The wealth gained by billionaires in the COVID crisis is enough to pay @ $13,000 to every unemployed American

23 thoughts on “The wealth gained by billionaires in the COVID crisis is enough to pay @ $13,000 to every unemployed American

    1. True, Jim, life has never been fair. But the super-wealthy have arranged this our government to benefit themselves greatly and shift the much financial burden of maintaining the government and society to everyone else. That is the kind of thing that led to the collapse of the French monarchy into the Terror, followed by the Empire. And to the decay of the Western Roman Empire. If you want to go down that path, well, peachy. If you don’t, you might want the system adjusted somewhat. It’s not unthinkable. It mainly means repealing 30 or 40 years of tax cuts for billionaires.

    2. It’s actually pretty simple.

      1 – Be born with the correct DNA and into the correct family. At worst, upper middle class who can pay your way through a school like Stanford, and has a moderate amount connections. At best, an extremely wealthy family where margin of error on failures is high, and you couldn’t fail your way into not having opportunities even with effort.

      2 – Once in school, find other silver spooners and use fraternities and your families connections to build a network in which you can never not have opportunities. If you suck at class, just cheat or hire a high end ‘tutor’ who does work for you.

      3 – Once out of school, while other lower income students are paying off debt, working in very low entry level positions, or as unpaid slave labor called interns – you’ve accepted a high level position in a business or firm based on a family or friend’s connections that has high power and status out of the gate – without needing to earn anything

      4 – Embrace the dark traits. Lie, manipulate, and use your power to both hold your place in the hierarchy while destroying others chances to challenge you. Hold the ‘right to work’ law directly over subordinates heads and demand work, then present that work as your own and get the praise and rise in power as you go along.

      5 – Meanwhile, as the connections rise as you move up – so does the compensation, and you’re ability to monetize it even more. Your new promotion gives you stock options, and your connections tell you when and how the exact time is to buy. Either directly from knowledge, or from the high priced personal finance group that all the executives use. Who also sides as a tax evasion firm, where your money resides in some odd mix of Delaware, Ireland, and the Caaman Islands under some shadow entity. Anything that must be left in the light is taxed only after every fine print exemption available.

      This virtually sets you up to be in the top 0.1% of society. If you make it farther to Chief Executive level, you have more tools under your belt directly controlling the finances of the company to your own personal gain. Contribute to lobbying firms to remove any oversight and lower corporate taxes. Push for stock buybacks, which raises your own stock compensation exponentially. Constantly search and attempt mergers and acquisitions, as in a merged firm you can remove employees as ‘redundancies’ and raise prices due to removed competition, and your power and compensation rises under the merged company.

      I mean that’s all there is to it. With the correct luck of the draw, and Ted Bundy-esque psychopathic traits, you too can succeed born into high level resources and connections, low to moderate skill and knowledge, and high levels of dark charisma with the willingness to step on others up the chain.

  1. This is using March 18 as the start date. Which is the market low after the earlier crash from Dow29k to Dow22k. What is the increase (if any at all) in wealth between Jan 1 and now?

    1. Exactly. Manipulated stats to try to make a political point as usual on the left. I love how they do not mention how much wealth was lost between January 1st and March 17th. COULD IT POSSIBLY BE MORE THAN HAS BEEN GAINED SINCE YOU DISINGENUOUS ASSHOLES?

      1. Manipulated stats? Really?

        Forget the dates, look at the actual studies on income inequity over a long period of time.

        COULD IT BE POSSIBLE YOUR SHIT OPINION IS STILL NOT REALITY FUCKTARD?

        Why don’t you cult members take a long vacation to the bottom of the ocean. I’ve never seen a bunch of idiots take the side of billionaires that you could fit half the entire planets wealth in a small auditorium.

        Fucking idiots.

      2. You’re the a—h—-! Having to resort to name calling exposes your lack of credibility.

    2. They did not choose those dates. That dates chose themselves because the point is about the new unemployment claims since the COVID-related unemployment crisis began. There was no unemployment crisis until the week ending March 21. Therefore, the Tweet specifically contrasts all the wages lost by the unemployed since the jump in new claims began to all the wealth that was gained in the stock market over the same period of time. The stress is that the rising stock market is wildly out of line with reality, that the wealthy are gaining wealth during the exact time when average people are suffering.

      What happened before the unemployment crisis may or may not be interesting, but is not relevant to this specific point.

      1. The point is that the stock market is a predictive measure that will always be ahead of employment numbers. Therefore the timing is everything. What this means is that you cannot use the same date ranges for the market and employment numbers without looking like an idiot. It also means that employment numbers are jumping back up now (as predicted by the market). There is no reason to compare stock market gains (which are predictive) to employment numbers unless you also bake in the time lag. The only reason to use the same dates is to confuse people who are not smart enough to realize this and make it seem like the system is broken when it is working exactly as intended. Which has resulted in the greatest quality of living for average people in America than ever before in the history of the world.

        1. The original Tweet isn’t meant to be a scientific analysis by a professional economist. It’s just an observation. In that regard, it simply points out the accurate fact that the wealthy are getting richer while average people are suffering and can’t pay the rent.

          Interestingly, the poorest of society haven’t suffered the worst in the crisis because many of them work in “essential” jobs – supermarkets, gas stations, warehouses, delivery, farms – and many of those outlets have actually been hiring. (Although hotel housekeepers are out of work.)

          The greatest suffering belongs to the next layer above them: waiters, teachers, live performers, leisure, hospitality, beauty, etc.

          And there are more bad times to come for them, although perhaps not so bad financially as in “lockdown.”

