“Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make”
Why do we only seem to get the bad outlandish things from books and movies? :/
Honestly, aggressive climate change would have a similar short-term impact, even if the net result is good, which is a large part of the reason we don’t do aggressive changes like this.
That said, I’m not convinced the net result is good, so we’ll instead have short-term suffering followed by longer-term suffering, all for a bit of protectionism for American businesses (which will probably leave them worse off in the long run anyway).
Wait till he hears how necessary it is for life to get harder for billionaires.
That’s why they’re trying to take power. Billionaires would rather destroy the world and drive all life to extinction than to give up their private jets and yachts.
just wait till they outlaw protests and impose curfews
That’s so 2020. Oh, that was under trump rule. Just a small sample of what’s to come if he gets into office again.
do i tell him?
The French found a solution some time ago, maybe history really repeats.
There are now a lot of people who think we should be nice to billionaires because they also could become one sometime in the future
Wouldn’t be the first civilization that disappeared because the elite doesn’t want to compromise and give up status. It’s a constant in history.
The worst part is–it’s really not. These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system’s worst distribution issues. Their biggest hardship could be dealing with not being The Guy With The Biggest Number when they go to their rich guy parties.
Personally I’m in favor of making them destitute and/or imprisoning them, but going that far really isn’t strictly necessary.
These guys could all stay millionaires and we could still solve our system’s worst distribution issues.
UBI actually makes billionaires richer, even with higher taxes. Money trickles back up to them. The problem with UBI is that it redistributes power, and the powerful want all of their power. Wealth “needs” to buy power.
Harder - lol. He’ll have to settle for two 180 foot yachts instead of three.
Eat the rich.
That graph is interesting. When was Reagan president again…?
When was Reagan president again…?
Nailed it.
81-89. I don’t think Reagan’s presidency or party really explains it, because we see it rise shortly and then fall, both during Bill Clinton’s presidency (93-2001). So George H.W. Bush raised taxes during his term, and then Clinton cut them again, but did so while balancing the budget (Clinton ran a surplus).
Reagan certainly slashed taxes, but so did Clinton, and to a similar degree.
necessary for what?
necessary for what, motherfucker?
Your comment has the same energy as "states’ rights to do what?", and I’m here for it.
If I wasn’t at work I’d edit the goose meme to match.
I love that meme
You get me.
For a complete fascist takeover.
🔪🦢
Protectionism. Musk stands to gain a ton if there’s less competition from imported EVs, and that’s true for a lot of other products that American companies make. If you can just throw a few million at a presidential campaign and essentially guarantee your competitors will have a 10-60% disadvantage, those few millions can turn into billions in profit.
On paper, the goal seems to be to spur companies to return to the US, but I think the net impact will be higher prices for Americans and reduced trade w/ other countries due to retaliatory tariffs.
Necessary for Elon and trump to evade prison sentences.
These shitbags are trading the health of the majority to evade repercussions for their crimes (of which there are many).
Drone strike please.
Shut up, shut up, shut up please just shtfu already elon. How are people like him and bezos controlling the world? I swear we celebrate and praise mediocre morons in the US.
As a nation we have lost 30 years of progress because we give the loudest most idiotic people to ever live a platform to spew their collective nonsense. Take me back to 2010 where the internet was still fun and not just some massive propaganda machine for the uber wealthy and political nut jobs
How are people like him and bezos controlling the world?
Capitalism
But without capitalism we wouldn’t have (insert something that has nothing to do with capitalism but that I completely attribute to it). And that would mean no trade.
My ancestors wouldnt have pushed at least one Southern plantation owner to suicide.
I believe this is what they call based
They werent John Brown style abolitionists, they just got pissed off by a business associate and took it about as far as you would expect from a family who still consider themselves American-Scots.
Which is now, very very obviously, not a system design to promote it’s own fitness, a la Darwinism…
I wonder what happens to piles of sand placed in the path of high-flowing rivers?
The United States has always been the best place for the mediocre white man.
In trump’s case, we praise exceptional morons
He’s never going to shut up. But people keep amplifying his pathetic voice by sharing what he says. There’s a very large group of society that needs to stop sharing outrage fodder.
There is no middle class. There are workers and owners. If you own real estate and stonks you are still a worker unless you can live off of just investments. This is designed to corrupt and neuter you. You have enough skin in the game of the owners to not want to oppose them, but not enough to actually be them. Unless you hope to retire, at which point you make the transition from working class to owning class, but only at the end of your life, if you even make it that far, and often owning very little.
This is why Worker and Consumer Cooperatives are so vital.
“designed” is a bit much but it sure does play into their hands.
It is designed. Being forced to buy real estate or stonks to save for retirement is a relatively recent policy, created by Richard Nixon, around the same time as deunionization that was also on purpose.
That’s not exactly true, here’s an article about the history of pension plans. Basically:
- pension plans weren’t common in the US until the mid to late 1800s
- contributions weren’t tax-free until 1921
- labor unions didn’t really get involved until the 1940s, or during and after WW2
- pension plans didn’t have much legal protection until the ERISA standards of the 1970s
So pensions are pretty recent, and IMO largely became important in the 1940s because companies were prevented from competing on salary due to wartime wage controls:
long quoted section
But there was almost no indication for decades that employer-sponsored health insurance would spread from sea to shining sea.
World War II disrupted those trends. As demand for everything — particularly labor — climbed, Congress passed the Stabilization Act of 1942, which allowed the president to freeze wages and salaries for all the nation’s workers. A day after its passage, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order invoking these powers, which applied to “all forms of direct or indirect remuneration to an employee,” including but not limited to salaries and wages, as well as “bonuses, additional compensation, gifts, commissions, fees.”
