this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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Edit: That argument is just "trickle down economics" with extra steps.
I disagree.
Billionaires have outsize influence. They buy politicians to set public policies that affect the working class and divert billions of our dollars into their pockets.
If you put all of their money in a pit and set it on fire, it would have a greater impact than just taxing them 2% and spending all of it on public programs, because they would no longer be able to do harm on a billionaire scale.
The people could heal.
We'd still have other beasts to deal with, but the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Trickle down economics is the argument that financial benefits given to the wealthiest will naturally make their way down to the rest, so there is no need to aid the impoverished directly.
There is literally nothing in what I said that suggests that course of action, at all. My talking about how taking direct action to eradicate poverty ought to be the top priority is literally the opposite of that. You're full of it.
Billionaires (inflation-adjusted, of course) per capita in the US increased by about 7x compared to 100 years ago, while the percentage of the population living in poverty is 4-6x lower today than it was 100 years ago, compared to what it is today.
The correlation is in literally the opposite direction as what you claim. How do you reconcile these facts with your assertion?
Its very easy to make an incorrect correlation like this when you are using faulty data like the FPL.
All it takes two seconds to find out the poverty line in the US is literally just 3 times the monthly minimum spend for food for one person. That doesnt factor in the extreme inflation on housing, medical, student debt, utilities, phone plan costs, taxes, etc. While food prices are inflated they are not nearly as inflated as the other areas critical to survival which are not calculated for the reporting of offical poverty figures. Once you actually account for all of this and look at what percentage of the population fails to meet basic needs you get to a more staggering 43% of the US living in poverty and even thats a rough estimate due to missing data points that might make it higher.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-many-are-in-need-in-the-us-the-poverty-rate-is-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/#%3A%7E%3Atext=Forty-three+percent+of+all+families+in+the%2Cfamily+budgets%2C+versus+37%25+of+white+families.
Yeah I was gonna say, that persons picture of two percentages wasn't very convincing.