They are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
See that 50-90% and 90-99%?
That's where all the money is. Moreover, the top 1% have tons of assets, but not much actual money.
Any "evening out" will come mostly from the 50-99% class.
If you want to see a crack in the echochamber, ask yourself why no publication has ever published this chart?
The point is that the top 1% can be taxed more heavily, not that they own the majority of wealth.
Think about it: to pay for this tax, the rich will need to sell their assets. Who is going to buy those assets? What impact would that have on the asset price?
It is just too much.
I'm an employee. I don't really benefit from doing more. When I do more, someone else makes money. In my experience that someone else is just as likely to lay me off for a cheaper worker as they are to give me a raise
The incentives our system produces are already really skewed, and it would be nice to see them skew the other way for once
It wouldn't be too hard I don't think. Avoid having employees by making everything a short term contract / gig style work
You can't pay bills with equity, you will get paid a smaller salary, you need to be a mature adult to understand what "value can go to zero, and that is the game" entails, you likely will get diluted, your ownership stake isn't large enough to materially change the company, you cannot cash out whenever you want, having equity definitely doesn't make you rich automatically.
Besides, if you are savvy enough to be genuinely motivated by the idea of having equity, just go buy stocks in solid companies.
> "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more"
This is completely beside the point, honestly
We should not use the most productive members of society as a measuring stick as though they were the average.
The average person does "way less work" than your very productive workaholic outliers, but that doesn't mean those people deserve way less.
Somehow we've all wound up being measured against the most exceptional people, instead of being measured against the average.
Keep in mind we're talking about a society where the median person only makes like $45k per year and exceptional people make many many times more than that
I'm not sitting here saying that some random shmuck should have Elon Musks income or anything, we could probably do better than 45k a year though
You're in a super small bubble if you think earning equity in your employer's company is standard.
Justify it based on the risk of the labor market and your work done.
I do find it interesting that a lot of people (not trying to imply that you are one) bang on about incentives while also fighting tooth and nail in favour of weighting taxes toward earned income (derived from doing useful/productive things) instead of unearned income (derived from simply owning things).
I get that some people view all forms of tax as theft and while I appreciate their honesty, I simply can't take them seriously.
"Valuable work leads to good outcomes for everyone" is probably one of the slipperiest slopes there is.
The disconnect is already there, any 5 year old already understands that stealing a comic book at the comic book store is better than paying for it. And more and more people are resorting to it at every level of society
Last time when link between work and material comfort was disconnected was communism.
It looked good on paper from 1920's perspective, but was a downward spiral.
If we are to be functioning society, people need motivation to do their best ... and then, there's some spare wealth for the unfortunate.
Infinitely redistributing does not yield products for all, but scarcity for all.
Take that capitalist pig!
There is no way around this, believe me.
Not sure why you call pigs to people producing actually. That is how things end up working.
Not waiting for people to produce fornyou while you insult them amd try to set infinite restrictions until they do what you want... which by the way looks to me like modern slavery.
Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
[1] https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
I got this feeling looking at the (non)word cantine.
Superior systems exist, but they require relaxing the adversarial asshole constraint.
That alone would be a massive win.
What worries me are the god knows how many "billionaire equivelent" entities and institutions that swing their dicks around in the same manner but do so with the sociopathic ruthlessness of corporations and governments.
Peter Thiel may be evil but he'll almost certainly never knowingly instigate genocidal war in a foreign land for marginal benefit to his interests whereas that's exactly the kind of thing that nonhuman entities do because no person is singularly responsible.
"Thiel's Palantir, Israel agree strategic partnership for battle tech" [2024] https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyx...
Ironically, that's the saved copy hosted by Palantir itself...
My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks.
The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it down the toilet (and bombing Iran).
This is so BS, the productivity of a company is given by cash flow and Discounted Cash Flow (output>input) , not stock market value , taxing Musk would force him to sell stock and dilute the ownership of Tesla and SpaceX down among the population proportionally and according to the brackets of taxation applied.
The fear that you are describing is exactly what's wrong with society, the virus of the mind that attributes to CEOs and especially tech CEOs demigod properties and if their ownership and decision making control were to be diluted the company would collapse and die.
If anything it's the opposite, the oldest companies in America have their ownership much more diluted than they once were . JPMorgan is not controlled by John Pierpont Morgan, same for all the companies which make up what once was Standard Oil
If anything history is showing that for the survival of a company it is almost a condition non negotiable that its ownership and decision making has to be diluted among millions of people with a low inequality factor, or at least lower than the one necessary in the first years of the company
Musk is a golden goose and there are people who think the best move is to cut him in half and get at all the gold inside.