5 ms·

This appears to either be a sincere product of a socialist Utopian who doesn't understand basic physical processes and tax concepts, or a cleaver work of satire

This appears to either be a sincere product of a socialist Utopian who doesn't understand basic physical processes and tax concepts, or a cleaver work of satire. I'm unsure which at this time.

iliekcomputers 5y ago
Great observation. I'd really like to hope it's satire. >You eliminate homelessness in the United States. Every person living in the US now has the guarantee of a roof over their head. >This costs you $20 billion, or a trivial 12.8% of your starting net worth. You still have $136,000,540,000. I really really wish it was that easy.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  It isn't that much more complicated than that — politics-wise, sure, but all you really need is housing and money to solve homelessness.
  - leesec 5y ago
    I wonder what kind of incentive it would create if we just started giving homeless people houses
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      What are you trying to suggest? That people only work to avoid homelessness? That homeless people deserve to be homeless? That providing homes to the homeless would cause people to stop being productive members of society?
      - leesec 5y ago
        Merely that you must consider the incentives of policy as well as the immediate result of a policy.
      - padastra 5y ago
        When you consider incentives, you have to think about more than just what one average person would do. There are 300M Americans. If 999/1,000 people say "hey, free housing is great, but I'm going to keep working" and 1/1,000 people say "hey, free housing! I can just kick back", we now have an extra 300,000 people who are on the dole (almost DOUBLE the current number of homeless).
    - triceratops 5y ago
      Housing, not houses. And they don't own the property. In most programs like this, the person gets a single room or (if they have a family) a small apartment. It's considered temporary - only until they can get back on their feet financially. It's still only one step above complete destitution. Most people would prefer better and would still work hard. It's a lot easier for a person to get a job, or beat any personal issues they have if they have a stable, safe roof over their heads. You gotta give people boots so they have bootstraps to pull themselves up by.
      - leesec 5y ago
        We spend about a trillion dollars on welfare a year but i'm sure this next 20 billion would finally crack it!
        triceratops 5y ago
        I make no comment about the wisdom of this particular idea. I'm only objecting to what you said about "incentives".
    - dgb23 5y ago
      You don't have to guess and wonder. What happens is that a small percentage stays dependent, but the majority becomes economically productive by getting education and jobs. If you can afford to keep people afloat, you should do it. The less complicated and less strings attached the more effective and cheaper is your solution. There are people who steer the discussion to those who stay dependent. They claim that some of those are "incentivized" to do so, in other words: they are lazy and greedy. Well that's true, and it's a problem. Primarily because they can be used as an excuse and as a scapegoat to distract from the fact that capital _owners_ are extracting power and value that is generated by workers and small businesses. What would I do if I were in that position? Be Jeff? I don't know, I'd probably be just as full of myself to believe that I deserve to be treated like a monarch and be able to buy what ever I want, while cheating my business partners, exploiting and surveilling my workers, manipulating my customers and ignoring my responsibilities as a citizen. Power should be somewhat proportional with responsibility. I'm pretty sure it isn't, not at that scale.
  - iliekcomputers 5y ago
