Re:Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
by onlyrealcuzzo on Saturday March 01, 2025 @01:30PM
(#43222100)
You don't get $400B by stealing pennies from poor people.
For one, there aren't 100m poor people in the US. Not even close.
Re:Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
by Supermancho on Saturday March 01, 2025 @04:30PM
(#43223885)
Somewhere around 45m in poverty in the US (2023), already counting around 1m homeless.
Re:Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
by onlyrealcuzzo on Saturday March 01, 2025 @08:27PM
(#43226136)
First - "poverty" is up to $14k per year. Many of those people are "poor" - but probably not the majority, and definitely not even close to all.
Second, billionaires have almost $7T in wealth - the top .1% are at about ~$20T.
They didn't get any meaningful percentage of that by taking pennies off of 45M. You'd need to take thousands. And they just don't have it. That's almost $450k per "poor" person.
That's more than the median HH wealth in the US.
If you look at the "actual poor" - you're likely looking >$1M per person.
You simply cannot "steal" that from the "poor" (who have almost nothing to steal, by definition).
Even if you amortize that over decades - it is just not how it happened.
IMO the main thing they extract from the working poor is time - what they're stealing is the excess value between their labor and the value is creates, and technology has made it easy to do this at a massive scale. So it's less $1 from each person, it's 8 hours per day from a million people makes 1 person a billionaire.