We should be way past taxing at this point.
Eating them doesn’t fix the problem that created them.
Eating one of their children would probably be effective motivation.
Again, tax is the real solution here.
Why not both? Eating a few of the worst offenders sends a message to the rest to accept the taxes without complaining.
You should ask Dogsoah that question not me, as they said “We should be way past taxing at this point” which explicitly says they want a solution which is not taxation.
Sure, after Bezos veal.
Taxing doesn’t solve the problem either. Don’t go around assuming everyone’s a liberal who thinks that capitalism can be made to “work” by introducing taxes.
The monkeys have too many bananas, we broke the system
Eat the Rich,
Eat the Rich,
Don’t you know,
Life is a Bitch!
Eat the Rich,
Eat the Rich,
Out of the palace,
And into the ditch!
Individual’s wealth vs minimum wage is not a great comparison. It’s showing accumulated wealth of an individual who will over time receive pay raises and build up their wealth.
Minimum wage is what it says the minimum. It’s supposed to be entry level income at the time. It should be adjusted for inflation.
To make it more accurate, it should show income increase for ech of the billionaires, and compare it to an income of some median individuals.
I tried do to just that, because i believed that it wouldn’t paint a better picture for the billionaires, and I also dont like that people have downvoted your comment without providing explanation.
Assuming Musk started working at 18yrs old, which would have been in 1989, 35 years ago. And assuming he started at 7.25 dollars an hour, and never got a raise, he would have accumulated roughly 527.800 dollars by now.
40h * 52w * 7.25 usd = 15080 usd 15080 usd * 35y = 527 800 usd
His net worth (according to meme) is a staggering 273 000 000 000 dollars. Obviously he had to have a pay rise to get there, lets calculate that rise, starting from 7.25 dollars an hour.
273000000000 ÷ 527800 = 517241.37931034
So his pay rise averaged over 35 years, would be an absurd 517240%, or 14778% per year. The yearly average pay rise is roughly 4-5%, its not even remotly close.
All of this assumes that Elon started with 0 dollars to his name, he didn’t. So in reality his hypothetical pay rise wouldve been a a bit lower. However the minimum wage wasn’t 7.25 dollars in 1989, and I haven’t accounted for inflation. Still the numbers would probably be similarly insane.
Even in a somewhat more accurate form, I think the core statement of the meme still rings true.
That’s not how exponential growth works. The pay increase would be in the ballpark of 50% per year for that amount of gain in 35 years.
And remember, wealth accumulates in passive investments, so even if you made $7.25/hr for 35 years, you’d have over $1m if you didn’t spend any of it and it accumulated at over ~3% per year.
If there’s a minimum wage, there should also be a maximum wage, but I may be a communist, idk.
Maximum wage used to be a thing. It’s how we got insurance tied to employment.
Imo, nothing about what you just said is communist in nature, as we are defining terms for a continued labor market.
The people in the meme aren’t getting their wealth from their wages
Which is why this policy usually goes by maximum income or income cap
but all the alpha sigma dunno what males think they can be the next elon musk and start their own diddy thing.
Probably not, TBH. It’s probably about social order; they likely believe that there should be a specific order and set of rules in society, and that somehow billionaires ‘deserve’ what they have, and that it’s ‘right’. “The way it is is the way it should be.” They likely also have regressive views about the position women should hold in society, LGBTQ+ rights, etc., for the same reasons. It’s a fundamentally conservative thought process.
They got nation-states by the balls. They’ll never let you tax them. At most there will be some concession made that just makes them look like they did something, how the ultra rich always do. Unfortunately liberal pacifism isn’t nearly enough.
These numbers are made up - specifically, they’re made up by the stock market. If you actually think Elon Musk has $273 billion dollars, I have some Saudi shares in Twitter to sell you.
Cool if their stock is worth that much they can get rid of it and make the company more public instead having so much power in the hands of the few
Oh so he only has two billion? Well, we’re basically equals then. I wonder how he takes his avocado toast…
I’m not saying that Elon Musk deserves his wealth, I’m saying the premise of the meme is nonsense.
deleted by creator
You misspelled hang.
