That’s 247 billionaires we could have put in the buffet. Never trust a billionaire. Eat them at first opportunity.
And I don’t believe shit of it. I think all their “donations” to foundations and “charity” are tax scams. I’ve seen so many of these deeply immoral and greedy fucks do this and go on charity drives and I’m not buying any of it, I know these people are just scamming us somehow, they don’t do anything out of the kindness of their hearts and betterment of society, it’s all about money.
The worst part is- they are not the problem per se, the system is. The system creates this, capitalism creates this, it promotes these people to the top sure, but if not them then anybody else willing to sell their souls to the literal antichrist.
Capitalism is a malignant cancer and needs to be excised and chemod or we all die. DIE. Civilization GONE. Humanity GONE. Culture GONE.
It’s us or capitalism.
Can’t say that I’m shocked.
These people are genuinely sick in the head, this level of pointless greed is not normal. Of course they aren’t going through with it.
Exactly like gambling addicts. They are blinded by capitalism, because capitalism is nothing but gambling, and not only are these people addicts, the game has completely usurped society itself. Just think about it- what dictates our society? It’s not our values, or ideals, our wishes and wants and dreams, it’s the economy.
The Economy is a fucking golem that has overtaken democracy, we have no say, what The Economy wants always takes precedence, and the only thing The Economy wants is MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE. MORE people, MORE things, MORE money, MORE. You know what else does that? Cancer.
Exactly! And like cancer, it will eventually consume and destroy its host. It may take time, but it will.
Once you start to have money, you get a money dependency. No matter how rich you get, the “baseline you really need to live the life you want and nothing more” growths together with your wealth.
Take lottery winners and ask them if they could give away half of their gains. Will you be surprised if most of them say no, even though the day before they would have set their “minimum needed to live a happy life for the rest of my days” at a much smaller fraction of it?
Now take a similar population, but who in addition rationalized them deserving that money through their hard work and talent.
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.
Financial obesity is literally capitalism. That’s the disease. Period.
Financial obesity is a large part of capitalism, but it’s by no means exclusive to it. Replacing capitalism with anything that tolerates obscene wealth accumulation would be a categorical failure.
I really like that as a term, never come across it before.
by followed up you mean: “Ok after I die, I will donate half of my money to my tax-exempt family-owned-and-operated charity, that just happened to only pay salaries and donations to causes that serve the interests of our family-owned-and-operated shell companies”… :D
it’s like sequeezing your late’s father dry-drenched cumsocket which he used his entire life, then drinking it, and brag about it… to which I say thanks but no fucking thanks.
On an unrelated note, Bill Gates is in the epstein list.
And he didn’t donate shit without an economic incentive, it’s all a tax writeoff, it’s all a scam. Even that shit he did pumping money into AIDS research as “charity” went into companies where he held stake himself. It’s so fucking vile.
guillotine.jpg
And the reason Melinda divorced him.
Serious or joke?
We can only speculate, but his infidelity with staffers was known, and him being on the Epstein list may have been the final straw.
A decent person would have gone to the press with it, but she’s wealthy so she didn’t.
Because it would reflect poor on her, too. It’s like when people don’t report being victims of sexual assault, because they know people will look at them differently forever, doesn’t even have to be that extreme, just imagine being a normal family in a normal neighborhood where everybody knows everyone for decades, and then you find out your husband has a fling with a younger woman. It’s just embarrassing, you know?
You and me and all of us lie all the time about way less embarrassing things, because we don’t want to be seen a certain way, as victims, as having been duped or gullible or even the butt of a joke.
Imagine on that level, where you are married to one of the richest men in the world, and your rollerdex contains thousands of names to some of the most powerful people on the planet, and you “go to the press with it”.
It would change your life forever, the scandal would stain every aspect of your life F O R E V E R.
Didn’t know that, but not surprised.
In an email sent after Gates went to have dinner with Epstein in his Manhattan mansion he wrote A very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there quite late
The prospect of still being billionaires, but with less billions, was just too much to handle
Exactly why they need to be taxed more.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist to begin with and don’t assume tax money are used by governments for good.
I mean, you don’t become a billionaire by giving money away.
Uh, yeah you do. What do you think charities are for? Helping people?
They broke their arms patting themselves on their backs and can’t write checks anymore. 😢
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Oh well, guess we’re fucked.
BUT THAT WOULD BE COMMUNISM!!1!
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Yes, some form of “giving pledge” where the amount was standardized and there was no option to back out. Radical thinking here.
