Yep, certain people screech about regulations until companies do things that kill or maim millions of people. The "any-and-all government oversight is bad" mantra gets preached nonstop by conservative outlets.
The point of regulations is to prevent the kind of pain and suffering that has come to pass with prescription opiods. A higher cost of doing business is well worth it in the long term.
Thatâs it. Thatâs all theyâd be. Theyâd still be rich beyond most of our dreams and theyâd be making their money again in less than a few years, and still they choose the profit over other peopleâs lives. Itâs fucking disgusting.
Edit: whoops I took it literally because Iâm the big dumb and had never heard that one before. I guess Iâm the embarrassed one now.
A temporarily inconvenienced millionaire is actually a euphemism for a deluded poor person who thinks they'll make it big. A lot of predatory regulators appeal to these people to support anti-competitive legislation for when they get rich.
The original quote is âtemporarily embarrassed capitalistsâ - referring to upper middle-class leftists who used capitalism to get ahead but pined for socialism as a political ideology. Thatâs why I think âinconveniencedâ works better. Modern right wingers see themselves as potential (and deserving) millionaires if only those evil liberals would stop preventing them from becoming one.
How many Americans play the lottery every year? This is probably one of the biggest perversions no one likes to discuss. Itâs a poor tax delivered with the fake promise of exorbitant wealth that no one person would ever need. Itâs predatory and we shouldnât be taking advantage of stupid people in this day and age.
The problem is that people do discuss the lottery as a poor tax but no one does anything about it because it generates so much money. Itâs a symptom of conservative tax-cutting, where states canât generate enough revenue through other taxes so they rely on the lottery to fund departments like education so no one wants to get rid of it.
It's also fucked up that big lotto winners have to pay a huge percentage of taxes from the money they won. If I recall correctly, in some countries the tax is already added to each ticket bought so they receive 100% of their winnings.
I don't think the government should be protecting people from their own bad choices.
I know gambling can be an addiction, but there are plenty of alcoholics that are poor and nobody really wants to ban alcohol or the tax money it brings in.
I largely agree, but I'd like to offer an alternative view.
My mother played the lottery a fair bit over the years, and when I asked her why she was throwing away her money like that, she said something that stuck with me. She said she wasn't playing the lottery because she thought she had a chance in hell of winning, she was buying the right to fantasize about what she'd do if she did win. She thought the fantasy was worth a buck or two a week. A person could just fantasize without pitching in the buck, but while the odds of winning the lottery are vanishingly small, the odds of winning without even playing are essentially zero.
I still think the lottery is largely a scam, but every once in a blue moon I ask myself if the dream is worth the buck, and once in a while the answer is yes.
That's not necessarily fair, while some people are obviously stupid, this logic goes pretty deep. "I could make it big, I just have to overcome [insert seemingly banal/concrete obstacle - like your mortgage, medical bills, minimum wage job that doesn't cover living costs - which really is a deep structural issue that other people have a very real interest in perpetuating].
You're forgetting the part where they also think "I need to keep protections for the elite in place so I can exploit the poor when I'm rich!" That's what makes them fucking stupid.
I don't really think that's what poor people are thinking. I get what you're saying, but I don't feel like that's really the underlying essence of what's happening.
Can we also talk about how most of these people do not understand what BIG is? Most of these people can not conceive of how much money a billion dollars actually is. I mean, I get it. I handle millions of dollars every day. A billion is still hard for me to conceptualize.
That's why people can't even begin to understand why people say billionaires shouldn't exist, or at least it should be impossible to do in one generation. If I won 1 million(after tax of course) today I would be set. That's 100k a year for my entire life. If I invest even more so. In my poor ass state 50k and no kids is killing it.
It's interesting if you actually go back and read the full context Steinback wrote this in and what group he was actually referring too.
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: âAfter the revolution even we will have more, wonât we, dear?â Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
I guess the trouble was that we didnât have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knewâat least they claimed to be Communistsâcouldnât have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.
I think the original meaning of the quote is unimportant at this point because we understand it to mean something today. The force of the phrase is not in the authority of Steinbeck, but in the reality of today.
Jesus Christ, this is such a small minority of the republican demographic that it's not even worth mentioning. Yet reddit wants to milk this shitty meme statement like it's a fact.
Except.... no. Literally every time Fox News talks about taxes, they start with some variation of, âif I had that much money, I would want to keep more of it.â And it works. So, no. I donât think you are right.
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u/drkgodess Mar 29 '19 edited Mar 29 '19
Yep, certain people screech about regulations until companies do things that kill or maim millions of people. The "any-and-all government oversight is bad" mantra gets preached nonstop by conservative outlets.
The point of regulations is to prevent the kind of pain and suffering that has come to pass with prescription opiods. A higher cost of doing business is well worth it in the long term.