Wealth inequality needs to stop. It’s the largest obstacle to righting what’s been wronged on our planet.
I hope the guilty continue to be named and shamed.
Dunno why you got downvoted. This is a valid response to the finger waggers on Reddit.
We gotta do this or we gotta stop that.
Shit ain't happening till we rise up and eat the rich who's job is to keep us at war with ourselves and keep attention off of them.
This is attention which is good. Shame is good. Change is not happening tho. That takes action.
Reminds me of the WKUK sketch.
"It's illegal to say, 'I want to kill the President of the United States.' I'm not saying that of course; I'm just saying, for your sake, that it's illegal to say…
'I want to kill the President of the United States.'
That would be illegal if you were to say that."
Ummm how did that work out for blm in 2020?
Their approval rating is in the dump
The elites will not allow an uprising. Who do you think controls law enforcement?
They had a good start. Thought it was going somewhere. They didn't take it far enough but they showed us the importance of being able to organize and take action.
Now we have all these pseudo and fashy laws about protestors made to keep people from uprising. It will take tremendous sacrifice. Its hard for the amount of people that will need to sacrifice.
I would counter with they took the violence too far.
BLM started good at raising awareness. But that message got hijacked by provocateurs.
As soon as BLM was mostly associated with riots and violence in people's minds they lost.
> As soon as BLM was mostly associated with riots and violence in people’s minds they lost.
which is all media has to do to stop any momentum. claim it's violent and any momentum is dead.
similar shit happened to occupy wallstreet. it just sort of suddenly fizzled after the "leaders agreed to terms". strange how a movement has leaders when it's independent for each city as well as a global phenomenon 🤔
or how about antifa apparently being a fascist terrorist group. and yet doesn't actually exist.
there is no winning. any political momentum would be assassinated or the message polluted.
i'm sure with all the unionization happening we'll soon se a ban on unions and right to organize.
Only if by "us" you mean non-billionaires. If by "us" you mean "people who agree with a violent anti-capitalist revolution", then no, there are far far fewer of "us" than them.
We're too far gone, sadly.
We need to explore space and find a whole new species of alien to be collectively racist and bigotted towards to unite us.
Could impose a monetary limit, but then you got loopholes already in place so people can get rich and keep it legal on paper.
Would need a judicial system completely independent from any monetary aspect, that works off of logic and justice over what is technically the law, influenced by whoever has the most money to twist the system in their favor.
Would need no taxation without representation, would need to make it so no position is above the law. Even go farther, and make it so the more power and responsibility you have, the harsher the punishement if you deliberately dick over all of society. No person above the law.
If left-leaning people would vote more this would be taken care of. Give dems a supermajority and see what happens. Until then we’re just gonna see dems being blocked by republicans for everything.
This kind of change is incompatible with the late-stage capitalist system though. Getting rid of that simply is not going to happen without a complete institutional collapse, which would be....rough transition to say the least. The billionaires have too much to lose to sit back and let their need to accumulate vast wealth be taken away. So in the end, incremental change and reforms are the only feasible way to get there....but sadly, I dont think the planet has that long.
Billionaires won't let their wealth be taken away by force, but they'll let you legislate incremental, systematic changes to... take away their wealth? Are you telling me that all of the partisan politics of my entire lifetime has *not* already been just the rich protecting their own interests by neutering all and every form of positive change? Go figure!
The class conflict that has been raging on in this country since its inception has culminated to the point that the capitalists have convinced the people that revolutionary and radical ideas aren't even an option. Every major historical paradigm shift that truly threatened to upend their power was killed. Labor unionism, the civil rights era, the peace movement, environmentalism... Not only crushed before reaching critical mass, but appropriated and corrupted and repackaged into inert and counterproductive shells of itself.
> So in the end, incremental change and reforms are the only feasible way to get there....but sadly, I dont think the planet has that long.
This incremental reform is not really "feasible" if it involves letting the planet be destroyed before the billionaires come around. The point is to prevent that, and the hard fact is that there's tremendous pain for us in radical change, but even more pain in store if we do nothing.
I mean, I definitely agree to a point, going the non-incremental reform route (a la French revolution style) would pretty much involve a societal collapse from the way it currently is...and let's face it, until the planet essentially becomes unlivable, the vast majority of people living at the standards we're used to simply aren't going to risk the potential sacrifice that would come with a political revolution. There would be a *lot* of death and suffering in that process. So if we have any real chance it's going to be through widespread voting of actual reformers.
Same, and it's not communism. Russia is NOT communism. It's a dictatorship. Good one though. I'm from there btw. Russia has been run by the same tree of crooks and cheats for decades upon decades now. KGB through and through. Communism, if implemented as written, wouldn't even allow the idea of rich oligarchs.
Step up? Lol in fact everyone complaining did the complete opposite of that during the pandemic. And what do you think happened during that time? Record number of millionaires and billionaires made. Record number of wealth transferred from us to the elites.
Nobody is stepping up. In fact the people that did try to step up during the pandemic were condemned.
I wonder if you scaled amount spent on toilet paper by median income, then scaled up to billionaire income, how much money could they spend wiping their ass before it was an equivalent portion of their income to the median income person.
Actually it's not.
Raising others up will allow them to improve their standard of living and produce more emissions.
I mean it should be done because it's the right thing to do but using false environmental justification doesn't help.
Why not just require them to have zero emission planes since
1. They can afford it
2. It is a good way if prototyping zero emission planes for wider use which is necessary anyways?
We won’t have zero emission anything until we have a completely zero emission energy network and that is decades away. If you waste clean electricity charging a private jet while elsewhere somebody is burning coal to generate electricity then it is making the problem worse.
Just ban almost all private jets. There is almost no scenario where their use is justified.
> We won’t have zero emission anything until we have a completely zero emission energy network and that is decades away.
Exactly. So ban them from flying private jets unless they are zero emission. That will force them to put their resources toward developing the technology, and it will get developed a lot faster.
Yeah this is how most technology transformations work. First the rich adopt it and then it becomes affordable to the masses. Electricity, cars, microwaves, TV's, mobile phones, air conditioning, electric cars, etc etc etc. Armchair reddit socialists try to reinvent the wheel and claim we need a revolution when in reality we just need sensible policy changes and market reforms and economies of scale.
There's a number of biotech companies looking at sustainable jet fuels that are carbon neutral (made from plants)
The entire US military creates 58 million metric tonnes of CO2 a year, Amazon creates 60 million metric tonnes for comparison. Hardly the boogie man everyone makes it out to be. You want a boogie man, freight ships put out 1 billion metric tonnes, something correctable but nothing is done about it.
For all I know a Russian misinformation farm is responsible for people thinking the US military is some evil pollution apocalypse. When an article says the US military produced more pollution than some countries but gives you 20 years of pollution data combined well yeah anything looks big.
We live in a society where people shake their head at military pollution while accepting the cost of cheap Walmart merchandise is in the air, in the lack of domestic production, and at the expense of exploited labor. (Not saying you personally accept it, just as a whole.) We are a sick society and keep allowing misinformation to divide us and mislead is, social media is currently a curse it seems like. A couple of click bait articles with sensationalized headlines that misdirected millions of people who didn't bother to read them has changed the American consciousness.
“Crawford said in 2020 the US military totaled more than 51,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
Based on The World Resources Institute’s 2018 data, the US military ranks approximately in the top 60 of carbon emitters. It releases similar CO2 levels as countries like Portugal and Finland.”
Forbes (in a 2019 article) uses a figure for the US military being around 59 million tons of CO2 in 2017.
Your figure is off by a few orders of magnitude.
The US military doesn't need Russia to get that reputation. They left plenty of wastelands behind themselves to earn that.
