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> the rich have been transferring money from the poor to themselves at a dramatic rate. By definition, the poor have almost no money to transfer. Wouldn't you
by onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> the rich have been transferring money from the poor to themselves at a dramatic rate.
By definition, the poor have almost no money to transfer.
Wouldn't you have to transfer from the middle class - which is shrinking in relative terms?
The poor have never had anything and still largely have nothing. It is literally in the definition.
I don't see how it's possible to enrich yourself (when the amount you need to grow by even small percentages is enormous) from a class with nothing to take.
- atomicnumber3 2y agoThe poor have no money individually, but in aggregate they have some. $1 from a million poor people makes one millionaire. IMO the main thing they extract from the working poor is time - what they're stealing is the excess value between their labor and the value is creates, and technology has made it easy to do this at a massive scale. So it's less $1 from each person, it's 8 hours per day from a million people makes 1 person a billionaire.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoYou don't get $400B by stealing pennies from poor people. For one, there aren't 100m poor people in the US. Not even close.
- Supermancho 2y agoSomewhere around 45m in poverty in the US (2023), already counting around 1m homeless.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoFirst - "poverty" is up to $14k per year. Many of those people are "poor" - but probably not the majority, and definitely not even close to all. Second, billionaires have almost $7T in wealth - the top .1% are at about ~$20T. They didn't get any meaningful percentage of that by taking pennies off of 45M. You'd need to take thousands. And they just don't have it. That's almost $450k per "poor" person. That's more than the median HH wealth in the US. If you look at the "actual poor" - you're likely looking >$1M per person. You simply cannot "steal" that from the "poor" (who have almost nothing to steal, by definition). Even if you amortize that over decades - it is just not how it happened.
- mtrovo 2y agoWhat about family-owned property? Lots of poor people live in multigenerational homes that might be the last step before not owning anything. Also, the fact that the housing market is this bad just means a large portion of the population will be stuck in rental accommodation for the foreseeable future, and that should be accounted for as a form of money transfer somehow. And for those who will say, "Then the government should just build more houses", let me point out that we might run out of space before the appetite for real estate investment dies out.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoBy definition, you're not poor if you own a multigenerational million dollar house in Los Angeles. The people who are ACTUALLY poor, don't have such things.
- mtrovo 2y agoI mean, define what do you mean by ACTUALLY poor. It's very common for people living in traditional working-class neighbourhoods to own a house and suddenly become paper rich when gentrification happens (e.g. Venice Beach in LA). They might find themselves in a situation where, in theory, they have a lot of wealth from the house but don't participate in the economy at the same level.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoThat's not poor. There are homeless people. People who are barely able to rent a room in a crack house. You are NOT POOR if you own a single family house in Englewood. End of discussion. Sorry. Sell your house and live off the annuity for life at > median income after taxes in perpetuity. If you don't, there is literally no excuse for your situation other than your own choosing. What's different here - that is critical - the actual poor HAVE NO CHOICES.