He’s absolutely right. Billionaires should not exist.
Wealth concentration is bad for everyone but the wealthy. https://inequality.org/facts/
Nobody asked me, but I agree with him.
Do you think we should have billionaires?
They should have one of these next to each city-owned grocery store.
"Here at Zohran Grocers, we're chopping prices down to size! Don't lose your heads over these great deals!"
Wholly agreed. There are no ethical billionaires. Fight me.
Nope! What you said is perfectly acceptable in polite society and in fact I agree. We should hang out sometime maybe.
Jesus said it best
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Imagine life was a game. You lived for 2025 years. You worked 260 days / year. You made the median US salary.
You would need to relive that process 3,145 times to match an Oligarch.
That amount of wealth is unethical while humanity suffers. No one can really fathom “1b dollars.”
Centrists already hated him, and now he said their gods shouldn't exist.
Oooooh! He said the thing!
Mamdani added in his response: “I have already had to start to get used to, get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately, because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for, and I’m fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower, that he has since then betrayed.”
Goddamn, this reads like a response that came from a real socialist playbook. Don't take the bait on the culture war bullshit, say it's distraction from helping workers. Wow.
This needs to become the mainstream opinion. Billionaires and ultra wealthy shouldn't exist. There is no trickling down or any of that stolen wealth coming back into the hands of average people.
Greed needs to be treated as an addiction just like alcoholism or gambling.
Here in the UK 78% of people support a 2% wealth tax on net assets worth more than £10 million yet our spineless neoliberal government is more focused on cutting disability benefits and bombing starving children.
Before the oligarchs say this is "violence".
This can be done peacefully. Just enact a law that taxes everything above like 999 million (or a fewer amount, to be debated on), and if you don't comply, that's tax evasion and you go to jail. Complelete peaceful (other than the tax-person we'd have to send to arrest the rich for non-complance), comply and everyone is happy.
Voila, no more billionaires, and that wealth redistributed will let everyone become a millionaire. Everyone is happy, maybe the 1% cries that they now have a few less yachts and mansions, but like, they can still enjoy that one house, same as everyone else would also have.
You know what? I don't want it peaceful. They've stomped on people there entire lives, forced others to rely on social programs, dig through trash, and work to the bone.
I want a comeuppance, I want blood, and I want it to be that of every fucking billionaires' head rolling off the guillotine
Yes! Let’s stop this modern day slavery.
Even the billionaires would be better off without billinaires. It their relative ranking was the same they would still have more money than they could spend but it would now come with clean air, water, land, better infrastructure, a healthier world, happier people to interact with.
I'm not against people having money, but to have a thousand times more than most people can make in their entire lifetime is just taking it too far. There should be a cap after which you pay 90% tax or something
Check the progressive taxation we had in the US after WW2 when, barring the racism/sexism/otherisms, the US actually thrived and single income families could manage being middle class, and owning a nice home. Reagan fucked us, but if it hadn't been him it would have been another terrible regressive.
All these conservative lapdogs continue to fuck us all with their single issue voting and sticking it to the libs.
I'm pretty judgy right now so imo anybody voting for GOP candidates in the US is either gullible, brainwashed, semi/fully mentally deficient, or is so racist or scared of other people's peepees that they will vote against their own best interests.
Problem is billionaires don't make "income" and it's quite difficult to even know what they own, let alone how to tax something like unrealized gains on stock holdings that they are using as leverage to get loans
At some point, somebody convinced people that unrealized gains were not actually income because you don't know for sure that you'd make that money, and I think that was a bad idea. Maybe unrealized gains aren't 1:1 the same thing as income, but the calculations of an income equivalent aren't going to be complicated.
Somehow property taxes are okay, though, even though we haven't realized the gains!
Once you go beyond $100,000,000, there is no measurable difference in lifestyle. However, power accumulates. That amount of power shouldn't be in the hands of so few.
Lmao that's because we shouldn't have billionaires
The wealth of the rich is still growing and it will continue to grow automatically until the middle class ceases to exist. If we do not take the assets back, it will become impossible for normal working people to ever buy a house, or have any economic power over their own lives at all - nevermind the political control or the media manipulation.
Extreme wealth concentration is THE biggest issue facing society. Mamdani is absolutely right.
He is right.
Imagine a "billionaire" in the wild: An animal sitting on a vast horde of food that it could never eat while others starved around it ... yea, it would not last long.
Imagine a "billionaire" in a living body. A corporate money making entity would basically be a cancer that had to be removed to save the life of the patient.
Based as fuck. The fact that the establishment players disagree is extremely telling.
Preach!
Bring the Left back in this country finally!
That’s entirely up to us. We need to flood all primaries, just like we did the NYC mayoral primary.
He's going to be assassinated, isn't he?
Nah, the mainstream media will just stop reporting on him, the social media algorithms will be tweaked to hide him, and when it comes to the election, people will go "Ugh, who is that Muslim sounding guy? I'm voting for Barron Trump."
No wealth above a certain amount should be inherited. There is no moral justification for absurd amounts of intergenerational wealth.
One of my favorite hypotheticals is that once someone gets to a billion money they get a trophy that says "I won capitalism" and anything over the limit goes to folk who need it.
Knowing greed, people would certainly find ways around it, but a gal can dream
This guy sounds pretty based!
One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.
-Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, 1792
Or, put in modern terms: There is no such thing as an innocent billionaire.
Alright, now I HAVE to donate to his campaign.
Here's the link for those who need to do the same after hearing this: https://www.zohranfornyc.com/
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to believe that's a controversial opinion. Most people will never meet a billionaire in their lifetime, let alone become one.
They could just stop impeding progress and let the working class have things like healthcare and a living wage. Guess that's too much to ask and they would prefer guillotines?
These people could still be fabulously wealthy and do anything they want for their entire lives while also ALLOWING for a healthy middle class and things like universal healthcare and living wages.
I capitalized "allowing" because I think it's absurd we're living under their domination and I think it's time we forcibly take what we need from them. The time for being amicable is over.
It's not that we shouldn't have billionaires. Its that we have billionaires when we have people living on the streets because the rent is so ridiculous. Its that we have people dying on the streets because they cannot afford health insurance. The gravy on the shit-fest is that billionaires are actively bribing the politicians to prevent those policies from being implemented. That is the textbook recipe for guillotines.
He's right. Let's see if people could live off 999 million in assets.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
And he's right.
By any measure, the exidtence of that great of a disparity in wealth in a society is evidence of the failure of the systems on which that society is built.
It's akin to if you were responsible for caring for a field of crops, and you ended up with a field in which two or three plants were enormous, bloated and overgrown. a few were more or less healthy, snd the rest were weak and shriveled and starving.
That rather obviously would mean you'd failed.
What is the other sides' argument for why we SHOULD have billionaires?
Genuinely asking if they have anything tough to contend with or is it just another critical avoidance of theirs?
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