The fact that there are 256 billionaires is an absolute failure of our society.
256 billionaires that we know of!
Soon to be a few trillionaires and a thousand billionaires
If there were 3 billion would that be a failure?
Lmao fuck them my taxesare higher then half
You don’t understand, they’re making money so much faster than they can reasonably give away.
making money
I think you mean stealing money.
Not true.
They’re also using imaginary methods to make money grow out of other money.
Which then needs someone in the real economy to make goods and services to back up the value of that money.
They are basically printing UOM instead of IOU vouchers.
Goods and services that nobody asked for and never needed at the expense of humanity and a finite ecosystem. We need to make sure to keep nativity numbers up though, that’s super important for the economy- got to keep growing forever, because we cannot have enough people, things, and more of everything, at any cost.
Isn’t that basically just stolen money from stolen money?
If you say things with enough confidence, maybe toss in the phrase “AI” somewhere…yeah you kinda can just create money from nothing.
In entirely unrelated news grocery prices go up.
This is kind of the actual problem though. It’s hard to actually have effective charities. Even some of the most ethical, and well run charities, end up with surplus funds (Dolly Parton’s charity for example). The government is setup to spend that much money helping people though. But paying taxes is somehow bad and wrong. I don’t know if I had a real point other than maybe we should actually tax these rich folks so they can achieve their dream of giving away at least half their wealth.
Paying taxes is only wrong when it goes to a democratically elected government whose purpose is to benefit all citizens. But if it’s paying tithes to the church or tribute to monarchs, then it’s a MORAL DUTY!
The Ayn Rand fever dream!
There was a post a while ago where a German person posted that they were confused by the US nonprofit systems, they basically said I pay my taxes and the government makes sure it’s spent feeding the needy and foreign aid and all that. Why should I go through the trouble of researching all these charities trying to find a good one to donate to.
Not that Germany doesn’t have non profits, but they really should be for special interest type cases where you explicitly want to send money to a cause, not general global well being.
It is a bit more complicated than that.
First of all the social security system in Germany should not be tax funded. It is a mandatory insurance which should finance its activities through the insurance rate collected on income. However with demographic shifts and the like it is notoriously unstable, in particular the pension fund. So what happens is the social securities being cross financed from tax money.
Like with climate change, we are talking about the issue since more than 30 years, the problematic effects are becoming ever more apparent, but no government is willing to address the fundamental issues, instead kicking the can down the road, until the system will collapse.
Then another issue is that the government activities are far from sufficient and it is en vogue to attack social security further. Especially in the last years we saw an unprecedented rise in people relying on food banks as unemployment checks and the equivalent for refugees, who are prohibited from working, are insufficient. But rather than adjust the payments to reflect the rising costs of living, we see a distraction debate about people “refusing to work” which make up only a tiny minority of people receiving benefits, but the goal is to abolish unemployment insurance.
Then another issue is that nonprofits are often used by rich families to circumvent inheritance tax. This year there will be an unexpected windfall of 4 billion Euros to the inheritance tax, as a rich family failed to set up their construct in time. Furthermore “nonprofits” by industrialists are often used for lobbying for more capitalism. In particularly infamous is the “Stiftung Familienunternehmen” (family run businesses trust). You would think this represents your local bakery run in the fourth generation. Instead it is run by “family businesses” such as Henkel (washing ingredients, chemicals) whose owners are billionaires.
Finally, Germany has the whole range of non profits which follow purposes that genuinely follow causes that benefit humanity and the environment and they also receive billions in donations in Germany every year. Overall the donations to nonprofits in Germany amounted to 12.5 billion € last year, or about 150 € on average. This includes a wide range of purposes. For instance sports clubs are usually nonprofits and donations to them are usually tax deductible. So it might be the father of one of the kids in the football club donating a new set of jerseys.
First of all the social security system in Germany should not be tax funded.
I got to here before I knew you were just full of pure shit. Unless you miswrote, because you are stating a moral proposition that is false at face value unless you’re either for oligarchy or are straight up fascist.
Sounds a bit like the US. I live in New York City, there are a lot of bloated non profits that are just used as slush funds for rich people and networking. I’ve met a few people on occasion who work in non profits that do things like provide hiring metrics for other non profits instead of actually doing direct good, so you really need to be careful who you donate to.
I’m sorry that Germany also has long term issues with its social safety net, but it’s morbidly reassuring as an American to hear we’re not going to be the only ones on the sinking ship.
Please do not compare Dolly Parton to Bill Gates.
