Because it's literally just pieces of paper. Using it doesn't mean making more resources, it means changing allocation of existing resources. It's a systematic issue. If you give resources to those people then those resources have to come from somewhere else, probably from raising the price of the resource for everyone who isn't the person you're re-allocating the resource to.
Jeff Bezos handing out money doesn't solve the issue. Whatever resource is purchased with that money is no longer available to people who you didn't give the money to (the proximate effect is that the price rises).
The core argument here is that since rich people are sitting on piles of unused money that's somehow making everyone else have less (of real things). It just isn't. That isn't how it works. If Jeff was a wild spender it would probably drive inflation more than do anything else, causing everyone else's money to lower in value. People saving/hoarding/not-spending money is strongly anti-inflationary.
We could definitely stimulate more consumption of real resources by everyone in general. There would be a number of ways to achieve that. However, think what that actually does for the planet and the environment? So, because people like Jezz Bezos are hoarding money, according to the idea, then other people can't access as much resources. But ... we're already consuming WAY too much resources, so stimulating more consumption as a way to fix inequality seems like a poor solution. If Jezz Bezos wasn't sitting on all that stimulus money think how much hotter the economy could burn I guess. Which isn't necessarily a good thing.
What people like Jeff Bezos have is purely nominal wealth. You could say that Jeff Bezos could afford to buy 90 billion hamburgers and give everyone in the world 12 hamburgers and how this would help world hunger. Except it's a stupid idea and wouldn't work, because the world cannot produce that many extra hamburgers. Sure, you can use the money to commandeer existing food and redistribute it, but then other people find that if they want any of the remaining hamburgers they're now $50 each. So this idea that just because on-paper such-and-such amount of money is enough to provide resources to everyone is actually a complete lie. The resources don't exist. You use money to change resource allocations, not to make fundamentally more resources (and if you do: you just wreck the environment that much quicker).
We waste a massive proportion of the food we produce in normal times. Estimates vary, but the average between them from what I've read in the past sits somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of food is wasted. Right now with COVID going on, there is threat of mass starvation at the same time that raw produce is being destroyed by the millions of tons. We also have several times more empty homes than homeless people. You can do a quick search right now and see images of homeless people sleeping on parking lot concrete inside little 6 ft squares to enforce social distancing with armed police standing over them, with hotels in the background completely empty.
In every case, the issue is resources only go to people when it's profitable. When you have a small handful of ultra-rich and a majority with essentially nothing, what this means in effect is that the those ultra-rich have nothing to gain from sharing resources which absolutely exist and are available with a huge portion of the population. It doesn't matter what form that wealth is in - the effect will be the same.
You're either completely unaware of what we produce and waste, or you're arguing that it's essential that those resources go to waste in order to keep prices from rising. Either way, it's impractical nonsense that just reinforces the fact that it's all an imaginary number game, and it's impossible to have a compassionate society that continues playing.
The matter is also somewhat complicated in that Bezos's wealth isn't exactly fungible. It is calculated based on the market value of the stocks he owns, but that isn't quite money. If he tried to access a large enough chunk of it, the actual value would become significantly lower. If you nationalized it in order to sell it and generate revenue for social programs, it would be worth much, much less that its currently stated value. It is wealth, but it is not money. While it may look like it since it is quoted in dollars, there isn't actually a 180 billion dollar pile of money sitting unused.
A better measure for inequality may be spending capability ( as in how much money one can reasonably afford to consume, regardless of availability of goods.), Mind you, even with that he is waaaaaaay richer than any common person, but that is a more accurate representation , if difficult to calculate, of how much richer than the common person he is.
Due to the way those huge net worths are tied to the market worth of businesses rather than actual physical stuff owned or money, it can be hard to fix without creating some perverse incentives or suboptimal situations. For example, if you have a wealth tax on shares, you basically force companies to issue enough dividends to pay the tax. Lets say, a 5% tax on all shares. For anyone to afford holding the company, that company needs to pay at least 5% dividend or owning it becomes extremely costly; since revenues are often quite a lot less than worth of a company, it becomes crippling. Of course you can have a threshold, but then you are incentivized not to grow your company. Which could arguably be considered a plus actually, with an incentive toward smaller companies. More diluted ownership is also a possibility, the effects of that I honestly don't know.
Point is, going directly after that accrued value has a lot more consequences to everyone than just lowering unequality.
I wonder if going after corporations themselves wouldn't be a more effective route, closing some tax loopholes and exemptions.
But regarding wealth accumulation itself, a favourite of mine is an inheritance tax. Let people earn and keep a lot in life, but don't let it accumulate across generations to make aristocracy.
Are you accounting for the
more than $20 trillion hidden in offshore bank accounts, as reported by Forbes (that radical communist publication)? Are they hiding stocks in those accounts?
And if Bloomberg can drop about $1 billion on a half-ass for the lulz vanity run at presidency while being about 1/2 a Bezos, doesn't that make you wonder just how much Bezos could spent on humanitarian efforts if he really cared? Or how much those 400 people could pool together? If Bloomberg's campaign spent about 2% of his net worth... and we assume that he could be capable of more... and we extend that to the rest of his class... that pretty easily looks to me like a bunch of the stuff in that infographic would absolutely be possible, and that they simply choose not to is a true statement.
And even if the numbers aren't representative of spendable cash...... so fucking what? Stocks and assets can be redistributed, too. How can anybody argue that it's healthy for anyone to control so much in any form? No matter how you spin it, those numbers are still representative of control over resources. And if too many people are lacking access to essential resources, then the pretty obvious answer is to wrest control away from those who are hoarding them. All of this dancing around petty details and definitions is just sophist obfuscation.
Author
Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4443089 times)