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The Case Against a Universal Basic Income (vox.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
A prominent think tank founder argues that a Universal Basic Income is more likely to increase poverty than decrease it. Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, estimates just in the U.S. the cost would reach $3 trillion a year, "close to 100 percent of all tax revenue the federal government collects... A UBI that's financed primarily by tax increases would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history..."
In a long interview with Vox, he warns that "If you have big, very expensive, and therefore highly politically unrealistic proposals, then I worry that people will look at them and say, 'Okay, we can do one or two pieces,' and too often the pieces that get selected out are pieces where a lot of the money goes to the middle or upper middle class... even UBI's staunchest supporters say we can get there in 15 to 20 years. I am totally not comfortable with any policy prescription that says we wait 15 to 20 years to deal with very deep poverty." He suggests instead focussing on the neediest people first, possibly by subsidizing jobs programs and making housing more affordable.
In a long interview with Vox, he warns that "If you have big, very expensive, and therefore highly politically unrealistic proposals, then I worry that people will look at them and say, 'Okay, we can do one or two pieces,' and too often the pieces that get selected out are pieces where a lot of the money goes to the middle or upper middle class... even UBI's staunchest supporters say we can get there in 15 to 20 years. I am totally not comfortable with any policy prescription that says we wait 15 to 20 years to deal with very deep poverty." He suggests instead focussing on the neediest people first, possibly by subsidizing jobs programs and making housing more affordable.
In today's world of increasing automation, how many of those jobs are essentially going to be makework? Or part of marketing efforts that try to convince people they need something frivolous that they don't have? Is the current economic system so inevitable or desirable that those things are preferable to just letting people stay home?
We're already spending an awful lot of money on social services that won't be needed if people had a guaranteed basic income. It's rather duplicitous of this think tank to pretend that it would be an entirely new cost, rather than a replacement for other programs as it is intended.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Ok... aside form the possible tax implications we may or may not have to deal with...
We've de-funded NASA, the National Endowment for the Arts, education in general, and the state university system.
All we'd have to do is fund those items fully- and ten years later we *might* be able to consider some form of UBI. But not before the infrastructure needed to support it is in place. And it's probably a bad overall idea.
This seems a better investment to me: Make education easier, fund creativeness (a singular American strength), fund science, and fund space exploration.
That's a winning combination for any economy.
UBI is a nice idea for countries who have their economy in order with the goal of long term prosperity. The USA does not manage it's economy for long term goals. It simply tries to survive....
(As a note I do support social security and disability benefits for those who qualify for it.)
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
So what if the UBI reaches 100% of the federal tax? It will replace Social Security (25% of the budget), safety net programs like unemployment insurance (10%) and partially Medicare/Medicaid (25%). That's 60% of the budget that will be replaced by the UBI.
The rest is military (24%) and "everything else". Military should be curtailed, but we probably want to keep the "everything else" stuff since it includes funding for NASA, NIH and education and other stuff.
So yeah, UBI is definitely doable but it will require significant adjustments in multiple programs.
they have more money than god, at this point in time. what they stock pile, many of us could live on for the rest of our lives, in the thousands and 10's of thousands. the disparity is disgusting.
take money from the churches, too. they should work for the people but they hoard and don't do SHIT with it, for the most part. sell their land and their assets and give it to the people. we need it. what does god need with a starsh^Hall that money?
stop spending on military. defund 90% of it. its bullshit and its not needed in the way it once was.
truly remove about half of the government offices and jobs. they suck up funds and don't give much back for it.
tax those who are leeches the most; like the wall street motherfuckers. they don't create anything (nothing built, nothing written, nothing really created in any sense other than virtual) and they take so much. tax those who do nothing and collect so much for doing nothing.
we could easily READJUST ourselves so that its more fair.
but we won't unless we fight. and oh boy, I see a fight coming on in the next 50 or less years if we don't fix things soon.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Running more money through the government is a rotten idea. It has friction. Taxpayers give 100 but only 50 goes out the government chews up the rest. Stop paying stupid girls to have unprotected sex. If you cannot provide more value than a robot why should you be breeding?
Correction...they want to make everyone who's not independently wealthy work. UBI already exists for those who can afford not to.
