Original artwork (using a Coca-Cola vintage ad nurse figure) and a cool Outdoors poster mockup.
OP by Mark Wallis, at FB. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1640919442727973&set=p.1640919442727973&type=3&theater
@realcaseyrollins Don't Vote Tory!! 😄
@design_RG
I can't speak to the right wing of the #UK, so I won't 😂 But over here in the #USA they seem to be the only ones concerned about what keeping the economy closed will do to the supply chain.
@realcaseyrollins The quarantine is creating a lot of difficulties and uncertainity for many people, for sure. Individual citizens, which in the USA might have lost their health insurance coverage, right when there's a pandemic which demands extensive and expensive treatment.
It's uncertain when they receive unemployment support, States are in charge and overwhelmed by the sheer demand.
However -- in the US, the return to normal talk was started by billionaires, and then spread on to others, sometimes with public manifestations with funding from some organizations.
The economic impact is huge, worldwide, no doubt. When the IMF talks about a possible Depression, that is how serious things are -- central bankers are very careful on their word selections. They went all out and throwed the faucets fully open to try and support the economy.
I follow economics and do worry about things - it's hard to recover, and many people suffer a lot.
@design_RG
It annoys me when people blame calls for a return to normal on the rich because it's completely irrelevant. Rich people and big companies are not the only ones who want a return to normal! Small business owners want it even more than big business owners.
Do we see big businesses trying to open stores despite fascist dictates from governors? No, but we see small businesses doing that. Why?
It's simple: no one can survive starvation, but those who are rich can survive it longer, because they have more supplies.
I do realize that the politicians are trying to use this to force us into socialism and have us rely on them for income, I get it. But people are getting fed up. Sometimes, Trump Bux aren't enough to feed an entire family.
It's not going to be long until violence breaks out over this and both police officers and civilians die.
🇳🇱
I have to agree with you there. When I hear people blame the rich its usually just a desire to have some evil entity to blame rather than accepting the general public are accountable for their own decisions. Though the left-wing I feel uses it even more specifically as a way to rally against a non-existant enemy. a way for them to justify increasing taxes ever upwards towards absurdity rather than being accountable for their own financial waste which could easily be resolved if they were more responsible in their spending.
I'm not even talking about social programs. They could easily cut defense spending in half, give everyone including the rich a tax cut, and still have more than enough money to cover their social programs. But that would require them to actually admit that all rich people arent evil after all.
@freemo Maybe if the rich didn't use crises like this pandemic as an opportunity to transfer more wealth to themselves they wouldn't get such a bad rap. @realcaseyrollins @design_RG
Some rich do, some rich dont, just as some poor and middle class use it to theri own advantage and some dont.
Humans are shitty, you will find shitty humans in every class and every denomination. But to say the rich are somehow uniquely responsible for such things is absurd given the overwhelming evidence of people from every class acting just as deplorable.
But of course the poor and middle class wont take that responsibility, they would rather just blame the rich. Same story as forever, the majority will always demonize the minority.
@freemo I forgot to include the #notall. I see everyone does shitty things so it's all just a wash. The difference is scale here and the opportunity granted by the economic power that super wealthy individuals have. All I'm saying is that the hatred of the rich doesn't come from nowhere. @realcaseyrollins @design_RG
Hatred for a lot of things doesnt come from "nowhere" so im not sure I'd use that much as ana rgument.
I have considered the scale argument before but it breaks down really quickly when you consider it. Sure if you consider one evil poor person vs one evil rich person it may seem that way, but in reality thats not how it works.
For every one evil billionair there are hundreds of thousands of evil poor and middle class people to match them. In the end the scale of all evil poor and middle class people is absolutely comparable in scale and effect as compared to all evil rich people. In fact I wouldnt be surprised if the collective results of evil non-rich people were to far outweigh that of rich people.
I understand the line of reasoning, but I find it faulty and ultimately caused not by the reasons given, that's just how people justify it to themselves, but rather from the desire to place the blame on any person or class of people that isnt themselves.
Most people dont do accountability too well, always has to be someone else it seems.
@freemo I don't accept your premise as true. Not all people are equally evil and not all evil actions have the same effect. When a small number of people hoard most of the wealth of a society that generates resentment. That also gives insight into what the actions of that number of people are that cause that. Perfectly conscious decisions.
@realcaseyrollins @design_RG
sure but there are still some pretty gaping holes in that logic.
For starters the evil poor and middle class people dont have any less greed or desire to hoard away money. They are just not as effective at carrying out their intention. So the distinction is mostly virtual.
Second, just because you have a lot of wealth does not mean you hoarded it or took it from anyone else. Wealth is not a pie where someone having more means someone else needs less. Wealth is generated and destroyed constantly in large quantity. It is entirely possible, and even common, to be rich and having generated the wealth you have, in fact its entirely possible for a rich person to have generated more wealth than they own (meaning they have given more than they have taken from others).
So the logic fails on both points really.
> evil poor and middle class people dont have any less greed or desire to hoard away money.
Is this actually true?
As for your second point it's so absurd I have to wonder if you live in the same world. Since there's no fixed amount of wealth in the world why the need for cutting military spending when we can have it all.
Well whether it is true or not is of course going to be hard to prove. But the fact is the rich give a larger*percentage* of their income to charity than middle class does, even if you normalize for just the percentage of income they have beyond their need to live.
So what little statistics I have to test the assumption suggests the rich are more generous to those in need than the poor or middle class is.
With that said, I dont think we can really objectively measure it and I find that to be a shallow measurement. So if i rely just on my gut mixed in with the evidence I'd suggest both groups are probably equally as generous.
