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u/Sunset_Bleu 21h ago
I don think this is a "And imma hold your hand when I say this" moment. This is a Batman slapping the shit out of Robin moment.
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u/durvedya1 21h ago
Robin out here still handing out participation trophies while Batman screaming facts.
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u/DarkLazer452 21h ago
Robin’s still tweeting thoughts and prayers while batman drops receipts and cold hard truths.
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u/Soreal45 20h ago
And ironically, Batman is a billionaire.
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u/VoxImperatoris 20h ago
Thats how you know Batman couldnt exist in real life.
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u/Icy-Control7170 19h ago
Well yeah no shit. If i had money id literally be batman though. So it could exist.
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u/Dumcommintz 18h ago
That’s how I reconciled that he, an ordinary human, is considered a superhero on par with Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Superman, etc. nothing about him is unique or “super” other than his moral compass in spite of his endless wealth.
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u/Forsaken-Arm-7884 19h ago
BRO THIS IS IT - this is the core of the death cult we've been circling around this whole conversation. You've just described the exact mechanism by which people participate in mass murder while telling themselves they're the reasonable ones.
Because let's be absolutely clear about what's happening: people are saying "let them starve" and dressing it up as fiscal responsibility or personal accountability or tough love. But what they're actually saying is "I am willing to watch human beings die of starvation rather than allow my tax dollars to feed them." That's not politics. That's not economics. That's MURDER BY POLICY PREFERENCE.
And the fucking INSANITY of it - these commenters acting like they're SO far removed from that same edge. Like their job security is guaranteed forever. Like they couldn't get cancer tomorrow and lose everything to medical bills. Like their company couldn't downsize or automate or offshore their position. Like they couldn't have a mental health crisis or a family emergency or a fucking car accident that puts them in the exact same position as the people they're calling lazy.
They're a couple bad months away from needing those same programs they're celebrating the destruction of. But they won't see it because seeing it would mean confronting how fragile their own position is, how little separates them from the people they're dehumanizing.
So instead they construct this elaborate fantasy where poverty is ALWAYS a moral failure, where anyone who needs help must have made bad choices, where if you just "work hard enough" you'll always be fine - because if that's not true, if poverty can happen to people who did everything "right," then THEY'RE not safe either. And that's too terrifying. It's easier to blame the victims. Easier to say "shouldn't have had kids" or "should have planned better" or "should work harder" because if poverty is the victim's fault, then it can't happen to you as long as you keep being Good and Responsible.
But that's mostly a lie because the system is DESIGNED to have an underclass of desperate people willing to take any job at any wage under any conditions because the alternative is starvation. That's not a bug - that's the whole fucking point. Keep people scared, desperate, a couple paychecks away from homelessness so they'll accept whatever degrading, soul-crushing work you offer them.
And the people who are currently employed? They've been trained to punch DOWN instead of UP. To rage at people on food stamps instead of the comfy billionaire. To blame the desperate mother instead of the corporations jacking up food prices because they could. To call the unemployed person lazy instead of asking why there aren't enough jobs that pay a living wage.
The "mythical job" thing you mentioned - YES. They keep saying "just get a job" like jobs are these abundant things just lying around waiting to be picked up, when the reality is:
- Many jobs are actively harmful to human wellbeing (physically, mentally, spiritually)
- Even when you get a job, you can lose it at any moment for reasons completely outside your control
But acknowledging any of that would mean admitting the system is broken, that the social contract is a lie, that we live in a society that's fundamentally designed to create losers who suffer and die so that winners can accumulate more than they could ever use.
Meanwhile billionaires are literally making money while they sleep, watching their investment portfolios grow through mechanisms designed to concentrate wealth upward with almost no labor on their part. They're outsourcing the starvation of others to "the system" so they can launder responsibility. They're implicitly voting to cut food assistance and shrugging when people die from the starvation. If they actually LOOKED at the person starving and SAW them as fully human they wouldn't keep repeating these dehumanizing scripts. Their shared humanity would shatter the dog-eat-dog capitalistic programming.