When all the baby boomers are retired, and retirees outnumber workers (taxpayers), Social Security and Medicare will consume two-thirds of the federal budget in 2030. Taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else. It's better to be rich or poor, as the middle class will pay through wazoo to support all those seniors who think the whole world owes them a dime or two.
You can't directly compare how much other countries spend on their militaries. For one thing, their soldiers make a lot less, and their benefits (such as, you know, treating them if their extremities are blown off) are much lower. That alone is about half of the entire military budget. It's also not like you have a choice to buy foreign military gear, it all has to be designed and made right here, at great expense. And even so, 5% of GDP is a small price to pay for having your children die on someone's bayonets. If you want to tell me this can't happen, this has happened multiple times in just recent history to countries which also thought this couldn't happen. In fact, US military (and US in general) is a major reason there hasn't been another major European war. What you now recognize as the EU, was created with heavy prodding from post-war US diplomats.
Using taxes to provide a UBI is stupid. The only way it works is to have the Federal Reserve create the money to pay out through the Federal government. This is not about wealth redistribution, but providing some basic level of capital that isn't zero.
The only question is what that does to inflation and whether that creates a de facto "tax" on the economy. As long as increases to the basic income are inline with increases in inflation then it is manageable. So the basic income should be enough to live on in the most affordable places, but not so much that it acts merely as an inflation causing subsidy.
As an American, you should never allow it either. If you haven't figured out, the founding mantra of the USA is "equal opportunity, not equal outcome". By forcing successful and contributing citizens to pay for someone else's income encourages mediocrity and abuse. Just look at all the failed socialist countries who had this as their main goal, with Venezuela as the latest example.
The GGP is, though possibly not intentionally. The only way to enforce the "a person who does nothing deserves nothing" rule would be to eliminate the stock market, eliminate corporations, and basically throw out the entire system as it is now. After all, the people at the top of our economic system make money by doing basically nothing other than loaning out their money.
In fact, capitalism in its purest form can best be described as "Those who have get; those who have not get bent." It is basically the exact opposite of the fanciful notion that people should be rewarded for their hard work; the people at the bottom invariably work the hardest (to the point that they get home from work physically exhausted) and get the least benefit from that work, and the people at the top do the least work and reap the biggest rewards.
A universal basic income is really the only way to make it possible for people to be rewarded semi-equally for equal amounts of work. It takes away the necessity to work for your most basic needs, thus freeing up time for people to learn new skills and improve their abilities so that the time they spend working is actually valuable to society instead of just continuing to do things that a robot will soon be able to do for less money. And whether they choose to improve themselves or not becomes entirely under their own control, rather than having menial labor forced upon them by the need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What?
No, you have to fund UBI by taxing productive assets - that's the whole point: ensure everyone in society is getting the benefits of productive assets, not just the owners of the productive assets. The only way to do that without wholesale socialism (state ownership of productive assets) is by taxing the productive assets.
Simply creating money like you suggest, without tying that money creation to increased production, is a textbook case for triggering runaway inflation.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Because we need more aircraft carriers than the rest of the world combined?
How about we just stop being the worlds police & take care of our own.
Is that too difficult to understand?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I don't know anything about Robert Greenstein. But I do know a straw man when I see one. So when someone writes:
* Government pensions / social security
* Extra medical support
* Welfare
* Food support
* Assisted housing
* Unemployment insurance
* Minimum wages (just basic income in a disguise, hoisted on the back of companies)
And on and on. And all of the overhead associated with all of those programs - both overhead on governments and corporations. We, as societies in many different countries, have already more or less come to the conclusion that we don't want people starving in the streets. So we have these patchworks of programs designed to roughly approximate the effects of UBI in this regard. And they're a waste and have gaps for people to fall through. Let's call a spade a spade, accept what we're already trying to accomplish and call it for what it is, and then replace it with a much simpler version.
After that point we can argue over how much money defines a basic standard of life that we don't want anyone to have to live below, wherein conservatives will argue for a lower figure and liberals for a higher one.
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
Swiss voters said Hell No to UBI.
The first three have small, and up until recently very homogeneous. If they start hading out $50k to the legions of Islmofacists flooding those countries, they get even more refugees and then go broke.
Unfortunately there is no such thing as equal opportunity, we have well and truly fucked that concept in the US. If you are born poor, you go to shitty schools, eat shitty food, have reduced access to educational materials, don't have the connections to get a good job, don't have a safety net to be able to make long-term beneficial decisions with high short-term cost (i.e. college), etc. It is not impossible to be successful, but the deck is highly stacked against you. That is the definition of unequal opportunity.
