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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.
Follow the money. Soros is a big contributor with CBPP. Should raise some eyebrows already.
Why not basic? Example: if you make less than $2500 per month, you receive a top-up to this 'basic' level of income. If you make an excess of $2500 per month, you don't qualify. Why Universal Basic Income? Why not simply Minimum Income?
How many jobs are already makework?
It's been 30 years since Lotus 1-2-3 became cheap, available, accessible, and accurate. What the hell are all of these accountants still doing? I personally think a lot of it is work for idle hands, but makework if you prefer.
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.)
Assume that a basic income is $50,000.
Deposit $1 million in an index fund and expect 7% annual return averaged over 40 years.
Discount 2% for inflation, that means the original $1 million deposit will yield $50,000 in perpetuity.
Do this incrementally.
Example: We have 10 aircraft carriers, and 2 under construction. Suppose we fix on only having 10 carriers, and at any one time one is under construction (to trade the older ones out due to obsolescence).
That's $6.5 billion savings in hardware costs, which would pay for 6,500 UBI accounts. Have a lottery, start taking people out of the workforce.
It costs $7 million per day to maintain any one carrier. Saving that money would provide for 2,500 UBI accounts annually.
Any savings in federal spending - any of it - could be funneled into the UBI lottery system. It doesn't need to give everyone a UBI right now, it only needs to go incrementally towards that goal.
Note that companies are testing autonomous tractor trailers in Nevada right now. By my estimate, autonomous vehicles will put 5 million Americans out of work almost immediately.
Note that Hillary wants to enforce Obama's executive order granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, which would put 7 million more job seekers into the market almost instantly. (And we'd have a massive influx of illegals after.)
Note that Amazon and WalMart are experimenting with automated order fulfilment and delivery. That will put a bunch more Americans out of work.
Note that fast food restaurants are automating their process right now. That will drop another 3.6 million job seekers into the market.
Fewer people starving for lack of a job means less chance for armed revolt.
Do the math.
turn it around: the system is too easily gamed and there are WAY too many that claim to be 'working' when in fact, they have some sweet deal that just works on its own (ie, they are a bank and make money no matter what happens in the world).
the rich don't have to pay for the common infra and yet they benefit from it. I say force it from them. make taxes truly work for us all. its not a hard concept to grasp.
and no one is suggesting a dr. zhivago style purge. but if you know you are not pulling your weight and yet are pulling in most of the money, you WOULD have something to fear and worry about.
what we have now is not sustainable. what do YOU suggest? I just told you what I suggest. leaving it as-is is NOT an option anymore.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Are people getting 3 trillion a year in benefits?
Obviously if you compare a higher net benefit level then you're going to have to have a higher income to pay for it. Stop the presses here. Nobody says you have to compare a higher net benefit level when talking UBI.
And while we're at it, can we stop pretending that all forms of basic income that we call by different names in our current systems are paid for by the government? What exactly is minimum wage if not for UBI on poor workers that we mandate that companies pay? Yeah, you won't see that figure on any government balance sheet, but it's a very real cost to the economy nonetheless.
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
As proponent of Basic Income, I disagree with much of the analysis offered in the linked article. However, I wanted to sink into this one point in particular: "If you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you’re redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them." This is a seductive line of reasoning, and appealing to liberals. But it misses the point about HOW taxation must be structured to take this into account. While basic income must NOT be means tested, taxation almost certainly must be. Poor ppl shouldn't be burdened by having to prove or disprove wealth and income. Having grown up poor I can assure you that that IS a huge burden. Let those most benefiting from the system be the ones who fight for the most fair tax rate possible, because they have all the tools and expertise at their disposal to do that. Poor ppl do not. So to the extent that basic income hurts ppl on the bottom, the taxcode must to that extent raise revenue from the higher economic classes to compensate for it. Easier said than done, of course, but the practicality of moving forward is an entirely different issue than the theoretical underpinnings of the idea in the first place. http://www.cbpp.org/poverty-an...
Actual accountant here.
