I prefer watching educational videos on YouTube more than watching television, but it’s tedious digging for good content, and I’ve already seen most of the good stuff while searching for videos to put in my blogs. In case anyone else is looking for entertaining educational videos on YouTube, I made a series of posts with all the ones I’ve used on The Wise Sloth, organized by topic, with links to the posts they appear in. You’re bound to be enlightentained, and if you need help exploring the 600+ essays on The Wise Sloth, these video lists offer a quick overview that practically summarize my philosophies.
This list comes from my essays on economics and focuses on the housing market, taxes, and crypto currency.
I prefer watching educational videos on YouTube more than watching television, but it’s tedious digging for good content, and I’ve already seen most of the good stuff while searching for videos to put in my blogs. In case anyone else is looking for entertaining educational videos on YouTube, I made a series of posts with all the ones I’ve used on The Wise Sloth, organized by topic, with links to the posts they appear in. You’re bound to be enlightentained, and if you need help exploring the 600+ essays on The Wise Sloth, these video lists offer a quick overview that practically summarize my philosophies.
This list comes from my essays on economics and focuses on fixing the economy.
The most popular Youtube vlogger is Pewdiepie, a Swedish man-child who posts videos about playing video games and acting silly in his computer room. Pewdiepie currently posts about one blog each weak, which means, in the time between each of his posts, at least 1,900 civilians died horrible war-related deaths somewhere in the world, and that’s a very conservative estimate.
The civilians who survive these conflicts are only technically lucky. Over 22 million people are living in foreign countries right now because they’ve had to flee the apocalyptic death, destruction and destitution in their birth-land. That’s not counting the 65 million people who have fled their homes but haven’t left their country. This means there are about 100 million people who are homeless because they would die if they went home.
That number doesn’t count the 100 million people in the world who are just old-fashioned homeless, or the 1.3 billion people who have homes and jobs but are working themselves to death while starving in a shit-covered tin hut with no water, electricity or sanitation.
In conflict zones, it’s hard to get real numbers how many people are suffering, but we know that over 3 billion people live on under $2.50 per day. These statistics don’t highlight a few isolated travesties. Almost half the population of the world lives in extreme poverty, and there are still several billion more who make more than $2.50 per day and live below the poverty level.
Basically, if you have running water, air conditioning, heat, a bed, pornography and an education, you’re one of the most privileged people in the entire world. Drop to your knees and thank God if the worst problem in your life is that nobody loves you.
If you factor in all the money countries and nongovernment agencies spend on humanitarian aid each year, the cost easily eclipses $100 billion dollars each year. The world could afford to spend more money to fight poverty, but it spends over $2 trillion on the militaries which are displacing people. So taxpayers are spending more money on creating humanitarian crises than solving them.
We already spend trillions of dollars every year on infrastructure that is supposed to help people live functionally, but it hasn’t solved the problem because it addresses the problem in a roundabout way that creates more problems than it solves. All the roads, plumbing, and power lines haven’t saved the poor in Detroit or any other major city in the world.
This makes the problem seem unsolvable, but the solution is really very simple. All people need to be happy and healthy are food, clothing, shelter, water, electricity, jobs, transportation and access to markets. If you built a ring-shaped apartment complex with 100 million condos and offices, then dug a man-made river encircling the entire building and used that to water gardens and orchards, you could give the people living there agriculture jobs and a never-ending supply of food and water.
With those problems solved, some workers could specialize in other jobs, which they could reach by walking across the hallway in their apartment complex. Every business would be connected by one road that would never get congested. The bigger you make the diameter of the circular building, the more external markets it would have access to.
Basically, the complex would operate like a secular monastery the size of a major city. You could also think of it as a permanent, self-sustaining refugee camp. As long as the residents don’t have to pay rent, receive an equitable percentage of the profits their work produces, and aren’t overcharged for the goods and services the monastery sells, then everyone will always have everything they need, and nobody would live in destitution or fear thereof.
How would you pay for such a mega project, and who would build it? It costs about $120 per square foot to build a traditional house, but if you built the refugee camp/monastery using earthbags, you could bring the construction cost down as low as $10 per square foot. Since all that dirt will need to be dug up anyway, you can use the dirt from digging the reservoir/water channel/moat around the complex.
It would take thousands, if not millions of people to build a structure the length of a small country, but earthbag construction is relatively simple. You could simply have the 100 million refugees do the work and then move into the home they built when they’re done. Then they would have a sense of ownership, pride and shared identity with their fellow coworkers/neighbors.
