And what do you do about the fact that this magic wand doesn’t actually exist, and that net worth is just a price tag, not an amount of actual money? The supermarket doesn’t accept stocks as payment.
Also, the vast majority of billionaires’ investments don’t even pay dividends at all, they’re re-invested back into the business for further growth.
I wish people who knew nothing about economics didn’t pretend to have any idea what they’re talking about.
Their “philanthropy” would be entirely unneeded, if they simply paid their fair share back to society
The entirety of the net worth of all billionaires in the US (~$5 trillion), assuming a magic wand could magically convert the figure 1:1 into cash (big assumption being made in favor of your argument), would foot the bill of total US government’s welfare spending ($1.03 trillion: https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS Report - Welfare Spending The Largest Item In The Federal Budget.pdf ) for five measly years.
So even if your definition of “fair share” for them is literally 100% of what they have, the quoted statement is extremely obviously untrue.
Not to mention that’s also assuming that that $1 trillion the government spends is enough to make philanthropy redundant, which it demonstrably isn’t.
One person earning $3600/hr, 24/7, without spending any of it, would take 31 years to become a billionaire.
Why are you using analogies that pretend compound interest doesn’t exist?
Even the best teacher on Earth can only teach so many students a year. You can’t become a billionaire without being able to ‘scale up’.
But, for example, someone who invents something that makes a common manufacturing process just a few % more efficient, can affect millions if not billions of products that millions if not billions of people around the world buy. Even a small increase in profit margin can aggregate to a huge amount of increased wealth.
If you create that level of aggregate value, then you absolutely have earned that aggregate sum.
Also, it is literally not possible to become a billionaire by simply underpaying employees. That’d be the same kind of linear increase used in all of the dumb ‘if you made $X every day for thousands of years (and interest didn’t exist for some reason)’ analogies, so I know the people who argue this do understand that linear growth doesn’t get you there in a lifetime.
P.S. if employees were such an automatic profit source, why does downsizing exist? If labor is a profit source, firing people is throwing money away.
It’s both.
Holy shit lol, I know it’s both! I never said it’s not both. I’m just pointing out the common misconception, that people tend to assume the wrong one of the two is statistically a bigger factor. And not just bigger, but much bigger.
“woman sexually assaults minor boy, gets herself pregnant from the assault, no punishment for her and boy owes woman child support for being her victim.”
In case anyone thinks this person is being hyperbolic here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/02/statutory-rape-victim-child-support/14953965/
you said that sentencing isn’t harsher for women of color
Literally never said that. I just pointed out that being the ‘wrong’ sex hurts you more than being the ‘wrong’ race.
White men get sentenced much more harshly than black women for the same crime, for example. That’s a fact.
None of that contradicts the simple point I made, which is that being a woman instead of a man is a vastly larger advantage in the US with respect to judicial leniency, than being white instead of another race, and yet certain biased people always seem to want to imply/argue that the latter is the primary factor, when it isn’t.
As an analogy, it’s kind of like how when people are talking about rape, discourse is typically more likely to center on ‘jumped in a dark alley’ type scenarios, even though the fact is that that is literally the least common way rape happens, and that statistically, it’s very rare for the assailant to be a stranger to the victim.
It’s not really for being a white girl, it’s primarily for being a girl.
Women get 63% lighter sentences for the same crimes as men ( https://academic.oup.com/aler/article-abstract/17/1/127/212179 ), while there is no racial gap between white and another race, whether among men, or women, that’s even half that wide ( https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/2023-demographic-differences-federal-sentencing ).
It’s only a dilemma if you’re 12.