Tax solves problems
Violence solves result of problem
People are super mad at the Chinese police for arresting Jack Ma, prosecuting him, and having the guy do community service work for a few years. But that’s honestly way better than a guy that greedy and exploitative deserves.
They have so much wealth it’s hard to visualise how much they have.
Eh, buying a president as your personal bitch and jumping around on stage with him in an undersized t-shirt with your belly sticking out like a brain damaged orangatan is a pretty good visualization of how disgusting this much money is.
buying a president as your personal bitch
Trump didn’t buy Musk. They’re ideological co-conspirators, eager for the day when they can each unleash the full force of the police state on their personal enemies. The fact that they both act like dim-witted children should warn the rest of us what too much money and too little social responsibility does to the human brain. Musk acts like a washed up 80s hack celebrity desperately flailing for attention because he’s fucked in the skull, not because Trump pays him to behave that way.
They hate each other. They all do.
But the difference between Trump’s wealth and Musk’s wealth is very close to Musk’s wealth.
A billionaire’s worth isn’t the size of the bank account but the limit on the credit card.
To date, I’ve seen nothing to suggest either Trump or Musk have a limit on how much they can borrow and spend. That’s largely because our historically fascist oligarchy of banking executives love their brand of politics.
Yeah, it’s one of the reasons Anna Sorokin took so much.
Banks were falling over themselves to lend money to her. They thought she was one of them.
Errmm. Don’t think anyone thinks for a moment Trump is paying musk. Did you mix up your rich fascist dipshits?
It might be more akin to a Trump escort service. You can buy him for a few nights and go around seeing the sites (rallies) like some kind of weird instagram influencer where you can get the attention you’re craving (news cycle) and everyone will be calling you again (media) to reinforce how important you are.
Of course that only lasts for like a day since Trump is a gold fish, he’ll be back to insulting the industries and generally dismissing Musk unless he stays right in his peripheral view.
You got it backwards friend. In the grand scheme here Trump isn’t comparitively rich, he has an empire that constantly hemorrhages money but value wise he is sitting around 3. 6 billion.
Musk’s currently valued at around 269. 8 billion. He spends a ridiculous amount of money on super PACs and uses his purchase of different platforms to kill news stories that show Democrats in a positive light and bankrolls a lot of Republican stuff. Musk isn’t being bought, Trump is.
Thanks for sharing this! I had not seen it in a while.
Q: What’s the the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars?
A: About a billion dollars.
The US minimum wage hasn’t changed in TEN YEARS?! You guys need to revolt, that is awful.
The US minimum wage hasn’t changed in TEN YEARS?!
The vast majority of employers can’t pay the minimum rate, because their employees wouldn’t be able to do basic shit like travel to the jobsite or afford to eat. Wages have been rising (particularly post-COVID, after a few million Americans dropped out of the labor force for some mysterious reason) as demand eclipses supply.
And a big reason AI has caught on as a techno-panacea is business analysts are looking at the median age and size of the labor force, the stark hostility to immigration, and the perpetually increasing need for technical work, then realizing this is going to put huge upward pressure on wages unless much of that workforce can be automated away.
But market forces are happening even in absence of legislative action. Union activity is reemerging as a socio-economic force. Not everything rests on a federal majority manually raising the wage floor.
You know, something always feels a little off with an underpantsweevil comment. I could never put my finger on it though, always seems so close to being factual but for some reason skewed. I think it’s the declarative statements which turn out to be more of an opinion or editorial piece that’s only backed up by other vague references much like a matt walsh or tim (can’t remember his last name) might make.
Wages have been rising…as demand eclipses supply.
