this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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A nice exercise is to take a small amount, like 50€ or maybe 1000€ if you have a steady job, and think how that would change your life if you were given it.
Then double (roughly) and think what you can do with that much money.
Repeat until you can't really know the difference.
No one needs a billion.
A million? Retire at 60 instead of 70, and change nothing else.
A billion? Retire today, buy a few mansions across the world, and start a few SuperPACs.
From there, it’s just more SuperPACs for a while.
A trillion? Add in a mercenary army with a few spy satellites.
You missed the point of the exercise.
What would you do with 50k?
100k?
200k
500k
1M
2M
5M
10, 20, 50, 100, 250M?
500 Millions?
1B?
Then think how many people could have a better life with just a "meager" 50K... if some billionaire were taxed slightly more...
I'm not even talking about the vast majority of earths population that would see their life getting better with fifty bucks here and there.
I mean for me anything after the 500k mark is just going to be givin away to people or communities in need. I can live off of 500k and a job for the rest of my life.
Personally I feel like I could do more good with super PACs by supporting politicians who would help those people and communities by forcing my fellow billionaires to also contribute. I don’t like the system I find myself in, but I don’t want to throw myself into the “Yet you participate in society. Curious!” hole.
Well, lots of people could do that, but are they?
Power corrupts and all that...
I get it but I don't trust the government to ever get better so I would rather give directly to the people or directly pay their bills so they don't get hit with the taxes from the money givin to them.
I didn’t answer your question in the way your script anticipated. I’m not your student.
If your script requires people to not know what they’d do with that much money, and then they do, it’s not a great rebuttal to tell them to stay on-script. That’s some Ray Comfort level rhetoric.
That said, I support far higher taxation of the wealthy. My criticism isn’t of your goal, but that your method is flawed enough to detract from it.
If you didn't get it, this is the reason:
You, and many others, use a multiplayer of 1.000 ; million, billion, trillion.
Those enormous steps exceeds human comprehension.
So use 2 instead.
Have a nice day mr grumpy!
Counterargument: think how many of those people could be put out of their misery if the cost of water was increased to $1k/gallon and all other sources of water were removed.
You can't really retire off 1 mill anymore unless you are living well below your means.
I didn’t say I’d retire today, I said I’d retire 10 years earlier than my current trajectory while not changing anything else. I’d keep working and contributing to retirement.
$1M is ~$40k/year. If you have a paid off house, that's pretty reasonable. If you rent, you're going to have a hard time.