@PhitDoctor50 I said THEY BELIEVE they work hard.

I'll give him the rod happily !!

The poor in America have become lazy as a result of entitlement.

@norealgod which of course is absolute bullshit

@norealgod The poor have become lazy after seeing hard workers driven to death by it.

@LadyAlyxandrea I prefer horse shit, but the poor suffer from lack of education and have lazy minds. do what is convenient and expedient. see what happens in inner city schools. We already have a 4th generation of illiterate peope

@norealgod Lack of education is driven by lack of appropriate resources out into education by government. Sure, there will always be some lazy people, but apologists like you onlymake things worse than they should be.

In your judgement it is corrupt. Do you buy the lottery every week? are the winners corrupt or just lucky. Buying the lottery is a losers' game. The smart take calculated risks and use their brains in placing their bets carefully. Is Thomas Edison, who by our standards was a billionaire, corrupt? Or Henry Ford? No. You speak from envy

@norealgod First, winning the lottery is pure chance, and I do not include them in my criticism. Otherwise, I stand by my comments. Certainly, the innovators among us who have made life easier for all of us can certainly expect more comfortable lives themselves. But do they deserve to earn billions of dollars in a world where well meaning but destitute people struggle to survive, who work hard and cannot even earn a living wage? This isn't envy on my part, and I resent your simpleton's comment; I'm saying that there is no one so great in the world as to be worth billions of dollars, and they are corrupt and greedy in their thinking that they are.

@godef So Thomas Alva Edison was corrupt?

Take all the money of all the billionaires and spread it over humanity, I expect every human being to be 1200 dollars richer and they will spend it on frivolities in a jiffy. For every dollar that Edison made humanity got 1000 in increased standard of living, and this just during the first 10 years of his inventions. By now his inventions contributed Quadrillions. . He actually collected just one mill of what he created. Socialism is a distorted view of the world. I will gladly pay billions to Edison and Barnes and many others because their continuations are in trillions. You take the billions and lose the trillions. Not a smart trade off

@norealgod "Quadrillions?" Seriously? Your error in attributing Edison's wealth is forgetting that, if he hadn't come along, others would have figured out the things he did and made the same inventions; he was just the right person at the right time. Socialism is not a distorted view, it is merely one view, and you are doing the distortion. Socialism recognizes that we are not cavemen anymore, and we have the intellectualism to create a better society through cooperation instead of fighting and competing for resources. Now, pure socialism is communism, and it's been long apparent that this isn't a feasible solution, because a spirit of entrepreneurship is required to maintain creativeness, and certainly those that "create" ought to be rewarded, but they do not need to be filthy rich when there are filthy poor in the world. You are like the guy who always cheats in line and rationalizes his action by telling himself everyone does it; it is this kind of thinking that created the need for the Me Too movement, and which continues to drive Wall Street greed and corruption to this day.

sorry it is possible , we just have to accept a lower class of living

Give everybody a million and 90% of the people will stop working. supplies will soon dwindle, inflation will be rampant, the world will whirl into complete chaos and poverty.

@markdevenish A lower class of living...no running water, no toilets, paying rent for a stair step instead of an apartment, tofu instead of meat, soybean meal porridge as a staple, etc. The world's output divided by ALL the world's people may very well reduce your standard of living far more than what you imagine. One of the reasons we (U.S. citizens) have a high (not the highest) standard of living is that the peasants in other countries have their labor and agricultural output taken at robbery prices.

What you say about Scandinavia is just a step away from the Utopian equality. Guaranteed income brigs more and more people into the pure receiving side. and an economy cannot afford it for the very long run

@norealgod And yet those Scandinavian economies are showing no indication of collapsing.

completely ... it's called fascism

America is already failing and it is the direct result of welfare. Greed is the most powerful driver of ambition. Welfare is the worst enemy of ambition. America is failing because it is running down on ambition.

America flourished because of greed. It is the outspoken criticism of greed that will destroy it

@Sticks48 Rememberthe 7 deadly sins? Greed is one of them - they called it avarice, but they are wrong. Greed is a motivator. socialism is a de-motivator. we need products, without them there will be nothing to consume. You are a truly religious socialist

@norealgod You are truly an idiot. ?

@norealgod If welfare will cause our economy to collapse, why are not the economies of the Northern European countries collapsing?

@dahermit Who says that they are not? It's a slow but inevitable process

@norealgod The only thing that is inevitable is death.

Greed at this very extreme leads to crime, but for the vast majority greed is a motivator. You cannot extrapolate on Shkrelli. You can only extrapolate on the mean (average)

Not at the expense of others. Most others will not get it on their own. They don't have enough ambition (greed)

It is not a zero sum game. Many of the very rich create new resources. These new resources are the source of the rise in the standard of living

That sounds like a Republican talking point. @norealgod

@nicknotes I see, and gog forbid (we are atheists so this is just a figure of speech), if it has just a smack of right wing, it must be bad, right?

Bravo!!

Also with the mentality that the poor are where they are because they choose to be there, are just moochers, and do not deserve any assistance.

There’s something to be said about how the poor are kept poor. Demand for jobs will always be consistent and jobs with high turnover rates won’t ever be valued more than the floor allows especially when the employer feels paying a worker less for similar production.

There are many jobs at the low level that goes through the natural progression of raises as per tenure of the job, but when it comes to budget cuts, the most senior members tend to always be the first to go perpetuating this cycle where very few are ever truly rewarded while businesses are more incentivized to bring in a new crop of disposable employees every year to pinch pennies on labor.

I haven't look at those two particularly, but the rich generally give less portion of their income then poor and middle-class do. I think if they have that much money, our tax system failed. 😁

education