The industry has a fuckload less AR/AP. There's a lot less clerks. There's no typists. There are no filing clerks. There is a lot less of anyone other than a handful who run much larger books and much larger payrolls. A billion dollar business has one Director, a handful of managers and a handful of divisonal staff under them, rather than the hundreds that used to be
So there are in fact a HELL of a lot less employed in the accounts department than there used to be. You haven't noticed as Old Mabel who retired was never replaced. The remaining have a lot to do with shit like payroll, applying the lastest rulesets, budgeting doing the work that 10 - 20 people would have needed to do 40 years ago.
Lotus 1-2-3 was a fucking godsend and presented complex accounts simply. It took a whole tho for the mass of jobs the Accounts dept supported to disappear tho but disappear they did. What's left is actually quite minimal and VERY different to when I started.
That's bullshit. My family came into this country as refugees with almost nothing. We depended on social services while my parents were learning English. I earned my way into school, got a scholarship to go to college. I worked my ass off in college to have a high GPA, worked 20+ hours a week in a lab in addition. I earned my way into an MD PhD program and didn't have to pay for medical school... worked my way into residency and fellowship. In the meantime my parents are earning 5 figures.
United States is the most amazing country in the world, where opportunity is still pretty open. I am so thankful to be here.
For duck's sake, please don't turn it into the country I ran away from.
We rule the seas, nearly from pole to pole, and we enforce free passage of commerce almost everywhere.
When Rome collapsed, global trade went into the shitter within a generation or two. Ruins in England show top quality pottery, nearly as good as anything you could buy today, buried under stuff much closer in quality to the ashtray your kid brings home from kindergarten art class.
Trump thinks we should get some payment from the rest of the world for providing that service, or at least some appreciation. Hillary thinks she should get some payment for it. But in the end, there simply isn't anyone else we can trust with it. Do you see a line of countries keen to behave responsibly with their own neighborhood, much less global trade?
See that "Preview" button?
Greenstein "suggests instead focusing on the neediest people first, possibly by subsidizing jobs programs and making housing more affordable."
The whole reason for a UBI is that automation has changed the work paradigm. There are no longer enough jobs for everyone, no matter how much people may want to work. Jobs programs are useless if there are no jobs. Affordable housing is a great idea, but how is that different from a UBI? Whatever housing subsidy you apply is just part of the UBI. And of course you start with the neediest people first. There is nothing in the definition of a UBI that prevents that.
What is the point of claiming a $3 trillion per year cost? If it costs that much, then scale it back to a level that can be supported. This is someone who started out with an agenda and is manufacturing reasons NOT to have a UBI.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
People can determine their own needs already.
If they CAN'T meet them, assistance to those makes sense.
If they WON'T, I'm lost as to why we should for them.
Or they are UNABLE, we must be compassionate. Of course.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Of course you can give them money forever. You know money is spent, right? That the crops to feed them are a renewable resource? That, as automation takes over more and more jobs, we're rapidly approaching the point where 1% of the population working can support the other 99%?
I mean, why can't we keep unproductive people around? What's the limiting factor? We already give the computers, and internet access, and food and medicine.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
My main fear is the same as that of many others -- that too many people would simply choose not to work.
UBI should cover your needs. The incentive to get *further* ahead by working will have people wanting to work. The flip side is that automation needs to be removing jobs, drastically increasing productivity, and reducing consumer costs to that the UBI is sufficient.
The $3 trillion 'cost' will be taken from welfare, disability services, veteran services, social security, superannuation type agencies (all obsoleted under UBI), transportation (less traffic maintenance / expenditure on highways and roads as people are not commuting), DoD (more automation), IRS (lower requirements); the list could extend to every agency.
I'm not American, so not sure how many agencies/what names you have.
You are certainly correct this is a straw man argument, but not really in the way you describe. The US government (federal, state, local) spends just over $400 billion on welfare per year, and $1.2 trillion on pensions and social security (94% of that on SS). That only comes to half the $3 trillion figure, and certainly not all of this would go away. I'd say its reasonable 2/3 of it would go away, leaving $2 trillion of the author's figures left over. Take away another $500 billion by removing children from the calculations, and you still have $1.5 trillion of increased government payments.
Then comes the real problem with the author's argument. No one claims everyone's net income would increase by $10k per year, just that they would all get a $10k check. We already have a progressive federal income tax, so it would be easy to adjust the brackets to ensure only the needy would receive an increased net income from UBI.
To simplify math, lets say 1/3 get $10k extra income, 1/3 pay the same in extra taxes that they get in UBI payments, and 1/3 pay for the lower third. Considering the top 40% of earners already pay 97% of federal income taxes, this wouldn't be much of a change in the status quo.
So now we are down to $500 billion in extra costs, which is a much more realistic figure. The federal government collects $2.4 trillion in income taxes, so the 50% of households and companies which pay any incomes taxes today would need to pay 20% more. I pay a little over $30k per year in federal income taxes, so this would mean almost $6500 in extra taxes for me personally.
But I would get something for this money. Reduced crime is hard to quantitatively measure, but removing the minimum wage would significantly impact the costs of basic services. If my food, daycare, house/lawn care, haircuts, etc. dropped by just 10% that would save me $6000 per year so this would be a wash for me.
These figures are all obviously very rough, but they at least show UBI is not as drastically unrealistic as this article suggests. It may still not work, but it is a very reasonable alternative to a future where technological disruptions make the status quo impossible to maintain.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
He's probably responding to an ignorant git like you that will happily be the pawn of the 1% that sow intra-class warfare by fueling class-jealousy between groups of people that really aren't all that different. Once you buy into the socialist nonsense you will actually make it HARDER for a normal guy to get ahead. Meanwhile, the expansive meddling in the economy will ensure the position of the aristocracy.
Socialists are the same kind of dupes as ditto heads.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Printing funny money is clearly not the problem. If there is an overproduction, then THAT is what needs to be spread around. People fixating on the UBI are whining that the rules of society are changing while forgetting that the rules about money will probably change too. The concept of money as we knew it will probably be equally obsolete.
Handing people money just sounds like an easy solution when presented to people who can't think anything through or see the big picture (which is unfortunately most people).
UBI is a solution to a future problem that lacks any imagination.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
This only seems to be an American problem. Here in the UK, people on benefits are given money. They are even given their rent money and mostly manage to pay their rent rather than drink or smoke it away.
If you treat people like children, they will behave like children. If people can't notice they are hungry or thirsty, and have nowhere to live even when they could afford it, then you have to let them deal with the consequences.
Do you not believe in the action of moral law?
No, I prefer ethics and scruples to completely arbitrary "because my badass sky-daddy says so" rules.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
1) Society needs that child more than it costs society to pay for it, as one day that child will be paying taxes and working
2) Society still needs that child, regardless of whether the parents own their house or rent
3) The US needs immigrants, and is far from full. Hell, most of the western world needs immigration to shore up the coming problem of "too many old folks and not enough workers" which are looming.
Maybe if we didn't have a bunch of people operating on ridiculously short-sighted, superficial appraisals of complicated issues, we'd not have to waste time and energy explaining to people why countries need tax payers.
want to talk about actuall current welfare?
fine.
first educate yourself about it instead of posting BS.
-Welfare is known as TANF, and it doesn't move anyone out of poverty because it was created in 1996 by the welfare "reform" law created by Clinton and the republican congress. TANF eliminated welfare, even though conservatives still act like it still exists. TANF, aka workfare, is not an entitlement , runs out after 2 years, and requires you find a job. TANF is a 16.5 billion dollar block grant divided amongst the states, and it is the state's reponsibilties to administer it. now heres the reason why it doesn't help poverty: because most states don't spend it on poverty . instead the states get to spend it however they want, as long as they can claim (without any proof needed) that the intent is to reduce poverty. so most use it to plug their own budget holes, particularly in education. nationally only about 12% of those who need/qualify for TANF actually receive it. that's why it hasn't done squat for poverty: because welfare reform was ultimately a lie . the old actual welfare system was an entitlement like SS: if you were below poverty line, you qualified and got money. period. the new one has instead had the opposite effect, of increasing poverty instead of decreasing it. meanwhile the rest of the western world still has a basic entitlement form welfare, and the result is their poverty rates went down. but then the point behind their systems isn't the same as our "welfare reform" really was: welfare reform was simply racism, a means of denying minorities a way up as they were perceived to be undeserving.
