Greed is Destroying the World

I feel like for the past three years, I've heard over and over again that a recession is about to hit, the stock market is gonna crash, the housing prices are gonna come back down to earth any day now, and yet somehow all of these things keep not happening. And for most people, it doesn't make sense. "What do you mean the economy's good? My dentist just tried to get me to sign up for a credit card."

Since the pandemic, the cost of living has skyrocketed, inflation is out of control, groceries have never been more expensive, layoffs are happening at an alarming rate. At this point, a college degree might be more likely to get you into crippling debt than it is to help you find a job. And even if you have savings, you're more than likely one stroke of bad luck away from losing it all to medical bills, and yet some people will look you right in the eyes and tell you, "I don't know what you're talking about." The numbers are green. Is this guy stupid?

The problem is each of these people are kind of correct in their own way. This is the best the economy has ever been if you already have money. If you bought a house five years ago, there's a chance it's already doubled in value. If you invested in the S&P 500 in 2021, you could be up as much as 80%. And that's not like saying, "You know, you'd be rich if you just bought Bitcoin in 1973." That's just the regular stock market. You didn't need to have some genius level of foresight to be able to do that. You just needed to already have a bunch of cash sitting around. And obviously for the overwhelming majority of people, that is not the case.

If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you're not thinking about the stock market. If you're in your twenties, you haven't even been working long enough to save any money to invest. You don't get to benefit from rising home equity if you don't own a house. The only thing this graph represents to you is how much further away that dream is getting. Right now, the average age of home buyers is 59 years old. What a depressing statistic.

This is the problem with an economy that disproportionately benefits asset holders instead of the people still trying to earn them. Wealth grows exponentially, but wages aren't even outpacing inflation, which means if your salary hasn't been going up every year, you're effectively making less money. Meanwhile, the fastest way to make a million dollars is to just already have 10 million. Leave it in an investment account for a year, and congratulations, you now have $11 million. At a larger scale, this is why it feels like there's two different economies happening, and they're both moving in opposite directions. 50% of the stock market is owned by the top 1%, and only 1% is owned by the bottom 50%.

Don't let somebody tell you that these numbers going up should discredit your own lived experience. Don't let somebody who's benefited from untaxed inheritance or years of compound interest granting them passive income tell you that your problem is you're just not working hard enough. No, the real answer is, "Sorry, you should have been born sooner." Have you thought about that? Maybe instead of wasting all that time farting around kindergarten class, you should have been investing in real estate. It's not my fault you're lazy. People are getting squeezed in every direction while also being gaslit into thinking that it's somehow our fault. There's CEOs in earnings calls bragging about how they get to make customers pay for inflation so they don't have to.

The economy is so bad right now I'm about to segue into an extremely ill-timed brand deal in a video about greed. You think I like looking like a hypocrite? Of course not. But my avocado toast isn't gonna pay for itself. Hi, I'm upside down, and I'm here to tell you about today's sponsor, NordVPN. If you're watching this video, you're probably connected to the internet. And if you're not watching this video, how are you hearing this? Anytime you're connected to the internet, especially when you're on public wifi, you should consider using a virtual private network for an extra layer of security. A VPN creates a nice, warm, encrypted tunnel for all your precious data to pass through as it gets communicated between your devices and the internet, keeping your sensitive information safe from criminals, losers, and especially, freaks. But North VPN takes online security a step further with Threat Protection Pro. All you gotta do is flip it on in the desktop app, and it'll block dangerous ads, check your downloading files from malware. It can even warn you if you stumbled onto a fake online shop before you try to buy something that doesn't actually exist. You may think you're way too smart to fall for something like that, but take it from me, it could happen to anyone. You might have also heard that a VPN allows you to unlock websites and content that may be restricted in your area. Just by changing your virtual location in the app, you can essentially trick the internet into thinking that that's where you are, unlocking that show, movie, or YouTube video that randomly got blocked in 98 countries, for some reason, in the process. If you wanna try out NordVPN for yourself with a 30-day money back guarantee, go to nordvpn.com/gooden for my exclusive deal with four extra months added on. You can also get there by clicking the link in the description or scanning the QR code on the screen. But don't scan me. That's not... That's not gonna do anything. I'm just a guy. Thank you to NordVPN for sponsoring this video.

The economy sucks ass for most people right now. The only reason we're not technically in a recession is because the GDP is still going up. But the only reason the GDP is still going up is because of the AI industry, but the only reason that even looks as good as it does is 'cause a handful of companies are just like passing money back and forth. But there's no recession. You're hallucinating that. Because the AI industry is now single-handedly propping up the entire global economy, there's really only two paths forward. Worst case scenario, turns out, it is all bullshit. The bubble pops in spectacular fashion, trillions of dollars of investments cannot get paid out, and everything goes up in flames. Or best case scenario, a few billionaires get even richer. Wait, is that what we're hoping for?