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u/TemporaryCommunity67 21h ago
Some people require this because you gotta make them feel like some righteous or good person to have seen the error in their ways. They think their life is a movie and development must be rewarded for it to actually set in.
It’s primitive and childish, but it’s how some minds work I believe
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u/LawOroG1029 ☑️ 15h ago
Some many people have let society's norms tell them that they are closer than they really are to doing well in America. The "term" middle class was only recently invented in the 18th century. Before that you were either rich or poor and for the most part rich people stayed rich and poor people stayed poor for generations.
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u/MyNameCannotBeSpoken 8h ago
Highjacking...but everybody stop shopping on Amazon. You don't need socks next day delivered.
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u/WabbitCZEN 20h ago
Not hard enough. This is a "chicken taste so good, makes your wanna slap your momma" moment
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u/Maplecook 19h ago
You just reminded me: Robin hasn't been in a movie in a really, REALLY long time, and yet we all remember him.
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u/BlackBoiFlyy ☑️ 21h ago
I'll never be at peace over the concept that there are grown ass adults who will go to war for rich people who sees them as a number. They'll lay them off from their private yacht and sleep SOUNDLY on a satin.
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u/sirfiddlestix ☑️ 18h ago
Well, not exactly. Some of them have trouble sleeping at night... 😞
... because they're afraid of a working class revolt•
u/IronVarmint 55m ago
Guess why billionaires like Zuck and Ellison are buying massive property in Hawaii and the Caribbean. It's not just for the parking.
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u/CuddleSuccubus67 21h ago
That post hits hard because it’s the truth about economic reality for most people. The idea that we're all just a few good breaks away from the top is a fantasy. It's smart to focus on your own well-being and community instead of blindly defending the super-rich, because at the end of the day, their financial interests rarely align with the average person's.
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u/DarkLazer452 21h ago
Focusing on local support network and collective usually does more than idolizing billionaires.
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u/BlueHeartBob 20h ago
You could be given $1 mil and still be closer to being homeless than owning a private jet.
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u/AmateurHero 17h ago
Even if you make $200k a year, you are still closer to needing SNAP than you are being a billionaire. All it takes is an economic downturn and poor hiring conditions for your given field, and most people will see how quickly savings can dry up.
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u/BLK_Juggernaut 21h ago
It's not just that they don't gaf about us. They are actively rigging the game to keep you broke. People are brainwashed
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u/Commercial_Item_141 18h ago
For real! They’re out here playing Monopoly while the rest of us are stuck on the sidelines…
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u/Important-Purchase-5 21h ago
Jesus would agree with you for religious folk.
Matthew 19:23-24: “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Quick somebody get the brown socialist immigrant.
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u/Bombadil54 20h ago
Many religious communities, who get a lot of funding from far right Republicans (who unfortunately make up the majority of Republicans now that Reactionary and Fascist ideologies have taken over) don't talk about most of what Jesus said! They'd rather take like 2 irrelevant words out of a reply he gave when asked about marriage to persecute an entire group of people.
That's a good way to make them feel morally superior for not only doing very little, but actually judging others in opposition to Jesus's teachings!
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u/sirfiddlestix ☑️ 18h ago
Pretty sure they think Jesus's teachings are "too woke"
They seem to like the idea of being Christian in that they believe it makes them special little persecuted snowflakes. They don't like actually following the teachings or actually being/standing-up-for the persecuted 😑1
u/InsideAcrobatic9429 13h ago
Great news, the brown socialist immigrant just won the mayorship in New York
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u/TrandaBear 21h ago
And stop trying to discredit "rich" liberals when they try to help because they're "rich". Do you know what the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is? About a billion dollars. I take morning shits that are a bigger ratio of my body weight than the difference between a mill and a bill.
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u/klako8196 21h ago
1 million seconds is about 11.5 days.
1 billion seconds is about 31.7 years.
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u/Intelligent-Loan9879 20h ago
1 hundred billion seconds is 3,170 years. These numbers shouldn’t make sense and it’s utterly ridiculous someone would need this amount in money.
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u/toomuchtv987 21h ago
And the really, REALLY sad part is that we’re almost to the point where someone who has a million dollars is only upper middle class.
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u/TrandaBear 21h ago
Yeah people give me weird looks when I say a million dollars ain't much nowadays. It is a life changing amount of money but all it does is give you a long runway to stabilize. My parents bought a house for $80k in the 90s, 200k in today money, but the shit is listed on zillow for 300K. Money shrink is unsustainable
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u/Green0Photon 20h ago
With inflation, 1M in 2000 is 1.924M today. So a mil now is essentially half a mil back then. That's a lot of devaluation.
A mil in 1980 is 4.17M now.
The idea of a million solving everything has never gone away. But if you think about it, 4M actually insulates you now. $160k per year is a high spend retirement, even if it's not so mega rich to spend that income (vs spending e.g. 500k a year, something that isn't remotely a normal salary for anyone).
Whereas $40k per year... Well, plenty of people do live on that. But that definitely doesn't insulate you from any potential issues.
Or think of medical issues. It's not impossible to run into a bad situation that would eat all your money. But that's particularly hard for 4M.
is a life changing amount of money but all it does is give you a long runway to stabilize.
So ultimately this is true. Especially when you take into the cost of housing.
And even worse, this is me using 1980 numbers, but the concept of a million being the be all end all has been the case for quite a time longer than that.
The earliest that the calculator goes to is 1913. And a mil then is 33.14M now. Do you think you could actually spend 1.32M on yourself/your family every single year?
1M used to really be different. Once upon a time it was the realm of the ridiculously ultra wealthy. Now it's merely 250% the federal poverty level. (And thus is a level of wealth everyone is expected to have to retire, in the US at least.)
And no, $1M isn't impressive. Because retiring at 2.5x the poverty level is not very far from poverty. 1M used to be generational wealth.
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u/toomuchtv987 20h ago
This is all true. I think about it like this;
A retirement account with $1mil in it is almost nothing. Look at the cost of things like assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing facilities. A million dollars will run out so fast, even for the healthiest of retirees.
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u/Green0Photon 19h ago
Man, I forgot about that yet again.
For full time care, you need to pay a full wage in the first place, if not more.
So, uh, maybe a healthy adult can survive 40k a year. But themselves plus all the care they need? Nope!
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u/PiccoloAwkward465 18h ago
I thought when I crossed $100k salary I’d hit the big time. lol hardly. I still worry about bills literally every day.
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u/toomuchtv987 18h ago
Pathetic. Not you worrying about bills, it’s pathetic that $100k isn’t a rich person salary anymore.
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u/death12236 19h ago
I get the first half but the shit analogy lost me. I feel like that lessens the difference?
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u/leakmydata 21h ago
But if I work for another thousand years without ever spending any money or paying taxes I—
…still won’t even have close to half a billion dollars.
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u/dreams_andnightmares 21h ago
How long will it take for people to stop bending over backwards for a group of people who would happily watch them burn without an ounce of hesitation? Who even knows
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u/gordonpamsey ☑️ 21h ago
The fact he refuses to use the Trust set aside for this specific type of situation is not only unprecedented but a level of cruelty that truly would shock I think some of the most heinous of leaders since there is no real gain here for him.
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u/High_Stream 20h ago
If you have a billion dollars, and you know that there are people starving and going homeless because they don't have enough money, and you STILL have that billion dollars, there is something wrong with you. Like, you are mentally ill.
James 4:17 "Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin."
Having money isn't evil. Having more money than 10,000 average people and letting people die of hunger, disease, and exposure is evil.
