No, it wouldn't. Gotham is thoroughly corrupt and the money would never have been used to do anything good.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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"Gotham is so corrupt all the money would be wasted."
That's fine. Wealth inequality on that scale is evil and corrosive to society. It would be better to do something productive with it, but setting the money on fire would still be better than letting billionaires like Wayne hoard it.
The joker was totally based with his cash pyre in Dark Knight.
‘Wayne foundation’
…
It doesn’t look like a lot of people even read the comic books before forming these opinions about his storyline.
Men will LITERALLY construct an entire persona based around their phobias as a result of trauma over witnessing the murder of their parents during a mugging orchestrated by crime bosses and spend millions of dollars on toys and gadgets to act out revenge fantasies and calling it vigilante justice rather than go to therapy.
God forbid a man has hobbies
Doesn’t he do both?
Bruce Wayne goes to therapy, not Batman, it's different (canonically).
So uh … his therapist must suck for not treating that borderline Personality Disorder and uncovering his dissociative identity disorder
Given that the most successful therapists in Gotham are people like Dr. Harleen Quinzel, I'm not confident they can overlook their own issues.
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I remember in some of the animated series that he would go to therapy but was not open and putting up his playboy billionaire persona. Honestly it seemed like a waste of a time for him if he wasn't being honest, unless it was to keep up appearances. Closest I think he gets to actual therapy is talking to Alfred.
This thread is full of people who have never read Batman comics.
Gothman is literally cursed from head to toe to be the way it is.
Batman is effectively sisyphus in that regard.
Gothman has syphillis?
Lmao, im gonna leave it.
Gothman is a meme in my friend group. He is effectively sad batman, a regular goth guy, and a visigoth all at the same time or which he ever needs to be at the time.
He may not be the meme we deserve, but he is the one that we need to burn Rome.
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Not only that, most fully realized versions of the character channel both the vigilante AND playboy personas to fight crime, using Wayne Enterprises to create welfare programs and jobs so Gothamites need not resort to crime to put food on the table.
There’s a scene where Batman pacifies a room of Black Mask goons without lifting a FINGER - he hacks the projector screen simply shows them a Wayne Foundation advertisement for better, safer jobs. One by one, every man simply drops their weapons and walks out the door as their crime boss irately yells at them to come back.
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I haven't even read Batman, but I've seen this same thread pop up enough times to know that:
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Gotham is literally cursed
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Gotham is extremely corrupt. Tax money wouldn't go where it needs to
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Bruce Wayne bankrolls tons of social programs
This ^^
It's cursed because comic writers couldn't come up with a better way to explain why the city can't be fixed by the world's smartest billionaire.
The city can't be fixed because then there wouldn't be any more stories for them to write.
Sure, but "cursed" is lazy and raises a lot of questions.
It's a comic book, I don't know what makes curses "lazy". Also the much more important factor is the deep corruption.
I say it was a process of elimination.
In a world in which heroes like Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, and Doctor Fate exist, your city has to be freaking cursed to keep getting all those cases of mental illness and corruption, keeping the city from really ever improving.
Organizations like the League of Assassins and the Court of Owls alone wouldn't cut it. Detective heroes would unravel their plans. Tech heroes would root their data out. Magical heroes would counter their spells, fast and strong heroes would weed out the thugs, henchmen, and mercenaries.
Eventually, it would get more under control, like Metropolis, Star City, Central City, or Keystone City.
They would need something so ingrained in the city that nobody can really ever remove it to get to the high levels of madness and crime you get in Gotham.
So at some point, a writer had to give up, throw their hands up in the air, and go "then... then... it's freaking cursed!"
And then you watch the God/King of Cities talk with the avatar Gotham (Stormwatch #3), and it's a freaking gargoyle talking about "the madness in me", while Paris and Metropolis are just human-like women.
We are assuming that somehow if Wayn pays large sums of wealth to the government, the government wouldn't just be their usual wasteful, corrupt, self serving self with said money. You get every current billionaire in the USA to pay a fair tax. Where do you think the money goes? Funding for food stamps or Lockeed-Martin?
