Safety Net

Ei seu caralhudo!

Use the original meme of Nazaré Tedesco (Senhora do Destino)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7QA0ogagEc

Or else we will make you come to Brazil and have 100% free healthcare and free public school/grad school!

Also we will make you watch "novelas" (brazilian drama) like Kubanacan and O Beijo do Vampiro!

The rich are so fucking stingy with their money that they have a private island and private city with no septic system and instead want to pump it into the nearby community at the other community's expense.

Like what the hell is the point of all that money if they are so utterly unwilling to spend any of it?

Next on Ask a Dragon!
How do you think they get rich?
- You don't get rich from being stingy. You get rich by abusing workers.

They say that because when they get more money they can invest it, grow it for later. They ridicule spending it because if you're able, investment IS the smarter decision, but that assumes all your needs are already met. The Capital class can't even imagine their needs not being met, only wants that they can afford to wait for.

The ultra wealthy have a tendency to just hoard it, accumulating far more than they will even use, and act like that is normal and the purpose of it.

Good time to remind there exist two "models" of economy:
Commodity- Money- Commodity (where money is used for the sole purpose of getting commodities like house, food, clothes, healthcare, ...)
Money-Commodity-Money (Where the purpose of money is to turn commodities in more money, so the end goal is getting more money).
The first one is okay. Humans always did it.
The second one is a disease that starter with what we call "nowadays" Capitalism.
 
I'm saying that because I see on real life a lot of people conflating the two and thinking that "ending capitalism"=="ending comerce/trade/barter" when the truth is that "ending capitalism"=="ending hoarding wealth like a dragon"
They accumulate wealth because it gives them power. Power is what drives their greed. Greed is what is killing our society.
- Wealth gives everyone power. The difference is that when most people want to excersise the power their wealth gives them, they do so by exchanging money for goods or services. For instance, I can influence a plumber to fix my toilet by paying them.
  Rich people do that too, but with a proportionally tiny amount of money. Most of their influence comes from the fact that they simply own stuff. They don't need to spend money to pay for entities they own to do what they want. If you own a voting stake in a company, you do not need to spend that stake to influence the company.

My friend's dad once told me that studies have shown that if you give $1,000,000 to someone without money and the same to a rich person that almost all the money will be gone from the poor person and will have increased when left with the rich person, because poor people don't know how to manage money and that's why they're poor.

My reaction was shock followed by, "it costs more than half a million dollars to pull someone out of poverty??? And won't putting a million dollars in the bank almost always gain interest? I wonder why people without money don't know how to put their money in the bank instead of starving!!"

Because your dad is wrong.
Many of the UBI-type (universal basic income) studies show that most people continue to work and in many cases they are able to increase their income from work in short order.
Turns out relief from chronic money stress liberates mental resources that increase personal resilience and that translates into better employment for many.
- Has there ever been a UBI study that lasted the person's entire life?
- My dad is dead, tyvm. He was pretty sure he wasn't having a heart attack, so you're right that he was wrong.
  But also my friend's dad is wrong about a lot of stuff, including when his son's and I are being sarcastic by saying "thanks Obama," and that it's an invitation for him to shit on social safety nets.
It's stupid in even more ways. The economy needs people to buy things to keep going and allow people like your friend's dad to have jobs and act condescending to people who don't have jobs.
So if everybody was "smart" like that theoretical rich person and kept all their money, there wouldn't be an economy for them to leech passive income from.
- Nuh uh. The economy needs billionaires to peepee money on me.
If you water a dying plant, it will drink. It's almost like people without enough money need it for something
It's also been known by economists for time immemorial that the best way to improve the economy is to give money to poor people, nothing else required. Literally just giving poor people money to spend skyrockets the velocity of money, whereas the hoarders just put it in an account to do nothing but gain interest.
It's not a fair comparison. Someone in poverty will use that million in order to lift themselves out of material poverty. Which means they will pay off debts, buy property, pay college tuition for themselves and/or their descendants, possibly start a business, and a whole bunch of other things I can't think of. That would easily cost half a million. Someone who's already rich will already have all that.

Among economists, this is actually a solid consensus and why many of them are in favor of policies that benefit the less wealthy parts of society. Politicians who oppose these policies often do so against scientific consensus.

more importantly, it's not just scientific consensus. Remember that trump voters don't care about the science. they care about the economy. You have to make it about the economy.
- Hoarding money and never spending it is good for the economy... Somehow, give me a minute I need to see what Fox news says so I can just repeat that.
Is this true? I know there has been research on the consensus among climate scientists (Oreskes, 2004), is there something similar for economists?
- It’s not really a consensus, it drives higher inflation (people are spending more) and a lot of stimulus vs tight purse economics are just doing the opposite of what they did in response to the last crash
  What I think they are talking about is UBI which in limited pilot projects haven’t impacted inflation
  The real benefit of uplifting the poor is that it creates a safer society for everyone and faster innovation in that society because people have time/money to do things. When flying was in it’s infancy a lot of farmers in the US had hobby planes and gliding/eventually flying was built off being accessible. Aviation laws get in the way but it’s completely foreign to think of some poor farmer in rural USA being a hobby pilot today
- The consensus is strong with regards to the question "What happens with money that you give to poor people?" and naturally becomes less strong with regards to specific effects on the economy or what policies to implement. But most economists would agree that stuff like food stamps or certain types of tax credits or (conditional) transfer payments geared towards very low-income households are often a net positive because of the immediate spending and investment in human capital. The downside is of course that these programs typically increase inflation. I don't think the consensus is anywhere near as strong as the one about climate (but few are).