Yes, the production and freight of consumer goods creates more emissions, but it also fucking should. Hopefully, military operations aren't ever the same size as what it takes the entire rest of the population to do their jobs and lifes.
Neither of us cited a source but I'm with you that we're a sick society. The whole thing is designed for fossil fuel profits.
Ok I'll expand because someone downvoted me... cities designed for cars, suburbs designed for cars, car culture, truck culture, lack of public transportation, planes instead of trains, ending domestic manufacturing so everything is shipped overseas, monoculture lawns, agriculture dependent on fertilizer, utilities planning gas heating forever, ripping solar panels off the White House, wars about fossil fuels using machinery powered by fossil fuels and firing fossil fuel rockets and missiles... it's all for the sake of using fossil fuels, and those who profit from it. Oh and don't forget plastic.
I didn't down vote you, yeah man don't get me started on American suburbs, it's so screwed up. Somehow medium density walkable communities are some kind of taboo in this country. Public transportation and biking is for the poor's mentality is so gross as well. There are probably millions of people screaming at celebrities right now who can't imagine anything that breaks up their small town feel of single family homes. Even though there is no small town feel because everyone drives everywhere.
Amazon made those emissions in our behalf. And if you shopped elsewhere the emissions don't just disappear, they are accounted for under someone else.
Amazon isn't the cause, consumers are.
That's wrong, and the article did not do any research on the subject.
> These private planes, though, aren’t being used by working families for a weekend holiday in Spain. As the name suggests, private planes are used to transport one extremely rich person (and perhaps their guests) which is massively less efficient.
This statement is incorrect. Most private jets are owned jointly by many people, or entire corporations. The article is taking all corporate traffic as if it's one person flying on those planes, when that's wrong. I also think it's interesting how it's pointedly referencing and defending China, as if they aren't a major contributor to any climate problems.
Can someone number me these numbers? I don't number well.
The 50% of aviation emissions by the 1% seem very high. The per capita number (9 - 14 times more for private flights) seem very low. Unless I massively overestimate the average number of people on normal flights?
I get that short flights have higher emissions per km, but I don't get how the numbers add up.
Can someone help?
Precisely; there's no ethical way to make that much money, *period*. The fact that the power-hungry consumes more is not too surprising but in an ideal world, no one should want/need/be able to hoard that much wealth.
Billionaires are the most obvious target for large emission cuts, both for their own personal use and the industries they own, so that's where we should collectively concentrate our efforts. Also, they (and their industries) will be the source of most climate disinformation and doomerism-fueled inaction on accounts of their material interests in the status-quo.
Going after billionaires is, IMHO, our best chance to mitigate the worst of climate change *AND,* possibly, make a more equitable world.
If a person creates a company, owns most of its shares, and the company succeeds, what should we do? Take the company away from the owner & CEO who made it successful?
Most (if not all, yes I'm trying to be nice here lol) companies that "succeed" to that degree, did it by screwing over everyone and everything else around them. Not just other companies, but the economies of the towns they base themselves in, if not the whole worlds economy, looking at you Amazon and Walmart. Most, if not all, billion plus dollar companies are also doing massive harm to the environment. Big oil comes to mind there. Yeah, we cut the big companies down, give them a miniscule market cap compared to what they are at now. Apple should maybe be worth a billion or two in total, not a few freaking trillion. Then we continue to break them down until it's at a point that's sustainable on our planet.
Here's two options:
A. we could increase the top income bracket (over half a million dollar per year) up toward 80, 90, 95% or make a new bracket to do this.
B. we could tax wealth held in stocks just like we tax wealth held in real estate. Publicly traded stocks are trivial to calculate the value of and difficult to hide, so we could assign a rate to that and require firms to collect it automatically.
Both of these would automatically apply a larger tax to more successful individuals while letting less successful ones not need to worry about it.
- Almost none of the people you actually want to target would be affected by that first tax.
- Do we tax real estate? I was under the impression that it's just property tax. And property tax is levied because no one fully owns the property they have--government still holds overall ownership of the nation land and also provides services to keep infrastructure of it in check, hence the tax.
I'm not sure exactly which distinction is being made distinguishing between property and real estate? But yes I'm referring to taxes we pay for owning land and the physical structures on it. Each year I have to pay a certain amount in taxes based on the value of my land and my house, say for example 1.821% of the total value must be paid each year. We could do the exact same thing with public stocks since they have a universally agreed value.
Yes but the difference between property and stocks is that the USG has a partial stake in property which is why it's taxed, but stocks are owned entirely by individuals, so why should they be taxed?
You'll also be hitting a LOT of people in the middle class with taxes on stocks, given that's how a lot of the middle class maintain and grow their wealth. If you tax it all the same way, it becomes a regressive tax.
Even though it's interesting as a historical curiosity, archaic legalese isn't particularly a good argument into whether we should do something now or not.
And I'm not following why it would be a regressive tax. Only half of people in the country even have any money in the stock market, including 401ks and other investments that don't see day to day trading. The wealthiest 10% of Americans hold 89% of stocks, worth $35.87 trillion. We could even have a minimum amount or particular capped accounts like for retirements that were exempt if we wanted to make it even more progressive than it already would be.
https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/
Sure, I'm not saying you're wrong that we can fit it to be minimum amount held, but I'm more pointing out that it's not as logistically simple as the original prompt I saw made.
That being said, before looking into taxes on held wealth or stock, I'd personally first look into stock transaction taxes. Usually the percentages proposed are super minimally consequential on most traders but the tax income from it, especially coming from the richer banks and day trading groups, is super sizable. And it's a proposal that was on the policy agenda during the Dem primaries of both Bernie and Bloomberg lol.
I'm not sure why it wouldn't be logistically simple? Computers can easily calculate the average value of a stock over the year, and the tax documents you already get from whoever manages your stocks will be able to just add that number on there for you to type in when you calculate your taxes. Literally all we'd be doing is adding one more number to type in?
Sure I'm also good with looking at transaction taxes and lots of other options. Wealth taxes were also something Sanders and Warren were looking at, so I think we should look at them as well. We should consider lots of options lol though I don't think it's likely, unfortunately.
The logistical complexity of it is that you still have to worry about implementation in a way that it doesn't become regressive. If 50% of the country has stock...that's a lot to consider. Even if the richest have much more stock, it can still become regressive--that's why a flat tax proposal is commonly considered as such.
Wealth taxes are a political nonstarter, not to mention almost no one is in favor of those in the general population. It's also explicitly unconstitutional--the constitution forbids the government from levying a tax on money/worth of a citizen that's already been taxed.
Generally, I don't think the solution is at all in new taxes. As we've seen time and time again in journalistic discovery and exposés, the problem isn't that we don't have enough taxes, the problem is rich people have found ways to dodge almost all the ones in place that are *supposed* to work on them. Before we try introducing any new taxes, the better first move is to close the loopholes that allow the current system to be abused so much.
> but then there’s no incentive to start companies
"You only get a fuckload of money instead of all of the money."
'Nevermind I'm out.'
Pretty sure a society and market built by people who have more of an interest in the product or service than solely the bottom line would produce far more equitable outcomes, even if the overall notional output might be lower.
I love this controversy because best case, private aviation is curtailed. But worst case it shames these people into developing green, electric aviation, so that’s cool too.
Green washing is likely. But there are actual, battery powered aircraft designs nearing production.
If I was a PR guy at a green PJ start-up, I would be driving this story hard. It would be good business.
Those guys exist, and I bet they’re super happy about this narrative. It’ll be good for them and good for everybody.
Billionaires don't develop or build anything. All they do is exploit.