This is a weird general statement that reinforces that “supply & demand” is a worth-while endeavor that has worked out for everyone economically and socially. Of course wages have been rising… it would be beyond a depression if the average salary went down for the past couple of years. The important caveats are completely missed though…
While salaries are up, salary growth is down — the increase in average earnings is lower compared to the 7.3% rise between 2021 and 2022. The gender pay gap, while shrinking by 1% over the last 10 years, was only cut by 0.7% between 2022 and 2023. This means the average male makes $63,960, while their female counterparts make an average of $53,404
The average white male earns $64,636, while the average Hispanic or Latino male makes $47,996 annually.
With the annual inflation rate for 2023 at 3.4% for the year — up from 3.1% previously — salaries aren’t keeping up. A Smart Asset report based on MIT’s Living Wage data found that the average salary required to live comfortably in the U.S. is $68,499 after taxes.10 This is nearly $10,000 higher than what the average salary currently is. link
AI… are you talking about like a general AI or chatgpt? What right-wing or doomscrolling blog are you reading about AI from? All these companies trying to cram some type of “AI” into their program is a problem for sure, but it’s just a fad which only the most useful implementations will stick around. If anything, the companies are spending more trying to make it work (which it doesn’t).
Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked - “AI” checkout was actually powered by 1,000 human video reviewers in India.
Here is an article by the Mckinsey Global Institute.
One of the biggest questions of recent months is whether generative AI might wipe out jobs. Our research does not lead us to that conclusion, although we cannot definitively rule out job losses, at least in the short term. Technological advances often cause disruption, but historically, they eventually fuel economic and employment growth.
This research does not predict aggregated future employment levels; instead, we model various drivers of labor demand to look at how the mix of jobs might change—and those results yield some gains and some losses.9 In fact, the occupational categories most exposed to generative AI could continue to add jobs through 2030 (Exhibit 4), although its adoption may slow their rate of growth. And even as automation takes hold, investment and structural drivers will support employment. The biggest impact for knowledge workers that we can state with certainty is that generative AI is likely to significantly change their mix of work activities.
“But market forces are happening even in absence of legislative action. Union activity is reemerging as a socio-economic force. Not everything rests on a federal majority manually raising the wage floor.”
Interesting you’ve again promoted “market forces” (reminds me of trickle-down economics). Union activity has been beaten down by a war being waged for decades, proper legislation and officials protecting the rights of Unions are the only way they will continue to have a chance. The recent changes in the Biden administration shows that unions can stand a chance if the branches of government would actually support it.
Wouldn’t having a federal majority, manually raising the wage floor, protect future workers when the AI revolution comes? If the market determines the wage minimum, won’t your points become moot when there is no more demand? I’m just still flabbergasted that you believe “employers can’t pay the minimum rate, because their employees wouldn’t be able to do basic shit like travel to the jobsite or afford to eat.” I don’t know what social circles you are in, but this isn’t the reality most lower income people are facing.
This is a weird general statement that reinforces that “supply & demand” is a worth-while endeavor
It’s a fundamental pricing mechanism. Low supply pushes demand up.
What right-wing or doomscrolling blog are you reading about AI from? All these companies trying to cram some type of “AI” into their program is a problem for sure, but it’s just a fad which only the most useful implementations will stick around.
Efforts to shoehorn AI into daily business activity aren’t just at the retail end. We’re seeing it show up in doctor’s offices, to replace transcription services, and legal offices, to replace paralegals, and in IT to replace developers.
The implementation is routinely worse than the human labor it replaces, but the cost is so much lower that business owners will justify the transition.
Union activity has been beaten down by a war being waged for decades, proper legislation and officials protecting the rights of Unions are the only way they will continue to have a chance.
Union organizers who wait on corporately captured politicians to save them are fucked. You build the union first and you get the legislation later, when politicians recognize the union as a force worth pandering to.
By contrast, the Wildcat Strike and the Slow Down… hell, the very act of collectively bargaining, leveraged market force to exert pressure on employers.
Depriving businesses of their labor supply compels them to increase their compensation. That’s Econ 101 tier material analysis.
Wouldn’t having a federal majority, manually raising the wage floor, protect future workers when the AI revolution comes?
Sure. But you need a movement large enough to obtain the corruptive force of private capital first. Where do you get that movement?