"they'll just spend it on drugs and drinking"

That's all I was going to spend it on...

(Paraphrased from Steve Hughes)

My favorite story was when a Karen told someone to not give money to the homeless man because he was going to use it to buy drugs and the man just that, "That's what i was going to spend it on anyway."

I agreed! We can't just give them things, they won't be poor anymore! What's next, taxing the rich?

The current situation is one I've been wracking my brain over for more than a decade.

What happens when there's no more money to firehose from the poor to the rich. When all the blood is squeezed out of the stone.

By the definition of money, that cannot happen. If all the money is owned by one person, then it is not money. If all of the money is owned by one group of people and another group of people have no access to it, then that will bifurcate the economy between those two groups and the second group will use something else as a substitute. No matter how little people have, there will always be some form of trade and commerce between them. Even North Koreans today (where private trade is largely forbidden) and enslaved Africans in the pre-Civil War US (who for the most part were not legally allowed to own anything) had some form of trade amongst themselves.
Each successive dollar (or euro, pound, yen...) gets successively more difficult to extract because as people have less and less to spend they get tighter and tighter with their spending. Without state intervention, there will always be a floor to how poor you can possibly make someone, because at some point they will realise that breaking the rules and risking the punishment is a better idea than continuing to play by them. And when enough people think this way, well... just ask Louis XVI or Nicholas II how that went.
Even if a communist revolution does not occur, this happens already to a lesser extent in the impoverished areas of cities worldwide, where people would rather turn to crime than work for starvation wages. So if you are someone on the side of the political spectrum which likes to talk against crime and socialism, the policies you should champion are those which prevent the poor from needing to resort to those things (not that any such people are likely to exist on Lemmy).
That's when we strike with pitchforks.
- Well they got tanks :/
Neo-feudalism. People who don't live off of investments (i.e., most of us) need to sell our labor to buy the necessities of life. Once the rich own everything and everyone else is poor, we will continue to sell our labor to pay off debts and make the lives of the wealthy comfortable in new and innovative ways.
You give billions of credit to rich people companies and create inflation. Companies go bankrupt, they create new companies and the process repeats. You stand no chance.

Conservatives are mad at poor people for uuuh... (checks notes): Using government aid to increase the GDP.

- If you're into watching someone eat a turd and are willing to pay 100$ for it, then a service worth 100$ was provided in each instance.
  But on a more serious note, this argument applies to the GDP in general – it's not a measure of how happy, how wealthy, or how productive the people of a given nation are. Yet, continuous growth (measured by GDP) seems to have the highest priority among so-called conservatives and neoliberals. At the same time, they're mad at poor people for increasing the GDP with government aid and don't see the irony.

They explicitly don't want it but the right thing to do would be to spend some money on the means of production.

Create a cooperative and start accumulating capital for the proletarians.

How dare those communist scum create a small business, and become independent of welfare! Steaming

you’re supposed to put it into shady cryptocurrencies. that’s your money making money for you, homeless people haven’t unlocked nft strats yet

Upvoting not for the political meme but to encourage the spread of She-ra content

Man I got a few episodes into that and it already felt formulaic…
And I could never get used to people, even villains, using the word “Princesses” as some entity of fear and cautious reverence.
- It is pretty formulaic for the most part (it does have some more nuanced and unusual dynamics later on )but I still enjoyed it. It's like a Saturday morning cartoon you would watch while eating cereal as a kid. It's just a cozy, chill sort of show you can watch when you feel like some nostalgic, cheesy, easy watching. It takes me back to a simpler time, if that simpler time was more also more culturally progressive, and that's very comforting.

Cool, so be super responsible on their part instead. If they can't be trusted to save up themselves, do the saving up of all the money yourself, o wise conservative. And let's put all that money in a trust fund for them and just give them the dividends. Let's call those dividends a "Universal Basic Dividend".

Poor people don't bribe the politicians making these decisions, so it's not in the best interest of the politicians.

Your suppose to shove the money to the closest representatives asshole.

Money should have an expiration date. There, I said it.