The richest 1,400 people in the world have $5.4 trillion dollars just sitting in their bank accounts, not doing anything. If each apartment unit in the earthbag megastructure is 500 square feet and costs $10 per square foot, you could build 1 billion, eighty-five million units with $5.4 trillion. This figure doesn’t take all the building costs into account, but to put this in perspective, it costs $1 billion per mile to dig an underground tunnel to reduce traffic congestion. You could build a mile of earthbag apartments with a road, gardens, utilities and an aqueduct for far less than $1 billion per mile, especially if you built it in the middle of Africa, Russia or China where property values are low.
We have the money to end extreme poverty in less than five years. We just need to stop spending it on constructing and repairing inefficient cities full of economic dead zones, and build a mega-home that fills all its residents’ basic needs.
The picture below has the aquifer in the center of the building instead of a moat around it, but it still illustrates my proposal.
The legal process of buying a house has been made so complicated that you have to hire a licensed professional who has taken a course on real estate laws to help you buy your home. During the process of buying a house your real estate agent will introduce you to a long line of fees that you won’t understand, don’t agree with, and in many cases, are completely unnecessary. You’ll be forced to lock in an interest rate that changes daily for no other reason than it can. By the time you close the deal on your house you’ll have signed so many papers your hand will hurt.
The justification for all of this is to protect you, but after all the charges have been tallied up, your 30 year mortgage will cost you twice the price your house was advertised at, but you won’t know that until after your charismatic real estate agent has made your head spin with 300 pages of legal jargon and schmoozed you into signing your future away so they can get their cut of the closing costs.
The justification for charging you twice what your house is worth is because the bank takes a risk. That excuse is overdramatized to the point of being a lie. In fact, the more your bank overcharges you and the less upfront it is about those charges the more likely you are to default on your loan. Your lending institution will also deflect the blame by saying a lot of the cost is taxes, which only proves the government is complicit in overcharging you for your house. The government doesn’t have to tax you to death on your home. It doesn’t have to make it hard for your family to own your own house. They just do it because that’s the way it’s always been done, and the reason it’s always been done like that it because there’s money to be made in it.
The immediate consequences of this system are obvious: home buyers get screwed out of their money and are set up to default on their loans, but the problem is worse than that. Since there’s so much money to be made selling overpriced houses to suckers, the rich (who can build houses cheaply or buy existing ones with cash so they don’t get screwed on a 30 year mortgage) have a lot of incentive to buy up as much land as they can and build houses as cheaply as possible. This results in cities full of dilapidated houses that require constant repairs being sold at astronomical prices.
If it weren’t so easy to screw over the little guy, property values wouldn’t be so inflated. If property values weren’t so inflated people could afford to pay off their houses and wouldn’t default on their loans. Then lending institutions would not go bankrupt, and governments wouldn’t have to “bail out” lending institutions.
But the system is designed to screw over the little guy, and that causes housing bubbles, which result in millions of people losing their homes and even more never being able to buy one in the first place. And even after the American taxpayers bailed out the lending institutions that screwed them in the first place…the process of buying a house is still exactly the same as it was before. The little guy is still getting systematically ripped off in the exact same ways, and the consequences will continue to remain the same until the fundamentals of the housing market are changed.
If the government was the sole lending institution through which all property purchases were financed it could set low, stable interest rates and eliminate all the predatory fees banks throw into the process just because they can. If the government collected the interest on housing loans it wouldn’t need to impose such oppressive property taxes on homeowners. Those taxes could be slashed or eliminated, increasing the working class’s ability to pay off their mortgages. Real estate agents could still assist home buyers, but they should have a fixed wage set, say $1000 per house. Period. This is a generous sum of money for what’s often less than a week’s worth of work, and it doesn’t incentivize overpricing houses to pump up the realtor’s commission. Building codes should have higher standards. This won’t lower the cost to buy a house, but it will lower the cost to maintain a house, which will increase the likelihood that a home buyer will be able to pay off their mortgage in the long run.
Finally, how much land does one person need? Why does one person need to own 10,000 acres? The more land one person owns the less land there is for everyone else. You can argue that everyone has a right to own as much land as they want, but when there’s no land left for the poor, the effect is the same as denying the poor the right to own land. If a law were put in place limiting the amount of land someone can own or the frequency with which they could flip their property it would prevent housing bubbles. This would kill the big business surrounding the housing market, but that business needs to be killed. It doesn’t benefit society in any way. It’s a drain on society, and when you consider that every dollar a home buyer spends on their mortgage is equal to time spent at work, you ultimately pay for your house with your life. As it stands, the exploitative nature of the housing market steals people’s short, irreplaceable lives. I won’t hesitate to say that it’s a crime against humanity. If all of this money weren’t tied up in the fake fees business it could be released into the economy to stimulate actual businesses that have a real-world benefit to humanity.
But your dearly beloved politicians aren’t talking about that, and they’re not going to, and you should be asking why.
