The U.S. economy basically works like this:
Get paid $5,200.
Pay $2,200 in rent.
$650 for groceries.
$550 for your car payment, insurance, and gas.
$450 for health insurance and medical bills.
$350 for utilities and internet.
Stretch whatever’s left until the next paycheck.
Then get a lecture from someone who bought their house for $95,000 in the early ’90s about how skipping lattes and Netflix is the key to building wealth.
Home prices are eight times the average worker's salary.
During the Great Depression they were three times.
The ratio is worse now than it was then.
Credit card defaults are reaching 2008 levels.
Consumer sentiment at an 80 year low.
More people hungry than during COVID.
It's a depression for the working class.
And a golden age for the top 1%.
“Oh Balogun is just playing for the U.S. because he couldn’t make the England squad”…Folks, that is the entire promise of our nation.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
And then we’ll beat your ass with them.
It really bums me out that we have the resources to fix our society, stop our reliance on fossil fuels, guarantee healthcare, house the homeless, and feed every person in the country, but doing so would be a bad time for like, 8 dudes, so we can’t do it.
Capitalism ruined people's perception of the world and made them think it's normal to be extremely selfish and greedy when it isn't. It's not even natural to think human beings should go without shelter, food, and healthcare simply because they have no money and it's disturbing.
Elon Musk just became the world's first trillionaire.
The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk's level of wealth.
We need a wealth tax.
Our species is going down in flames because we can’t agree that some people shouldn’t have more wealth than entire countries. It’s actually a shocking level of stupidity that we’re dealing with.
🔸Scrap the Social Security tax cap.
🔸Increase the federal minimum wage to $23 an hour over the next 5 years.
🔸End Citizens United.
🔸End the tax loopholes and write-offs that allow corporations and billionaires to pay a lower effective tax rate than teachers and firefighters.
🔸Tax long-term capital gains as regular income. Trigger capital gains tax on loans against unrealized gains.
The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant profit-generating machine for corporations.
Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.
That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.
It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.
Music is made to be as profitable as possible, which means giving it the broadest possible appeal using formulaic song structure calculated to cause a chemical response in the largest number of human brains.
Movies are designed to draw the largest possible box office revenue at the lowest possible risk to studios and investors, often by just rehashing a movie that’s already proven successful in the past or by slapping together a story about an IP with pre-existing mass appeal.
Food is made to be fast and addictive rather than nourishing.
Healthy human connection has been commodified as social media intertwines with friendships and dating apps insert themselves into the development of romantic relationships.
Human sexuality is being warped and twisted as internet porn normalizes violence and degradation for the maximum number of clicks.
Attention and engagement have been monetized, creating an information ecosystem dominated by conflict and gossip designed to appeal to our baser instincts.
Advertisement is injected into every possible corner of our waking sensory experience, with any available space where the eye might rest or the ear might listen being flooded with psychological manipulation compelling us to consume. They’ll start running commercials in our dreams the instant they have the technology to do so.
You spend eight hours at the office working to generate corporate profits, then you come home and consume products to profit other corporations. You need your beer and snacks to unwind, your streaming services and social media to distract your mind from the stress of it all, your online clothing purchase to try to feel good about yourself, and your prescription drugs to get to sleep at night. People live their entire lives like this.
And that’s those of us who are lucky enough to be living in the global north. In the global south you get wage slavery and exploitation with far more toil, far less relaxation time, and no cheap products made by impoverished workers on other continents with which to comfort yourself.
All of humanity has been roped into this mess. And for what? To make the numbers in some bank accounts increase. To get some green arrows pointing upward on the stock exchange. To enable a few billionaires to buy islands and elections.
All while destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival.
This, we are told, is the best possible system we could possibly be living under.
I personally do not believe this is true. I personally believe we can have better. Those who benefit from this current arrangement are going to assure us it’s impossible and do everything they can to stop us from changing it, but we do have the means to reclaim the wealth, dignity and happiness that they have stolen from us.
They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.
Musk is worth more than South Africa’s GDP. @BernieSanders and I proposed a 5% tax on people like him.
In one year, it could fund:
- free public college & trade school
-$10/day childcare
- Special-needs education nationwide
Wealth inequality is the moral failure of our time.
An economy that makes it possible for a trillionaire to exist, while the average American can’t afford gas and groceries, is fundamentally broken and rigged.