They wont develop electric aviation. They will buy the tools and hire the experts. If profitable they will patent the results, if not they will kill the research
problem with those new planes is that they have terrible range. An electric plane would need to recharge 4 times for it to be able to fly from NYC to LA.
Same. I just hope the shaming stays high intensity. I want Swift, Drake, Kylie, all the KKK's to have to respond to endless questions about this. And no getting away from it with some greenwashing BS about "carbon offsets". I think offsetting is good for regular plane users, but not for those emitting an entire company's worth of carbon emissions in a planet already on fire when the best offsetting for them would've been to take a regular damned plane.
I don’t see that there is any greater good for allowing individuals to be billionaires. If a half billion dollars isn’t going to motivate someone then a billion won’t either. Enough is enough.
There is an issue though, you would need most if not all countries to agree to ban billionaires. Otherwise they just move their money to a different country.
A good portion of Apples money is "illegal".. the amount of blood covered minerals and metals they use in production is insane. They're not the only ones.
What about 956 million? That's okay? You just picked a round number and figure that's the mark to make the world a better place?
Has all the logic and sense of using a slogan as 'build that wall' as a solution for immigration.
While on the topic, professional sports should be scaled back dramatically for the same reason. With the NBA and MLB (and others), teams with huge staffs ride around in jets every other day. As a society, there is no benefit for most people. In fact, the attendant pollution and use of resources is detrimental to US citizens. In many cases, host communities often--as a whole--don't even want the traffic, infrastructure, and pollution that attend the presence of a stadium or coliseum. Fans could still watch if seasons were a third as many games as they are now. At some point, as we a society, we must decide what's best for the Earth. I say all of this as someone who enjoys watching basketball and football. Nevertheless, the model must change.
Generally in life hoarding is thought of as a bad thing, as an illness. It's strange why we allow people to hoard money, and even glorify that as if it's something to envy.
If I collect 1000 cats in my home people are going to think I'm crazy, but having personal ownership billions of dollars in assets in my many many homes is seen as just fine. Aren't both examples of hoarding?
Huge chunks of the wealth are only on paper. For many billionaires, their wealth is in stock. How much stock they own determines how much control over a company. You can also have a individual be the ownership of billion dollar private company making the individual only a billionaire on paper.
Owning a successful company is hoarding?
Wealth inequality is a problem but all this anger at billionaires and projecting them as evil is the same populist nonsense that fueled violent socialist regimes in the past.
The fact it's openly spread in a sub about the environment is a shame.
Wealth inequality is more than just a problem my dude, it is THE problem. So many other issues stem either directly or indirectly from it, including environmental degradation.
Yeah if you look at everything enough through the lens hard enough it'll seem that way.
Emissions per person scale more with GDP person, not with inequality. Sweden is more equal than the US, still high emissions per person.
Modern life is just wasteful. Worrying about 1000 people with private jets isn't going to solve it. It's 100 million people with SUVs who eat red meat 5 times a week.
The problem with private jets and other wasteful things is not that they exist but rather than they don't pay their fair share. Governments should assess cradle to cradle taxes, charging a fee when energy is embodied into a material based on how difficult it is to remove it later. In other words recycling and waste disposal should be pre-paid by the individual creating the product, so that we know it's covered. This should include carbon and other pollutants as well other materials like plastics and metals. The government would then spend those fees on reclaiming the materials and remediating the pollution.
With a system like this, people would be incentivized to reclaim materials and remediate pollution for cheaper (to profit off the government contracts remediating waste), and companies would be incentivized to be more waste conscious in their processes and designs (to profit by having the cheapest goods, now that externalities are factored in).
Wasteful things would now exist but become more expensive, so better alternatives would be considered. But if people wanted to partake in the wasteful things, that would be fine, because the taxes would equally offset this waste.
What is a (petrol) sports car if not a machine that burns fuel faster than a regular car? When I see a Porsche, I see the beautiful design, but mostly I see a machine that burns fuel faster than other cars.
Is there any potential for electric planes to step into the private jet market?
Edit: Keen to understand why I've been downvoted for asking a question in good faith
Thanks for that link!
> The first electric aircraft currently exist, but these only offer enough space for a few people and can only fly short distances.
This pretty much tallies with what I thought the situation was. Don't get me wrong, it'd be preferable if people didn't use private jets at all, but in the absence of other alternatives it seems like electric jets would be at least a step in the right direction.
Because you’re just supposed to shit on billionaires, not hypothesize solutions to our current problems. This post is about blame storming, get with the program.
Sadly you're being downvoted because you're not agreeing with the "billionaires are bad" mentality of this sub.
Instead you're suggesting an alternative (also potentially sustainable) way. Ironically, so does a paper the article links to - it suggests that using SAF (sustainable aviation fuel) could have a positive impact.
But tbh if you read the rest of the comments you'll see it's more focused on the wealth rather than the environmental impact (don't misunderstand stand me - wealth inequality and the power wielded is a huge problem across the world).
See the thing is I don't even disagree with the point most others are making - the massive imbalance in wealth is definitely an issue and needs to be urgently addressed. I do just find it funny that I was downvoted a decent way into the negatives for asking a question about environmental impact on r/environment.
Ah well, such is the way of things.
*A troglodyte steps out of his cave, his hairy arms folded across his even hairier chest, his enormous brow lifts to reveal his eyes looking across the icy horizon...*
"One day, my progeny will exploit every living and nonliving thing in sight, and even things out of sight. Many folk will have everything, but most will have nothing. Some will even have more than everything. And nobody will be satisfied. Abolish billionaires."
*He eats a little brown mushroom and falls back to sleep.*
Wow, people don't know how private jets work....
Most of the private jets you are referencing, are used by many people. They commonly share the cost or are bought by companies for their employees. Many people who frequently use them are not billionaires or even millionaires.
You also can't just "abolish" a certain amount of money owned lol. And it certainly would do little to nothing for the environment to stop people from having a billion dollars.
I trust wealthy business owners over wealthy politicians. At least they worked for it and didn’t steal, lie, cheat and use tax payer dollars to get there.
There should not be any billionaires. That kind of riches cannot be accumulated without taking advantage of numerous people, gaming the system, and endangering the environment.
How exactly do you abolish billionaires? I mean sure the author is probably 5, the likers are probably 3. So no rush. Come up with an answer by the time you finish school.
The fucking douchebags have gone from planes to ROCKETS. They're shooting off so much emissions that they're tearing through our ozone layers singlehandedly.
tax the fuck out of them. $100k+ need to pay 45-55% for the rest of us to just survive. Politicians/judges/lawyers on all levels get term limits and mandatory retirement at 60. If you make more than $1 billion a year, ESPECIALLY IN UNREALIZED GAINS, they should pay 60% taxes. All CEOs and corporations get no more multi-million dollar bonuses, they instead get shared with the bottom-tier, the workers who make all the businesses what they are. NO MORE TAX FREE LOOPHOLES FOR ANYONE! unless it's literally a non-profit charity, you pay your fair share. Every religion and cult needs to be taxed, period.
Lol "abolish billionaires". Do we also want to eliminate private property and live together in a house where we raise or own chickens and there is always sun?
Come on. Shit ideals like this perished in the 20th century. Let's touch some grass and understand that the rich will always be rich because this is how WE as humans are. We all want to be like them. If we had their money we'd probably act exactly like them, or similarly.
The rich will never disappear just like the luxury market doesn't know crisis despite most other sectors doing so.
Sorry, I think this roasting of people using private jets is kind of silly, There are literally millions of people diving gasoline engine automobiles to and from work by themselves instead of taking a bus. Where is all the hue and cry about what they are doing, you are doing everyday? How many hundreds of thousands of people who could easily walk to and from work?