Everything costs as much as possible. When you see a sign in a store that says, “50% off,” what it really means is “Fuck you 50% less than normal.” Extortion is the norm. It’s half the reason the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poor. It maximizes profits for the rich and minimizes what the poor can afford. High prices are cruel. High prices kill people. High prices create misery. Yet, most of the world’s business owners have decided independently to set prices as high as possible so they can live opulently. Business owners wouldn’t do that if people were more important to them than paper.
2: Low wages
Business owners know how big their paycheck is, and they know how small their workers’ paychecks are. Business owners know they couldn’t get their big paycheck without all their employees working their asses off day in and day out for barely enough money to survive. That’s cruel, but it’s the norm.
3: Advertising
Businesses spend a lot of time and money trying to manipulate customers into buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have for reasons that aren’t important. Advertisements warp people’s perception of reality and make them act in their own disinterest. That’s cruel, but that’s the norm.
4: Subjugation of customer service workers
When an advertisement convinces you to go to a business and spend money on a product or service, you’re going to be greeted by a customer service representative who will be wearing a monkey uniform. You can yell at that person. You can treat that person like shit, and they’ll have to stand there and take it and smile and act like this is the best day of their life and you’re the best person in the world. Their boss will fire them if they stand up for themselves, and they have to take abuse from their boss too. And their boss will yell at them if they don’t work as hard as possible for longer than is healthy. So their lives just suck on every level every day they go to work. That’s the norm. That’s insane. Our society really doesn’t value people.
5: Acceptance of sweatshop workers
Most of the stuff you own was made by slaves in sweatshops. Most of the food you eat passed through a slave’s hands at some point between the fields and your kitchen. We know this. We know our iPods were made by people who live in dormitories with suicide nets outside the windows. If you knew that one of our family members had been kidnapped and was being forced to live in those conditions you’d make it your life’s mission to free them, but we don’t feel more than a slight twinge of guilt over it happening to the people it’s actually happening to. If all people are equal then we should be equally concerned for everyone.
6: Unequal rights
We take it for granted that women don’t have the right to take their shirts off where men can. We accept that gays can’t get married where straights can. We get offended at the idea of people from another part of the world moving to the part of the world we live in because we take it for granted that they don’t have the right to move. We accept that soldiers and prisoners have had almost all of their rights stripped away. We make excuses to justify these lapses of equality.
7: War
War is hell on earth. It’s the worst thing that can happen, and it’s never necessary, but there are lots of wars going on right now, and they’re going to keep going on, and after they end new wars will take their place. Hell is here to stay, and we don’t care. We don’t even care enough to pay attention to which wars are going on or why. We go further out of our way to find out about the latest blockbuster movie coming out, and we’re more emotionally involved in Hollywood stories than stories of people living in war zones. Where do we draw the line?
How bad of an atrocity has to happen before the world puts its foot down if we won’t draw the line at unjust wars? Based on the precedents we’ve set, we clearly don’t value our fellow-man enough to ever draw the line. If we don’t value our fellow-man then we must not understand why our fellow-man is important.
People are important. Every one of us is an animate, sentient, autonomous cosmic supercomputer. We’re the rarest, valuable and most powerful thing in the universe. Any one of us is worth all the money in the universe.
Being the rarest thing in the universe, we have the rarest opportunity to explore and experience the majesty of the inanimate, unconscious and yet uncannily elegant universe we’ve found ourselves in. There are wonders to behold, and we could have them all. We’ve got about seven billion animate, sentient, autonomous cosmic supercomputers we could use to design and create an interstellar chain of utopian planets. But we’re not doing that. We’re forcing them to assemble cheap junk in sweatshops that customers are going to be manipulated into paying too much for.
Not only are we throwing away the future’s potential but we’re throwing away the present as well. When you’re on your death bed the thing you’re going to remember fondest in life is your friends. Everyone you meet is a potential friend whose wonder you can bask in right now. Everyone is has a beautiful universe in their mind, and even if you don’t like someone, there’s someone who loves them because beneath their faults they’re worth loving. Everyone brings beauty into this world, but that beauty is minimized when you’re worked to death at a job that treats you like crap. That takes a diamond and turns it into coal.
It might seem like a lot to ask everyone to value everyone regardless of how different we are, but you shouldn’t have to be guilt-tripped into doing it, because we’re all family, and you don’t have to be guilt tripped into helping your family. No matter how different we are, we’re still human; we’re not just on the same team, we’re on the only team. We’re all we’ve got.
Every one of us count. We should value each other and treat each other accordingly. When we treat people badly we should be reminded how important we are so we don’t waste the opportunity to live, grow and experience the majesty of existence to the fullest extent possible, together.
One way high wage earners justify their pay is by saying that not everybody could do their job. So since their skill is so rare then they deserve to be paid more. This point of view overlooks the fact that not everybody can do hard labor If you took the CEO of a big restaurant chain and made them work in one of their restaurants’ kitchens for three months they’d all fail. Even out of the general public, there’s a significant percentage of people who don’t have the strength or patience to do the jobs minimum wage earners do.
