threat of Trump promising to do so that caused him to actually do it (in order to win in places like Georgia if I recall correctly). Then he shortchanged everyone on the actual amount he promised (I don’t care if when you read the fine print he was technically correct, that was not how the promise was pitched to voters).
Trump is far worse, but let’s not forget how pathetic the Democratic Party is at actually helping desperate people.
It’s almost like the president doesn’t have absolute authority to implement ideas exactly how they like, and have to work with other branches of the government, which usually means compromising.
Wow. Guess we really should pivot to authoritarianism. Then campaign promises can be implemented to the letter. /s if that wasn’t obvious.
Is there any other reasonable conclusion to draw from his behavior and rhetoric in the political context he was in? No.
Republicans said they wouldn’t let the full $2000 pass. If Biden tried it anyway it wouldn’t pass and Americans would be left with nothing. That’s common sense. But you claim there is no other conclusion to come to…
The process involved congress but the president had most of the power to frame and shape what the covid relief checks were.
And Republicans in Congress said they wouldn’t let the full $2000 pass.
Republicans said they wouldn’t let the full $2000 pass. If Biden tried it anyway it wouldn’t pass and Americans would be left with nothing. That’s common sense. But you claim there is no other conclusion to come to…
Source on this? Even if it is true democrats did nothing to publicize this fact, the fight for this shit is like Biden’s “fight” for a $15 minimum wage. Even if he technically fought for it, the strategy is so poor and so halfhearted it hard to count it for anything meaningful.
tl;dr - Biden campaigned on $2,000, so a lot of people thought they were getting $2,000. Turns out it was just $1400 because he was counting the $600 the Trump admin had already sent.
So you feel Biden should’ve stuck with that original $2000 and let Republicans block the bill which would’ve resulted in nothing for the American people?
I get you $14 and I say it's $20 because of the $6 from before.
Do you not get why people would be upset about this? Stop thinking like a wonk and start thinking like someone who reads at a fifth grade level and had their civics class cut due to lack of funding.
This whole exchange shows why we’re doomed. This guy is shitting on Biden for not giving him more money, but still giving him as much as he possibly could. Meanwhile it’s the other party’s fault the number is smaller to begin with.
Oh he should have predicted what arbitrary number the Republicans were going to dig in on and only promise that? Like they wouldn’t have used that as the new starting point in negotiations and gone even lower
Read this very carefully; winning an election doesn’t mean that you get to do everything you want. Again; winning an election doesn’t mean that you get to do everything you want.
There are a lot of people who don’t seem to understand this concept. Winning an election just means that you get to try to do what you want, but you’re always going to have to make compromises because that’s how democracies work.
You are definitely correct in the general sense. People actually to the left HAVE to remember: Democrats are allies only against the right. They are not ideologically aligned and no matter how many individuals you can pull left, “Democrats” will never be left or progressive.
They HAVE to be pushed to do good things. That doesn’t magically make Trump good. Fuck that wannabe dictator and everyone who supports him, but Democrats are allies only against the right.
I speak on behalf of the label. Like I said: “no matter how many individuals you can pull left…”
The party itself is not a specific person. MAYBE people like AOC and others will succeed in shifting the whole party left, but as it stands, it is a heavily center-right organization on the global scale of politics as far as how they vote in-house, on actual legislation.
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