By the time you have a coalition big enough to compel the federal government to change, you’ve already built a union big enough to force private industry to capitulate independent of a legislative fix.
Again, just baseless conjuncture that sounds “almost right”. You have the general principles, you even reference Econ 101, but analysis and expert opinion goes further (why there’s so many armchair champions out there, unfortunately). Please cite some actual sources that have analyzed the systems and what your perspective has been formed by. This just seems like base-level pandering that gets no where like a “group chat” on one of the mainstream news outlets.
Things do not happen in a sterile chamber. You can’t create union movements when they’re getting destroyed by officials
For approximately 150 years, union organizing efforts and strikes have been periodically opposed by police, security forces, National Guard units, special police forces such as the Coal and Iron Police, and/or use of the United States Army. Significant incidents have included the Haymarket Riot and the Ludlow massacre. The Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman walkout of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 are examples of unions destroyed or significantly damaged by the deployment of military force. In all three examples, a strike became the triggering event. (link)
Your AI argument is fear mongering, as I stated above, with sources, a net increase in jobs is projected. This is the telephone/computer technology fear now for the 2020’s. You’ve yet to provide an actual argument for why technology shouldn’t proceed. Should oil and gas not go through the same transition? God forbid we have less administration and more skilled workers, as my sources concluded would be the outcome.
Yes, supply-demand is a fundamental pricing mechanism, as econ 101 will teach. Unfortunately the subsequent classes that economists take after also include the million different factors with changes that mechanisms output. For further understandings, I would suggest Unlearning Economics (here is one of his videos going over a Sabine Hossenfelder’s video on capitalism). He comes with credentials,
My background is as an economist who specialises in behavioural economics. I did my PhD in economics at the University of Manchester and from 2019-23 was a Fellow at the Psychological and Behavioural Science Department at the London School of Economics. I remain affiliated as a Visiting Fellow.
I have quantitative skills including mathematics, statistics, and coding which are illustrated by my PhD and current research. I am also a published author, with my book The Econocracy selling 15,000+ copies and having over 200 citations on Google Scholar. I also have excellent communication skills and have presented both my research and book at numerous conferences and universities.
Please cite some actual sources that have analyzed the systems and what your perspective has been formed by
Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is a solid one.
Richard Wolff also has a great podcast on the subject
Your AI argument is fear mongering
That is part of the strategy to depress wages, certainly. But substandard substitution is also a standard business strategy.
It’s way beyond that, but the majority of the population has become weak and complicit. Either a general strike or full-on revolution is needed. I guess people will wait until everyone is suffering except the mega rich to be angry enough to break free from their day to day fantasy of blissful ignorance.
Because eXcEptIoNAliSm and mEriToCrAcY, tHe aMerIcAn dReAm!!!1122
It just goes to show how powerful the indoctrination really is.
Seriously, I made overtly anti-fascist comments on a politicalmemes post that are getting downvoted…
Edit for your reading pleasure: https://lemmy.world/comment/13098744
For what it’s worth, you’re spot on and I gave you my upvote lol
But yeah, the resistance to the truth in favour of temporary comfort is quite scary to watch as it unfolds live in front of our eyes, but that just means we have to say it louder.
Thank you! And very frightening, we absolutely need to keep repeating it and louder in this sea of propaganda. Though it seems history will repeat itself, and “comfortable”/ignorant people won’t budge until they are all personally affected and suffering themselves.
Yup, “first they came for…” seems as relevant as ever, it’s almost like we never learn (more like are deliberately kept ignorant and just comfortable enough to benefit the ruling class).
To be fair, many states and cities have their own minimum wages higher than the federal minimum. I’ll let you guess which states don’t.
50 states makes this game too difficult. Can we just guess colors instead?
And most people in those states that don’t have their own don’t work for the federal minimum wage. My state has no minimum wage, and most “minimum wage” jobs start at something like $10-12.
start at something like $10-12
Which is still garbage. How does someone survive today on less than $25,000/year?
Yes, it’s not meant to support a family on, but it’s totally possible to live on, especially if you live with other people (e.g. have a roommate). A 2 bed apartment is something like $1200-1500, so if you cut that in half (i.e. roommate, dual income family, etc), that’s about 1/4-1/3 of a $25k/year wage, which is about what PF writers suggest.
And this is starting pay at the crappiest jobs, many easy to get jobs pay closer to $15/hr. The only people actually making $10-12 are teenagers, college students, and people with limited/negative employment history.
The solution here, IMO, isn’t to increase the minimum wage (that’ll end up reducing jobs), but to supplement the income of people who do those jobs (i.e. something like UBI).
The solution here, IMO, isn’t to increase the minimum wage (that’ll end up reducing jobs)
Research has found that increasing minimum wage does not reduce jobs.
Employment typically lags policy, and stores will prefer to raise prices than potentially reduce their ability to service customer needs. However, the higher the minimum wage goes, the more attractive replacements for workers become, meaning there will be more investment into kiosks and other ways to reduce headcount.
I think we’ll really see how things will work in the next economic correction when stores cut costs to retain customers. So I’m less interested in data from a couple months after the policy change (basically the Berkeley study) and more interested in data 2-5 years after the change. Will fast food companies increase the pace of developing digital replacements for workers?
I don’t have a link handy, but there was a study that showed that fast food businesses didn’t reduce staffing when they replaced cashier’s with kiosks. Rather, they shifted employment to areas that couldn’t be replaced with a kiosk, enabling the staff to meet the increased demand and increased sales that were a result of the kiosks.
Live with their parents. It’s doable to “survive”, it’s just that someone cannot “thrive”, i.e. live the American Dream, or have health insurance, thus getting back to your point about survival, although that’s generally considered a separate thing than income, bc e.g. someone could be on their spouse’s health plan.
And then there are all sorts of tricks to go below minimum wage too… including having more black people locked up and working in for-profit prisons than were ever used as slaves; or Waffle House’s trick where someone only gets a base wage of like $3.25 an hour and then while the minimum $7.25 per hour is guaranteed, in order to get more than that they have to make up the difference with tips (on what is <$10 meals).
But how do you help people when (a) things like the electoral college and gerrymandering exist, (b) preachers say from the actual, literal pulpit that God commands to vote Republican, and (c) those areas vote conservative not only for themselves but also apply that to the nation at large, e.g. keeping Mitch McConnell in power, and making abortion illegal in those states.
TLDR: it’s how they choose to live. And they might be about to fight an actual civil war to extend those “rights” further.
And they might be about to fight an actual civil war to extend those “rights” further.
Well we know how American civil wars end, and the country could use some more Reconstruction
The ones where the people are most afraid of communism and think minimum wage is socialism?
That’s a bingo
You just say “bingo”.
For anyone about to downvote - it’s a quote from Inglorious Basterds ^
It’s an older quote, sir, but it checks out.
Lemming, chill
But you said—
Surprisingly, Florida has a higher minimum wage–nearly double that of the federal minimum, and will reach $15 in 2026. Of course, you can’t survive on that working 40 hours a week.
I live in a red state with an $11/hr minimum wage. We got that by amending the constitution, thereby overriding the legislature which was opposed to the increase. Unfortunately $11/hr is not even close to enough to live on here so apparently it’s time to raise it via another constitutional amendment. Sigh
Gotta double it to catch up, and pin it to inflation at the same time so it stops falling behind.
10 years… how refreshingly optimistic…
In 2007, Congress passed the increase to 7.25 to take effect in 2009. The minimum wage change 15 years ago was passed 17 years ago.
I wonder how hoarders of wealth will be thought of in the distant future. If we survive, I hope they are seen as fools with misguided goals, and criminals for being vacuums of human potential.
People should be contributing ideas, creativity and wisdom instead of worrying about their next meal.
Eat*
Opening a can of worms here, but I might have an opinion going against the grain. The minimum wage rate is not the problem, technically it should be $0.
