Look, I get that you have to believe that the fabulously wealthy's vast sums of riches are both real and simultaneously deserved but also absolutely useless, but this is getting sad
Someone(s) have sent out pro-worker messages to unsecured receipt printers connected to the internet
- Thread starter crimson5pheonix
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I'm insisting they cannot be solved with money. If every billionaire aimed all their wealth at trying to solve homelessness, they would barely make a dent. If they tried to end child hunger with their wealth, they would barely make a dent. If all it took to fix these things was money, we'd have done it through legislation that commands more economic power than any individual could even dream of, and we haven't, because it takes more than money can buy.
Elon Musk does not have a swimming pool full of gold. Their vast sums of riches aren't real, and the value we assign to the products of their imagination aren't necessarily deserved. You just don't get anything.
Except that we have a neo-liberal political establishment that believes that the poor already get far more than they deserve. Thanks Reagan.
We could absolutely solve most of our large scale societal problems with money. You know, like how buying houses and giving them to homeless people basically solves homelessness everywhere it's tried
Of course Elon Musk doesn't have a swimming pool full of gold. He has much more than that, largely wasting it on vanity projects.
Bullshit. They cannot be solved WITHOUT money under the current system. Because here's the thing, if we had governments mandate that ALL food waste be given to the hungry then we would see a massive drop in food waste because the profit driven companies do not want people eating for free. And also we would never see that kind of legislation because of lobby groups. How can you insist that wealth is not power when lobbying exists? Just admit that you believe that every starving homeless person deserves it for being less than you like a good Catholic.
They could literally buy enough housing to house all the homeless and have billions left over to administrate the program.
The government doesn't even know where the hungry are. By what mechanism do you expect companies to get food to the hungry? You aren't considering even the shallowest logistics of the problem.
Most of the homeless wouldn't accept, they don't want to be part of your program, the housing isn't where they want to live, and to get housing where they want to live, you have to start evicting the people who live there. Homeless people aren't stupid, if they're willing to move their lives and accept assistance, there are endless programs that do so, both government and charity. The problem isn't lack of funds.
So you will just ignore the fact that hunger cannot be stopped without money. Done with this.
Poverty is the poor's fault. Every good Christian knows that. It's fine to not help people in need because the people in need neither want nor deserve it. Just like Jesus always said.
Currency =/= wealth... but only because there are a few extra steps. "Wealth" is essentially a measurement of the value of someone's assets, plus their buying power to attain further assets.
The value of those assets is expressed in currency. The buying power to attain further assets is also expressed in currency. The "wealth" represented by both of them is dependent on, and measured in, currency.
If every house in the world collapsed spontaneously, the "wealth" of those with more equity tied up in their house than liquid money would drop, but the "wealth" of those with more liquid money than home-equity would rise. It would be a shift in wealth. But since wealth is fundamentally a relative concept, and you're talking about a collapse affecting every home simultaneously, it would not decrease the overall amount.
Wealth is not a fixed number. The wealth of a population rises and falls all the time.
You're done ignoring what I'm saying? What a tragedy, don't know how I'll manage.
You seem to have confused "not a fixed number" with "purely imaginary, with no limit". The wealth of a population rises and falls.... in accordance with that population's access to/ utilisation of resources, which are attributed a material value according to the needs of other populations.
This is way more correct than your assessment of what happens if all the houses collapsed. It would be a shift in the utilization of resources that would cause genuine loss, not just shift wealth to someone else.
You're looking only at the very most surface-level.
So, the shift in utilisation of resources. Higher acute demand for... mortar, building materials, scaffolding, and builders' labour.
The value of which (as measured by currency) rises, while replacement houses are built.
In the meantime, former homeowners lose the equity of their property. But the value of money which was not tied up in property equity increases. It has less competition.
I can quite assure you, aside from perhaps some homeless who are sufficiently dysfunctional that they need specialised care rather than just somewhere to live, the wealth of billionaires could very likely solve homelessness.
The USA has (according to a Google) ~600,000 homeless. Assume an apartment block with apartments having a build cost about 100,000k each, that's $60 billion one-off to build housing, which is but a fraction of Elon Musk's personal wealth. And frankly, they'll be a lot cheaper than 100k each, because they'll be very basic. Of course after that there would be running costs annually, although that would be vastly less - nevertheless I suspect taxing the income of the USA's billionaires by even a modest amount (<10%) could cover it easily.
The thing is, we really can vastly reduce all these problems with taxes that could be raised by legislation. It's just politicians don't want to, and the people whose interests they serve don't want to. The lowest minimum wage in the USA is ~$8/h. Assume a 1600h working year, call it $13,000 p.a. A UBI of $13,000 for the poorest 30 million Americans would cost about $400 billion. That's a lot of money in one sense - but in another sense it's a mere 2% of the USA's GDP. Increase the USA's net tax burden from ~22% to ~24%, that would cover it... and the USA would still have a tax burden lower than the OECD average.
This is one of the weird enduring myths, a sort of appeal to incredulity, that we can't fix these sorts of things. But the numbers say we actually can, were there the political will to do so.
That's almost all of the chronic homeless. Of the ~600,000 people, like 80% will have a home again within a reasonable timespan. The ones that remain overwhelmingly have mental issues or crippling addictions that prevent them from making reasonable decisions for their own well being.
Nations print their own money. You do not need to tax anyone for the government to throw money at things. On top of that, the amount the government pays on the homeless is substantially more than the estimates of how much it would take to give people houses. Are you really so cynical as to believe that the government would waste money to deliberately leave people homeless?
Your numbers say we could build housing. Your numbers don't say where or how we could do so, or who would be willing to live in them.
While you don't need to in any particular case, you sort of do in the general case. Currency originally derived its value from being needed to pay taxes (king tells goods producers they need to pay a certain amount of these newfangled tokens every year, gives those tokens to his soldiers, and instantly he's solved most of the logistical problems of having an army of men that are not, strictly speaking, productive). And similar dynamics are still at work.
Tax the billionaires because fuck 'em.
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If there are no limits to wealth, then why aren't all 8 billion people on earth mega-billionaires with personal chauffeurs, luxury yachts and penthouse apartments?
And why should they have to endure any significant time without a home? I appreciate there's a bureaucratic delay likely between signing up and getting a pad, but this should be in the order of days.
There are limits to how much money the government can print. This is inflation 101. One might point out that as inflation reduces people's purchasing power, where inflation is generated by government printing money for its own expenditure, this is in effect very similar to taxation.
The chronically homeless accounts for an estimated 110,000. That strongly implies the other 500,000 or so would like somewhere to live.
As to where... there is room everywhere. Even the largest, highest density cities have new building projects and redevelopments, and for swathes of the USA there would be even less problem. They might not be the nicest places, but I think the homeless don't tend to live in nice places when they finally get a new home, either.