As for the second point, you seemed to completely misunderstand what I said. I am not suggesting that there isnt a quantifiable amount of wealth in the world, there is. Obviously you if you have a certain amount of money in the bank you can only afford to spend as much as you have. So quite obviously you would need to cut spending to afford certain things. That has **nothing** to do with what I just said.
Wealth can and is generated, but it isnt generated out of thin air. We arent talking about just printing up some money and wham you have more wealth.
This is economics 101 so not only is it not absurd it is the accepted reality from anyone who has every studied wealth to any degree. I will explain it with an oversimplified example so you can understand how it works.
Imagine a world with only two people in it. I have 100$ in cows and 100$ in cash as well. Someone else has 200$ in cow feed. At the start this world has 400$ in it total, that is the fixed amount of wealth at that moment in time. If the person with the cows pays 100$ to buy the feed from the other person I now have no cash but I have 100$ in cows and 100$ in feed, the other person has 100$ and 100$ in feed. The total amount of wealth in the world is still 400$, everyone has the amount they had before, no one had to take any wealth from anyone else. But now I can feed my cows, I couldnt before. In 10 years thanks to the food I have I now have ten times the number of cows I owned before as they bred and were well fed. So in 10 years my 100$ in cows is now 1000$ in cows and I lost my 100$ in feed. Presuming the other person still has his 200$ the world now has 1200$ of wealth in it instead of 400$ of wealth it had 10 years earlier.
More importantly though 10 years ago me and the other guy both had the same amount of money. but now 10 years later I have 5x mroe wealth than the other guy.. yet I didnt take a penny from anyone, I **generated** that wealth in those 10 years and i am 5x richer than the other guy not because I took from him, but because I generated the wealth to make it so.
Its a simple concept, the fact that you think it "absurd" I think shows just how indoctrinated you are to a narrative even though it is so easily disproven with what we know of economies and wealth.
@freemo The world is more complicated than ECON 101 you condescending prick. Not that this has anything to do with the problem of oligarchs hoarding the wealth of the nation. For the record I'm not one for blaming the rich for everything either, but I have to give credit and blame where it's due because I again have to live in the real world and not in oversimplified abstractions of it. @realcaseyrollins @design_RG
@terryenglish Of course its mroe complicated than Econ 101, how is that statement relevant..
You claimed the idea that wealth gets generated as absurd, I showed a very simple example to disprove that. Obviously in the real world the dynamics are much more complex but that doesnt change the fact that you were wrong, wealth is, in fact, generated as a normal part of any economy.
@freemo What a waste of time you are. If you're going to make up my arguments anyway you can do that by yourself.
You also might want to take a minute and reflect on who is the condescending prick here...
YOU were the one who told me the notion of wealth generation is "absurd" and were quite condescending in your response to it.
Now your throwing a childish temper tantrum because I used a simple illustration to demonstrate why your wrong and even basic understand disagrees with you.
While I wouldnt call you a waste of space having the maturity of a child coupled with the fact that you were a condescending ass and then have a fit the second you get called out on it and proven wrong.. well I'd say of the two of us you're the one wasting **my** time.
Yes I can happily continue along without you a part of this conversation, thankfully.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
@freemo I said waste of time not space. You can't even get that right. Yes I'll find someone who's capable of arguing in good faith. See the problem is that your ideology has no answer to the problems I raised. Yet I'm the one who's indoctrinated. @realcaseyrollins @design_RG
You just assumed I have no solution to offer to the problem? lol and you think that assumption (which by the way you never asked and have no idea what, if any, I would offer as a solution) makes you not indoctrinated.
Hate to break it to you but by assuming someone has no solutions without first asking them, based solely on the fact that they disagree with your own logic... well yea, that is exactly what makes you indoctrinated. Otherwise you would have asked rather than assume.
Well depends on which problem, exactly, you want me my solution for. Presumably based on the context the issue would be the fact that we have poor and starving people who are suffering and need a way out of that situation (since the discussion centered around the false notion you put forth of the rich taking away that money for themselves)...
Like most problems the solution isnt simple, but there are solutions.
As a stop gap measure of course there is welfare. Welfare should be well funded to ensure at a minimum we should be able to give the absolute minimum to everyone who needs it to survive. That wont solve the problem but its a first step to at least keep people from starving.
The second part of the solution is to ensure that the poor and middle class can move out of their class and become the wealthy.
Since, as we covered, wealth is not a pie this is obviously entierly possible, the key is to make these people into people who can generate wealth themselves. Exactly what is needed to get someone to that point is very different for each person but but there are a few major categories if we cover them we should be able to help most people..
1) Those who have trouble succeeding due to mental health issues. This is a big portion of the homeless but also some of the poor. We have a **lot** of people in america of all classes with severe mental health issues and it doesnt help with any of the problems we face. So ensuring the welfare we provide includes excellent mental health care is vital. The insurance provided through welfare would obviously need an overhaul to get us there.
2) Another big issue is simply lack of marketable or wealth generating skills. Many have remedial education at best, or even if they are educated it isnt necceseraly in a marketable area. Therefore we need to provide free education at **all** levels, all the way up to PhD but also other marketable skills (the sorts of skills you cant replace with a machine, that takes years of training and devotion). This will of course ensure people have the means to generate their own wealth and rise out of poverty.
The other issue which is less of an issue but its there is motivation. You can offer people all the free education and training and healthcare you want but many people are intent on not doing it. Many people are not very motivated and even less so if you already have mental health problems or are low-education adult. for that reason I'd make the welfare system reward-based beyond the basic help. basic help would be for everyone, thats just the basics, enough not to starve to death or freeze to death. But anyone who demonstrates they are actively pursuing better mental health or training should be rewarded with much more generous welfare int he meantime. Generous housing for students, generous food stamps for those as well.