The issue here is basically legislation, policies and government, that has been captured by these big corporations to be business friendly and antagonistic to the workers.
Make no mistake being friendly towards businesses should be important, basically the driver of the economy, why these three billionaires are not the root cause of your problem. Your root problem has been the corporate capture of your government, that has bled through your other pillars of democracy, your judicial and finally the big one, the people. Americans are, in my opinion, so addicted to fast news, so that everything should stir an emotional response. You have been polarised for political and vested interest gains. You have let yourselves down. By not uniting, by dividing yourselves, you the people have become weak, thus a united market will take advantage of you, distract you to non issues, while conquering your nation.
It can be changed but only if there is a cultural change, and the will of the people will guide that change.
Hey I represent the Bad Take Society, and I wanted to recognize you for the absolute worst take I’ve seen today.
You can’t really believe this right? Surely you’re trolling or being sarcastic or something? I can’t imagine a person so utterly cucked by big business is even real.
The poor do not have the ability to manipulate mass quantities of people, the rich do. Because they are rich and have the resources and connections to accomplish this. They buy politicians and manipulate to cause the conditions you describe. If they were not rich, they could not do that.
Blaming the poor for being manipulated is bad faith. And victim blaming is not an effective rallying strategy.
Peak liberalism.
If regulation was bad for the poor and good for the rich the rich and large corporations wouldn’t try so hard to get rid of regulation.
They’re not trying to get rid of regulation though; they’re trying to make sure that the regulation is in their favor. That’s what regulatory capture is. They’re going to be fine with regulations that help cement their place in society.
Regulatory capture is certainly a thing but all that “small government” and “too much red tape” rhetoric free market parties have been spewing for decades is not that.
Not the most fair comparison. Compare it to the richest people in 2012, as extreme wealth ebbs and flows with inflated “funny money” stocks.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01026
Edit: also remember the unit on the left side is 1,000,000.
So 10,000,000 is 10 trillion dollars.
So that would show ~5 trillion dollars in net worth to 45+ trillion from 1990 to now.
So they have made 900% increases over 35 years. Note inflation would have been 241% during those years.
Instead of being rich for life and never needing money for anything, now they are rich for life and never need money for anything times 3.73.
Instead of that money going to the people starving while working their ass off.
This is a better comparison than the post itself, and we should also be putting the minimum wage on the graph to compare the gains.
Minimum wage shouldn’t ever be a specific amount, it should be a percentage tied to some other economic metric, so that as inflation or cost of living rises, wages increase with it as well. This BS of having to wait for out-of-touch millionaire Congress members to approve of minimum wage increases is ridiculous.
In Europe we call this wage indexation, you should try it!
Canadians and Europeans, hold on to this stuff. There are people trying to take away universal healthcare from Canada and Brexit happened. This shit can happen to anyone if you get complacent.
Don’t worry, we won’t.
Meanwhile, Congress has raised their own pay multiple times since they raised the minimum wage back in 2009.
Actually, looking into it, it seems that they gave themselves an automatic annual pay raise back in the ethics reforms act of 1989! Fucking assholes.
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/97-615.html
“The automatic annual adjustment for Members of Congress is determined by a formula using a component of the Employment Cost Index (ECI),…”
“…This adjustment formula was established by the Ethics Reform Act of 1989.”
How about we just make minimum wage a percentage of the highest income in the country? Take whoever made the most money in a given year, divide that by 52 weeks, and then divide that by 40 hours. Then divide whatever the result of that is by 1000. This should be very reasonable basis. It still allows for a huge wealth gap, but asserts that nobody should make over 1000 times more than anyone else. You still get rich and poor people, so this is in no way a leftist policy. It’s a very moderate middle of the road one.
Anyway, looking at 2023. Not even examining his true income and how much he blew doing who knows what, Elon Musk had $95.4 billion net gain in wealth that year. Divide that by 52 weeks, 40 hours, and 1000 - we should make minimum wage $45865.38 per hour. And if that’s not reasonable or feasible, it just means he makes too much for the good of the economy.
