No Matter How You Slice It, At Minimum You’re Primarily Paying For A War

Moral Heathen
Aug 22, 2017 · 8 min read

In response to ‘How 90% of American Households Lost an Average of $17,000 in Wealth to the Plutocrats in 2016’.

This is what we’re talking about when we talk about oligarchy. The billionaire class consolidates power and wealth at the expense of everyone else. In 2016, the top 1% effectively shifted nearly $4 trillion in wealth from the rest of the nation — meaning over $17,000 in housing and savings per lower-to-middle-class household lost to the super-rich. It gets worse. 50 million middle class households lost $1.76 trillion of their wealth in 2016, or over $35,000 each. We cannot continue to operate under the current system which rewards the wealthiest with more wealth at the expense of everyone else.” -Bernie Sanders

I know that a lot of people think, “I bust my ass to put food on my table and give my family comfort and I don’t want to support the livelihood of people who are not working as hard.” I get it. But considering the pittance that welfare recipients receive, that only really makes sense if you think that EVERYONE below you on the ladder is mooching. And forgive me but you can EASILY look up a trillion examples of people who are busting their ass harder for less. Much MUCH less. And here’s the thing: we do not live in a world of scarcity. We throw away so much food, so much plastic, so much clothing. The quality of plastic spoons given out for one use at Yogurtland are the same quality that I used to get as a prize in my cereal as a kid — a spoon I would use every day for a year! And we COULD invest in lots of infrastructure for solar and wind energy which would create tons of jobs and tons of cheap energy. And we could even have communities themselves invest in their energy infrastructure so that it wasn’t all centralized in one company, which would be obligated to skim additional money for their shareholders (again, somehow considered MORE efficient).

And more importantly, the reason you have to bust your ass IS NOT to pay for welfare recipients. No matter how you slice it, at minimum you’re primarily paying for a war. A war that is a complete failure — we have the military budget of the next 7 nations combined and yet we’ve been in war for more than half of my life now. And the military lost $6.5 trillion in one year. And war is a TERRIFIC way to keep prices of oil high, enabling the fuckers who are actively profiting off of my ruined future. And our army doesn’t even use all that money, they hire private, for-profit, contractors. WAR PROFITEERS. And for all the gospel about how privatizing everything that is part of the government, explain to me how giving tax dollars to FOR PROFIT companies isn’t just using my tax dollars to contribute to their profit? How could we possibly think that giving money to a company whose CEO can make whatever the fuck is going to be a MORE efficient use of money that a non-profit, regulated government task. Literally impossible unless you believe the myth that government is far and away less efficient or somehow hire from an especially lazy crop of potential employees, unlike small businesses. The only real difference is that government is constantly overseen, whereas businesses can be shady for longer because they don’t have as much oversight. I don’t want shady efficiency because all those jobs their creating are then potential exploitative jobs. That’s useless. As useless as working full time for an unlivable wage. And it’s criminal for the rich to insist that it’s the only way. Bullshit.

And even if you’re not worried about war specifically, I need to emphasize a point that I mention a lot but is one of the most critical pieces of perspective to understanding how rich people have conned us. If you count to 1 million using one number per second without stopping, it will take you 11 days and change. If you count to 1 billion, it will take you 31 YEARS and change. That is how much difference there is between a million and a billion.

Let me add some perspective:

“He gave an example: An estate worth $50 billion with $25 billion of unrealized gains would pay income tax of $5 billion under Trump’s plan — a lot less than the $20 billion that would be owed in today’s tax system, but “not zero.”” (I took this from a Politifact article arguing Bernie’s claim that the top three family’s would save $100 bil from repeal of the estate tax)

So in this example, which says that Bernie overestimated, if the repeal of the estate tax lost $15 billion in taxes, you could pay 428,571 people $35,000 a piece. And a) only 11 states would offer up to $35,000 (read: most people don’t receive nearly so much), most of those recipients do work, most people don’t stay on welfare for an extended period of time, and they are individuals who have stories, and maybe if you heard them you might think some are weak, but you’d think a whole hellava lot are troubling, sad, and compelling. So if you want to get your tax money back by scrutinizing poor people for any possible money-costing mistake, I ask that you also look above and scrutinize these billionaires to determine that they are truly 10,000x better than everyone else. Because even ONE of them being undeserving can provide for 400,000 others who are.