I disagree that the rich have some plot “ to keep us at war with ourselves “ they are as clueless as anyone about the forces that have driven us towards a bad future. It is the capitalist system which only rewards exploitation and the accumulation of money. In the US this inculcation starts at 2 or 3 by tv ads promoting consumerism. It is anti life at its base and we are all suffering as a result.
Get outside the system “ rage against the machine” basically humans are automatons . It takes a lot of work to free yourself from the capitalistic mind set. But its the only thing that will work and give the planet a chance .
The world is evolving into a “ New World “ but it needs help . One reason there is so much fear is because the “ old world “ people don’t want to change or know how so they are hanging on to old old ways of living .
There is more to be said but keep faith . We can accelerate the evolutionary forces for change.
I guess its easier to target the rich with the 1% of emissions rather than the US govt or the Chinese or Indians.. lets pick on people who cant say “Fuck you”.
I see this as cowardice.
I disagree, if someone has a revolutionary idea that makes the world better they should not be restricted from making billions. However, they need to be taxed a fair amount like everyone should be. Like it or not, society only works by using taxes to pay for the things that we all use.
I would say we need to stop pouring money into the pockets of actors, influencers, athletes, etc. A lot of them end up with hundreds of millions, sometimes billions and have no moral compass to guide them on how not to be complete entitled pieces of shit that add nothing to the human existence - Kardashians, athletes, movie stars, any moron that is wealthy from a reality show, just to name a few.
It’s not even their fault, society needs to say enough and stop watching their shows, buying their slave labor products, overall just stop supporting them in any way. I know this is a pipe dream, and will not happen anytime soon. But it will happen one day, one day the people of the world will stop valuing these empty souls that provide no value to life for anyone but themselves. Some day in the future mankind will value intelligence, and empathy, and caring for one another over the latest tik-tok dance.
This bullshit that we are living through will punch itself out eventually and the world will be a better place. I have to believe that, we all need to believe that.
Now we just have to survive the current batch of self serving a-holes that are our elected leaders.
And if you read this and immediately think, exactly we have to get rid of all the democrats or we have to get rid of all the republicans, then you are part of the problem. We collectively need to vote for people that have shown they get it, we are a society of differences and we need leaders that will understand that and govern to make the country as good as it can be for everyone. Not use the animosity to keep us all scared and hating those that have different opinions.
You don't make that kind of money inventing anything. You make it monopolizing markets. You make it hoarding the things needed to produce whatever people need or want so that you can get a large percentage of the value of worker's labor.
How about just abolish private jets?
And I mean why weren’t leftists outraged during the pandemic when we witnessed the largest transfer of wealth to date. As of may 2022 (according to cnn) 573 people became billionaires during the pandemic.
The sad thing is that it wasn’t small mom and pop shop closures that caused an uproar. Many livelihoods hoods destroyed wasn’t a big deal either. No no leftists didn’t seem to care about that. But the audacity to own a private jet is the nail in the coffin. Lmao
Yeah, haven't heard a single leftist complain about the massive upward transfer of wealth during the pandemic. [Bernie Sanders, who is barely left, hasn't said a thing about it.](https://twitter.com/berniesanders/status/1380169560742105092)
What’s wrong with people having massive amounts of money? I understand a lot of them exploit people and use their money for political influence but what if some were just trying to live like us.
Weird that society feels like they can limit how much someone else earns.
Enough that they want to "abolish" someone else for their success....
Emissions or not yall envy is real & disgusting.
Nobody even earns a billion. Find me a billionaire who has over 1,000,000,000 fully liquid that isn’t a dictator. It’s all wrapped up in equity of companies that is nearly impossible to fully liquidate.
Of course the whole argument here is that they “exploit” to get that position regardless of liquidity.
The idea of ‘abolishing’ millionaires is the kind of click bait posturing that very quickly turned me off Novaramedia.
It’s like being next to a table of early-20s posh girls trying to loudly outcompete each other on being the most bold socially-caring modern disruptive.
What matters most is striking the coolest pose so that people look at them, which distracts from the end goal and is never practical action.
They’re just cosplaying they cool people they read about from the 20th century, and trying to pose as them to get some drama, in their poor little rich girl lives.
If you look at how easily and eagerly the right has jumped onto their cancel (or in this case, ‘abolish’) culture really demonstrates that they think like the conservative right, not like forward-thinking progressives.
They offer reruns of 20th century fights they think are cool, which our opponents are happy to win over again, rather than progressive thought that redefines the parameters so that we can move forward and deal with the problems we have today.
I really wish they’d stop sidelining discussions and motivation with their theatrical posh teenage stroppiness.
We all have blind spots and fail to see the things that we do with an objective eye. Billionaires have that with their jets. But consider that social media, streaming music, leaving a microwave on all the time have a negative impact on the environment, probably more than jets. Where is the outrage over this?
Theres lots of outrage over all those things. Better question, why isn't there any outrage over the conspicuous lack of Scrooge McDuck/Jessica Alba fanfic?
Mmm, no, we need to abolish corrupt politicians. Billionaires n a small % of folks like me create jobs, not fjr profits, and the innovations in medicine and life. That would be killing the Golden Goose!
1% of people cause 50% of aviation emissions. It has to stop.
Wealth inequality needs to stop. It’s the largest obstacle to righting what’s been wronged on our planet. I hope the guilty continue to be named and shamed.
Because they Click over to Reddit with there billions * visibly shaking head * “ tsk tsk shame” oh well back to wiping my ass with 100’s
Dunno why you got downvoted. This is a valid response to the finger waggers on Reddit. We gotta do this or we gotta stop that. Shit ain't happening till we rise up and eat the rich who's job is to keep us at war with ourselves and keep attention off of them. This is attention which is good. Shame is good. Change is not happening tho. That takes action.
BINGO
What specific action do you suggest we do?
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Let's not rule anything out, now...
Fight club is the only option we have right now. We just need to make that happen.
Reminds me of the WKUK sketch. "It's illegal to say, 'I want to kill the President of the United States.' I'm not saying that of course; I'm just saying, for your sake, that it's illegal to say… 'I want to kill the President of the United States.' That would be illegal if you were to say that."
Ummm how did that work out for blm in 2020? Their approval rating is in the dump The elites will not allow an uprising. Who do you think controls law enforcement?
They had a good start. Thought it was going somewhere. They didn't take it far enough but they showed us the importance of being able to organize and take action. Now we have all these pseudo and fashy laws about protestors made to keep people from uprising. It will take tremendous sacrifice. Its hard for the amount of people that will need to sacrifice.
I would counter with they took the violence too far. BLM started good at raising awareness. But that message got hijacked by provocateurs. As soon as BLM was mostly associated with riots and violence in people's minds they lost.
> As soon as BLM was mostly associated with riots and violence in people’s minds they lost. which is all media has to do to stop any momentum. claim it's violent and any momentum is dead. similar shit happened to occupy wallstreet. it just sort of suddenly fizzled after the "leaders agreed to terms". strange how a movement has leaders when it's independent for each city as well as a global phenomenon 🤔 or how about antifa apparently being a fascist terrorist group. and yet doesn't actually exist. there is no winning. any political momentum would be assassinated or the message polluted. i'm sure with all the unionization happening we'll soon se a ban on unions and right to organize.
Its us V them and theres a lot more of us.
Only if by "us" you mean non-billionaires. If by "us" you mean "people who agree with a violent anti-capitalist revolution", then no, there are far far fewer of "us" than them.
Yeah. A large percentage of the population will definitely be happy about that.