-the abuse is largely a myth as always has been. the famous "welfare queen" Reagan talked about? a single middle class white woman who was caught and sent to jail. though the image in most conservatives minds is an unmarried black women with a dozen kids (re: racism). in reality, for the reasons state above, she actually isn't like to be receiving any TANF.
-SNAP moved to cards because its cheaper/easier to administer, and because it makes it even easier to detect fraud. not that fraud was rampant before: it wasn't. but the elimination of paperwork, paper stamps, and addition of computers reduced overhead and administration costs, and computers can sort quickly though the data much quicker, and the result is fraud, already low, was reduced to less than 4%. which, compared with the economic stimulus effect (every dollar spent on SNAP generates over 2$ in economic activity) means its practically negligible while the program actually helps boost the economy.
-the list of eligible food items never changed. enforcement was always essentially the job of the cashier to ring up the items properly. cards/computers make that task easier. your "extremely large" comment is nothing but "extremely large" pile of BS. no, the money was not going to alcohol or cigarettes. cashiers who allowed such transactions lose their jobs, because companies that allow such transactions risk losing the privilege of participate in the program.
-the idea behind the basic check is that there are no restrictions. you spend it on whatever. so again your comment is ignorant.
-and then you devolve into some typical ignorant strawman comment on communism, china, etc, building another mountain of BS, once again ignoring what REAL welfare states look like, and how they are not only higher than the US on the freedom index, but the economic and poverty ones too.
oh btw, as China's economy has improved, so has the status of their citizens, including the poor. their poverty rate is comparable to the US's. and if the trend continues, within 20 years it be less than ours. their social support programs are stronger than ours, and their minimum wage is far higher, being pegged to 40% of the average urban salary.
so as I said: learn what youre talking about.
and maybe stop picking china as your strawman while youre at it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Want to do the numbers? I'll even put a tl;dr summary at the end.
In 2013, the cost was $1.678 trillion, with $1.276 trillion spent on Federal programs.
In 2013, retail for apartment rent in low-income areas spanned from $0.62 cents per square foot to $1.10, with a general median around $1/sqft. This included samples spanning from California and Washington to New York state (mostly Western New York, but also some of the ghettos of Manhattan, near the big city centers) and Baltimore.
Renting an apartment to someone with a low income poses business risk: empty units and tenant evictions are expensive, and low-income individuals are prone to lose their unemployment income or face reductions in working hours at their part-time jobs; these risks are offset by raising the rental pricing, which makes renting unaffordable to these income levels, and thus excludes the market. A stable, guaranteed income eliminates this risk and the associated cost-of-risk, allowing lower rental prices with the same profit margin (about 33%, typically, although I didn't account for anything but retail).
To that end, I estimate the housing cost in 2013 at $1.33/sqft, being $1/sqft plus a 33% risk reserve (i.e. I might be wrong about $1/sqft; I'm less likely to be wrong about $1.10/sqft; I'm approximately 100% guaranteed to be above the threshold at $1.33/sqft). Budget: $300/month, single-person, 244sqft. That gives a 6x9 bedroom, 6x10 main room, a bathroom (shower stall with corner sink integrated, plus a toilet outside the stall), and a small kitchen (I've lived in an apartment where the kitchen was ~6 feet wide, with only a 3 foot wide floor space). That can be shaved a bit at the edges (it's 255sqft), or fit as-is, or widened, to fit to budget.