And reminder that they can pass wealth onto their children and that wealth can bequeath wealth SOMEHOW even though that FUNDAMENTALLY does not make sense as wealth is labor + resources and dollars are a convenient invention to symbolize wealth. So some hypotheticals:

— What would happen to the world if every billionaire dropped dead tomorrow? Vs. what would happen if every farm worker (who infamously make LESS than minimum wage) dropped dead. How in the FUCK could one be worth 10,000x more than the other? And how could it be the one who is not providing ANY vital services for life.

— What would happen if we taxed the shit out of billionaires? Some of them might leave, sure. But search your soul. Would this create a true problem? Because commerce, in some form, has existed for at least as long as agriculture, which began about 10,000 years ago. Wall Street has existed for 200 years. If those billionaires leave, do you think ALL the jobs would go? Or would we tell those billionaires that they can’t do business in our country anymore and then America just fills with new businesses who don’t need to be incentivized with billions of dollars to display any sort of pro-social behavior. All those aforementioned farmers would be MORE than happy making a low 6 figure salary and paying employees here to make clothes by hand for a livable, nay let’s shoot for DECENT, wage. And if we had a bunch of these businesses with all people making decent wages doing non-exploitative work, they will be able to buy those clothes for the higher price instead of being forced to pay Walmart prices and willfully ignore that the clothes were made by someone in appalling conditions akin to slavery. And the reason I think this would work is that I don’t buy the line of thought that says people would die of laziness if there was no potential for profit and I am not wrong! Exhibit A: EVERY SINGLE TEACHER. Exhibit B: EVERY SINGLE SOCIAL WORKER. Exhibit C: EVERY SINGLE NON-PROFIT WORKER. People work hard their entire lives and never once think it’s going to make them rich. And don’t confuse it. This isn’t about wanting to make enough money so that you aren’t constantly stressed that any accident will put you in debt. Everyone wants security. But not everyone wants to eat $400 dinners. And I think that more people do right now because we’ve trained them too. We trained them that way when we made “value” synonymous with “American dollar value” and “success” synonymous with astronomical profits. But why do we want dollars? So we can get people to do things for us. Why do we want to appear successful? So we look good to other people. Other people are our main resource. NOT MONEY. So why don’t we measure growth in terms of thriving citizens. Because measuring our countries success by growth is objectively unsustainable. It fundamentally does not make sense to think that growth can be unlimited and that there are no consequences to unceasing taking. Our species lived in relatively stable population for 200,000 years before agriculture gave us a boom. But even those early civilizations knew about crop rotation and over-grazing, and those who didn’t control for their growth and population did perish so…

This GOP plan of just erasing information on the biggest threats or, presumably, thinking they will make it to space before the real shit comes down, speaks to a common disease you can witness for yourself amongst the rich. It is the inability to understand reality. No one speaks truth to you when you’re rich unless you go out looking for it, and that takes a person with a certain type of character. And if they don’t have people around them who will speak truth, over time, their ability to understand reality and their ability to manipulate it completely atrophies. I have seen many traits of our leader in other rich people. The kind who thinks they could be a professional comedian even though they’ve never said a funny word because they surround themselves with people who fake it because… that’s their job (see when Madonna tried to do stand up on a late night show).

Side note: the economy of making rich people feel superior and exclusive is inane. I reject the idea that it is our only option and while we simultaneously eliminate all knowledge-based pursuits. And I reject the argument that we can’t get off this path of servicing rich people’s every need until they finish killing us. Let’s just tax the shit out of them. Let’s just see.

All I’m saying is, it may seem politically impossible to dismantle the system we know, the one predicated on infinite extraction and disposability of people and planet. But if what is politically possible will be the end of humanity on Earth in a few decades, then we need to drastically expand what is politically possible. And all these problems about the loss of working class jobs, the oppression of minorities, the scare tactics about different people, the abundance of unlivable jobs, the growing inequality, the looming climate catastrophe, the most embarrassing president mirroring all our terrible underlying values — they are all born from this system. Dump is a symptom of our diseased system. He isn’t an outlier, he is the rational culmination of our idea that wealth=superiority. It does not. And I personally will never coddle this line of thinking again.

Follow the Moral Heathen on Twitter: @moral_heathen or send mail to moralheathensays@gmail.com

)
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade