The Hardest Thing in the World

Dealing with the billionaire problem should be everyone’s top priority

There's no solving climate change until we've solved billionaires.
- Nah, buying a Tesla, a Porsche Taycan or a Volvo XC90 hybrid will solve the climate crisis. Trust me. Some guy on another thread told me.
- Ah, yes, lets put the climate crisis on hold
Even the billionaires, really. Less income inequality, more income security.
The French Solution. Worked before.

First, immigration drives up housing prices because everyone needs it, and it can't be built overnight
Contrary to what they say on Faux News, caravanfuls of immigrants aren't let in overnight either. As for undocumented immigrants, the vast majority are Canadians and Europeans overstaying their visas and refugees who aren't rich enough to complete the legal process, neither of which will suddenly buy a shitload real estate.
Second, it drives down wages by flooding the labor market with a high supply of people desperate to take whatever is offered to them
Classic victim blaming and othering. Native born and naturalised citizens lose orders of magnitude more potential wages to wage theft than to exploited immigrants "flooding" anything. Another fallacious talking point, I'm afraid.
Rent goes up, and wages go down. That's the fault of the 1%, not immigrants looking to make a better life for themselves.
Oh good, you DIDN'T mean to victim blame, you just did it accidentally. Let's see if you can stay away from the right wing talking points for the rest of your comment, then!
The cherry on top is that were conditioned to respond to anyone who acknowledges this as a racist. If you want to avoid the label, you need to support tla policy that will push high rents higher, and depress low wages even farther.
Guess it was too much to hope for..
You don't come off as racist, you just come off as someone who, in spite of meaning well and knowing who's actually to blame, has fallen for some of the lies the billionaires and their pr machines use to make the discrimination more palatable to non-racist people.
The people at the top have a few economic levers they can push around to manipulate society reliably.
Including the dissemination of gaslighting and other insidious lies to fool even their enemies to help their cause, as you've just demonstrated yourself.
can't be built overnight
Jimmy Carter does it all the time.
- He only does it overnight with the help of chuck norris
Second, it drives down wages by flooding the labor market
Some study found immigration only reduced real wages for americans with only a high school education, and by a few percentage points. Perhaps that isn't the end of the story - wage growth? Bargaining power, simce everyone's wages are going down? I think the main takeaway was that immigration had a much less harmful effect than Outsourcing, and of course more recently Automation.

Its not hoarded wealth, its spent on things that make them more money. More "ownership" of others work.

There's actually a stunning amount of simple hoarding of cash. It's a major contributor to economic stagnation:
https://psmag.com/economics/one-percent-stop-hoarding-much-cash-84996
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/companies-hoarding-cash
https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/the-velocity-of-money-with-ann-pettifor/

It's so hard to know where to even start. Say one thing and it's like you have to go right back to the basics of how money, capitalism and society work. Nuanced conversation is Impossible.

I never thought that the rich hoarding immigrants was the problem.

The More You Know 🌈
It's the rich hoarding cash that's the problem. They should be hoarding immigrants instead, right?
- We used to call that slavery 🤠

I was having a talk with my 73 year old dad the other night and he still swears up and down that it's the illegal immigrants crossing the border that are stealing all of our money. I asked him where he got this info from, he said he reads things on the internet. I had my laptop out and said "show me" and then of course he said "I don't know how to search for it!". I then told him that he was full of shit, he said the same things about the points that I was bringing up. I told him the difference between my points and his is that 95% of my points I can find a source for, his is always a form of "do your research!".

He said he never believes online surveys because he's never been asked to participate in one, so he thinks it's always a small perfectly chosen group of people in order to sway the results. I read him Pew Research's surveying methodology and they said that they have all the datasets available. I mentioned that the GOP is almost entirely white people, and he said "How come there were 'Black People for Trump' in the last election?". He wanted to know the results of a particular survey that had to do with politics, but of course wouldn't look them up himself so I registered for an account, downloaded the datasets and showed it to him. From 2018 until now the GOP has been almost entirely white people, from 88%-92%, it even said that a quarter of them were "males over the age of 65 who identified as Protestant".

I asked my mom if she had seen that one Presidential debate where Trump was asked by Chris Wallace to say denounce white supremacy and the man literally contorted his brain into a pretzel to fudge out "stand by and stand back." It was a 100% crystal clear call to "those type of supporters." When I told my mom this, her rebuttable was "I didn't watch it" so for her if she didn't watch it, then it didn't happen and even if it did happen, she doesn't have to believe it. It floors me that white supremacist are emboldened these days, but the ignorance, complacency, and lack of empathy and critical thinking from the Right will probably doom us all in a long enough time line.

Poor people have shitty lobbyists -John Oliver

Super simple analogy I like to use:

You're a kid and you go to a badly run daycare with nine other kids. Your parents pay for your stay and the person running it gets a daily shipment of food from that money, let's say, eleven sandwiches [a convenient but not perfect stand-in for workers generating the resources and value for the bourgeoisie]. He should keep one for himself and give ten to the kids, so everyone gets one sandwich, but instead he keeps six and gives all of you five, so you only get half each which is barely just enough. Now, five more kids join, their parents are also paying the daycare owner, and he now gets sixteen sandwiches per day. But he keeps the difference for himself and still gives you all five. Now you each only get a third of a sandwich, barely even a mouthful and you're hungry all the time. Do you blame the new kids for also being hungry and eating the food, or do you blame the daycare worker for hoarding all the food in the first place?

Technically they don't hoard the cash, they loan it out to other rich people with the expectation of a return on their investment. Or theyhoarfd property.

Its not even the loaning out of the cash that is the problem. The real problem is that they spend the cash on ways to prevent other people from having the opportunity they had. This goes for political routes, such as donations to influence tax breaks, goverment backed monopoly, etc. Its also spent buying competitors or losing money to crush conpetition.

Do we really want the rich to start hording immigrants?

Start?

Income inequality can just be set through fiscal policy. It doesn't matter how much "cash" the rich want to hoard if they can't do it (as much) because it was already taxed.

The rich stole our shares and our migrant friends' shares in order to enslave us all. Taking back what was stolen is surely a better option than fighting people who have been similarly victimized.
- Which is possible because the worker world is a race to the bottom between natives and immigrants, who in most cases are willing to accept lower salaries and worse conditions to land a job. Both are true.

We need to shift away from traditional coporate ownership and move towards worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and/or syndicates. Labor ownership invariably leads to the accumulation of wealth as you make money off a larger and larger percentage of workers.

Convincing people that transwomen are women and transmen are men is right up there too.

You are correct that everyone literally having and making the same amount of income is likely undesirable. But you could do a hell of a lot of motivating of bad jobs, at, say, a 10x max pay differential. But more importantly, remind me, is it the hard, dirty and dangerous jobs that currently make the most money? No. It's not jobs at all, it's ownership.
That's some Milton Friedman grade bullshit right there. Bravo.