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bernie sanders voters be like

mostlyjudson

What 16 trillion dollar debt? I have no idea how my free stuff is going to appear. I just know I want it.

fullten

He’s raising taxes on the rich

mostlyjudson

He’s planning on stealing more from people… ok that makes sense. Just because *They* are rich doesn’t mean those people deserve to have more of their wealth stolen from them.

fullten

Yes because the wealthy billionaires that steal and undervalue labor, and companies that scapegoat paying taxes are really hurting

ohmygil

why even bring up the national debt if you don’t want people to pay taxes

fullten

I’m on the phone half asleep, but yeah, Thank you for real

hollowedskin

I don’t think OP understands what rich people are.
Like
they literally won’t even notice the taxes. It will make no impact on the wealthy at all. You could take literally 50% of the income of the top 10% and they would have to make zero changes to their lifestyle.

Money to them is just a high score. They whinge when you take them down a bit but it makes literally no difference because they’re still winning the fucking game.

queercatmermaid

They do actually 100% deserve to have their money taken. People are starving to death because we think disability payments shouldn’t be enough to live on and minimum wage should be half of what you need to survive so yeah, I think millionaires and billionaires deserve to have a tiny fucking fraction of the money they could never spend in a fucking lifetime so I can fucking EAT AT ALL.

hollowedskin

I also don’t think people understand actually how much a billion dollars is. Like. it’s such an enormous number.

We think of numbers that big like a set of stairs, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, ten million, a hundred million, a billion.

With each jump just being another step on the staircase and not realising HOW FUCKING HUGE each step is, and how vast the gap is between each of them.

Aside from the fact that even a million dollars is far more than you need, a billion is disgusting excess. There is no conceivable way one person could justify needing a billion dollars when you know HOW MUCH that is.

To put it in perspective:
a million seconds is 11 and a half days
a billion seconds is 31 years and 9 months.

Another example would be Warren Buffett:
He made $US12.7 billion in 2013. That was his yearly income, not his total worth. Just his income for 2013.

That’s $37 million per day;
$1.54 million per hour;
$25,694 per minute

How much do you get per hour? Is it enough to live on?
the minimum wage in america is $15,080 per year
That man makes more money per minute just for being alive, even in his sleep than most of you do in an entire year.

also, just using seconds for reference again

15,080 seconds is just over 4 hours.
12.7 billion seconds is 402 years and 4 months.

phineaslightfoot

Can someone please make a staircase graph with dollar amounts?

I have discalcula and have a hard time conceptualizing numbers.
I feel like that’s a great analogy and would help me.

hollowedskin

Ok so I tried and the number differences broke the weird little graphing thing I was using.

so here we have one thousand (1,000) not showing
one million (1,000,000) at one pixel

and one billlion (100,000,000) is the big pilon there.

I added fifty million in to show because that graph goes in increments of 50 million.

So how much is 50 million compared to a million though, it’s only one pixel?

so smol.
But still we’re trying to get down to a thousand, (which is ten hundred-dollar-bills.)

So what does a million look like compared to a thousand?

oh. We broke it again. It will only go in 50 thousands.
So we got to look at how big 50k is compared to our wad of hunjies.

ok.

This is why i like using the seconds instead of graphs…
But I won’t give up here.

the reason it’s so so hard to process is because a BILLION is an enormous number. there comes a point with numbers where we can’t actually process them and its just like…a lot. And more than “a lot” is still “a lot”.

So we need visual representation. Lets use pennies (thanks megapenny)

Imagine a penny. Just one.

Ok, you get a thousand pennies a week, and you end up with 52 thousand in a year. If they were dollars that’s a nice paying wage.

with me?

now this is a thousand pennies.

this is 50 thousand pennies (1 square foot solid of pennies! COOOOL)
It’s roughly how many pennies you would have in a year if you got a thousand pennies a week.

This is a million pennies

And this is a billion pennies

(Which is 5 schoolbuss sized blocks of solid pennies.)

that is so many.

The problem with numbers is that we see them written like this

1
100
1000
1000000
1000000000

And we kind of subconciously go “well… it’s only increasing a little at a time, like a staircase. When the progression is more like

10……….

100………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

1000………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ………. ……….

And so on. which is not a staircase I want to climb because it starts off reasonable and then jumps to building size, then mountain size.

We ‘add a zero’ which is confusing because it’s timesing (x) not adding (+).

to make ten thousand dots, I would copy all the dots in my thousand pile, and paste them ten times. to make a hundred thousand, I would copy all the dots in my ten-thousand-dot pile and paste them ten times. thats what “times by ten” means.

That’s what adding a zero is, it’s multiplying (x) the last number we had by ten. (i also say timesing: as in copy and pasting it ten times)
try it with a word document and see how many pages it takes to get you a billion dots, and how many it takes for 15 thousand (minimum wage anual)

hopefully this was at least somewhat useful.

Anyway, the point is that if we imagine them as dollar coins, and one square block is established as good enough to live by a year, there’s no reason one individual deserves 5 bus-worths.

phineaslightfoot

Omg this is excellent!
Thank you so much, that does really help!
The pennies in particular

Check out this awesome visual representation of how messed up our society is, everyone!

soundlyawake

I literally was about to google a visual representation of this and then THERE IT WAS IN THE POST

nierfenhimer

Seriously. It’s time for people to wake the fuck up. I’m sick of the godsdamned wilful blindness.

stappls

We had this conversation in my sociology class.

If you dont understand the wealth distribution in america, here you go

This is what OP and America thinks it is

What it actually is. Evaluate your life. Evaluate your income. This is why we need to take from the 1%

The 1% makes so much money its off the grid.

If you stack the 1% money next to eachother it would be like this

That 0% is your college students and people working fast food. Its below the poverty line. So taxing the 1% wont do shit to him.

isiwashere

This post got so incredibly awesome I’m almost glad OP posted it in the first place-almost

azuuure

Idgaf how much a billion is. You not about to take MY money and spend it on who knows what to pay a debt when you shouldn’t have been borrowing the money in the first place.

People be making policies with the mindset that they going to be poor forever.

Socialism and more government intervention is NOT the answer

systlin

They’re not taking YOUR money. You are not at the top of that graph.

And you’re not gonna get there either. That’s the myth they sell you, but it’s just that; a myth.

prismatic-bell

My problem isn’t loans, asshole, it’s that food costs money. I’d like to NOT die of malnutrition because in my world broccoli is a LUXURY ITEM, you feel me, asshole?

wilwheaton

I just can’t comprehend how the 1% have been so totally successful convincing a significant portion of the 99% that they shoudl continue to suffer so the 1% can have even more money they’ll never be able to spend in their lifetimes.

myseri

I just can’t comprehend how some people can be so cold blooded. I’m not the 1%, I will never be the 1%. But I’m willing to pay my share of the taxes so some kid could have a meal, or a disabled person could have a home, or even just so I can drive down the road after the pothole is filled. It’s a part of a functioning society, to help each other out. Plus I can’t see someone in need and think, “I got mine, screw them.”

awed-frog

On top of everything else, I think what many people don’t get is that everything that’s happening is fairly new. We hide behind stuff like ‘there’s always been rich people’ and ‘bosses have always been richer than workers’ and that’s true, but we don’t realize just how much distribution of wealth has changed in the past 30 years. Like, look at the gap between a CEO and their employees:

Until the 1970s, a CEO would earn about 30 times more than their employees. Which you may think is reasonable, or not, or whatever, but fits into the traditional ‘things have always been this way’ narrative. Today, the average is 271 to 1. How is that healthy or normal? Especially when we consider that wealth doesn’t go into taxes for the community (including stuff both rich and poor people need, like roads, hospitals, scientific research and so on) and doesn’t even go into making their own companies stronger?

Because something else that’s changed is that those überrich stakeholders don’t give a shit about the companies they half own. Again - they used to. It used to be that profits were reinvested into the company to make it stronger and more competitive and everything else. Now, the big problem is that companies tend to be cannibalized - profits go to the shareholders, who simply keep them, so the burden on the CEO - if they want to keep their job - is to make as much money as possible in the shortest time possible whatever damage that’s going to do long-term to their own company. This is also new.

And there’s a bunch of other stuff that’s unprecedented, including the fact people can now speculate on food in a more aggressive and selfish way: what used to be straightforward futures until the late 90s is now a huge and profitable market, and that’s already caused misery and damages for consumers and farmers around the world.

So, whatever. The idea of a completely equal society may be a myth, and someone may even think it’s a stupid myth - that complete equality is unfair and unrealistic - that’s okay. It’s a complex ethical and philosophical issue, and people are going to disagree. What we all need to realize, though is that no - things have never been exactly this way and this is not normal.

onecatshort

Every time this comes around it has new information, so I will keep reblogging

nuraleo

Talking as someone living in Belgium, this year, in only nine days, the average CEO made as much money as the average working person in one year. Which means a CEO makes about 40 times as much as the average working person. is pretty much in line with the ‘old’ scenario above but it also goes to show how inherently unfare even that scenario is. In what world is it acceptable that some people can earn an average yearly wage in 9 days (or less).

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

bernie sanders voters be like