      2. Except they did choose the dates.

        If the relevant dates are to be “during the pandemic” or “during the COVID crisis,” then the start of the pandemic has to be the start date – not a date conveniently chosen to reflect the bottom of the market, some 1.5-2 months AFTER the start of the pandemic.

        The purpose of the original tweet seems to be to make it appear as if the wealthiest are actually profiting off the pandemic, when they are still deep in the red.

        1. The point is about the unemployment crisis, the loss of wages, and the suffering attached thereto. It begins when that began. Any other dates – when there was no such crisis – would be irrelevant. It is specifically about relieving the burden on the unemployed.

          The points you have created are straw men to suit your convenience. You’ve created a non-existent false argument, then refuted it.

          The actual point is this: the wealthiest are gaining wealth WHILE average people are unemployed. Things the wealthy have done at other times in their lives, and things average people did when they were still employed, or things that may happen in the future, have no bearing of any kind on that point. They chose the only dates they could possibly have chosen, since any others would be irrelevant to the point.

          When the unemployment crisis has abated and we can look at a very long-term view, the point may change. Given that the current stock market confidence seems irrational to many economists, investors may end up taking a bath in the long run, while at the same time, most people will get jobs again and the cycle will reverse. But we don’t know any of that at the moment. What we do know is that investors have gained wealth during the unemployment crisis which has caused suffering for average people.

          The Tweeters did however, word their argument poorly. The obviously don’t mean “the beginning of the pandemic,” since we don’t really know when that was. Was it Jan 20, when the first USA case has been identified? Was it in late February when it started spreading through Italy. Was it in November when the Chinese (and now the French) identified it? Was it March 15, when NYC announced its shut-down.

          The pandemic’s health crisis is difficult to pin down, but the pandemic’s unemployment crisis is not. It began when people lost their jobs, and that started the week of March 21.

          1. We’ll just have to disagree. If the original tweeters arguments was that the uber wealthy made money while others lost their jobs, they could have said so – but didn’t. I didn’t see any similar tweets reveling in the super rich losing stock valuation while the unemployment was still sub-4% (but the, I wasn’t looking for any).

            I understand the difficulty of picking a “pandemic start date.” Had they wanted to encompass the entirety of the economic impact, they could have chosen a week or two prior to the dates it hit the capital markets. But no, they picked a starting point that was after the pandemic hit the employment market but weeks after it hit the stock market. Which is convenient for their argument, but not the full picture.

          2. Except your reasoning has no merit. That’s like disagreeing on whether the earth is round.

        2. Also it’s a naive take to say the wealthy ‘are in the red’.’

          Most certainly Bezos, the Walton family, and others have went UP in the pandemic, not down.

          And what counts as the ‘red’ for the wealthiest is a joke. Even when companies go bankrupt, the bankruptcy court will still allow gigantic bonuses to executives as ‘incentives’ to get the company out of bankruptcy.

          And if it does go bankrupt? Trust me, these execs aren’t hurting for opportunity. Most will never fall into a situation where their compensation isn’t anything less plus or minus a bit around half a million a year at another corporation.

          Meanwhile, the blue collar workers have their jobs wiped out and are trying to find a way to pay rent to other wealthy real estate tycoons. Or if the company *does* come out of bankruptcy, that money isn’t going to keep jobs or raise wages – its going straight to the wealthy shareholders and execs AGAIN.

          You literally can NOT fail or have any bit of hurt once you’re in that class of power and wealth. I get sick of the shitty take that Wall Street losses somehow effect this people. At best, the money flows to certain industries.

          At worst, the execs cash out, get bonuses in first in line in bankruptcy court, and move on to another company. They never get hurt or have to take responsibility for their failures in any way, shape, or form in this society.

          1. You make good points. What I meant by “in the red” was a decline in their stock valuations relative to their pre-virus highs. Not red as in actually going bankrupt.

            As to Bezos and the Waltons , I think Bezos is net positive due to the nature of Amazon and the boom in online sales when local stores were shut down or restricted. The Waltons are near their starting point, but Walmart is still below it’s pre-virus highs (I think – I haven’t checked in a couple of days, but that’s my recollection).

            But overall, the DOW (an imperfect metric, sure, but commonly used) is still down around 10% from it previous highs. That’s a lot. And those people that lost jobs also reflect businesses closing (small, medium and big), some forever. Stores that close don’t pay rent, and real estate “tycoons” have loans to pay as well, which is difficult when rents crater.

  2. Ever since Reagan and then subsequent neoliberalism from Democrats, the combination of conservatives and neoliberals have caused this issue.

    Essentially ever since the 401K was created to take away standard pension funds, and then tie them to Wall Street, it’s created this construct where the top 1% own nearly 40% of the stock market – and then most individuals apparent ‘retirement fund’ is tied into how greedy these individuals and corporations can be.

    I use a 401K, but its at the most stable option I have, made up of mostly treasury bonds. The matching portion is enough for me, I’m not going to risk the rise or fall of my money on what the extremely wealthy decide to do with nearly have of the stock market pricing.

    You want to undo this stuff and get society back to an equitable level? Repeal the amendment that states CEOs have a ‘fiduciary duty’ to shareholders. Pick a timeframe, say, the past two years – when an individual who’s net worth is in the bottom 99% – to remove their 401K when its value was at its highest – and then remove the assets out of the stock market into a pension fund with the same matching companies already do. Freeze any cashouts from the 1% until everyone else has their high point 401K into a pension fund. Tear these fucks like Bezos or the Walton family’s market value apart.

    It’s time to untangle this shit system with real policies, because people aren’t bright enough to look at layer upon layer of how this occurs. Start with the idiotic tie-ins that originally started this system, and remove them, and force these assholes to take the hit. Not the rest of society they’ve leeched on.

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