• 4 Posts
  • 1.98K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle

  • The report won’t go viral because it’s a 100+ page report. Everyone plays a different role, Gary’s role is to raise awareness of the solution of wealth tax and push for an implementation. He’s done a great job at that. I have watched the documentary written about in that article and I agree it wasn’t good, he didn’t push back enough most of the time. His skill was limited in that respect, but his skill at getting clicks is still good to give traction and momentum to the idea of a wealth tax where others can pick up the torch and carry it to the goal.

    Farage does not advocate for a wealth tax and Gary has talked about Farage multiple times on his channel, pointing out that he is taking advantage of the situation where institutions and the elites are indeed corrupt, but will not implement a solution to fix it and will actually do the opposite. I don’t see how that messaging benefits Farage. If you make a wealth tax a partisan issue, then you’re cutting along party lines rather than class lines and that will mean people in poorer classes not supporting a wealth tax simply because of allegiance to their party of choice.

    Additionally, Gary has talked about working with economists and politicians. He doesn’t claim to be the only one with all the answers.


  • You claim it’s not about stats and yet their issue is that he didn’t want to get dragged into a pointless argument over the minutia of some chart. If these hosts agree that wealth inequality is a problem, then it’s an established point that doesn’t need to be rehashed through arguments over a chart. Gary knows this, his audience knows this, the hosts know this, and we know this, and many are living through this. What purpose does arguing over a chart do other than to try to distract from the message? If you want a strong message that resonates with people, you have to keep it simple and straightforward.

    Whether he’s a grifter or not is a matter of opinion. Dismissing his message by calling him a grifter is a textbook example of ad hominem. His message is simple:

    • There is massive wealth inequality.
    • Wealth inequality tends to get worse since the more assets one owns, the more they can use that as leverage to obtain even more assets.
    • A wealth tax addresses the heart of the problem by taxing wealth directly.

    What is your issue with these key points? That he hasn’t spent enough time in the chart mines? That you think he’s a grifter? Clearly his method of communication has been effective in drawing attention on the issue while offering a solution and I think that’s a great thing.





  • When you want your message to reach the masses, you have to oversimplify, otherwise it gets bogged down in details that ultimately may not even matter. People are having trouble with basic cost of living: shelter, healthcare, education, and even food. Focusing so heavily on numbers and graphs is how you get clowns claiming that it’s just a “vibecession” just because some dumb metric like GDP or their arbitrary basket of goods looks fine, meanwhile these people can’t afford the basics.

    The problem is that the field of economics is biased so heavily towards policies that benefit the rich because that is how you get funding. Economists are largely in servitude to the rich and that is why they consider an effective tax on the rich “bad economics”. What these past decades have clearly shown that catering to the rich does not work. Why do you think they’re so vehemently against a wealth tax? If it was so ineffective then they wouldn’t care about a wealth tax getting established.











  • Apparently the hosts of that video you shared don’t like graphs either because they covered the most critical part of the graph with their dumb grinning faces:

    Gary has a point, there can be endless playing about with numbers, and looking at a single graph is not enough to draw a vast conclusion. How about we look at a stat from the same page that graph was pulled from?

    and that stat highlights the point Gary was trying to make about looking at the wealth of the top 0.1% who are largely the ones taking wealth from everyone else, including from the rest of the top 10%. The host trying to pull a gotcha on Gary can’t even read the graph he handpicked because he said that things are better now than in 1980 before trying to correct himself by saying “they’re kind of like they were in 1980” even though actually the share of wealth for the top 10% was lower in 1980 and the share of wealth for the bottom 50% was higher.

    On top of all that, the numbers end at 2020, which is right before plundering frenzy that the wealthy did thanks to all the money printing that took place during the pandemic. Here’s the page with graphs and stats for anyone interested: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/



  • Most democracies would have toppled the government with protests already. It is fascinating how much the American public can take.

    Would they though? A lot of so-called democracies are turning more and more right-wing since they’re in a similar situation with far-right parties dragging “the center” towards the right and actual left-wing parties made mostly irrelevant due to the influence of the rich. Trump and gang have the subtlety of a hydrogen bomb, but that doesn’t mean other countries aren’t also suffering from rampant corruption just because the politicians have more decorum.