I’m not going to dispute the premise or the figures, but the parallel is not an exact one.
Costs of living were very different in the 1840s, and the relative value of money was higher. However. Victorian clerks were regularly required to work 10-12 hour days - no ovetime pay - and the only day they were allowed off was Sunday. So Cratchit was being paid 15 shillings a week for 60 hours of work.
Taking the figure of $27,574 above, that works out to about $13.25 an hour, if Bob Cratchit worked 40 hours a week.
But at the more likely 60 hours a week, he earned $8.84 an hour.
So why am I bringing this up, if I’m not quibbling with the premise?
Because $8.84/hour IS STILL MORE THAN THE U.S. FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE.
Because we’ve had over a hundred years of labor agitating for a 40-hour work week and a legal minimum wage. People have fought and bled and been imprisoned and been killed to gain us these.
And we must never forget that.
Today I learned Ebenezer Scrooge was a jerk but not enough of a jerk to pay his workers minimum wage and tbh that’s kinda fucked me up.
scrooge is still a better employer than jeff bezos
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
God dammit
If you were making, for the sake of argument, $25 million a year, you could live a life of extreme luxury. Even then, it would take you forty years of spending none of that money to amass a single billion. There are multi-billionaires out there. No one needs that kind of money.
Currency came into existence to simplify trade. It was meant to make things easier and better for society. When a single person has more than they need, even more than they would need for an extravagant lifestyle, they’d completely unreasonable. Money isn’t meant to be hoarded for status. I honestly think billionaires are addicted to money.
petition to remake all of the twilight movies where everything is the same except that bella is played by john mulaney who has not been given a script and just has to deal with these circumstances as they come.
unpopular opinion but gravity falls really went downhill after season 6
fair point but the villains were just so boring after bill cipher. call me a purist but not even a great VA like steve martin can make a sentient purple cube interesting.
also i think we can all agree stanley’s character arc went way off the rails during the killer tomato arc. what were they thinking, making him a double agent for the lizard aliens? it’s like the writers didn’t even care anymore lol
yeah dude they just wrapped season 8 a couple weeks ago
?????????? what the fuck is voltron??
jeb bush……..? obviously? i don’t see how this is relevant
I think that Mabel obtaining conditional immortality in season 7 kind of made dippers arc and the reveal of his true name in season 5 moot.