    The major complication is the politics though, the fact that building housing is so hard isn't for lack of money, it's all politics and Bezos' $20B won't be able to solve that.
  - belval 5y ago
    Of course it is! The market doesn't have 20B$ worth of contractors to build homes so just by injecting that much money your house prices will increase, making it hard for everyone else to build their own home. To get 20B$ in actual money to pay the above-mentioned contractors, you need to sell an additional 7.4B$ in shares (to pay the taxes). Selling 27B$ of your portfolio would inevitably mess with Amazon's stock price, the value of the company would tank and now your 20B$ endeavour effectively cost you 40B$ (remember he doesn't have 136B$ in currency in a vault). Those homes that you are building needs to have clean water and will consume electricity, this is a maintenance cost that homeless people might not be able to afford so there is a yearly price to this endeavour unless you want to go back to square one. On top of that, the grid can't handle the surge that all these new homes require, you need to scale the producing capacity. This puts an additional strain on the global supply chain, again raising your prices. Of course the above is just one big conjecture, but the point I am trying to get across is that it is never simple when these amounts of money are involved because other constraints will emerge that will limit what you can do with your seemingly unlimited amount of money.
    - jkestner 5y ago
      Building is a solved problem. The hard part is the political will to do it. The point of this game is not to show a detailed budget, but the magnitude of money needed to make it happen, if only the will was there.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
unethical_ban 5y ago
I think it's pretty a humorous method of stating what many progressives have been saying for some time: Being a billionaire is inherently immoral. That you simply cannot accumulate that much wealth without underpaying or overcharging others. I think the creator is aware that stock holdings are not legally bound to the income tax rate. That's not the point of the simulation. The point is that the rich have vehicles for their wealth that normal people don't have access to. The point is also that there are pressing, permanent problems in our society that cost less to fix than a quarter of the wealth of one person in our country.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  >"Being a billionaire is inherently immoral." No it isn't, and that's no a self-evident assertion. Jeff Bezos is a billionaire because the company he created and led for the past 20 years is an insanely productive business. People want to own shares in his company and that is why his holdings are worth so much. >"without underpaying or overcharging others" This is an impossible standard to meet. In a system as massively complex and chaotic as an economy there is no way for any business to pay/charge the "right amount". Not only is the fair amount an unknown value, anything resembling a fair price is only discovered through overpaying/underpaying until prices regress to some middle ground. And then something inevitably happens in the world that necessitates finding a new value and the process begins again.
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    I would argue that's the baseline disagreement right there. "No it isn't, and that's not a self-evident assertion" - I would say those on the further left think it is. The premise being "Is there an amount of wealth one person or family can have, that is so exorbitant in comparison to the average citizen that it is unjustifiable on its face?" - and the easily marketable answer is "billionaire". Do you think there is no moral limit to the amount of wealth one person can have in society, while millions around him suffer?
    - zachthewf 5y ago
hncurious 5y ago
It's really at a Twitter mob level of financial understanding. Which is to say it only understands to the degree that it generates outrage.

