There is a very small faction of billionaires siphoning wealth away from the world, truly hoarding it such that it is unused and unproductive. The role of the political class is to facilitate this and distract the general population away from it by setting naturally allied groups against each other. Divide and conquer is as old as humankind and we still fall for it every time.
Maybe, but it is also a social values problem. People have been raised to believe they are entitled to the wealth they’ve accrued, their society be damned. They got one or several houses? They can rent and are entitled to passive income with very little overhead while the rest of society increasingly finds it harder to make ends meet because they don’t even own their property. Have a lot of wealth? Just live off of the interest while inflation and lack of ways to make money for those belonging to the part of the economy not optimized to make as much money as possible get poorer.
Being rich after a certain threshold needs to be taxed. Hiding your wealth in investments and feeding a market only focused on maximizing profit needs to be regulated. How much property someone can own needs to be limited. MAGA is only possible because of the effort they spend to crowdsource the values of greed and narcissism onto their followers.
We need a system with “regression to the mean” built in.
Savvy investing, business and hard work should get you ahead. The key is that it should be taxed enough and in a way that, unless your children are also exceptional, the generational wealth will tend back towards the average. The same applies from the bottom. Someone from a poor background should be able to pull themselves back up, if their work ethic etc is appropriate.
Right now we have run away in both directions. Wealth begets more wealth, and poverty begets more poverty.
I just want to point out that billionaires do not have billions on their bank accounts, they own companies worth that much. The issue is the concentration of power they have through that.
There is a very small faction of billionaires siphoning wealth away from the world, truly hoarding it such that it is unused and unproductive. The role of the political class is to facilitate this and distract the general population away from it by setting naturally allied groups against each other. Divide and conquer is as old as humankind and we still fall for it every time.
Maybe, but it is also a social values problem. People have been raised to believe they are entitled to the wealth they’ve accrued, their society be damned. They got one or several houses? They can rent and are entitled to passive income with very little overhead while the rest of society increasingly finds it harder to make ends meet because they don’t even own their property. Have a lot of wealth? Just live off of the interest while inflation and lack of ways to make money for those belonging to the part of the economy not optimized to make as much money as possible get poorer.
Being rich after a certain threshold needs to be taxed. Hiding your wealth in investments and feeding a market only focused on maximizing profit needs to be regulated. How much property someone can own needs to be limited. MAGA is only possible because of the effort they spend to crowdsource the values of greed and narcissism onto their followers.
We need a system with “regression to the mean” built in.
Savvy investing, business and hard work should get you ahead. The key is that it should be taxed enough and in a way that, unless your children are also exceptional, the generational wealth will tend back towards the average. The same applies from the bottom. Someone from a poor background should be able to pull themselves back up, if their work ethic etc is appropriate.
Right now we have run away in both directions. Wealth begets more wealth, and poverty begets more poverty.
I just want to point out that billionaires do not have billions on their bank accounts, they own companies worth that much. The issue is the concentration of power they have through that.