Political Memes

Because your dad is wrong.

Many of the UBI-type (universal basic income) studies show that most people continue to work and in many cases they are able to increase their income from work in short order.

Turns out relief from chronic money stress liberates mental resources that increase personal resilience and that translates into better employment for many.

It's stupid in even more ways. The economy needs people to buy things to keep going and allow people like your friend's dad to have jobs and act condescending to people who don't have jobs.

So if everybody was "smart" like that theoretical rich person and kept all their money, there wouldn't be an economy for them to leech passive income from.

If you water a dying plant, it will drink. It's almost like people without enough money need it for something

I'm also very tired of people saying that pan handlers are all millionaires because they heard or read some anecdote somewhere.

Like yeah I'm sure there are scammer pan handlers, but even in that 0.0001% case it's because begging for money is easier or better than getting a job.

more importantly, it's not just scientific consensus. Remember that trump voters don't care about the science. they care about the economy. You have to make it about the economy.

Yep learned that crazy enough from my maga dad. He got mad at his sister in 2008 during the crash because she was hoarding the money instead of stimulating the economy. Why also was pissed Obama bailed out the banks. If he just gave all the poor people a check they will go out and spend it. Why we have the whole tax season. Technical when you get a tax refund just means you paid more in then you should have. But it's by design. Because poor people will go spend all the money. Buying cars, furniture etc. Shit they normally couldn't afford to do.

Why drives me nut. Fucking Regan his trickle down economics. It needs to be reversed. Trickle up economy does work.

My favorite story was when a Karen told someone to not give money to the homeless man because he was going to use it to buy drugs and the man just that, "That's what i was going to spend it on anyway."

By the definition of money, that cannot happen. If all the money is owned by one person, then it is not money. If all of the money is owned by one group of people and another group of people have no access to it, then that will bifurcate the economy between those two groups and the second group will use something else as a substitute. No matter how little people have, there will always be some form of trade and commerce between them. Even North Koreans today (where private trade is largely forbidden) and enslaved Africans in the pre-Civil War US (who for the most part were not legally allowed to own anything) had some form of trade amongst themselves.

Each successive dollar (or euro, pound, yen...) gets successively more difficult to extract because as people have less and less to spend they get tighter and tighter with their spending. Without state intervention, there will always be a floor to how poor you can possibly make someone, because at some point they will realise that breaking the rules and risking the punishment is a better idea than continuing to play by them. And when enough people think this way, well... just ask Louis XVI or Nicholas II how that went.

Even if a communist revolution does not occur, this happens already to a lesser extent in the impoverished areas of cities worldwide, where people would rather turn to crime than work for starvation wages. So if you are someone on the side of the political spectrum which likes to talk against crime and socialism, the policies you should champion are those which prevent the poor from needing to resort to those things (not that any such people are likely to exist on Lemmy).

My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with you, because it seems like this policy would punish money hoarding and therefore keep money circulating.

Then I thought about what I would do if I had a sudden large influx of expiring cash, and quickly decided on buying illiquid assets (stocks, bonds, property, a couple fast food franchises in an underserved-but-growing area, etc) which is pretty much what the wealthy already do. The World's Richest Manchild doesn't have $300 billion in cold hard cash sitting around, he has maybe a few million in easily-accessible funds and the rest is tied up in investments (that's why he had to borrow so desperately to get the $44 billion to buy twitter - he couldn't quickly cash out his stock investments without cratering their value).

If money expired, the rich would continue to do what they already do - turn their money into long-term investment vehicles. The worst off would be the people who are in the middle - not doing so bad they have to spend every penny they make right away just to stay afloat, but not doing so well that they can invest in illiquid assets (either because they don't have enough left over after the bills are spent to realistically be able to invest or because they need a safety net in case the car needs to be replaced in a hurry or a tree falls through the roof or the hot water heater busts and ruins the floor).

'Expiring wealth' is something that would do society good by forcing the wealthy class to re-invest in their communities and peoples, whereas 'expiring cash' would just hurt those who would otherwise be on a path to being able to retire someday

Yeah, I think this is what they mean. It is a form of poor bashing: poor people don’t invest their money to create jobs, grow the economy, etc. I have a friend who is very susceptible to this type of right-wing propaganda, and i had to point out that rich people can only invest a large portion of their income because their basic needs are (abundantly) met.