Go ask any kitchen staff, road crew, farm crew, or retail worker about people they’ve seen work at their job for a week and then burn out from exhaustion or didn’t have the mental fortitude to do their jobs. Those who pass the test will always be able to look each other in the eye and know they had the metal to make it while so many others didn’t. But even though minimum wage earners have attributes and skills just as rare any upper-middle-class job. Their paychecks don’t reflect this.
2. Compensation for pace
Think of an office romance drama series like Mad Men, Suits or The Office. Imagine if the characters ran as fast as they could everywhere they went, and where ever they went they were always very busy with their hands, and they were always racing the clock while pacing themselves so they could last the day. And somebody was always yelling at them and threatening them. It would be funny if it wasn’t true.
The longer and faster you have to work the more you have to commit your total life’s attention on what you’re doing. Some people have slow-paced jobs where they can daydream all day, call their friends and family and take long lunches while getting paid very, very well. A lawyer would charge you more for his services if he had to devote his total attention to your case and work as hard as he could none stop for three months straight. But field hands, cooks at chain restaurants, and warehouse staff don’t get paid any extra for how totally they have to devote themselves to their jobs.
3. Compensation for inevitable injuries
If you do anything as fast as you can for nine hours a day for a lifetime you’re going to hurt yourself. Just lifting files or typing will give you crippling hand aches in old age. Lifting heavy bags and boxes will take its toll immediately. When you do minimum wage it’s not a matter of if you’ll develop some kind of health problem, it’s a matter of which one you’ll get. And since millions of minimum wage jobs involve handling poisonous material, a lot of people are guaranteed to die from work-related illnesses.
It’s bad enough that people are dying from work-related injuries, but they’re suffering here and now in very real, very graphic ways. Any fry cook can tell you a few stories about burns and cuts they’ve seen kitchen staff get. There are millions of people in the world who have stitch marks on their bodies from on the job injuries they got while working for minimum wage, but they don’t get any compensation. Their employers don’t even offer them health care. If you asked the employer why, they would probably tell you that the accident was the employee’s fault. Even if that were true, these injuries are statistical inevitabilities. If you put 90 million human beings in kitchens around the world working as fast as they can all day for three months cooking over hot stoves, slinging boiling liquids and chopping things with sharp knives, you’re going to end up with millions of injuries. You can repeat the experiment as many times as you want, there will always be injuries. So going to work is like playing the lottery. You might be one of the unlucky ones who fate has doomed. And when that inevitable day comes for some man, woman or child, their employer will probably find some valid excuse for why they don’t have help the person who won the doom lottery inherent in minimum wage work.
4. Compensation for degradation of off-duty time
A lawyer would charge you a premium if he had to work all day every day as fast as he can for three months. A lawyer would probably raise that fee after a week after he realizes that working that hard and that long doesn’t leave you any energy to enjoy your free time after work, and in fact, he was probably spending all his evenings just trying to recuperate from the day’s work while prepping himself for another day of marathon work tomorrow. I’m sure a lawyer could write a fantastic explanation of why they should be compensated extra if their professional work degrades the quality of their personal time. So far no lawyer has done minimum wage workers the favor of writing an explanation of why they deserve extra compensation for not being able to fully enjoy their free time.
If a lawyer worked as fast as possible for three months he could pamper himself all along the way with good meals, healthy snacks, massages and a big vacation at the end. Minimum wage earners can’t afford any of that. They don’t get to stop at cafes on the way to work. They have a hard time getting sick days, let alone vacation days. And for them, it’s not just three months. It’s their fate in life. That’s why poor people drink and smoke so much. Their life is fucked. There’s no hope for them. In hopeless times humans tend to turn to religion or hedonism for relief. If minimum wage earners got paid more I predict you would see a decrease in religion and hedonism. Think about that. Minimum wage jobs are so miserable they force people to turn to God or slow, euphoric suicide to cope. That’s morally fucked up. That’s an atrocity. That’s the kind of thing that generations from now, our descendants will look back on us and say, “Damn, that generation was stupid and backward. I’m sure glad we’re not that shamefully stupid and cruel now.” So how about we not be that stupid and cruel now? How about we compensate minimum wage earners for losing their personal lives. Better yet, let’s not take away their personal lives to begin with.
5. Compensation for humiliation
Some lawyers get to pick and choose their clients and their price. If a prospective client insults the lawyer or is obviously going to be a pain in the ass to deal with, the lawyer could charge the client extra to make it worth his time. Minimum wage earners get yelled at constantly by bosses and customers. Everyone is allowed to tear them down and use them as punching bags, and the minimum wage earner has to just stand there, wearing a demeaning company uniform and endure emotional and sometimes physical abuse from the people they have to spend almost every day of their life with.