In fact, capitalism in its purest form can best be described as "Those who have get; those who have not get bent."
That's feudalism. In capitalism you have to be smart if you want to keep your money. Any company can go bankrupt any day, making your stock worthless. Holding cash will diminish your fortune by inflation. If you are not smart, you lose your money. Lots of aristocrats lost their relevance during industrialisation, because they were not smart. Some invested smartly and kept their riches.
Investing isn't just "doing nothing". You have to chose well and know what will take off and what won't. Do you think warren buffet just sat there all day and drank a coffee for all his life? Or maybe you think he became a freemason and now all he needs is to think of fake stories of how he got his billions?
Yes, you have a better position thanks to the fact that you have money, but getting richer or even keeping your fortune isn't guaranteed.
And i prefer this system ten times over one where somebody inspects your flat, says its too big, and tells you to house more people inside it because its now property of the people.
UBI is a good thing, don't get me wrong. Its just a matter of when and where first it will come. Its less a question of whether. Sometime around this century we simply won't need this many humans working anymore, and if the people in power (whoever that might be) dont want people to starve they'll have to introduce UBI one way or another, whether its free goods or free money.
10K/year basic income for 300 million people is not going to "cost" 3 trillion. 14.5 percent of americans are considered poor. UBI will be structured in such a way to to supplement income of these individuals to the level where they can purchase food, shelter and other basic human needs. The other 95.5% will be paying the basic income they received and extra to cover the poor in taxes. So the net income transfer will be around 10% of cash flow (not all poor have zero income), or 300 billion. This is about half of 2015 military spending.
But wait, there is more. Basic income can replace most other assistance programs like food stamps and homeless shelters. These programs employee a large number of government bureaucrats and enforcement officers. If the value and overhead of these other benefits are saved, we can substantially reduce additional taxes needed or alternatively provide more substantial basic income for the same cost.
But wait, this is not all. Since basic needs of everyone are now taken care, you no longer need to pay "living wage" to your nanny or gardener. You can now hire people for a dollar per hour so long as that's the best money they can get at the moment. In fact poor communities can jump-start their economy by first providing services to each other and gradually attracting wealthier customers and raising their profits.
And then are still in desperation because of poor choices.
So what you're saying is "we cannot trust people to decide where best to spend money; instead, we must trust the government to spend it for them"?
I'm not a huge fan of a nanny state myself, but if you cannot trust people to make good choices...
AND those countries all all 1 race, 1 religion and 1 culture.
A level playing field like that sounds good to me. That means eliminating the cognitive load caused by not knowing where your next meal is coming from and not knowing how you're going to pay the bills, because that cognitive load is a burden on the poor that the wealthy don't share and prevents the poor from climbing out of poverty.
So the "equal opportunity" you seek requires some form of welfare.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
https://slashdot.org/journal/2... is an intro to the topic, but to reword it in terms of this article:
What if there is NO work that actually needs to be done? Why should people be forced to work just so that filthy rich bastards like Robert Greenstein can get a little more money that he doesn't actually need?
The ekronomic answer is threefold:
(1) The nonessential investment work that they willingly do will help reduce the required amounts of essential work in the future, which is basically a nice thing. (No insult intended to the people who enjoy doing the essential work and more power to them. Actually, they are lucky to enjoy doing what needs to be done anyway.)
(2) The nonessential recreational work on the creative side will remain as bottomless as ever. Still not possible to force anyone to do it.
(3) The nonessential recreational work on the consumption side also remains as bottomless as ever, and they also serve who only sit on the couch and consume entertainment. However, if they have some money to spend, then it's an important metric what sort of entertainment they want.
What greedy bastards like Robert Greenstein can't understand is that ambitious people will be ambitious no matter what, and those ambitious people will eagerly invest their time in increasing their own personal productivity (rather than recreation). Creative people will be creative no matter what, and if they can get paid enough money to survive longer, then they will eagerly create more things (without wasting precious creative time on grunge work).
