Capitalism ends poverty

Trickle down economics ... give more money to the ultra rich and eventually some money goes down to the people at the bottom of the economic system
The problem they've discovered after 50 years of this system is that there just isn't enough money in the universe to send to the top and allow enough of it to flow down to the bottom.
A billion dollars only allows a dollar to get to a person living on the street ... so we have to send billions, trillions, gajillions of dollars to the super-ultra-giga rich to get enough money to average people.
This is the problem of trickle down economics .... we just haven't given enough money to the top yet
We have to give the rich more! ... in order to save the poor ... do it for the poor!
- This is just patently false. I mean,
  The problem they've discovered after 50 years of this system is that there just isn't enough money in the universe to send to the top and allow enough of it to flow down to the bottom.
  That couldn't be less true. No one "discovered" anything. Economists knew this was true 50 years ago. They knew when trickle-down was being developed. It's actually really obvious, especially if you have any relevant data whatsoever. The ones with scruples pointed it out many times, the ones without hopped on the gravy train.
  
  They have to pour a steady stream of gold coins to the top of a billionaires penthouse to try to fill it enough so that a few coins can fall out and land on the street below
  /s /sarcasm /imbeingsarcastic
  
  I agree with you, but they knew this more then 50 years ago.
  Horse and Sparrow Economics

I verified the number because it doesn't sound quite right. Walmart makes profit of roughly $20B yearly, per day that is $55M, the family owns around half.
So they make like $25M per day.
That is still insane amount of money, and probably also they do some tricks to lower the profit and hide the money through some loopholes, like all the millionaires/billionaires.
Nobody needs that kind of money, so they should be taxed like hell, but not in this world
- but not in this world
  That is until people take measures into their own hands
- https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-walton-family-gets-100-million-richer-every-single-day-2019-08-12

Wait do people actually claim that?
Like I guess it does, for the rich assholes. But it sure seems to make a lot more for the other people
- Libertarians and neoliberals unironically believe that "a rising tide lifts all boats"
  
  A rising tide does lift all boats. Giving all your money to a couple uber rich people is not a rising tide, though.
  
  Libertarians don't, and it's one of the few things Neoliberals are actually right about.
  "A rising tide lifts all boats" refers to the fact that giving money to the people on the bottom of the financial pyramid who needs it the most will benefit everybody. Unlike just shoveling it at the already rich, which is what capitalism is designed for.
  Infuriatingly, almost none of the Dem leadership actually follow through on this mantra with actual policy, beholden to the rich capitalists as they are.
  
  I heard that recently and thought to myself 'yea I don't have a fucking boat' and realized that is the true meaning of this phrase. People who own boats already are gonna do great. People who don't will drown.
- My coworkers do. Somehow the reason things suck is because of immigrants. Despite being immigrants. It's the lazy people who don't work as hard as them. Mathematically removed if you look at how things work. Not to mention that all these systems are artificial ... why shouldn't we build a system that benefits everyone instead of the few?
  
  I know lemmy.ml censors, lemmy.ca as well?
  Mathematically “ignorant” I’m guessing

No, energy sources end poverty. There was plenty of capitalism before even coal, but lots of poverty.

So for one minute of profit they could pay 350 people $25/h for a full day. 21000 people with a full hours profit!

Capitalism can end poverty for sure and was definitely a step up from feudalism.. it just happens to also birth a whole slew of contradictions within the social fabric.
- Capitalism can end poverty for sure
  much in the same way that hand-grenades cure cancer, yes
  
  Hey, curing cancer and surviving cancer are two different things.

It could
If it were done right. Just as Communism really really would end poverty and save the world and bring equality for all if juuuust done right.
I gettit, capitalism as done now (especially in the US) is a joke where the rich leech the poor and destroy the world
Tax the shit out of them. Leave capitalism be, but put up taxes in brackets that hits 100% after 10M net worth. This way, you still have the raw resource making power of captialism, but the richest anyone can get is 10 million networth.
Similarly for companies, once they get bigger, taxes go up untill it hits, say, a billion in net worth.
No company shall be too big to fail, too big to not steal, lie, and cheat, too big to be a net positive for humanity
This way governments end up with huge tax incomes. Use that tax for free healthcare for all, same with education, housing, public transportation, all free, even universal income
I think that'll work a whole lot better than "let's try communism" which simply won't happen and it would destroy us all.
- Communism really really would end poverty
  Name communism that didn't significantly reduced poverty
- You're confusing capitalism and commerce.
- Won't they just pay politicians to make sure this never happens?
  
