“Capitalists operating within the framework of capitalism have every incentive to grab every possible dollar they can as soon as possible and keep them all. Should disaster strike, the government can ride to the rescue.”

What you’re describing is a huge part of how wealth inequality happens. It’s not the nefarious scheme where people lie, cheat, and steal that GMG writers like to imagine. It’s the totally mundane process where people that have a financial clue put their money to work by leveraging the eighth wonder of the world…

Did you guys really manage to blur every face except the black kid’s?

If Bernie Sanders could put together a calculator where you provide some basic income information, info about your healthcare expenses, some demographic/health info for projecting where you might sit on the lifetime expenditure spectrum, and it spits out an earnest, verifiable, lifetime cost comparison that worked out…

AOC needs to chill with the “got eeemmmm” caliber preaching to the choir and explain how MfA is going to be cost effective for the people that don’t need heart transplants (read: the overwhelming majority of Americans). That has always been the real issue.

I don’t think trading current day earning potential for 10-20k/year guarantees decades later is a very good deal. I’m pretty sure that math doesn’t work out in the employee’s favor in the long run. That’s with today’s relatively short vesting schedules too. Go back a few decades to when vesting schedules were still…

“Ideally, pensions would exist again, not just investment vehicles which might lose everything you saved just when you were about to retire (as so many did in 2008).”

100k/year doesn’t even get you into the top 1/5 of American households. Given all the stuff you listed your “rich” guy is probably drowning in debt. He may not be struggling from a cash flow perspective but dude is far from rich and I’d wager his net worth is negative.

If everyone remembered that the only rule of employment is fuck you pay me we’d all be perfectly fine. Unions do not fix laborers that do not understand that rule.

Unions are not a silver bullet.

“For what it’s worth, I think the numbers would work out, as we currently spend far more per capita on healthcare than countries with public coverage*.”

“By acting less racist, liberals are making things worse, somehow!”

Net worth is assets minus liabilities. Cash is an asset.

“ It seems more than a little callous to create a situation where human health and profits have to be weighed against one another.”

“That’s good news for people like Bezos and Gates, because chances are if you knew how much money they actually have”

“ 5 million shares of Amazon were sold on Friday. We know the value. ”

Assets are assets. Shares are not special.

1) Do you include the value of your house in the amount of dollars you have? Your car? The computer you typed this comment on? The clothes on your back?

You are quite clearly the one that’s confused.

People like you that do not understand the basic 5th grade civics level functions of local, state, and federal government are certainly not helping the problem.