It is ONLY the money-loving greedy bastards like himself who desperately need to get more money no matter what. From Robert Greenstein's perspective, slavery is just as good as anything else that gives him the same amount of money. Unfortunately, his personal problem is fundamentally unsolvable because there is NO amount of money that is sufficient.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Excellent plan! We'll let Yemen and Somalia handle all those pirates on one of the world's largest shipping routes, because they've done a great job so far, and we'll let China handle the South China Sea. The Congo and Mali can deal with their own heavily armed gangs of bandits, and no one needs to care about a genocide or two.
Then next time that someone invades Kuwait, or Germany invades Poland, we can sit back and go tsk, tsk, tsk, safe in the knowledge that we aren't the world's police and it isn't our problem.
Yes, let's get right on that.
It takes away the necessity to work for your most basic needs, thus freeing up time for people to learn new skills and improve their abilities so that the time they spend working is actually valuable to society instead of just continuing to do things that a robot will soon be able to do for less money.
You presume that, if someone is getting their basic needs fulfilled, that he'll be motivated to improve himself just for the sheer joy of it.
There are two ways to motivate the donkey: carrot in front or stick on the behind.
If the basic needs are fulfilled, there is no carrot in front NOR a stick on the behind; there would be no motivation to change anything.
I don't think man is, generally, motivated to super achievement... otherwise, Einstein (and his like) wouldn't be so rare; there's something unusual in those that over-achieve, and I don't think that's an element strongly apparent in common man.
You're ignorant propaganda
Pretty well speaks for itself...
That's feudalism. In capitalism you have to be smart if you want to keep your money.
Are you suggesting that feudal lords did not have to be smart to get where they were and remain there?
Any company can go bankrupt any day, making your stock worthless. Holding cash will diminish your fortune by inflation. If you are not smart, you lose your money. Lots of aristocrats lost their relevance during industrialisation, because they were not smart. Some invested smartly and kept their riches.
Plenty of aristocrats went bankrupt prior to the industrialization of the west. In fact, the reason that Friday the Thirteenth is unlucky is because a king of France was on the verge of bankruptcy himself.
And look at Donald Trump. That guy is an idiot who has managed to hold on to at least some of his fortune and inheritance despite failed business after failed business. If I failed half as many times as Donald Trump has, I'd be completely destitute.
We depended on social services while my parents were learning English.
This is the exact argument for expanded social services. Thank you for making my point for me.
In capitalism you have to be smart if you want to keep your money.
You forget we don't live in a capitalistic society but merely in a corrupt kleptocracy in which the government works for the wealthy and against the rest.
So 'being smart' doesn't help much if the tax system is used against you, and your money.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I never said it was impossible, just a lot harder for some people. You had to work substantially harder than a trust-fund kid, that is not equal opportunity.
All I did to collect rent and interest was take the risk of a mortgage, empty units, damage, maintenance, taxes, insurance, and fees.
In exchange for that, I get to collect rent most of the time, deal with tenants that destroy my property, answer to the police when tenants do stupid things, and assure my lenders that I'm not in need of their 'homeowner retention experts' when THEY withdraw my payment late.
Other than that, and the occasional midnight call, I just sit on my fast ass and collect rent. And work my day job.
Stupid gits. You have no idea do you?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The lie inherent right from the get go, money is a resource, it is not, capital is an illusion, an imaginary parking spot for the resource access it represents. We either have the resources to sustain the population or we do not. No amount of imaginary capital can create resources or distribute them, capital is simply the currently chosen means to distribute access to the available resources, however it is broken, because it purely aligns with greed, rather than need ie some have millions of times as much a they need, whilst others not only have nothing but due to capital debt, less than nothing.
Basically what they are really saying, is their needs, their psychopathic ego, demands poor people (a capital fabrication) they can exploit to feed the insatiable ego of psychopaths. The demand to have more, they must have more, the demand to be able to order other people about, not just some but as many as possible, in fact they fight amongst themselves for total control and absolute power over everyone else.
The resources are there, an administrative means of allocating and distributing those resources just needs to be found. However rewards come into play, extra for those who contribute more (not just take the credit for the contribution of many others or manipulate capital to no advantage of anyone except themselves). So having more than others by being wealthy but wealth is only fun if it is based upon fairness and generosity otherwise it is just harmfull and no fun at all (greed destroys it never builds). There in is the catch, they actually want that power to harm and destroy, to choose whether others live or die, it feeds there genetic anti-social cerebral disease. Going to them for solutions is like the chicken going to the fox for solutions on how to be safe, the foxes response, every single time, you can only be safe from the attacks of others, inside my belly.
