How much actual money do you think the “people with billions of dollars” have in comparison to the needs of the population as a whole? I think you’re very confused about where the actual income in the economy goes.
Perhaps what's happening is that in their attempts to reach a personal all-time high in their bank accounts the ultra-wealthy are destroying value and economic systems en mass with little regard to the efficiency of their money siphoning process?
It's kind of like a drug dealer selling brain burning addictive substances to a few people on a street. Sure they're going to extract a person's life savings to date and whatever money that person can steal once they're addicted but that value pales in comparison to what that person could have made over their career, what it could have made if properly invested, the cost of law enforcement to deal with these addicts, the cost of the stuff that they destroy in their quest to get money to buy drugs, the opportunity cost of them not raising their kids to be productive members of society... like it all just snow balls all so some asshole can make a few bucks...
The ultra-wealthy are doing that shit where people burn acres of pristine forests to get some biochar -- but to the entire world.
Isn’t it strange
That princes and kings,
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders for eternity?
Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules;
And each must make-
Ere life is flown-
A stumbling block
Or a stepping stone.https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stumbling_block
Turns out it's a fictional object created in the translation of the Koine Greek for "obstacle".
I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".
Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.
The entire Earth's population dead, with evil corporate board members holding votes underground as to who gets to be the CEO of the company.
Avicebron brought up inequality as the root cause.
DavidPiper indicated only the few thousand richest as the root cause.
Rayiner questioned if those few thousand richest have the means or capacity to reduce inequality.
estimator7292 responded that everyone has to help reduce inequality.
To which I wanted to point out exactly what would need to be sacrificed, because it would involve sacrifices among the top 10% to 20% of the world (constituting many on this forum) which those 10% to 20% would not even consider a "luxury". It is easy to claim a billionaire's private jet is an expendable luxury exacerbating inequality, but the reality is the bar is far lower than that (see statistics on energy used per capita, which can serve as a good proxy for which side of the inequality the lifestyle you might expect is).
That is why we are all mostly talk and no walk, because push comes to shove, we can't even get a sufficient fossil fuel tax passed to slow climate change for our own descendants, much less voluntarily decrease our standard of living solely for the benefit of others in the world.
Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
Those two groups are on the greater side of the inequality, and the third group is on the lesser side of the inequality. All the dragons on their mountains of gold can stop existing, and the inequality barely changes.
Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.
Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.
As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.
Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.
EDIT: grammar
If American billionaires couldn't exist then America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe, the entire tech industry wouldn't exist, and it'd be entirely at the mercy of China. Because nobody's going to start a business in a country that violently confiscates their wealth just for being successful. The envy of people like yourself is a deep moral illness that destroys civilizations if left unchecked.
Sounds like a self-defeating argument to me.
Billionaires who inherit their wealth shouldn’t exist. But I have no problem with people like Bezos owning a sizable percentage share of valuable companies they created. When I was a kid, getting something ordered by mail took a week or two, even if you called in the order. UPS and FedEx existed, warehouses and storage trucks existed, but Bezos reduced that to a matter of hours. And now the sheeple can get their daily Amazon deliveries while complaining that Bezos is making a nickel on each one.
In a purely analytical calculation—without emotional nonsense—one Jeff Bezos obviously is vastly more beneficial to society than thousands of ordinary people. If we just had school teachers, or whoever else you idealize, we’d all be living in mud huts. The average person would be living like an animal without the technology created by exceptional people like Bezos. Why shouldn’t society reward them lavishly?
Let's just look at countries which have high income and very low income unequality, like Finland.
Turns out they don't live in mud huts, and most aspects of society work far better than in the USA.
But even if Bezos actually creates billions of value on his own, it doesn't mean that he should get those billions. The reward for such high value work should be high enough that Bezos chooses to do it instead of something else, but it doesn't need to be higher than that. In a world where the highest paid position would reward a few million instead of a few billion, I'm sure Bezos and people like him would still gravitate towards that work since it'd still be work with the best rewards.
People who have some revolutionary ideas wouldn't abandon them if the potential highest reward was millions instead of billions. Or do you believe that there are people with good ideas right now that abandon them because they can't earn trillions with the idea? What people expect as a reward for their work is what decides whether they do it or not. If we can lower the expectation, we can get the high value work without creating dangerous levels of power concentration.
I have no issue with incentivising and rewarding individuals who contribute great works. Any rewards, monetary or otherwise, would be fine if our institutions could continue to serve all and not just the few "rewarded" individuals.
Unfortunately, time has proven that money and power are intrinsically linked and those same few will continue to shape how and what paths humanity takes at large. I'm simply stating we should tread more carefully and not place all trust in a few cult of personalities as many seem to, and your response implies. Perhaps the stories of the self-made individual and the chances of becoming one of those few (however vanishing small the chance) is too ingrained in our collective psyche that we blind ourselves to what parts we actually play in this game.