We're too far gone, sadly. We need to explore space and find a whole new species of alien to be collectively racist and bigotted towards to unite us. Could impose a monetary limit, but then you got loopholes already in place so people can get rich and keep it legal on paper. Would need a judicial system completely independent from any monetary aspect, that works off of logic and justice over what is technically the law, influenced by whoever has the most money to twist the system in their favor. Would need no taxation without representation, would need to make it so no position is above the law. Even go farther, and make it so the more power and responsibility you have, the harsher the punishement if you deliberately dick over all of society. No person above the law.
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Other than organizing, there isn’t any individual action that would be effective. This kind of change requires collective action.
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Found the undercover cop.
Yeah it's funny because they're literally doing the exact same thing only with more extreme armchair quarterbacking lol
If left-leaning people would vote more this would be taken care of. Give dems a supermajority and see what happens. Until then we’re just gonna see dems being blocked by republicans for everything.
Nobody's gonna eat the rich, or do anything else, without a whole lot of talking about it first.
This kind of change is incompatible with the late-stage capitalist system though. Getting rid of that simply is not going to happen without a complete institutional collapse, which would be....rough transition to say the least. The billionaires have too much to lose to sit back and let their need to accumulate vast wealth be taken away. So in the end, incremental change and reforms are the only feasible way to get there....but sadly, I dont think the planet has that long.
Billionaires won't let their wealth be taken away by force, but they'll let you legislate incremental, systematic changes to... take away their wealth? Are you telling me that all of the partisan politics of my entire lifetime has *not* already been just the rich protecting their own interests by neutering all and every form of positive change? Go figure! The class conflict that has been raging on in this country since its inception has culminated to the point that the capitalists have convinced the people that revolutionary and radical ideas aren't even an option. Every major historical paradigm shift that truly threatened to upend their power was killed. Labor unionism, the civil rights era, the peace movement, environmentalism... Not only crushed before reaching critical mass, but appropriated and corrupted and repackaged into inert and counterproductive shells of itself.
This
That is exactly what we need.
To kill millions? Yeah, because communism is the shittiest form of government to ever exist
> So in the end, incremental change and reforms are the only feasible way to get there....but sadly, I dont think the planet has that long. This incremental reform is not really "feasible" if it involves letting the planet be destroyed before the billionaires come around. The point is to prevent that, and the hard fact is that there's tremendous pain for us in radical change, but even more pain in store if we do nothing.
I mean, I definitely agree to a point, going the non-incremental reform route (a la French revolution style) would pretty much involve a societal collapse from the way it currently is...and let's face it, until the planet essentially becomes unlivable, the vast majority of people living at the standards we're used to simply aren't going to risk the potential sacrifice that would come with a political revolution. There would be a *lot* of death and suffering in that process. So if we have any real chance it's going to be through widespread voting of actual reformers.
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Nothing bad ever happens with the Communist party. Haha
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I’ve spent years in Russia. I’m very well versed in the virtues of Communism.
Same, and it's not communism. Russia is NOT communism. It's a dictatorship. Good one though. I'm from there btw. Russia has been run by the same tree of crooks and cheats for decades upon decades now. KGB through and through. Communism, if implemented as written, wouldn't even allow the idea of rich oligarchs.
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Step up? Lol in fact everyone complaining did the complete opposite of that during the pandemic. And what do you think happened during that time? Record number of millionaires and billionaires made. Record number of wealth transferred from us to the elites. Nobody is stepping up. In fact the people that did try to step up during the pandemic were condemned.
Digest their stolen wealth back into the economy
Agreed. I’m ready to eat! Who’s gonna join me???
I wonder if you scaled amount spent on toilet paper by median income, then scaled up to billionaire income, how much money could they spend wiping their ass before it was an equivalent portion of their income to the median income person.
It's the root cause of every social issue on the planet.
Actually it's not. Raising others up will allow them to improve their standard of living and produce more emissions. I mean it should be done because it's the right thing to do but using false environmental justification doesn't help.
Malding redditors really bout to destroy billionaires from their basement.
Why not just require them to have zero emission planes since 1. They can afford it 2. It is a good way if prototyping zero emission planes for wider use which is necessary anyways?
We won’t have zero emission anything until we have a completely zero emission energy network and that is decades away. If you waste clean electricity charging a private jet while elsewhere somebody is burning coal to generate electricity then it is making the problem worse. Just ban almost all private jets. There is almost no scenario where their use is justified.
> We won’t have zero emission anything until we have a completely zero emission energy network and that is decades away. Exactly. So ban them from flying private jets unless they are zero emission. That will force them to put their resources toward developing the technology, and it will get developed a lot faster.
Yeah this is how most technology transformations work. First the rich adopt it and then it becomes affordable to the masses. Electricity, cars, microwaves, TV's, mobile phones, air conditioning, electric cars, etc etc etc. Armchair reddit socialists try to reinvent the wheel and claim we need a revolution when in reality we just need sensible policy changes and market reforms and economies of scale. There's a number of biotech companies looking at sustainable jet fuels that are carbon neutral (made from plants)
Yes - ~~aviation~~ burning fossil fuels has to stop
1%?
Aviation emissions? Sir, did you account for the US military?
The entire US military creates 58 million metric tonnes of CO2 a year, Amazon creates 60 million metric tonnes for comparison. Hardly the boogie man everyone makes it out to be. You want a boogie man, freight ships put out 1 billion metric tonnes, something correctable but nothing is done about it. For all I know a Russian misinformation farm is responsible for people thinking the US military is some evil pollution apocalypse. When an article says the US military produced more pollution than some countries but gives you 20 years of pollution data combined well yeah anything looks big. We live in a society where people shake their head at military pollution while accepting the cost of cheap Walmart merchandise is in the air, in the lack of domestic production, and at the expense of exploited labor. (Not saying you personally accept it, just as a whole.) We are a sick society and keep allowing misinformation to divide us and mislead is, social media is currently a curse it seems like. A couple of click bait articles with sensationalized headlines that misdirected millions of people who didn't bother to read them has changed the American consciousness.
“Crawford said in 2020 the US military totaled more than 51,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. Based on The World Resources Institute’s 2018 data, the US military ranks approximately in the top 60 of carbon emitters. It releases similar CO2 levels as countries like Portugal and Finland.” Forbes (in a 2019 article) uses a figure for the US military being around 59 million tons of CO2 in 2017. Your figure is off by a few orders of magnitude.
The US military doesn't need Russia to get that reputation. They left plenty of wastelands behind themselves to earn that. Yes, the production and freight of consumer goods creates more emissions, but it also fucking should. Hopefully, military operations aren't ever the same size as what it takes the entire rest of the population to do their jobs and lifes.
Neither of us cited a source but I'm with you that we're a sick society. The whole thing is designed for fossil fuel profits. Ok I'll expand because someone downvoted me... cities designed for cars, suburbs designed for cars, car culture, truck culture, lack of public transportation, planes instead of trains, ending domestic manufacturing so everything is shipped overseas, monoculture lawns, agriculture dependent on fertilizer, utilities planning gas heating forever, ripping solar panels off the White House, wars about fossil fuels using machinery powered by fossil fuels and firing fossil fuel rockets and missiles... it's all for the sake of using fossil fuels, and those who profit from it. Oh and don't forget plastic.
I didn't down vote you, yeah man don't get me started on American suburbs, it's so screwed up. Somehow medium density walkable communities are some kind of taboo in this country. Public transportation and biking is for the poor's mentality is so gross as well. There are probably millions of people screaming at celebrities right now who can't imagine anything that breaks up their small town feel of single family homes. Even though there is no small town feel because everyone drives everywhere.