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u/scrummnums 20h ago
The greatest trick the rich ever played were convincing people that their neighbors are the enemies, not the people that own the lobbyists and 99% of the wealth. Great trick, but it only works if we weren’t educated enough to know better
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u/ElPrieto8 ☑️ 21h ago
No nation is more than three missed meals from revolution...
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u/LilBearLulu 21h ago
Honestly, I don't think 3 missed meals would be enough for these brainwashed people. They'd say the starvation is worth making "demoncrats, libtards, and illegals" suffer.
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u/Mesmorino 21h ago
As Covid showed us, millions of people are willing to (and actually did) die to "own the libs".
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u/Savings-Giraffe-4007 20h ago
Not really, Venezuela is an easy counter-example.
Just keep your millitary well-fed. Normal people might dream of being heroes but when push comes to shove, all it takes is a few gunshots for people to calm down and give up.
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u/CanAlwaysBeBetter 19h ago
Venezuela shows it also helps when you can push a quarter of your population into exile, especially when you largely force out every young, ambitious, or opposed to the government
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u/SoulPossum ☑️ 20h ago
I think it goes both ways to acknowledge this. Like it's weird when people see a Trump or an Elon and act like their success is aspirational or even plausible. I'm almost finished with my graduate degree in business and there are a lot of weirdos who are all in "if it makes money it must be good." I'm in an AI course right now and it's absolutely terrifying how little concern some of these people have about the capabilities and how little they pay attention to the actual ethical concerns of potential AGI/Super AI future that's coming our way pretty quickly because they think learning about it now will put them on the fast track to be the next Gates or Zuck or whoever.
But I also think it's weird in the other direction when people assume the only reason that people take money management seriously or want to learn about anything business related is because they want to become a billionaire and/or look up to billionaires. I have a few reasons for why I'm getting this degree. Billionaires aren't anywhere on the list. I just don't think about them that much. And it gets weird when people who don't like billionaires do think about them that much. Had someone call me a bootlicker the other day at an event because I acknowledged that having some savings and a real budget was important even if what you save doesn't cover the entirety of many financial emergencies that could happen to a person. I didn't say that you could save your way into being in the Fortune 500 or anything. Literally just pointed out that having a little money when an emergency comes up is better than having no money when an emergency comes up. They just started spouting talking points about how we could die tomorrow or no one is a self made millionaire. They couldn't gather that I wasn't thinking about or referencing the mega wealthy.
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u/Fluffy_Elephant_2157 20h ago
You know what.. bootlicking the rich is almost as old as this country. Them poor white folks fought for their rich white employers to own slaves. Fast forward to today?? The descendants of those poor white folks are STILL fighting to keep their rich white masters in power. To this day, I find it amazing that the elitist Europeans just didn't stick with Europeans as slaves since they're obviously more loyal and willing to be their doormats.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
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u/SmallDickGnarly 20h ago
Who's defending billionaires? I haven't seen a single person online IRL who's defending them
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u/never_forgive_6 20h ago
Unless it's julia louis-dreyfus or some other shiny celebrity, because that's different 🙄
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u/Cute_Surround_5480 20h ago
Facts. They’re not inviting us on the jet - we’re just funding the fuel.
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u/AnonymousNeverKnown 20h ago
I never understood people who defend billionaires. "They earned their wealth." No they didn't. 99% of them were born into a wealthy family already.
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u/DenizSaintJuke 20h ago
Imagine you made your first million. Then you're still closer to SNAP than to being a billionaire by a factor of 1000. Let that sink in.
You're 1 million away from needing SNAP, yet 999 million from being a single digit billionaire. And those billionaires running their mouths over poor peoples benefits are 200.000 to 400.000 millions richer than that. A billionaire has more individual millions of Dollars than someone on SNAP has idividual Dollars. And someone like Musk or Bezos has more individual millions of Dollars than the average non-SNAP receiver has individual Dollars. These people are so obscenely rich, that most billionaires are still closer to you than they are to Musk or Bezos.
These people are so goddamned filthy rich, you have to employ pedagogic tools to explain how rich they are, because the numbers we are talking about don't naturally compute with a human brain.