Utilities for a space of that size range around $30. I know because I've heated a 700sqft apartment for $56/month utilities (gas and electric), and it had poor insulation. We may need to mandate better insulation standards for micro-units; the cost to insulate well when you're already doing demolition and construction (to subdivide for the new market) is cheap. Good R-23 stone wool insulation only costs like $50 for the whole apartment's 16 foot back wall; $100 if you have to do one of the side walls, and $200 if you have to do the side walls and ceiling. In-wall foam sealing would cost about $50 per apartment. A normal 1 bedroom costs around $58,000 to build; these smaller ones would cost around $25,000, including the replicated cost of stove, sink, and bathroom, so this additional cost is not onerous if implemented during already-planned remodeling. Such insulation stabilizes utility costs, thus decreasing risk of tenants coming up short.
Moving on.
I've run estimates on food as recently as April, 2016, and gotten as low as $25/month for 2000kcal/day 30day spans, including lots of beans, rice, frozen mixed vegetables, the occasional rotisserie chicken, bread, eggs, and so forth. This actually spans a fair variety of food (pancake vs bread, rice dishes, and so forth combine a surprisingly-consistent set of ingredients), although nothing luxurious.
My original estimate was $100/month per person in 2016, because of extreme risk if the food budget deviates (which can happen *easily*). While that remains valid, I also overestimated personal care ($35 in my original budget) and clothing (another $35). It turns out tooth paste and soap are pretty cheap, less than $5/month per person. To that end, I used a combined Food-Clothing-Personal Care budget of $170/month in my models: personal care is cheap and clothing is elastic; food is inelastic and volatile.
That all left about $56/month in the 17% figure of the time--another risk reserve. That gave a total of $546/month per single adult. Total inflation in the following two years was 4.24%, and per-capita GDP increase was 6.24%; that means the inflation-adjusted equivalent would be $569 in 2015, and the *actual* income per adult would be $580/month. That makes sense bec
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When poor people are given money, they will spend it, which would boost the economy. A lot of people would start new businesses if they had the ability to do so without fear of failing and going hungry, which would create jobs and improve the economy. Both these would increase tax revenue, meaning it would be as if the program cost that much less.
It doesn't actually work that way. Money isn't wealth; money is backed by the productive output of labor. Every dollar spent goes to buy a product, and becomes the income of an individual (wages) or a business (net profits). More money without more production means inflation; more production without more money means deflation.
The gain from a basic income is the efficiency gain in reducing risks and reducing wage:income ratio.
Risk comes with unstable markets, unstable employment, and unstable incomes. To rent apartments, for example, you need to recover the loss in empty units, in tenant evictions, and in tenant damage. As income levels decrease, the stability of an income falls: resilience to financial emergencies, fluctuating hours in part-time jobs, loss of part-time work, and loss of unemployment. That means more evictions and empty units, increasing the cost per square foot charged for apartments marketed to these levels. Below a certain income level, the costs are more than the tenant can pay, so certain sized apartments marketed to certain levels of income just don't exist.
This is loss: evictions and empty units are worthless; they produce nothing, they do nothing to enrich society, yet they carry a cost. Evictions require labor for legal action, for moving action (removing all your stuff), and so forth; they also frequently destroy a person's possessions, as the evicted has nowhere to go, and thus said possessions can only be reclaimed by expending new labor to make more. An empty unit requires upkeep and consumes heat and electricity, yet provides no one a home; and it cannot be rented out for free, lest other tenants pay to cover the costs--the wealth represented by housing is the support of labor which produces other things.
As for wages, your employer pays your wage, your benefits, and payroll taxes. You might make $50,000/year, but your employer is paying $56,000/year; likewise, you only take home $42,000/year. For every dollar your employer pays to have you, you as a consumer receive 75 cents; yet, as a consumer, you must pay the wages incurred by the time invested in making any product you purchase. Narrow this gap and the consumer can purchase more.
These are mechanism. If you just handed out money, or just took more money from one place and sent it to be spent in another, you wouldn't increase labor time and, thus, produced output; you would only either exhaust the economy (make everyone spend until they're in deep, deep debt) or create inflation.