But there was an exemption of massive proportions slipped into a fateful clause: “insurance and pension benefits” could grow “in a reasonable amount” during the freeze.
As companies struggled to deal with wartime labor shortages, the wage freeze left them in a serious bind: How could they retain workers if they couldn’t give raises? If they didn’t soon realize the allure of fringe benefits, insurance companies pressed that case through marketing campaigns, as historian Jennifer Klein has observed.
The Revenue Act of 1942 triggered another rush to enroll employees in health plans. By slapping corporations with tax rates of 80 or even up to 90 percent on any profits in excess of prewar revenue, Congress all but guaranteed a frenzied search for loopholes. Employee benefits, according to the new law, could be deducted from profits. As an anonymous employer observed in a study published on trends in health insurance, “it was a case of paying the money for insurance for their employees or to Uncle Sam in taxes.”
Due to that, employer healthcare and pension/retirement plans became common because companies had to pick between paying a ton of taxes or increasing benefits to attract and retain workers, and many of them chose the latter.
Defined contribution plans (e.g. 401ks) actually started under Carter when he signed the Revenue Act of 1978, which was also a tax cut. They became prolific under Reagan, but probably because he took office 3 years after (big changes like that take time to get adopted) and not because of anything he necessarily did.
Companies are moving away from pensions because they add risk to the company that 401ks don’t, and employees aren’t necessarily choosing jobs based on them having a pension, but based on overall benefits. And the average person is probably better off with a 401k instead provided they contribute the same amount as they would to the pension because pensions are conservatively invested (i.e. the company wants to cover its butt), whereas 401ks can be aggressively invested, meaning more growth and thus more money available at retirement time. It can be pretty dramatic too, as in 4-5% growth for pensions vs 10-12% in a 401k, because a pension needs to provide guaranteed payouts, while a 401k just needs to provide expected payouts.
Before Nixon, you could just save money for retirement.
You still can.
That said, before the 1920s or so, a lot of people just lived with family when they got old. That changed after WW2 when people started depending more on the company than their families for retirement expenses (partially due to Social Security being enacted, and partially due to wage controls forcing companies to provide benefits to attract talent).
Having a comfortable retirement has already been tied to the value of stocks going up. And a while back republicans wanted to do the same to social security.
The fucking gall this billionaire POS has to utter the phrase “live within our means.”
Add this to the news that Mike Johnson said they will end Obamacare and I can’t believe anyone would vote for Trump. He’s going to raise your costs, reduce government services, kill healthcare as we know it, the list goes on and on.
They literally want to end government. Aka, services for anyone who isn’t wealthy.
The only government service they want is the police, and it to be funded by civil forfeiture.
Also the military.
🗡️🫨
… there’s no guillotine emojis yet
What even is that face emoji doing?
I like how you improvised.
Edit: 🗡️🫠. I wanted to try and I like this.
That was my other choice
its the billionairs head rolling away, no?
So where are the “Republicans are good for the economy” voters now?
Anyone that actually cares about the economy would see that every time the republicans get in they fuck it, and every time the democrats get in they fix it.
But they don’t care about reality, only their feelings
“Some of you may die, but that is a risk I am willing to make”
When can we feed Elon to a dragon?
Trump is better at this than Musk…
It will be a beautiful necessary. Everyone will love the carnage. We will destroy America bigly. Like never before. The radical left democrats will hate it, but it will be glorious. Trust me.
I wonder if when he says “necessary” he’s referring to some longtermism weird BS.
I mean, he’s definitely referring to some weird BS. But I wonder whether specifically it’s longtermism BS.
I read recently “On Freedom” by Timothy Snyder and he mentions that. Billionaires are sucking or wealth and when we suffer, we are told that this is temporary and toward a greater good (which never comes).
Sadly it is successful and a lot of Americans believe that.
It opened my eyes seeing how we are set up to fight each other (blaming minorities) while oligarchs are making our lives more miserable by hoarding country’s wealth.
He is, though he’s wrong about Trump’s plans being anything beneficial in the long term. But even what he’s saying about any part of it being harmful is a contradiction of Trump’s claims about the economy
He’s not wrong, he’s bald faced lying. The two are not equivalent.
Bro we couldn’t even get people to wear masks and get free tests and vaccines without triggering white outrage, how you think actual financial hardship is going to go over with these people?
He’ll immediately blame Biden for all the suffering he causes.
They’ll scream for blood, but it won’t be the blood of billionaires.
They own the largest communication networks across the globe, both traditional and digital. They have access to the most cutting edge AI technology that’s fast becoming indistinguishable from reality. They’re cooperating with the man in charge of the most elaborate troll farm ever created.
They’ll use that power to keep breeding angry, violent reactionaries who blame minorities and swallow whatever their cult leader tells them to. But that will be rookie shit a decade from now. Forget social media sock puppets, our entire chain of knowledge is about to be undermined. Bullshit, agenda pushing academic papers will be published, filled with bullshit, agenda pushing statistics, fawned over by bullshit, agenda pushing media and cited in bullshit, agenda pushing books. It will spew out at a rate far faster than anyone can possibly debunk and even if they try, they’re indistinguishable from the AI-powered, sock puppet “experts” they’re arguing with.
Laws, regulations and life-altering punishments are the only way to stop them so they’re working hard to ensure that never happens.
This is why i think there’s still such a strong push for AI from the major tech companies–it’s not just about developing a product for consumers to use–it’s a product to use against consumers too
In an alternate universe, conmen Trump and Musk used their sole talent of convincing fools to wear masks.
