I don't understand why some left wing politicians always talk about the 1% as if they own stashes of money at home and that they need to redistribute or feel ashamed about being rich. the mental model the leftist media has of being rich is still that of a man having a lot of dollar bills at home but is it true? for example I doubt any billionnaire owns the amount the media talks about in liquidity, most of it are shares in companies that all of us work for, they power new companies, innovation... so when leftists talk about redistribution do they want the 1% to sell their shares and destroy companies generating wealth and give them back to people ? isn't that going to destroy those same companies?
You think you'll be a billionaire one day, eh?
There's nothing inherently wrong with being wealthy. Wealth is an artificial human social construct. However, it kind of depends on whether you believe in an "every person for themselves" style cutthroat world where "fuck you, got mine" is appropriate, or whether you believe in some form of fairness, social responsibility, and rights to be healthy, happy, and treated equally. Extreme wealth inequality results in a ruling class that never goes to prison regardless of their crimes, while everyone else suffers in poverty. The average human being has historically been happiest and healthiest when wealth inequality is minimized.
> a ruling class that never goes to prison regardless of their crimes, while everyone else suffers in poverty. This is exactly how socialist / communist countries operated, until they ran out ot other people's money. The elites there didn't earn their special status by creating jobs or innovative businesses, most of them were corrupt insiders willing to do whatever was necessary for them to remain in power. This is also what the extreme left is trying to achieve in the US, by making large groups of voters poor, defenseless, and dependent on the government for their survival.
About the corrupt leaders of some other countries, that is equally awful, but isn't really a refutation of my point. Large groups of voters are already extremely poor and have no options besides relying on the government, I don't really see anyone besides progressives trying to help them. Are you saying if we ended food stamps, the billionaires would step in to provide free food to the poor? Would billionaires provide free health care for the poor? How are poor people supposed to survive without a social safety net?
It’s not just in USA. In every country there are politicians who cater to the below the median population. It’s easy to run on the platform that over the median people are over because they took advantage of those at the bottom
The 1% is far lower than at a billion dollars. People just want billionaires to pay their fair share.
Kindly explain to me how billionaires are not paying their fair share? I don't think Jeff Bezos owes me a penny unless I provide him with a service or product that he values more then he does the wealth that he gives me in exchange for it. Does that sound unreasonable?
It’s not about you. It’s about paying his fair share to society for its operation.
That would be most people in this app
I love billionaires. They pay the most taxes and create all the jobs. What’s not to love??
They inflate the cost of positional goods while infrastructure crumbles, is the common argument.
They decrease costs for people through the magnificence of capitalism. Thanks to people like Gates and Jobs you can buy a supercomputer for a tenth the cost of a car.
They use billionaires as an excuse to raise taxes on the middle class. Billionaires pay very little tax anyways.
Not true. Per https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2018-update/ "The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent)."
Top 1% is not billionaire. Your statistic is meaningless.
Op, to answer your question the reason why people hate billionaires is jealousy. They can't accept that billionaires deserve the success they have, and therefore assume that the only way anyone could have possibly accumulated that much wealth is by stealing it from society. There is this view that wealth and wellbeing are finite resources, and that Jeff having more means I have less.
Imagine two children sitting at a table together. The first child has a massive mound of sandwiches in front of them, more than they could ever consume. The second child has no food. The first child refuses to give the second child a sandwich. Any sane parent would make the first child share with the second.
Thank you for informing this person.
The irony is rich people pay most of the taxes and give most of the charity