Also in the DC universe, the equivalent of Lockeed-Martin is Wayne Enterprises. There's stories where Bruce is conflicted in making weapons, but nonetheless, his fortune is built on the military industrial complex.
So Bruce Wayne is somehow worse than freaking Tony Stark?
Then again Stark is an inventor and comics-level genius who lacks a secret identity, so pivoting to another industry was way easier for him. Bruce Wayne probably can't change his company too much without losing a ton of pull and drawing unwanted attention to himself, plus losing access to the gadgets he relies on.
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Underfunding the government through tax cuts makes corruption more likely. The richer the rich are, the easier it is to manipulate the government for them. Why do you think so much money goes to Lockheed Martin? Who gets government contracts isn’t chosen at random, there are moneyed interests involved.
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isn't a big part of the whole setup that this would not help much? like Gotham is just too corrupt, whenever programs are set up to invest in the public, they're mostly just stolen from.
Wayne is a philanthropist who gives a ton of money back through his own programs, right? presumably better overseen than the government ones.
I don't know how much money of Wayne's is actually used for philanthropy, but he can't just give the city all his wealth because it's too corrupt for it to be used well, right?
whenever programs are set up to invest in the public, they’re mostly just stolen from.
I'm reminded of the time Walgreens reported they were raising prices and closing stores because of rampant crime, but later admitted they made it the fuck up.
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Tax wealth not work
Oh you're saying we should tax wealth, and we should not tax work.
For a second I thought you were saying "taxing wealth does not work" like a tribal. Few word sometimes do trick.
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In the Batman Year 1 comic the thing that makes the police believe there really is a 'Bat-Man' is when he attacks a fancy dinner party and warns Gotham's movers and shakers that justice is coming for them, too.
Yeah, it's pretty clear Gotham was full of corruption from top to bottom, which pushed him into becoming Batman. Philanthropy would just fuel the corrupt politicians into funneling money to the crime bosses, and taking a cut. Probably if he started a soup kitchen and was on the ground getting people out of poverty, he would achieve improvement, but when the police, courts, and politicians are on the crime bosses payrolls, funding those institutions more will not solve Gotham's problems
I vaguely remember some stories, he does do the whole non-profit thing, too. It's still a little bit too pro-billionaire but yeah, in their setting it's quite likely the government is too corrupt.
Also he fucking funds other superheroes, so it's a little hard to say what actually works in that crazy universe. I can't imagine superheroing to be profitable.
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Here is a short list of shit going on in Gotham at any given time, not including the wide array of psychopaths and supervillains doing shit at any given time:
- The insane asylum with the portal to hell (Depending on if you consider Living Hell canon or not.)
- The Lazarus pit in the city spewing chemicals into the water supply.
- All the other chemicals likely in the water supply from a wide array of sources, including regular pollution and goofy shit.
- The remnants of the evil warlock who was sealed under the city for centuries.
- The massive mafia presence and general corruption.
- The Illuminati that uses zombie soldiers.
That is not shit proper taxation is going to resolve. You can't protected bike lane away the zombie controlling Illuminati.
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Gotham is extremely corrupt, from the police departments being riddled with officers on any of the several mob payrolls. Same for the politicians. Feeding more tax dollars into that won't mean that money is going to the poor people who would benefit from it
Weirdly, when I watched the first season of Gotham, the GCPD was pronouncedly less corrupt than your typical municipal police department in the United States. The difference is GCPD was on the take by the Falcione family, but IRL police departments are the crime syndicate, themselves.
(This is a product partially of too much fighting with the Prohibition-era mob syndicates through the later 20th century until RICO laws were established, but now the mafia families are vastly reduced in power, the police unions took over. It's why we shrug off four-to-five officer-involved killings of innocent civilians every day, most of whom are unarmed and not resisting when the officer decides to escalate to unaliving them.)
At that point I realized even Gotham is copaganda, and the Batman/DC Cinematic Universe has little to do with what IRL looks like. Which is a shame, because DC could do better.
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