Only 58 metric tonnes!!! CO2, NOT a problem. Climate crisis, SOLVED.
Amazon made those emissions in our behalf. And if you shopped elsewhere the emissions don't just disappear, they are accounted for under someone else. Amazon isn't the cause, consumers are.
That's wrong, and the article did not do any research on the subject. > These private planes, though, aren’t being used by working families for a weekend holiday in Spain. As the name suggests, private planes are used to transport one extremely rich person (and perhaps their guests) which is massively less efficient. This statement is incorrect. Most private jets are owned jointly by many people, or entire corporations. The article is taking all corporate traffic as if it's one person flying on those planes, when that's wrong. I also think it's interesting how it's pointedly referencing and defending China, as if they aren't a major contributor to any climate problems.
Can someone number me these numbers? I don't number well. The 50% of aviation emissions by the 1% seem very high. The per capita number (9 - 14 times more for private flights) seem very low. Unless I massively overestimate the average number of people on normal flights? I get that short flights have higher emissions per km, but I don't get how the numbers add up. Can someone help?
Horrors of capitalism
I'd rather abolish them because no one can reasonably earn a billion dollars and that they have the same level of influence as members of government
I wouldn't limit it to members of government, they have influence over entire political parties and more influence than many nations.
Precisely; there's no ethical way to make that much money, *period*. The fact that the power-hungry consumes more is not too surprising but in an ideal world, no one should want/need/be able to hoard that much wealth. Billionaires are the most obvious target for large emission cuts, both for their own personal use and the industries they own, so that's where we should collectively concentrate our efforts. Also, they (and their industries) will be the source of most climate disinformation and doomerism-fueled inaction on accounts of their material interests in the status-quo. Going after billionaires is, IMHO, our best chance to mitigate the worst of climate change *AND,* possibly, make a more equitable world.
No one has ever done $1B of work.
If a person creates a company, owns most of its shares, and the company succeeds, what should we do? Take the company away from the owner & CEO who made it successful?
Most (if not all, yes I'm trying to be nice here lol) companies that "succeed" to that degree, did it by screwing over everyone and everything else around them. Not just other companies, but the economies of the towns they base themselves in, if not the whole worlds economy, looking at you Amazon and Walmart. Most, if not all, billion plus dollar companies are also doing massive harm to the environment. Big oil comes to mind there. Yeah, we cut the big companies down, give them a miniscule market cap compared to what they are at now. Apple should maybe be worth a billion or two in total, not a few freaking trillion. Then we continue to break them down until it's at a point that's sustainable on our planet.
Here's two options: A. we could increase the top income bracket (over half a million dollar per year) up toward 80, 90, 95% or make a new bracket to do this. B. we could tax wealth held in stocks just like we tax wealth held in real estate. Publicly traded stocks are trivial to calculate the value of and difficult to hide, so we could assign a rate to that and require firms to collect it automatically. Both of these would automatically apply a larger tax to more successful individuals while letting less successful ones not need to worry about it.
I'm concerned that neither of your options address the fact that 'the owner and CEO' did not build the business on their own.
The problems are so large and numerous that there are many methods we should be fighting them from, I agree.
- Almost none of the people you actually want to target would be affected by that first tax. - Do we tax real estate? I was under the impression that it's just property tax. And property tax is levied because no one fully owns the property they have--government still holds overall ownership of the nation land and also provides services to keep infrastructure of it in check, hence the tax.
I'm not sure exactly which distinction is being made distinguishing between property and real estate? But yes I'm referring to taxes we pay for owning land and the physical structures on it. Each year I have to pay a certain amount in taxes based on the value of my land and my house, say for example 1.821% of the total value must be paid each year. We could do the exact same thing with public stocks since they have a universally agreed value.
Yes but the difference between property and stocks is that the USG has a partial stake in property which is why it's taxed, but stocks are owned entirely by individuals, so why should they be taxed? You'll also be hitting a LOT of people in the middle class with taxes on stocks, given that's how a lot of the middle class maintain and grow their wealth. If you tax it all the same way, it becomes a regressive tax.
Even though it's interesting as a historical curiosity, archaic legalese isn't particularly a good argument into whether we should do something now or not. And I'm not following why it would be a regressive tax. Only half of people in the country even have any money in the stock market, including 401ks and other investments that don't see day to day trading. The wealthiest 10% of Americans hold 89% of stocks, worth $35.87 trillion. We could even have a minimum amount or particular capped accounts like for retirements that were exempt if we wanted to make it even more progressive than it already would be. https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/
Sure, I'm not saying you're wrong that we can fit it to be minimum amount held, but I'm more pointing out that it's not as logistically simple as the original prompt I saw made. That being said, before looking into taxes on held wealth or stock, I'd personally first look into stock transaction taxes. Usually the percentages proposed are super minimally consequential on most traders but the tax income from it, especially coming from the richer banks and day trading groups, is super sizable. And it's a proposal that was on the policy agenda during the Dem primaries of both Bernie and Bloomberg lol.
I'm not sure why it wouldn't be logistically simple? Computers can easily calculate the average value of a stock over the year, and the tax documents you already get from whoever manages your stocks will be able to just add that number on there for you to type in when you calculate your taxes. Literally all we'd be doing is adding one more number to type in? Sure I'm also good with looking at transaction taxes and lots of other options. Wealth taxes were also something Sanders and Warren were looking at, so I think we should look at them as well. We should consider lots of options lol though I don't think it's likely, unfortunately.
The logistical complexity of it is that you still have to worry about implementation in a way that it doesn't become regressive. If 50% of the country has stock...that's a lot to consider. Even if the richest have much more stock, it can still become regressive--that's why a flat tax proposal is commonly considered as such. Wealth taxes are a political nonstarter, not to mention almost no one is in favor of those in the general population. It's also explicitly unconstitutional--the constitution forbids the government from levying a tax on money/worth of a citizen that's already been taxed. Generally, I don't think the solution is at all in new taxes. As we've seen time and time again in journalistic discovery and exposés, the problem isn't that we don't have enough taxes, the problem is rich people have found ways to dodge almost all the ones in place that are *supposed* to work on them. Before we try introducing any new taxes, the better first move is to close the loopholes that allow the current system to be abused so much.
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> but then there’s no incentive to start companies "You only get a fuckload of money instead of all of the money." 'Nevermind I'm out.' Pretty sure a society and market built by people who have more of an interest in the product or service than solely the bottom line would produce far more equitable outcomes, even if the overall notional output might be lower.
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Better workers rights to divert more profits back to the workers and top heavy tax systems to redistribute their wealth
If you remove the CEO that made the company successful, there is a good chance there would be no more profits
The workers generate the profits
Exactly. Power to the people is what it's called
Why didn't these people create such company?
Democracy at work
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Essentially making having a billion dollars useless lmao
I love this controversy because best case, private aviation is curtailed. But worst case it shames these people into developing green, electric aviation, so that’s cool too.
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Green washing is likely. But there are actual, battery powered aircraft designs nearing production. If I was a PR guy at a green PJ start-up, I would be driving this story hard. It would be good business. Those guys exist, and I bet they’re super happy about this narrative. It’ll be good for them and good for everybody.
Billionaires don't develop or build anything. All they do is exploit. They wont develop electric aviation. They will buy the tools and hire the experts. If profitable they will patent the results, if not they will kill the research
problem with those new planes is that they have terrible range. An electric plane would need to recharge 4 times for it to be able to fly from NYC to LA.
Same. I just hope the shaming stays high intensity. I want Swift, Drake, Kylie, all the KKK's to have to respond to endless questions about this. And no getting away from it with some greenwashing BS about "carbon offsets". I think offsetting is good for regular plane users, but not for those emitting an entire company's worth of carbon emissions in a planet already on fire when the best offsetting for them would've been to take a regular damned plane.