There’s been a lot of research done on the topic of classical conditioning and bullying. If you insult someone and humiliate them every day, they’re going suffer. It’s immoral to do that to somebody. It’s downright sadistic to do that to somebody and then tell them that they have to come back every day for the foreseeable future and endure the same emotional abuse while smiling and pretending like it’s the happiest day of their life, and if they can’t maintain constant perfect bearing they’ll be thrown out into the streets to starve and die in the rain. That’s as messed up as the plot to The Human Centipede 2. If you’re going to have to spend your life eating other people’s shit you should get some kind of compensation for that. Better yet, maybe we should stop sewing retail employee’s mouths to the customer’s asses or giving bosses god-like authority to bully employees.
6. Compensation for investment of labor
You can’t build a company with capital. Investors who provide employers with start-up capital expect a return on their investment, and everyone agrees that this is entirely reasonable. However, you can’t build a company without labor either, and the workers who invest the irreplaceable seconds of their lives at work don’t get dividends. They just get the lowest paycheck legally allowable and a kick in the ass the day they quit, get fired, their contract ends, the company goes bankrupt or gets bought out.
If you invest a few thousand dollars in a company at the right time you can get millions of dollars in return. You can invest a few thousand hours of your life in a company, and you won’t even get a thank you card. You have to be a complete sociopath to think that’s okay.
7. It’s the decent thing to do
Why should we pay minimum wage workers more? Because it’s the decent thing to do. That’s why. That’s all that should have to be said. Everybody knows it would make minimum wage workers’ lives better if they worked shorter hours and were paid a higher percentage of company profits. It would make people happier, and we would live in a happier society. That’s what the world is supposed to be like. Are we not good people? At least, don’t we want to be good people? Well… let’s be good to the people holding up the pillars of our economy.
Even if you’re a complete sociopath who doesn’t care about anybody else but yourself and you look at the world through a cold, calculating perspective, you should still want to raise the minimum wage, because the empirical cost/benefit analysis of economic oppression didn’t add up.
Most of the workers at the place I work get paid minimum wage, but the work we do generates millions of dollars of profit for our company every year. The people who generated that money only see a fraction of it. They eat like shit because they can’t afford real food. They drink to forget their shitty lives, and they’ve accepted that they’re going to live shitty, hard-working lives forever. The top two or three people in company live in mansions, do very little work and smile all day, every day.
This describes most companies. The standard business model is based on a modern version of slavery that allows the masters to exploit their workers with plausible deniability. The end result is unmistakable though. The masters make all the money for controlling the means of production while the people running the economy get paid nothing and waste their lives in humiliating servitude.
I know all the excuses for why we should live under corporate slavery, and I don’t buy them. If we ever hope to live in utopia or even just be decent human beings we need to figure out a way to share profits equitably within companies using a better system than supply and demand, which really just amounts to, “screw whoever you can, however you can, whenever you can.”
2: Workers should not have to take shit from customers.
Worker’s aren’t allowed to verbally abuse their bosses. Parent’s aren’t allowed to verbally abuse their children. Teachers aren’t allowed to verbally abuse their students. You can’t verbally abuse a random person on the street without fear of repercussions. Everyone is protected from verbal abuse except customer service workers. Customers can bitch out customer service workers as hurtfully as they want and the customer service representative has to submit to it. If they demand to be treated with the basic level of human dignity everyone else is afforded under the law they’ll be labeled insubordinate and get fired.
I have no idea how/why my parent’s generation allowed this to happen, but if its’ wrong to verbally abuse people, then it’s blatantly a violation of basic human dignity for a company to force it’s workers to submit to verbal abuse from customers. Customer service representatives need the law to protect them from verbal abuse and give them the right to tell jerks to go screw themselves.
3: Workers should have more freedom of expression.
People should be allowed to dress however they want. Nobody should have the power over another person to tell them what to wear. Basic human rights don’t get any more basic than that. Being forced to wear uniforms or even conform to certain standards of appearance is humiliating, degrading and oppressive. If we want to live in a free society we can be proud of the very least we can do for our children is let them dress themselves how they want and quit forcing them to conform their identities to the soulless, exploitative standards of professionalism.
4: Stop drug testing.
Nobody with any intelligence thinks drug testing really accomplishes anything productive. People who use drugs aren’t bad. Most people who use drugs don’t use them at work. The purpose of drug testing is defeated by allowing people to drink alcohol. If there’s a legal way to get high, does it really matter which way you get high? No.
And most high paying jobs don’t drug test. Politicians don’t get drug tested. CEOs don’t get drug tested. Important people don’t get drug tested because important people use drugs, and it doesn’t matter. The only thing drug testing accomplishes is making life harder for people whose lives already suck so bad that the only realistic chance they have at any form of happiness is through ingesting chemicals. Help their lives suck less by ending the practice of drug testing or drug test everybody.
