Every once in a while a complete tool graces the comments and inspires a post with their sheer stupidity.
A trillion dollars is a million million dollars. Elon is worth over a trillion dollars. Let us say that all of that minus 20 million was taken from him and it added up to on trillion. He should be fine on just 20 million. (I sure would be. Perhaps your need to snort cocaine off naked models is greater than mine. Hey, I’m not judging.)
Now let’s take that trillion dollars and give it to the homeless. Supposedly there’s about 750K, but we’ll give the next poorest 250K money too.
That’s a million each.
“But Ian”, you cavil, “they must be irresponsible people because only bad, stupid drug addled bad bad bad people wind up homeless. They can’t manage a million dollars and they’ll just spend it all on drugs in a few months and be homeless again!”
That’s not actually what the evidence shows. When you just give homeless people money, they mostly use it on smart stuff, but let’s pretend it is and admit that some of them, like some of us, don’t make the best decisions.
We’ll buy them annuities. Assuming age 40, that’s about $3,500 a month. Age 60, over $5,000 a month.
So, Elon has enough money to make every homeless person not homeless. And he’s only one billionaire+.
All total America’s billionaires hold about 8.5 trillion dollars. If we knock them all down to 20 million we could give at least 8 million of the poorest people in America annuities that pay about $3,500 a month. (One does feel for the cocaine dealers and models in this scenario, however. Oh, an the mega-yacht builders. No progress without someone suffering, I guess.)
Now do “use the money corporations spend on stock buybacks.” Left for the reader, but… there won’t be any poor people left in America.
The fact is that the really rich people are, well, so amazingly rich that it boggles comprehension. They don’t have a lot of money. They don’t have a LOT of money. They don’t have a LOT of money.
They have a LOT of money.
OK?
And yes, they do get a lot of it by making other people poor, they receive massive public subsidies, blah, blah, blah. I’ve written a bunch of those articles and if you’re making the argument that they did it all on their own Atlas Shrugged’esque, you an idiot. A very useful idiot for the people with so much money.
(This proposal is illustrative, not expected and yes, if taken seriously it would cause a lot of economic re-balancing and lots of people would whine it wasn’t fair. It’s illustrative. Illustrative. Repeat after Ian, “illustrative”. It’d still be a better way of using the money than the AI bubble though.)
America has poor people because the people with money and power want it that way. The details of how it is done are complicated, but it really is that simple.
What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.