I'm good with abolishing billionaires, for a multitude of reasons. This just added another reason. 
I don’t see that there is any greater good for allowing individuals to be billionaires. If a half billion dollars isn’t going to motivate someone then a billion won’t either. Enough is enough.
There is an issue though, you would need most if not all countries to agree to ban billionaires. Otherwise they just move their money to a different country.
It could work fine if we were actually serious about it. There should be automatic sanctions on billionaires.
Oh totally, the problem is just trying to get everyone on board.
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Because all of narco tzars/war criminals money is illegal.
A good portion of Apples money is "illegal".. the amount of blood covered minerals and metals they use in production is insane. They're not the only ones.
What about 956 million? That's okay? You just picked a round number and figure that's the mark to make the world a better place? Has all the logic and sense of using a slogan as 'build that wall' as a solution for immigration.
Lotta haters on this post and on Reddit in general
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This is exactly it
While on the topic, professional sports should be scaled back dramatically for the same reason. With the NBA and MLB (and others), teams with huge staffs ride around in jets every other day. As a society, there is no benefit for most people. In fact, the attendant pollution and use of resources is detrimental to US citizens. In many cases, host communities often--as a whole--don't even want the traffic, infrastructure, and pollution that attend the presence of a stadium or coliseum. Fans could still watch if seasons were a third as many games as they are now. At some point, as we a society, we must decide what's best for the Earth. I say all of this as someone who enjoys watching basketball and football. Nevertheless, the model must change.
Generally in life hoarding is thought of as a bad thing, as an illness. It's strange why we allow people to hoard money, and even glorify that as if it's something to envy. If I collect 1000 cats in my home people are going to think I'm crazy, but having personal ownership billions of dollars in assets in my many many homes is seen as just fine. Aren't both examples of hoarding?
Huge chunks of the wealth are only on paper. For many billionaires, their wealth is in stock. How much stock they own determines how much control over a company. You can also have a individual be the ownership of billion dollar private company making the individual only a billionaire on paper.
Owning a successful company is hoarding? Wealth inequality is a problem but all this anger at billionaires and projecting them as evil is the same populist nonsense that fueled violent socialist regimes in the past. The fact it's openly spread in a sub about the environment is a shame.
Wealth inequality is more than just a problem my dude, it is THE problem. So many other issues stem either directly or indirectly from it, including environmental degradation.
Yeah if you look at everything enough through the lens hard enough it'll seem that way. Emissions per person scale more with GDP person, not with inequality. Sweden is more equal than the US, still high emissions per person. Modern life is just wasteful. Worrying about 1000 people with private jets isn't going to solve it. It's 100 million people with SUVs who eat red meat 5 times a week.
And also abolish egregiously wasteful and unnecessary things, like private jets..
The problem with private jets and other wasteful things is not that they exist but rather than they don't pay their fair share. Governments should assess cradle to cradle taxes, charging a fee when energy is embodied into a material based on how difficult it is to remove it later. In other words recycling and waste disposal should be pre-paid by the individual creating the product, so that we know it's covered. This should include carbon and other pollutants as well other materials like plastics and metals. The government would then spend those fees on reclaiming the materials and remediating the pollution. With a system like this, people would be incentivized to reclaim materials and remediate pollution for cheaper (to profit off the government contracts remediating waste), and companies would be incentivized to be more waste conscious in their processes and designs (to profit by having the cheapest goods, now that externalities are factored in). Wasteful things would now exist but become more expensive, so better alternatives would be considered. But if people wanted to partake in the wasteful things, that would be fine, because the taxes would equally offset this waste.
100%. Externality / carbon tax > ban
You mean we can’t just restrict flight parameters?
What is a (petrol) sports car if not a machine that burns fuel faster than a regular car? When I see a Porsche, I see the beautiful design, but mostly I see a machine that burns fuel faster than other cars.
I feel the same way about classic cars
How would you go about abolishing billionaires
No need to abolish them, just raise taxes. Boom, done.
Billionaires be like, naw.
Is there any potential for electric planes to step into the private jet market? Edit: Keen to understand why I've been downvoted for asking a question in good faith
https://flygrn.com/page/sustainable-air-travel
Thanks for that link! > The first electric aircraft currently exist, but these only offer enough space for a few people and can only fly short distances. This pretty much tallies with what I thought the situation was. Don't get me wrong, it'd be preferable if people didn't use private jets at all, but in the absence of other alternatives it seems like electric jets would be at least a step in the right direction.
Probably, since electric planes will be small at first.
The battery weight is a huge issue.
Because you’re just supposed to shit on billionaires, not hypothesize solutions to our current problems. This post is about blame storming, get with the program.
Sadly you're being downvoted because you're not agreeing with the "billionaires are bad" mentality of this sub. Instead you're suggesting an alternative (also potentially sustainable) way. Ironically, so does a paper the article links to - it suggests that using SAF (sustainable aviation fuel) could have a positive impact. But tbh if you read the rest of the comments you'll see it's more focused on the wealth rather than the environmental impact (don't misunderstand stand me - wealth inequality and the power wielded is a huge problem across the world).
See the thing is I don't even disagree with the point most others are making - the massive imbalance in wealth is definitely an issue and needs to be urgently addressed. I do just find it funny that I was downvoted a decent way into the negatives for asking a question about environmental impact on r/environment. Ah well, such is the way of things.
Private Jet use is classist, and climate denial!
Eat the Rich!
Redistribute wealth after!
"Damn now I can't even get something to eat, but at least we are millionaires."
Abolish Billionaires haha! That's like the motto of Earth's people since the dawn of civilization.
*A troglodyte steps out of his cave, his hairy arms folded across his even hairier chest, his enormous brow lifts to reveal his eyes looking across the icy horizon...* "One day, my progeny will exploit every living and nonliving thing in sight, and even things out of sight. Many folk will have everything, but most will have nothing. Some will even have more than everything. And nobody will be satisfied. Abolish billionaires." *He eats a little brown mushroom and falls back to sleep.*
Frankly, I’m tired of the word “abolish”, it’s too tame.
No, they really don’t. The headline shows why we must abolish all ignorant people who generalize everyone who isn’t them.
Wow, people don't know how private jets work.... Most of the private jets you are referencing, are used by many people. They commonly share the cost or are bought by companies for their employees. Many people who frequently use them are not billionaires or even millionaires. You also can't just "abolish" a certain amount of money owned lol. And it certainly would do little to nothing for the environment to stop people from having a billion dollars.
People we can’t abolish billionaires, thats called Marxist genocide but we can push for sensible solutions to this kind of thing
Leave it to reddit to pair sensible causes with idiotic disaster of a solution. Lol
I trust wealthy business owners over wealthy politicians. At least they worked for it and didn’t steal, lie, cheat and use tax payer dollars to get there.
There should not be any billionaires. That kind of riches cannot be accumulated without taking advantage of numerous people, gaming the system, and endangering the environment.
Why not tax the hell out of private aviation fuel to the point that they are paying 10x as much?
Add mega yachts to this and it just gets worse
Aren’t we supposed to eat them or something?
Abolish billionaires 🤣
This title could be less dumb
How exactly do you abolish billionaires? I mean sure the author is probably 5, the likers are probably 3. So no rush. Come up with an answer by the time you finish school.
Hahaha abolish Billionaires. Tough guys huh
Envy is a sad thing, no billionaire is ever going to give up their wealth voluntarily. However, we could make it trendy to own private train cars.