Then they’re not really trying. I get what @Hobo@Lemmy.World is saying, but I find it hard to believe. If their bar for “respectable charities” leads to them not being able to find charities, then just lower the bar. Or just give money to people.
Yep, pay for everyone’s university for a year, pay everyone’s healthcare debt, do something.
A pizza party would be cool also.
nah I get those at work instead of a raise
Lol… While gates foundation does do some decent work. Let’s be real it is astroturf operation inherently
Also, Warren already back out.
So this is just a shill op for these “good” parasites.
Read between the lines folks, these people are your enemies
To people like this, the number in their bank account is like a scoreboard. They didn’t get that high up the leaderboard purely by accident.
Anyone who thinks that kind of person is just going to give up their place on the scoreboard is either incredibly naïve or gullible.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some people to there who may have some semblance of empathy, but as seen by the title, that’s about 1 in 25.
They also don’t do good things out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it to win social points so that they don’t get gunned down in the middle of a NYC street.
This doesn’t make much sense to me.
Sure. Gates is not a “nice” person. The business practices involved in becoming a billionaire require him to be a vile human being. Granted.
That said, he has given up his place on the leaderboard. He has become dramatically less wealthy as a result of his philanthropic work.
What are you claiming is Gates’ motivation here? Not getting murdered? Come on. There are much more practical, reliable, and cheaper means to achieve that.
To people like this, the number in their bank account is like a scoreboard.
It’s not just that.
Besides the humanitarian work that the gates foundation does do “voluntarily”, money is agency, it is power.
There is very little argument and reason to believe that “people” and “countries” would actually be more responsible in spending it.
If there was a big, motivated, carefully planned social movement that had a solid idea and spending plan, things would be different. And such a group could also force them to give up that money to spend it on these things. But such a movement doesn’t exist.
As it stands, the idea that they would voluntarily give up money is dumb. To do what? Feed the corruption and nepo network in their country, that then will benefit only the people that are just like them, but less rich? That makes no sense.
It has to come from public pressure and equal wealth taxes.
They didn’t get that high up the leaderboard purely by accident.
You also don’t stay up there in the leaderboard by accident
I assume that tax avoidance is also a factor.
You wouldn’t expect these clowns to pay taxes that’s what w2 slaves are for. In fact, the treasury should be paying them. Just look at the national debt since 1980s then look at how fat these swine got.
Crux of the everything crisis we got on our hands.
But hey the good parasites paid 15k for a fluf piece, put on a suit and say thank you!
Let’s not forget
lobbyingbribery. And since said political influence is ostensibly being bought for the sake of charity, nobody would even blink.Just my theory, mind you. But every one of these charitable foundations is primarily done for tax avoidance. No question. Well that is every one of these foundations except for the one set up by Mr President Tiny Dick. He just can’t resist the temptation of embezzlement. I mean seriously, he bankrupted THREE casinos, and had a judge not just dissolve his foundation, but also bar him from running one of these so-called charitable foundations ever again.
I don’t even want to know how you can fuck up that egregiously. One of those things where you have to wonder if successfully finding understanding of how it happened is going to hopelessly corrupt your own soul for all of eternity.
What taxes?
It always has been (points gun)
Why would you waste $10 to save $5 in tax?
I can’t say how the tax avoidance strategies of the super-rich work in practice, but in any case, their feigned philanthropy is a key part of it.
It’s not.
This is a common misconception based on meme level reasoning.
I don’t know how this works but I know I don’t like billionaires.
You need to be more specific. I’m not going to waste my time refuting your statement because I can’t even begin to imagine how you came up with that.
That makes two of us I guess.
You said that you don’t know how it works, I can’t really respond to that.
You said that philanthropy is not misused to avoid taxes—that is definitely wrong, but if you want to believe it, please do.
It’s the difference between spending money to have your will enacted, and having your money taken by the people, for use of the commons.
The latter is a very dangerous precedent to set. You don’t want the people feeling like they can have their will enacted.
The only good billionaire is a dead billionaire whose stolen wealth has been returned to the people
Does that mean Gates will be “good” if he spends all his money on vaccines and then dies of natural causes?
also Gates have accused of vaccine colonialism by african countries, hes not doing out of his own heart, its most likely his way of laundering money, plus to distance himself from epstein.
This doesn’t make any sense.
He’s been doing this since long before Epstein was arrested.
He also doesn’t need to launder money because he’s already paid tax on all his money. He’s becoming demonstrably, significantly less wealthy in the course of distributing vaccines. If he were laundering money he would be becoming more wealthy.