Going to the current rich psychopaths for solutions, those who parasitically prey upon the rest of society, is just as stupid. Look at the response, it can't be done, we don't the capital. What the fuck does that even mean, when we obviously have the actual resources to do it, they are going to purposefully starve to death as many as they can for fun, they are going to stick as many as they can in labour camps for fun, they will lord it over us peasants yet again for fun (this after millions died stripping away that power, the current gutless generations will give it back, pathetic).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It's all their fault for being successful.
Can we please quit referring to theft as "success"?
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
The claim that BI works is wrong, and it really should not take a whole lot of thought to make you realize it. Start by studying the current Government Welfare and see how it works. It does not move anyone out of poverty, and quite frankly it is abused by a massive amount of people.
Why did they make SNAP all card based and put restrictions on what you can purchase? Because an extremely large percentage of people were not purchasing food for their kids, they were drinking and smoking the money away. So what do you believe will happen when someone gets a basic check? Same damn thing.
Now what happened when people smoked away their food stamps? Did we cut them off? No, that would be cruel to the kids. We had to come up with other money from numerous other sources, and the bad behaviors still don't change.
Taking from the productive people to give to the unproductive incentivizes non-productivity. That is the only way to give everyone money, by taking it from people that have it. That is why all communist countries must be tyrannical. Fear is the only other incentive, and that incentive paralyzes innovation and thought. It is the Dark ages versus Renaissance. That is the reality of BI.
If you want to see the experiment in action, go live in China and become a Chinese citizen. How about instead of "giving" them money we continue to have jobs so that people can work.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Bet we get
What are you betting? Someone else's money?
Einstein's day job was being a patent examiner. If you aren't contributing, it's because you're a lazy shit, and not because the Man is holding you down.
Not at all. His point was the help was temporary until they understood the culture. Until you have grown up around generational poverty and people who accept it as normal,you don't know what the duck you're talking about. People need hope and education, not hand outs until the Sun turns into a cinder.
>> please don't turn it into the country I ran away from
As a successful immigrant myself, this is _exactly_ my sentiment. Fuck that commie shit with a broomstick. I came to this country not just with not a dime to my name, I had significant debts as well. I now pay four times in taxes alone compared to what I made here in the first year. It took me 15 years and a lot of hard work and perseverance to get to this point. Now some communist comes out of the woodwork and says I need to "share". But dude, I already "share". Even with my great accountant doing my taxes, Uncle Sam takes fully 29% of what I make, with nearly zero accountability for how this money is being spent. To me it appears as though it disappears into the void, since neither the federal nor the state government ever has money to fund even the basic necessities like education. There's literally zero incentive for the government to spend this money wisely, _especially_ if the government is run by democrats who think they should have unobstructed access to my wallet.
The problem with the future of AI and automation is that you might not have the opportunity to work.
Maybe if we didn't have a bunch of people breeding or migrating just so they could get various welfare checks there would be enough work to go around and enough leisure time for people to enjoy life. but its politically incorrect to say any of the following.
1) if you can't afford to raise that child don't have it.
2) Or get a job then a house then have a child.
3) stay in your own country we are full
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
The same problem comes up in every discussion about UBI, and it is this one: people have no idea of the numbers involved, nor do they seem able to do basic sums. You come up with an impressive sounding list of programs 'that could be eliminated' under UBI, and then you vigorously wave your hands and assert that surely these are worth more than UBI!
Well - no, they are not. According to wikipedia, total expenditure on social programs in the US is $1.3 trillion per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States) ), far less than the $3.2 trillion per year needed to provide every American with $10,000/year stated by an earlier poster. So that's already $2 trillion unaccounted for right there. And _no_, government overhead is not anywhere near $2 trillion. You would only reach that figure if every last civil servant in the US (around 2 million, not counting postal workers) worked in social security, and earned around $1,000,000/year.
Is $10,000/year even enough to live on in the US? http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-... lists the price of a one bedroom apartment outside the city center as $900/month, i.e. around $11,000/year. There would be no money left over for food, education, medicine, etc., so anyone who is poor today would still be poor under this new system - and living out on the street. Well, nicely done - you did not eliminate poverty after all, but you did triple the cost of the program. Moreover, you reallocated funds that today go to the poor, and spread them to people who are already well-off.