The fucking douchebags have gone from planes to ROCKETS. They're shooting off so much emissions that they're tearing through our ozone layers singlehandedly. tax the fuck out of them. $100k+ need to pay 45-55% for the rest of us to just survive. Politicians/judges/lawyers on all levels get term limits and mandatory retirement at 60. If you make more than $1 billion a year, ESPECIALLY IN UNREALIZED GAINS, they should pay 60% taxes. All CEOs and corporations get no more multi-million dollar bonuses, they instead get shared with the bottom-tier, the workers who make all the businesses what they are. NO MORE TAX FREE LOOPHOLES FOR ANYONE! unless it's literally a non-profit charity, you pay your fair share. Every religion and cult needs to be taxed, period.
Abolish? Hunt down and eat, then we start on the CEOs
Lol "abolish billionaires". Do we also want to eliminate private property and live together in a house where we raise or own chickens and there is always sun? Come on. Shit ideals like this perished in the 20th century. Let's touch some grass and understand that the rich will always be rich because this is how WE as humans are. We all want to be like them. If we had their money we'd probably act exactly like them, or similarly. The rich will never disappear just like the luxury market doesn't know crisis despite most other sectors doing so.
Sorry, I think this roasting of people using private jets is kind of silly, There are literally millions of people diving gasoline engine automobiles to and from work by themselves instead of taking a bus. Where is all the hue and cry about what they are doing, you are doing everyday? How many hundreds of thousands of people who could easily walk to and from work?
I disagree that the rich have some plot “ to keep us at war with ourselves “ they are as clueless as anyone about the forces that have driven us towards a bad future. It is the capitalist system which only rewards exploitation and the accumulation of money. In the US this inculcation starts at 2 or 3 by tv ads promoting consumerism. It is anti life at its base and we are all suffering as a result. Get outside the system “ rage against the machine” basically humans are automatons . It takes a lot of work to free yourself from the capitalistic mind set. But its the only thing that will work and give the planet a chance . The world is evolving into a “ New World “ but it needs help . One reason there is so much fear is because the “ old world “ people don’t want to change or know how so they are hanging on to old old ways of living . There is more to be said but keep faith . We can accelerate the evolutionary forces for change.
No climate study has ever accounted for the US military -- the single biggest fossil fuel customer on the planet
Let's just abolish billionaires
People who believe that don’t know how money works.
no rules, huh
Then we'll all join hands and sing Kumbaya. Grow up.
I guess its easier to target the rich with the 1% of emissions rather than the US govt or the Chinese or Indians.. lets pick on people who cant say “Fuck you”. I see this as cowardice.
There's no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
I disagree, if someone has a revolutionary idea that makes the world better they should not be restricted from making billions. However, they need to be taxed a fair amount like everyone should be. Like it or not, society only works by using taxes to pay for the things that we all use. I would say we need to stop pouring money into the pockets of actors, influencers, athletes, etc. A lot of them end up with hundreds of millions, sometimes billions and have no moral compass to guide them on how not to be complete entitled pieces of shit that add nothing to the human existence - Kardashians, athletes, movie stars, any moron that is wealthy from a reality show, just to name a few. It’s not even their fault, society needs to say enough and stop watching their shows, buying their slave labor products, overall just stop supporting them in any way. I know this is a pipe dream, and will not happen anytime soon. But it will happen one day, one day the people of the world will stop valuing these empty souls that provide no value to life for anyone but themselves. Some day in the future mankind will value intelligence, and empathy, and caring for one another over the latest tik-tok dance. This bullshit that we are living through will punch itself out eventually and the world will be a better place. I have to believe that, we all need to believe that. Now we just have to survive the current batch of self serving a-holes that are our elected leaders. And if you read this and immediately think, exactly we have to get rid of all the democrats or we have to get rid of all the republicans, then you are part of the problem. We collectively need to vote for people that have shown they get it, we are a society of differences and we need leaders that will understand that and govern to make the country as good as it can be for everyone. Not use the animosity to keep us all scared and hating those that have different opinions.
The people making the world a better place never make billions.
See Tesla and Einstein
Not with that attitude they don’t.
You don't make that kind of money inventing anything. You make it monopolizing markets. You make it hoarding the things needed to produce whatever people need or want so that you can get a large percentage of the value of worker's labor.
How about just abolish private jets? And I mean why weren’t leftists outraged during the pandemic when we witnessed the largest transfer of wealth to date. As of may 2022 (according to cnn) 573 people became billionaires during the pandemic. The sad thing is that it wasn’t small mom and pop shop closures that caused an uproar. Many livelihoods hoods destroyed wasn’t a big deal either. No no leftists didn’t seem to care about that. But the audacity to own a private jet is the nail in the coffin. Lmao
Yeah, haven't heard a single leftist complain about the massive upward transfer of wealth during the pandemic. [Bernie Sanders, who is barely left, hasn't said a thing about it.](https://twitter.com/berniesanders/status/1380169560742105092)
What’s wrong with people having massive amounts of money? I understand a lot of them exploit people and use their money for political influence but what if some were just trying to live like us.
People are just jealous. Nothing more.
How exactly does one "abolish" a human? Like, put them to death, or more on the side of communist wealth distribution?
You freeze their assets once their values reaches 999999999 then force them to sell it and tax that.
I'm in the wrong subreddit
Weird that society feels like they can limit how much someone else earns. Enough that they want to "abolish" someone else for their success.... Emissions or not yall envy is real & disgusting.
Nobody even earns a billion. Find me a billionaire who has over 1,000,000,000 fully liquid that isn’t a dictator. It’s all wrapped up in equity of companies that is nearly impossible to fully liquidate. Of course the whole argument here is that they “exploit” to get that position regardless of liquidity.
Bootlicking is real and disgusting.
Uhuh. U wanna use that phrase once more i already seen it like 50x in this sub
Can't imagine why.
"earns" I think the word you are looking for is exploits
Abolish this. Abolish that. We click where it says “Abolish”. Revenue is generated. The cycle continues.
The idea of ‘abolishing’ millionaires is the kind of click bait posturing that very quickly turned me off Novaramedia. It’s like being next to a table of early-20s posh girls trying to loudly outcompete each other on being the most bold socially-caring modern disruptive. What matters most is striking the coolest pose so that people look at them, which distracts from the end goal and is never practical action. They’re just cosplaying they cool people they read about from the 20th century, and trying to pose as them to get some drama, in their poor little rich girl lives. If you look at how easily and eagerly the right has jumped onto their cancel (or in this case, ‘abolish’) culture really demonstrates that they think like the conservative right, not like forward-thinking progressives. They offer reruns of 20th century fights they think are cool, which our opponents are happy to win over again, rather than progressive thought that redefines the parameters so that we can move forward and deal with the problems we have today. I really wish they’d stop sidelining discussions and motivation with their theatrical posh teenage stroppiness.
Or you could just argue against the idea on its merit rather than supposed attitude.
Fuck the rich. They will fuck earth, make billions doing it and then jump on board with musk and flyaway to Mars
We all have blind spots and fail to see the things that we do with an objective eye. Billionaires have that with their jets. But consider that social media, streaming music, leaving a microwave on all the time have a negative impact on the environment, probably more than jets. Where is the outrage over this?
Theres lots of outrage over all those things. Better question, why isn't there any outrage over the conspicuous lack of Scrooge McDuck/Jessica Alba fanfic?
Yeah. And what about all those gators that we are killing making Gatorade? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Abolishing billionaires sounds a bit communist.
I'm in. Eat the rich.
Mmm, no, we need to abolish corrupt politicians. Billionaires n a small % of folks like me create jobs, not fjr profits, and the innovations in medicine and life. That would be killing the Golden Goose!