5: Employers shouldn’t get a carte blanche on contracts.
Workers are exploited, stolen from, abused, humiliated, forced to live in fear and fired with complete disregard for their dignity because people need jobs to eat. This means employers can put anything they want in their contracts and people have to agree to it to get a job. Then when the company wants to abuse their workers they can say, “But you agreed to this. See you signed your contract.” Of course, we signed the contract. We need to eat. So we had to concede to your extortionate demands. Workers should be protected from this kind of unethical treatment by the law.
6: Make shorter work weeks.
What are we doing here people? The year 2000 has come and gone. We’re living in the age of technology. There’s no reason to work 9+ hour days 5+ days a week. All we’re doing is lining our masters’ pockets with thicker pads of money. We’re wasting our lives at work, and it’s making us miserable, stressed and volatile. This is so pointless a child can see it. We should be working 7 hour days 4 days a week. You know what will happen if we do? Everyone will be happier. That’s it. So why aren’t we doing it already?
7: Create one national job board.
People can’t find jobs because networking is more important than skills. The “good old boy” system is outdated and detrimental to the national economy. We should get rid of the millions of avenues business have to advertise jobs and force them all to post on one federally funded job board. That way everyone will have access to every job opportunity.
The big argument against raising taxes on the rich is that the fewer taxes the rich pay, the more incentive they’ll have to work hard and create jobs, but if we tax the rich heavily, then they won’t be motivated to grow their businesses. This theory ignores a fundamental truth about capitalist economies: You become a millionaire by working hard, but there isn’t enough time, energy or opportunity in one person’s life to become a billionaire through hard work. The only way is by underpaying your workers and overcharging for your products or owning stock in companies that underpay their workers and overcharge their customers. So the only way to become a billionaire is to steal. The way you do that may be legal, but it’s still stealing.
One way to fix the economy is to put a 100% tax on individual’s income over $1billion. No human being needs more than $1billion, and if you made it impossible to make more than $1billion then you will eliminate the incentive for anyone to try. This won’t stop people from working harder. It will just stop people from exploiting their workers and their customers or cutting jobs to maximize profit.
Plus, you could use those billions of tax dollars you’ve liberated from the greedy to stimulate the economy by creating new businesses. If you want to create jobs and stimulate the economy… then create jobs. The government could sell on of every product. If the government used the money it requisitioned from the rich to start businesses, it could regulate those businesses and make sure its employees got paid a fair percentage of the profit their work generates. The government could guarantee its workers are treated with more dignity than McDonald’s. Plus, it could guarantee the quality and safety of its products, which this would stimulate competition with the rest of the private companies.
Best of all, if the government sold one of every product, then the extra profit those businesses generate could go directly to paying for public programs instead of paying for a CEO’s new yacht. If the government made enough money off the goods and products it sold, we could eliminate the need for many of the taxes and fees we pay. If nothing else, we could subsidize healthcare, give our teachers raises, or invest in free education.
If you believe America is a welfare state, then instead of giving money away to the poor, clear out every other floor of the projects and replace those apartments with offices and pay for it with the money the government takes back from the ultra-wealthy. Give everyone in the projects jobs right there. That will eliminate the excuse of not being able to find a job as well as the need for the poor to buy cars and gas to travel across town to demeaning jobs that pay demeaning wages.
Americans are raised on the idea that working like a slave without complaining and hoarding money are hallmarks of virtue, but some people don’t want to work like slaves nor do they want a lot of money. If the government opened businesses that didn’t set Asian sweatshop work quotas and paid their workers good wages with lifetime job security, a lot of individuals who would have otherwise turned to a life of crime to support their unambitious lifestyle would gravitate to part-time jobs where they would be happy and not bother anyone.
Billionaires could just pay and treat their workers humanely, but they’re not going to. Poverty and crime aren’t their problems. If they won’t treat workers with respect and foresight, then the government needs to step in and do it.
1: Americans can’t vote directly on what their taxes are spent on.
Few, if any, of the problems listed below would exist if Americans were able to vote directly on what they want their taxes spent on, but there are only a few minor times and places where Americans are allowed to do that. Despite the fact that Americans have no say in how their taxes are spent, they’ll be sent to jail at gunpoint if they don’t pay whatever amount the government demands of them. This is the definition of extortion, and it’s the opposite of freedom. If your political representatives don’t spend your taxes on what you want them to, then that constitutes taxation without representation.
2: Americans aren’t allowed to know what a lot of their taxes are spent on.
