And all to have a few thousand extra billionaires.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Yeah, but maybe someday I'll be one of those billionaires!
You vastly overestimate the billionaire cast. As of April 2025, there seem to be 902 billionaires in the US. (I can't access the original Forbes article, sorry).
Always love a good pedant.
But the exact number really doesn't matter and isn't the point.
Well it kind of does. Less than 1k people is a lot easier to grasp than thousands for people.
Thats more of an SEP field
Full-time jobs that don't pay a living wage should be illegal. No matter how "beneath" you the job feels, if we need someone to do it "full-time" then anything less than a full living is a rip off, and you have to either advocate for taxpayers to subsidize the employer's greed or that they overwork to make a living.
Not only that, the other side is also that owning buildings as investments should also be illegal.
Assuming 25/hr minimum living wage: There are optional positions within businesses that are nice to have, but very simple, but can be opted to be done for any number of hours a day up to full time, and cannot be justified to carry 25/hr... You could have a company offering menial work on razor thin margins, but some people like working there, like scooping ice cream, which could not otherwise exist at 25/hr. There are small businesses that people want to work with that don't make enough to pay everyone 25/hr (ex. some small gyms). There are cases where low revenue businesses could pay with future equity, but cannot afford 25/hr now. You have to account for these cases in your rules.
You are both extremely bad at logic and math.
You have to account for these cases in your rules.
Why? They can't afford an employee. They shouldn't hire one.
If you are not paying living wages for a full-time job, that means you are getting subsidized employees from the government.
part of walmarts onboarding process is how to apply for government assistance like snap
It blew mi mind today when i read that people work at Walmart AND collect food stamp. What is even the point of working if you can't afford to live?
That's been known and publicly stated for what feels like a decade or more. Good to know NOTHING has been done about it.
I'm pretty sure its in Walmart's on-boarding process to instruct new employees to apply to welfare programs. If your multibillion dollar corporation is pushing their employees onto government assistance than what the fuck is the point of working. You know that nothing you do will get you a better salary because they aren't just doing this to you but thousands, maybe millions, across the US and globally. And the c-suite is raking in billions in profit that they squeeze from their employees. But don't worry Walmart had a college repayment program so they are giving back /s
Their on boarding process 10 years ago also implicitly told you that they would fire you if you attempted to unionize, and even explicitly told you to report your coworkers to management if they talked about a union.
It's extremely illegal, but I've never heard of them getting in trouble for it.
That's because we gained workers rights by force and ever since: the elite have been driving us (the working class) apart from each other to make us isolated and powerless.
They have shut down entire stores that were trying to unionize.
Like Starbux, in its hometown.
Low wages and poor labour laws actually make it so big corporations can indirectly profit off social programs:
This has been happening for like 30 years now, you just read about tris today?
Commodity housing is a crime against humanity.
Buying homes to use as gambling chips is a crime against humanity
IMHO the problem is systemic. There are very few ways to save for retirement without economic rent. Landlords suck, and so does the macroeconomic policy that encourages becoming a landlord instead of just saving money.
I'm very worried I may appear in this comic soon. I hate being an American.
You and me both. I have about two weeks left...
Land of the free, free to die on the streets
"But not these streets, we want people to come through here and spend money. Wouldn't want to risk them seeing you and giving you that money instead."
I don't get it
Gentrification.
In some areas of the country, being homeless is a crime.
"The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY"
POTUS
Hey at least you're brave and free.
Feels like the problem is systemic and tied to the high price of real estate relative to the low price of wages.
Would be nice to get some kind of public officials involved. People genuinely interested in building public housing or, at least, implementing a citywide rent freeze until supply is released to match demand.
Millions of Homes Still Being Kept Vacant as Housing Costs Surge, Report Finds
The current system is broken fundamentally and cannot be fixed, because it was actually designed this way and is working as intended by all billionaires.
We are way past simple changes like that and relying on bureaucrats to do anything is just giving them time to make things even worse.
What we need is to send all the billionaires straight to giloutine, take their wealth, redistribute it and build a new system where no single person can have so much power to affect millions of other people.
A rent freeze is decent, but what would really help is everywhere to implement caps on how much you're allowed to charge for rent and utilities. Without those, then they'll just raise prices by however much the freeze cost them. UBI will also be ineffective without it cause they'll just raise prices by however much the UBI is.
They just announced that they're raising water and sewage in my area by 300% by the end of the year. No reason given, just because they can. It should be fucking illegal. They're also planning on putting in a few data centers, which are currently being hotly contested, because they're supposed to make everyone's electric bill go up about 300% as well. I'm terrified as to how I'm going to afford my electric bill. Water and sewage is included in my rent, I can't wait to see how much that increases when my lease is up this winter and I also have no idea how I'll afford it, but I also don't know if I could find anywhere to move that would be cheaper and not give me a commute that negates any savings.
This isn't theoretical. UBI has already been tested in real life, and rents do not increase as much as incomes do. This is because supply and demand are not perfectly elastic.
Rent caps are a great idea and would help, but they aren't strictly necessary for UBI to be a net gain.
I mean, broadly speaking, you want staples and basic lifestyle needs provided at-cost by a public functionary. Leaving groceries and housing and health care and education to the free market has created enormous amounts of waste, a maze of barriers to entry, and ballooned administrative overheads.
Countries with much lower cost of living tend to be where utilities are owned and operated by the state as a social amenity, while luxuries and economic frontier advancements are left to private experimentation and entrepreneurship. But even then, the intention is to glean the wheat from the chaffe, incorporating the best of the frontier into the interior with an eye towards efficiencies of scale.
USA operates the exact opposite of this. We use the government to do the big things that aren't/won't be profitable immediately to set things up for big business to rake in all the benefits later by building their businesses on that foundation. Of course, all those business owners "did it on their own," neverminding the fact that the ground they walk on only exists because of everyone else.
770,000
It's an entire city.
If only we listened.
His Wikipedia page is interesting. He's largely got left leaning positions but doesn't believe in man made climate change and endorsed Donald Trump in 2015.
Wonder how he feels nowadays
On transgender people, McMillan says "When you see a guy walk down the street and he's got a little skirt on, and he's so happy. Why shouldn't you be happy? This is America, it's beautiful to watch someone different."
Based-ish? He's clearly happy to see trans folk be happy, but still adresses them by their former gender. His heart feels like its in the right place.
The manager of the 7/11 down the street from me was homeless. She'd finish her shift and go spend the night at a "pod village" the city had set up.