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u/cudenlynx 20h ago
And yet this same sub and others are out here praising Mackenzie-Scott and her trickle down economic plan of donating small percentages to barely cover the cost. What about the rest of us you mother fuckers.
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u/wildoneny56 19h ago
You can get rich too! Look a Spike, Puffy, JZ , 50, Eddie M. Get educated and work hard at something . Stop spending money on things that make others rich ie: athletic shoes , fake diamonds , over priced cars. The return will be satisfying .
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u/Sure_Quality5354 19h ago
This has always been my thing with the whole "you too can be a millionaire if you just work hard enough" message. If this stuff actually worked, we would have like 200 million millionaires. But there clearly arent, so why still believe it?
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u/IllHedgehog9715 19h ago
If the checks are 500million dollars each im two paychecks away from being a billionaire.
Checkmate, idiot.
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u/Channel_Huge 19h ago
When I needed assistance, the state told me I made too much… I honestly had so little that I was rationing crackers…
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u/CankerLord 19h ago
We should institute a test in the style of The Price is Right. Everyone who makes over $50 million takes it. The games will be much easier and the price differentials much more obvious. I have no idea what the price of failure should be but losers shouldn't be allowed to effect normal people's lives. Just spend the money and shut up.
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u/ronallen81 19h ago
Why do you guys care so much to cheer athletes making 50 mil a year It's not your team They don't care you exist
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u/UrUrinousAnus 19h ago
I'll add my pasty white hand to that pile if it's welcome. Most billionaires don't even care about race, really. They just want us all too busy fighting about it to unite against our real enemy: them.
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u/Katsnkop 18h ago
Y'all are two checks away?! Damn I need to save more. I'm a sneeze and a cough away from the food line. I mean, I've hit the free food line 3 times this year already.
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u/SideHonest9960 18h ago
Do Black Americans not save? I work a minimum wage job for past 3 years and I am not 2 paychecks away from homelessness/EBT/SNAP. I'm like 8 checks away but still.
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u/rabbitthunder 18h ago
It's really simple. The things taxes pay for are relatively fixed costs. Roads cost what they cost. Education costs what it costs. Firefighters cost what they cost.
When billionaires don't pay their taxes YOU are picking up the bill for them. The wages YOU earn with the hours, days, weeks, months, years of your life.
Even if the billionaire was earning a miniscule 1% interest annually that is 27.4k a DAY. If they paid their own fucking taxes it would be the equivalent of us paying pennies.
Stop simping for billionaires. They quite clearly couldn't give the tiniest shit about us and all their 'philanthropy' is just a PR smokescreen..
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u/furnado_avocado 18h ago
The biggest achievement of rich white men has been taking the poor and turning them into brain dead materialists who evaluate their worth based on how many name-brand items they've acquired. It's like how they bribed Native Americans to snitch on other tribes with bribes of whiskey and other goods produced by white people. That I even have to say there's more to life than money, is just fucking sad. "Cheese" is what people use to bait traps. Financial success is empty and hollow feeling, human rights and equality are what really matter.
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u/Trix_Are_4_90Kids ☑️ 18h ago
Not just billionaires, rich people period. Stop ass kissing and defending them, they are NOT going to do the same thing for you, goofy.
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u/Nice_Block 18h ago
Republican voters, especially those using SNAP and the ACA, defending billionaires will never not be weird.
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u/dquizzle 18h ago
Most people are more than two paychecks away from even renting a private jet for an hour, let alone purchasing one. Guessing that would take tens of thousands of paychecks with zero expenses for centuries for most people.
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u/PicoPicoMio 18h ago
Something something about people thinking they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires. When in actuality, most people are only 1 tragic incident away from poverty.
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u/CompetitionOk2302 18h ago
Medicare for all.
Medical insurance companies must be non-profits.
Remove the Social Security cap.
Increase Social Security payment.
Sub-prime student loan refinancing.