My main fear is the same as that of many others -- that too many people would simply choose not to work. This one problem could be the doom of the whole idea.
Modern welfare sharply reduces your wealth and devalues employment if you seek employment.
When I was on unemployment, I took in the equivalent of $10.25/hr. Would that Fedex offered me $10.50/hr, I'd have laughed them off; 40 hours a week for only $0.25/hr? I can stay home and get checks from the Government for near as much.
Any form of UBI has the advantage of continuing to provide income as you move into employment. The decision between $X and not working vs $Y and working has to compare ($Y-$X) to the effort of working; whereas the decision between $X and not working vs. $X+$Y and working only has to consider the value proposition of $Y in comparison to the effort of working.
This is bolstered by security: if you take a job when receiving welfare benefits and then lose it, you risk being denied further benefits. If you take a job under a UBI system, your benefits never stop. The individual doesn
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What the fuck are you smoking?
The lie inherent right from the get go[; that] money is a resource[. I]t is not, capital is an illusion,
First off, "money" and "capital" are separate concepts. You're talking about money. Capital actually DOES refer to real things. Goods, machines, roads, schools, and ALSO money. I get what you're saying, you're just technically wrong on this.
Second, yes, money is just a placeholder. A tool to help mange it all. The US$ is backed by nothing but hopes and dreams and 11 carriers and a bunch of nukes.
The resources are there, an administrative means of allocating and distributing those resources just needs to be found.
...We HAVE that. The "administrative means" we use to figure out who gets what is called "capitalism"*, with a healthy dose of taxes and socialism and welfare because we're not the monsters from the robber-baron era. You even mention this because you know that it's the
*The -ism portion is important. Capital and capitalism are two different things. Related, of course, but it's the difference between saying a friend is fucked up, and saying friendship is fucked up.
but wealth is only fun if it is based upon fairness and generosity
HohoHO! Said like someone who has never been wealthy. No kiddo, the vast majority of history shows us that most wealthy people have PLENTY of fun regardless of how fair and generous you'd consider their source of wealth.
Sweet jesus. ALL of that rant can be boiled down to "I don't like capitalism". The rest is a mad ranting of a laughable caricature of rich people. Even the actual robber-barons weren't that monstrous.
It's not constructive. Do you get that? This sort of stark-raving-mad soap-boxing doesn't help tear down capitalism. It doesn't support socialism. It doesn't feed the hungry or raise up the poor. (Poor as in actually physically poor. The group that don't have the resources they need and not some pseudo-intellectual "everything is a metaphor and the fault of capitalism" sort of poor). To be blunt, you're hurting the cause. The catch phrase "Eat the Rich" is supposed to be humorous.
No, not all rich people are psychopathic monsters. There are certainly monsters out there. Real-deal psychopaths that are so focused on climbing that corporate ladder that they don't pause to think about what the thousands of unemployed will do when they liquidate. There is a sector of business where those people excel. But they do not represent all rich people any more than dirty hippies strung out on heroin represent all socialists. The vast bulk of all of us want a stable functioning society. A good swath of them, they vote republican, they don't want to hand out money to people who aren't working for it. Another good swath of people, like you and I, see that we are really wealthy as a whole and there's no real reason people should be so screwed by technological improvements and shipping jobs overseas, and helping people down on their luck will end up helping all of us in the long run. There's currently a debate about which group is more correct and what kind of society we want to be.
But the answer is not to tear it all down. We've seen how that goes in the communist states. But the current system of welfare and subsidies and grants and scholarships and services are CERTAINLY not in the philosophical camp of capitalism. We've ALSO tried a more pure form of capitalism in the late 1800's. It sucked for most people. Dear god man, we've got to learn from the big lessons of the past. Take a look at the Nordic countries. Very socialist, but they STILL HAVE MONEY and they still operate by people working and getting paid in cash. MONEY, as a placeholder for wealth, WORKS.
Get your shit together. You're making us look bad.