ajax18 wrote:I guess we need to understand that socialist party leaders are entitled to a royal standard of living worlds ahead of those who are not among the political elites. That's clearly what socialism means to the people commenting on this thread.
Conversely, you're a fan of a system where if you make $100,000 a year, you would have to work for
1,500,000 years to earn as much as Jeff Bezos is worth right now. As much as you bitch about working (while taking socialist dollars
) you seem perfectly ok with capitalists crushing the soul out of the population to hoard insane wealth.
So. For anyone paying attention this is how capital works without lifting a finger, and why it's soul crushing for people who make a wag and are trying to stay afloat when they're paying over 30% of their paychecks just for rent:
I recently attended a financial planning seminar with a friend of mine. During the course you have to have a 'budget buddy', and he was mine. He owns his primary house, and is buying two others where he 'rents' to family at about 40% of the market rate because that's what he thinks he should do. When he paid his first house off, and without lifting a finger, he immediately got a $1250/month pay raise. That's equal to about 17 or 18 days of full-time labor at $15/hr. He also just paid his car and a small loan off totalling $400/month. Again. That's equal $1650 totalling 24 or 25 days of full-time labor at $15/hr.
Think about that for a second. Without
doing a thing, he just about equaled an entire month's worth of labor at a "living wage." He'll now roll that cash, without any additional labor, into his second mortgage and will probably pay that house off in five years which will net him another $1200/month capital. That's SIX FULL WEEKS of someone laboring at a "living wage" for $15/hr. Without lifting a finger. That's capital.
Now project that out to a millionaire who owns $650,000,000 in assets that generate incredible sums of cash without him or her having to labor for it. A billionaire is an order of magnitude beyond that. Trump supporters don't understand that they're not temporarily embarrassed millionaires who haven't quite made it yet, and that the 'trickle down' theory is, in fact, a TRICKLE DOWN REALITY.
At what point does capital become, really, a tool to dominate the market and oppress the little man who works for peanuts all the while paying 35-40% of his net income for an apartment owned by a capitalist who owns thousands of apartments in toto? The inequity is obvious and apparent.
So. Someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn't saying there shouldn't be millionaires, or even billionaires (in my world someone's net worth would cap out at about $500,000,000). She's just saying that excessive capital is immoral, and we ought to use that excessive capital to build infrastructure, apartments designed and managed by regulated capitalists, pay for some fat “F”'s stomach bypass surgery, and ensure little johnny goes to medical school without getting balls deep in debt.
Gotta say. Looks pretty good from here.
- Doc