Hi comrades, I'm new here, how do we feel about posting Mastodon content on Lemmy?
Not only nobody "earns" that much money, nobody should have the right to command the amount of influence that kind of money provides.
We are literally talking about FIVE people fucking with the lives of the entire planet.
Even if you add the active politicians of every country on earth, it would be a minuscule number of people controlling the lives of eight billion of us, and the most frustrating part of it is that vast majority of that eight billion thinks this is normal, or even should be encouraged.
Most of the eight billion don't think it's normal. Basically just the golden billion do (aka the West, Global North, Imperial Core, First World, etc.).
Most of the world thinks that the working people should control their own destinies.
The minimum wage is a complete joke. Tie it to median rental prices of the area. Tie it to inflation at the very least (after adjusting for the past decades of inflation). Tax capital and not labor. There is a lot that could be done, but we keep voting these geriatric vampires to DC and they can't seem to give a shit about most of the country.
Or the government could just set price controls on everything necessary for life. Already happened under Nixon
Nixon also passed a windfall tax on US corporations after the hyper-inflation of the 70's.
Most of this wealth is in stocks, though. Their worth is based on the number of shares they own of these companies. For every share they sell the value of the other shares drops a bit. So if Musk or Bezos sold all their shares, to have this money in actual cash, not only would they probably bankrupt their company and crash the stock market, but the cash they got out of it would be only a fraction of what this shows on paper now.
I’m not sure how to edit comments so I’m adding this… I agree with the sentiment and how insanely low the minimum wage is. But these billionaires don’t actually have the amount of money most people believe they have. Functionally, it’s nowhere close.
But these billionaires don’t actually have the amount of money most people believe they have. Functionally, it’s nowhere close.
What do you mean by this?
If you have $10 billion is STOCKS (which is what ALL of these billionaires have, NOT cash)… then even if you sell your stocks you’ll end up with WAY less because of how the stock market works. Also taxes.
Let's say you only get 10% of the value, which is a massive stretch. What's 10% of $10 billion? $1 billion. That is still an absolutely insane amount of wealth.
The point "they don't have as much as you think" is meaningless, because the amount they do have is still exceptional. There's no functional difference past a certain threshold.
Rules TBD.