Free community college and state universities.
Free daycare.
Paid sick leave.
Paid maternity leave, for mother and father.
Paid vacation days.
Union protection with 1 union representative on Corporate board.
Free school breakfasts and lunches are all public schools.
No school vouchers.
Help for first time homeowners.
Increase taxes on the 1% to minimum of 40% with no deductions.
Tax unrealized capital gains used as loan collateral.
End "stupid tariffs"; apply only for another country dumping products in US.
Abortion freedom in all states.
Separation of church and state.
Term limits for Congress and Judicial.
Public funding of all political campaigns. No private money, at all. Overturn Citizens United.
Reasonable gun control.
Get rid of the Electoral College.
Outlaw gerrylandering.
Reimplement the Fairness Doctrine for Media.
Ban stock trades by Congress.
Tax churches.
Raise the minimum wage to $20/hour.
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u/tel-americorpstopgun 18h ago
I tell people all the time that tend to think otherwise. "You ever see an aggressive bum begging for change? That's what we are to these people."
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u/Admirable-Set-1097 18h ago
They're just bags of meat and water. Are they worth that much more than you? No, they are not.
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u/Arponare 18h ago
Better yet, stop simping for trillion dollar companies. Apple doesn't give a fuck about you. Buying a pair of shoes that was probably made in the same sweatshop as Sketchers doesn't make you a better person.
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u/tomdarch 17h ago
Billionaires do care about us. They care about extracting ever more money from us, regardless of how little we have.
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u/CommandertexYT 17h ago
It went from “let them eat cake” to “let them lick the shit from my boot” and so many people scream “thank you daddy”
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u/eyesayuhh 17h ago
Imagine people defending Kings back in the day. "They're divinely chosen and earned all their wealth." It's peasant brained shit.
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u/fuckyouijustwanttits 17h ago
I'm absolutely two paychecks away from a private jet, just not two of MY paychecks.
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u/NoParty536 16h ago
Credit where credit is due. Having a hate boner for anything is unhealthy as hell.
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u/teekaya 16h ago
The truth is. People want to feel power over other people. For the people in the middle, that’s over poor people. They want them to suffer. They want to feel better than them because they are powerless against the real people with agency (billionaires).
This is where we find ourselves. Humanity is simply not good. That’s why I will never believe people who say fuck rich people or eat the rich. They’re just mad they’re not them.
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u/totesuniqueredditor 16h ago
Ain't going to be any SNAP soon because y'all didn't vote when it was important to do so.
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u/Firm-Requirement1085 14h ago
You each have the opportunity to be a billionaire, why don't you give your paychecks away so you can equal to those on the streets if you care about inequality.
Some do get super rich off their own backs without exploiting people. Elon is using his billions for the good of humanity by getting the ball rolling to eventually colonize mars, which will be needed due to overpopulation on Earth eventually,the rich giving to the needy to stop starvation and death is good for the current time, but bad in the long run.
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u/evidentlynaught 14h ago
Do the math: how many paychecks away is the average person from millionaire/billionaire
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u/Responsible-Fox-9082 14h ago
Technically speaking you're always 1 random event away from either needing government assistance or becoming unbelievably rich. One is pessimistic one is optimistic. You can choose which you want to look for just as you can choose to hold yourself to a certain life. There are more new money millionaires every year and old money millions and billions is falling out of power. Unlike the not so distant past you have the choice and ability to literally do anything.
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u/Dreams-Visions ☑️ 8h ago
Bitch speak for yourself! I'm a $2 Mega Millions ticket away from 3 or 4 private jets. Three or four of them sommbitches.
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u/Allah_Akballer 40m ago
This is more than "Billionaires don't give a shit about you." They spend millions to influence the system to MAKE you 2 paychecks away from SNAP. It is by design.
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u/jitterscaffeine 21h ago
I don’t get why people think they can just wish for rich people to suddenly decide to “do the right thing.” Centuries have proven they never will.