4 ms·

Oh if only we had a super wealthy patron of sorts who could eliminate food banks with one squiggle in a cheque book

• jws 4y ago
  Looking at the current estimates from the UN, if you completely liquidated the British monarchy and got good value for all the seized assets, you could feed the hungry for 6 months.
  • tpush 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • LeoPanthera 4y ago
      The Royal Family makes a profit for the British government. Removing them would be a long-term loss. A better solution is for the British government to actually give a shit about the poor, but they don't.
      • fullshark 4y ago
        Perhaps I am dense, but how? Do you see the royal family as a positive branding exercise or something, inspiring people to work harder?
        • LeoPanthera 4y ago
          You can read the finances in detail here, which is now a few years old, but still relevant. https://brandirectory.com/download-report/bf_monarchy_report_2017.pdf https://brandirectory.com/download-report/bf_monarchy_report...
        • Jensson 4y ago
          The royal family owns a lot of land and they let the state use it for free. Of course you could take that land from then when you dethrone them, but since we respect property rights of billionaires we probably wouldn't.
          • jleyank 4y ago
            They’re not billionaires in a liquid sense. Read in the bbc or guardian that the current pm (sunak) was wealthier than the queen. And people on HN love to talk about some billionaires…
      • ljf 4y ago
        Palace of Versailles draws more tourists than the Royal Family in the UK. France has not had a royal family for some time.
      • flarg 4y ago
        They don't make a profit and they don't give a shit. Britain's biggest recipients of state benefits and they still don't pay inheritance tax.
  • flarg 4y ago
    They cost 345 million a year in money that we give to them.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  If you give one million dollars to every person, a sandwich would cost one million dollars. Because the farmers, truck drivers, slaughterhouse workers, butchers, truck drivers, would quit their job immediately upon receiving 1 million dollars. It's a fallacy that giving money to people would solve poverty. It would simply force the system to recalibrate so that everyone asks for more money.
  • flarg 4y ago
    Food banks. People are living off food banks. No one is getting a million dollars but they be should at least be able to afford food.
  • jemmyw 4y ago
    That's a simplistic example with extreme inputs. If you gave the people earning the least, in a country like the UK, a sensible increase it doesn't follow that all prices will rise to match it, although they might rise a small amount. The reasons being that the total income and spending power of those on minimum wages and benefits is small compared to the total economy, and that each working person in the supply line of sandwiches is only a small proportion of the sandwich cost, i.e. once you get to a certain scale you can churn out a lot of sandwiches per worker. Sure you can cite silly and extreme examples like "give everyone 1 million dollars." But how about an analysis of "raise minimum wage by 5 dollars per hour and increase benefits by 50 dollars per week"?
  • flandish 4y ago
    How about we take the things that are necessary for a functioning life, and make them provided to each person based on a universally understood base tax layer. Things like food, shelter, electricity, heat, water, healthcare, etc. Just… start there. That there are hungry people in the same world as there are people with such billions amassed and through exploitation… is just deplorable.
    • 29athrowaway 4y ago
      Then you would be artificially raising the population capacity, causing population to grow exponentially until reaching the new capacity, determined by the point in which you cannot keep providing those things for free anymore. This creates a much bigger problem than the one you initially tried to solve and would lead to a total catastrophe. Economic hardship is the population feeling the backpressure from what essentially is the reality of living in a world with limited resources. You can decide to ignore those limits but that does not end well.