My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with you, because it seems like this policy would punish money hoarding and therefore keep money circulating.
Then I thought about what I would do if I had a sudden large influx of expiring cash, and quickly decided on buying illiquid assets (stocks, bonds, property, a couple fast food franchises in an underserved-but-growing area, etc) which is pretty much what the wealthy already do. The World's Richest Manchild doesn't have $300 billion in cold hard cash sitting around, he has maybe a few million in easily-accessible funds and the rest is tied up in investments (that's why he had to borrow so desperately to get the $44 billion to buy twitter - he couldn't quickly cash out his stock investments without cratering their value).
If money expired, the rich would continue to do what they already do - turn their money into long-term investment vehicles. The worst off would be the people who are in the middle - not doing so bad they have to spend every penny they make right away just to stay afloat, but not doing so well that they can invest in illiquid assets (either because they don't have enough left over after the bills are spent to realistically be able to invest or because they need a safety net in case the car needs to be replaced in a hurry or a tree falls through the roof or the hot water heater busts and ruins the floor).
'Expiring wealth' is something that would do society good by forcing the wealthy class to re-invest in their communities and peoples, whereas 'expiring cash' would just hurt those who would otherwise be on a path to being able to retire someday
- Generational wealth is an area where this money hoarding really, really goes wrong, because then it's lifetime after lifetime of the accumulation and hoarding of wealth. So obviously one change I would strongly support is extremely high tax on inheritance income.
  But we need to separate money from wealth, I think. Because if it takes all of us working together to generate that wealth in the first place, there is simply no possible excuse for not sharing that wealth equitably. As long as money=wealth, I'm just not sure we'll ever really accomplish that, though.
- Billionaires have tons of debt they would have to rectify before they stabilize. Then you assume their liquid assets would be reduced and they would have to find ways to generate more liquidity to maintenance their properties.
That is literally what inflation is for. Central banks try to keep inflation at around 2% to discourage hoarding money.
- This is not what im talking about and they are not 1 for 1 analogous.
Many indigenous americans including the Aztec and Mayan cultural groups used cacao as currency. I can't say if it was intentionally a method to reduce wealth hoarding but it did have that effect.
I’ve had an idea for a book, where the protagonist is a “classic build your fortune” type dismayed at the way capitalism is failing, who ends up making a currency like this; wanting everyone to make money and then spend it by the end of the month; somehow allowing the recipient to get a new extended deadline.
I have some curiosity for where the concept would go. In the story as well it’s imagined that some oligarchs will find ways to abuse the system and hoard it, but in some other cases it might trigger interesting movements.
money kinda already does expire. if you just let it sit around for long enough, it will devalue over time, typically around 2% per year. It's called inflation.
Nobody really hoards wealth by hoarding lots of paper money. Except maybe foolish people trying to save up for retirement that way. (they will make bitter experiences)
Wealthy people invest all their money into company shares, houses/apartments, or gold. That's actually why we see the price of these things constantly increase: Because the wealthy don't know where else to put their money, and so they buy these things, which creates demand for these things, which constantly increases the price for these things (by the rule of supply and demand).

Stimulating the economy baby

Boil it, mash it, stick it in a stew.

Invest it, of course! If you just invest a million per year into private equity, soon you'll be able to afford your own private jet. But those stupid poor people will rather buy avocado toast and iPhones.

I mean that's kinda the point though. Giving poor people money sothat they spend it, it's called consumerism. It's what makes the economy go round.

While true, they are worried that people will spend money on drugs and those aren't taxable, that's what they're really talking about.

Spend it on things that people don’t consider spending; despite literally being spending in the cash on hand sense…

Like buying bonds, stocks, cryptocurrencies or other such commodities.

Yeah, I think this is what they mean. It is a form of poor bashing: poor people don’t invest their money to create jobs, grow the economy, etc. I have a friend who is very susceptible to this type of right-wing propaganda, and i had to point out that rich people can only invest a large portion of their income because their basic needs are (abundantly) met.
- Buying things is literally the economy. People spending money into it improves the economy directly. The velocity of money is a key part of a working market, and the rich impart very little of their wealth into it.

Their argument for not paying taxes is old. And boring.

Is that She Ra in the meme? Forgive me im less aware of stuff than I used to be.

That's Adora, who turns into She-ra but is not currently She-ra. From the show She-ra.
Yes. She can defeat any enemy except geometry.
- That DOES sound like Adora...
That's Adora.

Not sure if that was ever the issue? I don't think I've seen people taking issue with that.

I think it's two different conservative talking points morphed together:
"If we give homeless people money, they will just spend it on drugs and alcohol"
"Poor people are poor because they spend their money rather than investing it."
- ”If we give homeless people money, they won't want to work to earn it. I earned my way!"
  "Poor people are bad with money. That's why they are poor."
Republicans will trot out the 'ol "give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day" line.

You're supposed to give it back to them in the form of investments.

invest it

You do need to be careful about what people spend that money on. Soooo many people just funnelled their covid stimulus into cryptocurrency or NFTs or Gamestop stock in the vague hope they'll get rich, only to lose everything.

I mean, there's always going to be scams. You probably want to address that with education more than expensive "you're not allowed to buy salsa with your government money" stuff.

Maybe they need to eat, for example?