  Aren't they already doing that?
  Aren't they the politicians?
- It could
  If it were done right. Just as Communism really really would end poverty and save the world and bring equality for all if juuuust done right.
  Yeah! All it takes is a fundamental change in human nature where we eradicate greed. Funnily enough, that one little trick fixes both Capitalism AND Communism and allows us to finally reach utopia.
- What I hear out of all that is I don't mind the exploitive nature of capitalism as long as it doesn't exploit me.
  All those words and you could have just said I don't understand socialism or communism
- For all their warts, the socialist nations did actually improve the economic standing of their workers compared to before socialism was introduced. Does the reduced homelessness, better education, and free health care warrant the authoritarian measures needed to deal with attacks from America (cf the cold war, the Pinochet coup, the wholesale economic blockade of Cuba, the bombing (20% of the population, dead) and economic blockade of North Korea, and so on)? I don't know. But the idea that you have to get socialism juuuust right to enjoy its benefits is a false one. Cuba manages to achieve an average lifespan similar to (some years even higher than) America's despite the blockade.

This reminds me of a government scheme some ten years ago or so. Workfair it was called, or something.
In short, someone claiming job seekers allowance would be required to work something like 10 hours a week for a company such as Tesco, or Poundland in order to be eligible for their welfare payments. On the face of it, fair enough. The person gets some work experience and the possibility of being hired.
Except all it really did was provide free labour to companies whose profits were in the billions. And that labour was paid by the tax payer.
And no one in the government at the time either saw how bad that might look, or more likely, cared.
I still think about that.

They unironically live in NWA and refuse to acknowledge the humor. They’re not human.

And the Walton family sponsored the no kings protest!
- That's a somewhat misleading summary
  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-walmart-heiress-nyt-protest-ad/
  While Walton inherited a 1.9% stake in Walmart following her husband's 2005 death, according to Forbes, a spokesperson for Walmart told Snopes via email that Walton has no involvement in the business.
  
  Tell that to her 20b net worth
- All those 'protests' are coordinated by the oligarchy as pressure release values because they know the public is at a tipping point for rejecting both right wing parties and their policies, preventing organic protests from rising and creating a threat to their existence. They allow voters to blow some steam while giving the illusion they are participating in democracy.
  
  "All civil unrest is actually corporate psyops" is certainly a take.

Seems to work for the Walmart guys

I cannot take seriously any claim of the ultra wealthy “making” x number of dollars per minute/hour/day. That’s just not how wealth works.
- I agree entirely. The rich don't "make" any money. They siphon it from the poor.
  
  if I had a pile of gold, it would increase in value without taking from anyone. Generalized statements don't help your agenda when it's generalizing hatred towards others.
- This is whats called a breakdown... if their yearly income is X, then you can find out what their hourly and daily incomes are through rather basic math.
  
  Most of these memes simply take a net worth a divide it by 365 or whatever.
- I'm sure explaining the shell game the rich play is really comforting and helpful for the starving masses. /s
- Why not? If contractors can earn a “per hour” wage why can’t the uber wealthy?
- That’s just not how wealth works.
  Would you expand on that, in the context of previous replies that point out that this is meant as a simplified analogy of the value of one's own time?
  How does wealth work? This is not a loaded question.
  
  I think my point isn’t being well taken, or perhaps I phrased it incorrectly. I certainly agree with the sentiment that wealth disparity is maybe the biggest problem we face.
  The vast vast vast majority of the wealth of the uber wealthy come from the assets they own. If they can be said to “make” money over the course of the year, it’s as a result of those assets increasing in value and not directly tied to the “work” they put in.
  My problem with these comparisons are two-fold. One, they usually conflate an individuals net worth with income. If Elon has 365 billion dollars, he doesn’t “make” 1 billion per day. Two, phrasing it as “making” “per hour” implies their income is tied to the hours they work, and that’s just not true. It puts value on their labor I think isn’t justified.
- I get it, you have no concept of economics and refuse to learn.
- Umm, what? That's exactly how it works.
  That's not what you were told, sure. Maybe time to shed some of that naivete, though.
  
  I don’t mean it as acceptance of the massive wealth disparity, about which I agree fully.
  I meant that “per hour” implies a wage paid by somebody/ some company, and the uber wealthy don’t really collect a wage.
  It’s fair enough to say that a person’s wealth went up *x *last year, or y the year before that. But whatever the increase (or decrease) in net worth was, it’s not dependent on the number of hours they worked in the same way it does with a wage.
- it's a good approximate. the reason their wealth score increases is because there is more wealth in the world being generated to go around. Disproportionately, it's landing on their already obscene pile, instead of being fairly distributed. And fairly doesn't necessarily mean everyone gets the same, but everyone actually profits from it.
- If I said: “Same
  They must be lying by a factor of 10, no! A factor of 100! Orders of magnitude!”
  Ah now in this case it don’t matter much, number is still beyond our ability to intensely grok it
  Epic profits should get taxpayers off the hook every time. That’s a wildly leftist and a wildly MAGA take!