This last problem will cause massive pressure to 'do something extra' for peope who still live on the street (and perhaps 'a little something' for people who have relatively high medical costs, and perhaps 'a little something more' for veterans or retired civil servants or whatever). Your claims that it would eliminate 'overhead' would quickly disappear as these new programs are put into place, and the government needs to figure out who qualifies and who doesn't.
There are other issues as well, but the simple fact that society simply cannot pay for UBI should already be enough to convince anyone.
There are no longer enough jobs for everyone, no matter how much people may want to work.
There have never been enough jobs for everyone. Well, maybe in 1942, when 12% of the population were in the military and the rest were trying to build airplanes faster than they got blown up. The US isn't built on an image of "come to the US because our factories need drones," it's built on the image of "come to the US and build something for yourself."
India is trying hard to take the title "land of entrepreneurs," but there's a reason so many great companies have started in the US. Do something for yourself. Don't sit around waiting for someone else to "give" you a job; much less to just give you money. Look around, find something you can do for other people, and do it.
So, your parents depended on social services to get started, and you got a scholarship.
You are the very definition of not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but benefiting from the kindness of strangers. The bequests that paid for your scholarship and the taxes that paid for your parents to integration in your new home are as responsible for your success as your hard work is.
Well done for your hard work, but for every guy like you, there's a bunch of guys in the same situation who fought for those opportunities and came second, didn't get the scholarship, couldn't go to med school. Just because their story didn't resonate as well with the scholarship board doesn't mean they are any less talented, or any less talented than the rich kids who's parents paid their way - why don't they get your opportunities too? Because equality of opportunity is a lie.
In business and pretty much everything in life, the only true failure is to stop trying.
>> the people at the top of our economic system make money by doing basically nothing other than loaning out their money.
Hold on, buddy. Let's take a simpler case: that of a surplus. Suppose you earn $10 but you only spend $9. You now have a $1 surplus. If you do this ten times, you'd have a $10 surplus in your bank. You could then live one pay cycle without income or "doing nothing" as you put it. That doesn't make you "evil", that makes you prudent. You've earned that right... much more so than someone who spent $11, earned $10, and now needs a bailout from someone else.
When you come in and look at this after the fact and say, "look at that rich bastard, sitting on his ass", you're really deeply twisting the situation by not examining how we got there in the first place.
If you take away the ability for people to earn, keep, and invest a surplus, you take away the incentive to produce anything beyond what you personally need in the near term. Production is the foundation of wealth. All of these dollar bills mean nothing without it.
You're so focused on "haves" and "have nots". But how did the haves get to have? That's the important question. Most of us earned it through honest means: building and selling products and services to others who needed them.
To read your post is to believe that anyone who ever built anything is a thief, and anyone who ever didn't build anything is a hero. Isn't precisely the opposite true? Shouldn't we be celebrating people who built the goods and services we rely on?
Except that's not how it works. The "haves" earn $10, but receive income of $3000 by making sure other people who earned $10 only receive income of $9. Then everyone has roughly the same $11 cost, but the "haves" have a $2989 surplus and the "have nots" have a $1 debt. Further the surplus is then given to children of the "haves" who earned $0, but start with surpluses undreamed of by the "have nots".
That's extreme income inequality, and that's what people are complaining about. The person pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to become one of the "haves" is almost but not quite mythical. Most people that are thought of being in that category had backing that a "have not" doesn't have access to.
He effected a bored affect.
Ah, the Big Lie of the post-Reagan age.
Greed is when you want more than what self-interest demands. Greed is excessive desire that exceeds what is reasonable, healthy or meaningful.
Many, if not most, of the rich are greedy. They want more than what is best for themselves; they don't understand that impoverishing others also harms them.
As Adam Smith figured out a long time ago, a viable economic system has to work despite the existence of greed. This is not in any way the same thing as rewarding or encouraging or worshipping greed, as lassiez-faire capitalists want to do. In fact the principal function of government in a market economy is to provide regulation that will restrain the destructive effects of greed on social structures (such as the market itself).
As you say, a market should work best for those who behave in their own self interest. Greed is by definition excessive and thus not in one's one self interest; it is a character flaw and not the virtue that greedy folk wish you to believe it is.