The trade offs here aren't as simple as getting packages sooner rather than later. The tradeoffs are accepting a brutal, fuedalistic society where the negative outcomes for the many are disregarded for the positive outcomes of the few.
Perhaps the negative outcomes are too "invisible" in our daily lives because we, in tech, are isolated enough by nature of being fairly well compensated for the work we do. This in all likelihood will change if history is our guide. I personally know many individuals that work 2 or 3 jobs to be able to afford a roof over their heads because of wage suppression by corporations like the one you mention. Teachers, healthcare workers and the like. You may not see them as important but you may want to reflect on why. Meanwhile, the commons are actively being destroyed: hard won clean air and water protections are being rolled back. My father is dying of cancer because of exposure to chemicals that corporations actively lobbied to hide from the public at all costs, even though they were well aware of the dangers. These are the real results of direct corporate lobbying efforts made by the rewarded few. I don't see this as an "emotional" argument to make, but rather an inherently humanist one.
My children are growing up in a world with dimmer prospects than I or my parents had. If this is simply the cost of faster packages, than I want none of it.
Money is just a way of keeping track to how high of a fraction of the future output of the civilization any one person or entity is entitled to. This is by consent.
With AI all is subject to change.
Nope. AI is an accelerant that makes the divide between rich and poor grow even faster.
Also, a UBI is likely to cause inflation.
As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now.
It doesn't need to bring anyone down. It's just a different way of distributing what we already receive. For you ordinary workers, they will receive $X in a monthly check, and their salary can be reduced by $X (since the minimum wage can also be abolished).
That does mean that the desirability of some jobs will shift. Good. We have a bunch of very dirty jobs being done for minimum wage, even though demand is extremely high. I'd love to see the garbage men and chicken processors get more money for their dangerous work.
And if I get less for my cushy desk job, oh well. Especially since we seem to be putting all of the effort into replacing me, and none into the jobs that come with hazards to life and limb.
That is double current federal and state welfare spending.
I'm dead tired right now so I'm sure I'm missing something, but considering that is far below the poverty threshold in any big city, I dont think we'll be solving anything by eliminating welfare in favor of UBI.
UBI is basically of no benefit to the upper middle class or wealthy, and it won't be enough for the poor who cannot work enough. It really only benefits the upper lower class and lower middle class the most.
It doesn't benefit the wealthy at all. They come off worse for it. (There are revenue-neutral versions but I don't think they suffice.) But I believe that they can afford it, and will find the result a healthier America that they won't want to abandon.
"Everyone gets a livable minimum wage! Oh by the way if you had a cushy desk job, that's gone because Claude can do it, or you get paid peanuts to manage Claude instances if you're lucky. Don't worry though, you can still make big bucks by working as a garbage man or at a chicken processing plant"
and the alternative is
"Burn the data centers down"
then the 2nd option may have a bit more appeal?
"cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not a constant ever-looming devaluator.
We're talking about an increased federal budget in the hundreds of billions/trillions to support such a UBI. That will cause a massive increase in taxation on the people who can still find jobs.
To make matters worst, the government in 10-15 years will likely be spending ~25% of it's budget on interest payments alone. Hiking the federal budget up even more sounds like a hard sell.
Look at Rome and what it had to do when the system shock of so many slaves disrupted labor. Wild that Roman patricians understood you have to...like...feed society, but modern right wing Americans don't.
If AIs simply replace people, the same total work gets done. It's just a matter of who gets the profits from it.
It won't be that simple, to be sure. Nonetheless we already produce far more than subsistence, and there's no reason why a UBI would change that. If it increases the price of some commodities because now everyone can buy them, I'm ok with that. It already horrifies me that some go hungry in the fattest nation in history.
Even if it were true, you still have distribution. You can’t get goods across a nation, let alone the globe, without significant inputs.
Are you checking the local grocery store and extrapolating globally?
Were you talking about specifically how do you restrain the power of massive corporations to harm people? AI is coming but a lot of the other things that are happening are preventable - like the rise of no-benefit gig work.
The richest nation in world history and we can’t spend any of it for the betterment of our citizens. It’s disgraceful.
"Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use."
Moreover, these people do not simply lobby the government, but directly elect it, and actually have many times more money at their disposal than the rest of the world.
/s
Salary (income) is a horrible choice to serve as the marker to determine a person's (family's) fair share contribution to the burden of paying the costs to operate a society. Not everyone is so poor that working for a living is a matter of survival.
I can think of only one universal marker that would assure every citizen shares the burden of paying for society's costs equally: wealth.