This appears to either be a sincere product of a socialist Utopian who doesn't understand basic physical processes and tax concepts, or a cleaver work of satire. I'm unsure which at this time.

iliekcomputers 5y ago

Great observation. I'd really like to hope it's satire. >You eliminate homelessness in the United States. Every person living in the US now has the guarantee of a roof over their head. >This costs you $20 billion, or a trivial 12.8% of your starting net worth. You still have $136,000,540,000. I really really wish it was that easy.

marcellus23 5y ago
It isn't that much more complicated than that — politics-wise, sure, but all you really need is housing and money to solve homelessness.
- leesec 5y ago
  I wonder what kind of incentive it would create if we just started giving homeless people houses
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    What are you trying to suggest? That people only work to avoid homelessness? That homeless people deserve to be homeless? That providing homes to the homeless would cause people to stop being productive members of society?
    - leesec 5y ago
      Merely that you must consider the incentives of policy as well as the immediate result of a policy.
    - padastra 5y ago
      When you consider incentives, you have to think about more than just what one average person would do. There are 300M Americans. If 999/1,000 people say "hey, free housing is great, but I'm going to keep working" and 1/1,000 people say "hey, free housing! I can just kick back", we now have an extra 300,000 people who are on the dole (almost DOUBLE the current number of homeless).
  - triceratops 5y ago
    Housing, not houses. And they don't own the property. In most programs like this, the person gets a single room or (if they have a family) a small apartment. It's considered temporary - only until they can get back on their feet financially. It's still only one step above complete destitution. Most people would prefer better and would still work hard. It's a lot easier for a person to get a job, or beat any personal issues they have if they have a stable, safe roof over their heads. You gotta give people boots so they have bootstraps to pull themselves up by.
    - leesec 5y ago
      We spend about a trillion dollars on welfare a year but i'm sure this next 20 billion would finally crack it!
      - triceratops 5y ago
        I make no comment about the wisdom of this particular idea. I'm only objecting to what you said about "incentives".
  - dgb23 5y ago
    You don't have to guess and wonder. What happens is that a small percentage stays dependent, but the majority becomes economically productive by getting education and jobs. If you can afford to keep people afloat, you should do it. The less complicated and less strings attached the more effective and cheaper is your solution. There are people who steer the discussion to those who stay dependent. They claim that some of those are "incentivized" to do so, in other words: they are lazy and greedy. Well that's true, and it's a problem. Primarily because they can be used as an excuse and as a scapegoat to distract from the fact that capital _owners_ are extracting power and value that is generated by workers and small businesses. What would I do if I were in that position? Be Jeff? I don't know, I'd probably be just as full of myself to believe that I deserve to be treated like a monarch and be able to buy what ever I want, while cheating my business partners, exploiting and surveilling my workers, manipulating my customers and ignoring my responsibilities as a citizen. Power should be somewhat proportional with responsibility. I'm pretty sure it isn't, not at that scale.
- iliekcomputers 5y ago
  The major complication is the politics though, the fact that building housing is so hard isn't for lack of money, it's all politics and Bezos' $20B won't be able to solve that.
- belval 5y ago
  Of course it is! The market doesn't have 20B$ worth of contractors to build homes so just by injecting that much money your house prices will increase, making it hard for everyone else to build their own home. To get 20B$ in actual money to pay the above-mentioned contractors, you need to sell an additional 7.4B$ in shares (to pay the taxes). Selling 27B$ of your portfolio would inevitably mess with Amazon's stock price, the value of the company would tank and now your 20B$ endeavour effectively cost you 40B$ (remember he doesn't have 136B$ in currency in a vault). Those homes that you are building needs to have clean water and will consume electricity, this is a maintenance cost that homeless people might not be able to afford so there is a yearly price to this endeavour unless you want to go back to square one. On top of that, the grid can't handle the surge that all these new homes require, you need to scale the producing capacity. This puts an additional strain on the global supply chain, again raising your prices. Of course the above is just one big conjecture, but the point I am trying to get across is that it is never simple when these amounts of money are involved because other constraints will emerge that will limit what you can do with your seemingly unlimited amount of money.
  - jkestner 5y ago
    Building is a solved problem. The hard part is the political will to do it. The point of this game is not to show a detailed budget, but the magnitude of money needed to make it happen, if only the will was there.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

unethical_ban 5y ago

I think it's pretty a humorous method of stating what many progressives have been saying for some time: Being a billionaire is inherently immoral. That you simply cannot accumulate that much wealth without underpaying or overcharging others. I think the creator is aware that stock holdings are not legally bound to the income tax rate. That's not the point of the simulation. The point is that the rich have vehicles for their wealth that normal people don't have access to. The point is also that there are pressing, permanent problems in our society that cost less to fix than a quarter of the wealth of one person in our country.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"Being a billionaire is inherently immoral." No it isn't, and that's no a self-evident assertion. Jeff Bezos is a billionaire because the company he created and led for the past 20 years is an insanely productive business. People want to own shares in his company and that is why his holdings are worth so much. >"without underpaying or overcharging others" This is an impossible standard to meet. In a system as massively complex and chaotic as an economy there is no way for any business to pay/charge the "right amount". Not only is the fair amount an unknown value, anything resembling a fair price is only discovered through overpaying/underpaying until prices regress to some middle ground. And then something inevitably happens in the world that necessitates finding a new value and the process begins again.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  I would argue that's the baseline disagreement right there. "No it isn't, and that's not a self-evident assertion" - I would say those on the further left think it is. The premise being "Is there an amount of wealth one person or family can have, that is so exorbitant in comparison to the average citizen that it is unjustifiable on its face?" - and the easily marketable answer is "billionaire". Do you think there is no moral limit to the amount of wealth one person can have in society, while millions around him suffer?
  - zachthewf 5y ago

hncurious 5y ago

It's really at a Twitter mob level of financial understanding. Which is to say it only understands to the degree that it generates outrage.