The White House, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI, each branch of the military operate top secret facilities the average American isn’t allowed to know anything about. There are other agencies taxpayers don’t know exist. Taxpayers aren’t even allowed to know how much they’re spending on these programs, but if you don’t pay for them, you’ll go to jail.
3: Billions are spent spying on Americans, controlling them, and destroying their lives.
In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked information detailing how the U.S. government is using the NSA, in cooperation with the military, to spy on American citizens. The government responded to this by labeling him an enemy of the state and reminding the rest of America that whistle-blowing is punishable by death or life in prison.
Since September 11, 2001, the average police department is militarizing, but they’re not using their expensive resources to protect the people who pay them. They’re using their power to hunt civilians and dole out enough fines to fill their quotas to pay for more militarized gear. At the same time, the police are filling private, for-profit prisons with non-violent offenders.
The entire world knows America’s “War on Drugs” is a failure that creates more problems than it solves. Every expert and most laymen agree on this, but America won’t change its laws because there are too many industries with lobbyists that are making too much money off of it.
Americans not only have to put up with this constant intrusion into their lives, but they have to pay for it all, and they have no way to opt out.
4: Billions are spent funding industries that rely on selling their product to the government and are allowed to lobby the government for more funding.
Industries like the prison system, standardized testing companies, weapons manufacturers, military contract staffing agencies and mercenary groups are funded almost completely by taxpayer money. Those industries then take that money and use it to lobby politicians to buy more of their products and services. The healthcare industry’s lobbyists were able to go as far as to strong-arm the government into forcing every taxpayer to buy nearly-useless health insurance and be fined if they don’t, and law enforcement is complicit in fining and jailing anyone who doesn’t obey the insurance companies’ demands. The cost/benefit analysis of funding these industries doesn’t add up to the taxpayer. They’re not getting a positive return on their investment.
5: Billions are lost on subsidies for the rich.
Private businesses that sell their products and services directly to the public can also lobby politicians to give them taxpayer money. When the government gives away subsidies to big businesses, the taxpayer doesn’t get anything in return. In theory, they should get cheaper products, but the rich don’t get rich charging as little as possible. They get rich by selling the cheapest product for the highest price they can get away with.
6: Billions are lost to legal tax evasion.
The law frowns upon people putting their tax dollars in off-shore tax havens, but there are ways to legally do that. You can also legally take advantage of tax loopholes that allow you get out of paying the same rates as everyone else.
When a government-funded industry becomes big enough to lobby politicians, they’re almost guaranteed to be able to fleece taxpayers indefinitely. For every business that relies solely on the government, there are hundreds more that will successfully lobby politicians to give them one-off payouts that benefit the business owners more than they benefit taxpayers.
8: Other countries can lobby the government to give them taxpayer money and representation in government.
America gives away at least $70 billion to foreign interests annually. Foreign governments and businesses can use this money to lobby American politicians to give them more money or vote on policies that benefit them regardless of whether or not it’s in the best interest of the American public.
9: The tax code is literally impossible to understand.
The federal tax code is so big, the IRS doesn’t even know how big it is, but it estimates it to be about 7,400 pages long. This doesn’t include state and county taxes. It’s so difficult to calculate how much you owe in taxes, people spend $7 billion annually to hire tax experts to calculate how much they owe. Even those experts are only trained in niche sectors of the tax code. Nobody understands it completely.
10: Small businesses are choked by convoluted taxes.
Working class citizens are frustrated by the fact that they don’t know how much taxes they have to pay or why, but as long as they cough up enough money to stay out of jail, their lives can go on as normal. Small business owners’ livelihood depends on their ability to navigate the labyrinth of tax codes that apply to them. If your business is small enough, it’s possible to file your taxes yourself, but if you’re not good at math, you won’t be able to open a lemonade stand. This is a huge part of why half of all small businesses fail. However, if you were born rich, you can pay someone to manage all of that for you.
11: Regressive taxes oppress the poor.
Some people would say America has a progressive tax system, because the more money you make, the more you have to pay in taxes. But consider that if you make $1,000 per month, the government will take a little over $100 out of each paycheck. If you only make $1,000 per month, you almost certainly don’t have any savings. So you’re paying 10% of your total net worth in taxes every month.
Millionaires who pay 40% of their income to taxes annually will complain that they’re taxed too high, but they can still afford to eat steak and lobster dinners, buy their own home and pay for their kids to go to college. The consequence of poor people paying 10% of their net worth to taxes every month is the difference between eating fresh food or boxed food, fixing your car or walking, seeing a dentist or buying Ibuprofen.
The 10% the poor pay in federal taxes don’t include sales taxes, property taxes, auto taxes, county taxes and state taxes. When you add it all up, taxes cripple the poor more than they help them. Once they run out of money, they may be able to qualify for some kind of welfare, but it’s not enough for them to have a decent quality of life. With or without government assistance, the poor still live in constant fear of starvation and homelessness. This regressive tax code amounts to institutionalized economic oppression.