Adjusted in a manner that the financial impact of one thousand dollars to a full-time MacDonald's counter worker is transformed into a dollar amount that causes the same relative financial impact to everyone, all the way up to the wealthiest family in America.
1 Normal person
3 Doctors / Lawyers / Engineers ($1M+ net worth)
3 Successful Entrepreneurs ($10M+ net worth)
3 Ultrawealthy ($50M+ net worth)
1 Normal person
3 Professional ($100k+/yr passive)
3 Successful ($1M+/yr passive)
3 Wealthy ($5M+/yr passive)
Are the in-betweeners part of the problem? Sure, but we have a foot on either side of the problem. We could get hype for many of the plausible solutions to aggregate labor oversupply (e.g. shorter workweeks) even if it meant our stocks went down. Not so for 6/10 people in that sample. The core problem is still that the economy is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly owned by people who own things for a living and all of the good solutions to the problem require rolling that back a little against a backdrop that, absent intervention, stands to accelerate it a lot.
EDIT: one more thing, but it's a big one: the higher ends of the wealth ladder have the enormous privilege of being able to engage in politics for profit rather than charity/obligation. A 10% chance of lobbying into place a policy that changes asset values by 10% is worth $1k to a "Professional", $50k to a "Wealthy", but $8B to Elon Musk. The fact that at increasing net worths politics becomes net profitable and then so net profitable as to allow hiring organizations of people to pursue means the upper edge of the distribution punches above its already-outsized weight in terms of political influence. It goes without saying that their brand of politics is all about pumping assets.
The electoral college system, coupled with it's winner-takes-all implementation in most states, means that voting is a sham for 80% of the population. The other 20% live in a swing state and their vote can at least potentially affect the outcome of an election, but even there "your vote" will literally be cast opposite to what you put on the ballet unless you end up being part of the winning majority.
Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion
Forbes 400 (US only): 2025 cutoff was $3.8 billion to make the list. Forbes publishes the aggregate annually and recent years the total net worth was over $5.4T for the 400.
It appears you are the one very confused about wealth distribution in the US. Maybe you are confusing "income" with "wealth hoarding". The hoarding is happening to a gross amount, and this is why there should be a 1% tax on fortune portions over 100 million and 2% on portions over 1 billion. That and going back to the 70% tax over incomes in the top bracket (eg > 10million / yr)
Those taxes are coming. Trumpty Dumpty and the oligarchs brought it on themselves. Maga grifters are getting f'd in the midterms. Maybe maga should have picked a few dear leaders with some integrity instead of greedy frauds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Edit: downpout all you want, doesn't change the facts.
Maybe Notch when he sold Minecraft, apparently he had $2B sitting in a bank account, but I'm sure by now he has deployed it.
They've also stolen a good economy. The economy in this country worked best when corporate profits were taxed at a much higher rate and companies were incentivized to grow business and we could create more jobs for people. Through their grip on society they have stolen that wealth and good economic output.
We have plenty of evidence that tax cuts do not fuel economic growth look out our industry right now there are massive layoffs everywhere and it's not because of dogshit LLMs
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/olig...
But we can't talk about this because it includes a large tract of the white collar everyday man workforce.
This is why the focus is so heavy on billionaires, so heavy on increasing minimum wage, so heavy on protecting immigrants. Those are all virtuous values that also bolster the value of the 70-95%, while piling all the blame (and responsibility) on the 1%.
The wealthiest group in America is doing an excellent job at protecting (and growing) their wealth.
(for those wondering, the "back breaker" of this class is zoning laws and new housing, everyone is aware how intense NIMBYism is in the middle/upper middle class hives).
The middle class has the gold vault (well the closest thing), and that's where the redistribution would happen.
If you don't believe me, look at Europe. You can be a baker and make $35k yr, an SWE and make $65k yr, or a doctor and make $100k/yr.
You may say "Yeah, that's great, they live happy lives!"
But then convince American engineers they need to take a $140k paycut and the doctors a $220k paycut so that we can pay bakers $10k more a year. They'll just tell you the billionaires are the problem, and you'll believe them.
The group you’re talking about, 70-95 percentile, are often people that just own a house near a big city or a farm/small business.
Once the Democrats who are elected on the fantasy of making Musk and Bezos pay for everyone’s past and future college/student loans, Medicare for all, UBI, high speed rail, while simultaneously closing every fossil fuel plant and subsidizing clean energy to replace it at the same cost — once they’ve failed to raise enough to pay for 1/10 of those promises, they’ll be coming for everyone more “wealthy” than $100k net worth.
You can just look how successful the USSR was, or China before they sold out their own Communist ideals. Most people were just subsistence farmers, or factory workers living in crowded minimalist apartments if they were lucky.