12: Billions are wasted on corrupt, ineffective social programs that treat the symptoms of poverty, not the causes.
Millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted every year on ludicrous bureaucratic expenses like requiring a military veteran who lost his legs to submit forms every year stating he still doesn’t have any legs. It doesn’t take many internet searches to find more examples of government waste.
America spends over $1,066 billion on Medicare, welfare, and other social services each year, but poverty, fear, and misery still exist. Doubling the money spent on these programs wouldn’t solve the problem because this money is spent addressing the symptoms of poverty, not the cause.
No matter what you do, you’ll still have to pay for taxes, food, clothing, utilities, and housing. There is no finish line in the rat race. There’s no point where you can stop working and live your life free from the bill collector. You’ll always be forced to pay landlords, banks, grocers, utility companies and the IRS, and everyone is charging their customers as much as possible. Giving the poor handouts to pay banks and big businesses ultimately amounts to redistributing the nation’s wealth to the rich.
Conclusion
Taxes keep citizens mildly safe from criminals and terrorists. Taxes also build roads, schools and other services that help people fulfill their potential, but we all live in a predatory economy that is designed to bankrupt the poor, and there’s no safety net. Once the rich succeed at taking all your money, you have to sleep on the streets, which is illegal in many cities. Until you reach rock bottom, you have to live in fear of running out of money. That fear drives the poor to work as much as possible without complaining, and they’ll never be free to stop working long enough to join a successful protest. Even if they could, the police will beat them and send them to jail.
Given the choice, no rational person would agree to this social contract. This raises the question, what’s the alternative? The answer to that question is deceptively simple. In order for a person to be secure, free and happy, they need the basic necessities of life: food, water, shelter, and education.
If it costs $86,100 to build an apartment unit, the government could build an apartment for all 318 million taxpayers for $274 billion, which is well within America’s budget. This would eliminate homelessness and the gut-wrenching fear that comes from barely being able to afford rent.
It would only cost $30 billion to feed the entire world. If the American military spent 5.4% of its $664 billion budget, it could feed everyone on the planet. At the very least, it could feed every American very well. Then no American would ever have to live in fear of starvation again.
For another $100-$200 billion, every American could have free utilities and education, especially if the government isn’t paying inflated prices to private utility companies and schools.
For about $500 billion per year, every American could be housed, fed and cared for. This would eliminate the need for social security and welfare, which Americans currently pay more than twice that amount for. It would also eliminate the desperation that drives so many people to use drugs and commit violent crimes.
You don’t need to raise taxes to accomplish this, you just need to stop spending taxes on things that don’t benefit taxpayers. Instead, use the money people already pay to help them directly. If that sounds radical, then that just proves how dystopian America’s tax system has become. We’ve strayed so far from reality that sanity looks crazy.
A friend sent me a Youtube video and asked for my opinion on it. I had so much to say about it that I wrote a blog about it. The video argues that America’s progressive tax system rewards the lazy and punishes the rich. If you don’t want to watch the five-minute video, I’ve summarized it in a one-page comic below.
In case the message in the video isn’t clear, the producers at PragerU.com made at least two more, Do The Rich Pay Their Fair Share? and The War on Work, reiterating the point: Poor people just aren’t trying hard enough, and rich people are hard workers who have to feed the leeches. PragerU probably isn’t run by capitalist conspirators who are knowingly creating misleading propaganda to placate the masses into accepting a life of indignity, fear, and toil. There are millions of other Americans who have the same perception of reality and want to spread the truth as they see it.
Recently a story went viral after a twenty-six-year-old woman lost her job for writing a blog called, “An Open Letter To My CEO” about how little money she made and how hard it was/is to survive. Then a twenty-nine-year-old wrote a response that went viral. She basically told the first girl to suck it up, work harder and stop expecting handouts. She’d probably tell me the same thing if she read the open letter to my CEO I wrote five years ago.
Nobody wants to give handouts to lazy people who don’t want to work. Saying that poor people are just poor because they’re not working hard enough is a warped perception of reality at best and a straw man argument at worst. Below is a comic that more accurately reflects America’s class and tax system:
The poor are not America’s enemy, they’re its victims. The ultra-rich aren’t heroes. They’re the creators and sustainers of economic oppression. They’re going to continue to make economic inequality worse as long as they have all the money and thus all the power, and they’re going to hold onto their money and power as long as Americans justify and glorify their own slavery.
The economic revolution America needs has to happen in the minds of Americans. They need to understand how the economy is stacked against them and start pointing fingers at the real source of the problem.
_FiguresAtAGlance_Infographic(4JULY2017)_StaffNumberUpdate.png "There's no excuse for this in world so rich with resources")
The Wise Sloth 