All right, you're gonna have to bear with me while I go on another AI rant here. I know I do this like every six months, but it's not going away. It doesn't count as beating a dead horse if the horse is still alive. We gotta kill that horse first. People largely do not like AI and are worried about the future it imposes. It's currently being used to make a bunch of promises that almost no one asked for. The main appeal of it comes from corporations who see advancements in AI as a way to further reduce their dependence on human labor. The only thing cheaper than outsourcing jobs is just eliminating them all together. The wet dream that soils the sheets of every CEO is a company that somehow run entirely on its own and they can just sit back and collect all the profits for themselves. No more dealing with pesky labor laws or health insurance, or "Can I have Saturday off? My family died." No! Shut up! That's the eventual goal and why they're all pouring billions of dollars into Nvidia chips and data centers and cool shirts for Mark Zuckerberg. And in the meantime, we're stuck with ChatGPT, a humanized Google search designed to affirm whatever belief you share with it, even if it's incredibly dangerous, or generative video apps that are already being used to trick people into thinking something happened that didn't actually happen. Awesome technology. I'm so glad this exists.

And I think the best thing we can do to fight back against AI is to simply not engage with it. The problem is, even if you don't use these tools, if you live in certain parts of the country, you might be paying for them. There's been a lot of really good investigative journalism done on all these new data centers that are popping up around the country, who's funding them and who's getting screwed over in the process. For example, some residents in New Jersey who noticed that their power bill kept going up even though they were actually using less electricity than usual. Well, it turns out it's due to an overall supply cost. Basically, when the total amount of electricity usage in an area goes up, power companies tend to pass those higher costs on other customers. And for the past several years, electricity usage has been skyrocketing with over half of that increase coming solely from data centers. Your utility bill is going up because Elon Musk wants to pretend to have a girlfriend.

You see, AI doesn't just exist in some theoretical space. It has to be trained on trillions of gigabytes of data, and that data has to be stored in a physical location. To power this, it requires an absurd amount of electricity, which generates an absurd amount of heat, which then requires an absurd amount of water to cool off. Most of these buildings use over a million gallons per day, roughly the equivalent of 10,000 people. This would be even more problematic if they were being built in areas where water is extremely scarce. So we should be good as long as we don't build a bunch of 'em in like the middle of the desert. Whoops. But to be fair, they are extremely efficient about it. They don't just use the water, they also poison it. Every part of this process is wasteful and destructive. And this is only the beginning. AI is still a relatively new phenomenon, so we're only just starting to see the effects of this. But the Department of Energy projects that the percentage of electricity used by data centers could nearly triple in just the next three years. And who gets to pay for it? We do.

It's hard for me to accurately express how infuriating this is. The giant buildings that power these stupid fucking technology are being subsidized by people who just happen to live near them. Oh, but hold on, because they're technically contributing to the operating costs. So does that mean that they get to share in the eventual profits? No, of course not. They're more like involuntary investors doing it for free. Or Really, worse than free because a lot of them are being kept awake at night by the deafening hum endlessly emitting from the factory shoved into the backyard of their homes that have now surely plummeted in value as a result. But, hey, at least they're doing all of this to make a product that hopes to replace 80% of humanity. It's not enough that these people already own everything they could ever want. They could so easily afford to pay for these things without even noticing that that money is gone. But why would they do that when they could simply have poor people pay for it instead? Because nothing will ever be enough for them.

You know, when a rich person makes some shady deal to screw over the working class, people will joke that they just need that money to buy their fourth yacht. And, like, I don't even think it's that. They could buy a thousand yachts and still not run out of money. They don't wanna spend their wealth, they just want it to get bigger. It's the same obsession with seeing number go up that keeps me addicted to old school "RuneScape," except the only life that's ruining is my own. What they have is a disease. They have been scorched with the blight of insatiable greed, cursed to an endless pursuit of wealth that will never bring them true happiness. I would almost feel bad for them if they weren't actively destroying the world in the process.

One of the most frustrating things about this problem is that if you even try to suggest that maybe these guys should just have a little bit less money. Like, you guys can still be rich, whatever. Just turn it down a notch. 'Cause you're kind of making shit terrible for everybody else, you're treated like you're crazy. "No, this is the American way. If you don't like it, then leave." And yet these ideas aren't radical. They're not even new. Most people who advocate for a more progressive tax system are only calling for a return to something that used to exist in this country, we just forgot about it. So I think it's important to do a little history lesson here.

If you can believe it, there was a time where the working class in this country actually had it really good, and it was mostly because things got so bad during the Great Depression that the government was worried about the country collapsing. Thousands of banks had closed, millions of people lost their entire life savings, unemployment peaked at 25%. So, in fear of a revolution happening, the government was like, "All right, fine. We'll give you livable wages. Just please put that musket down. I don't like the way you're looking at me." So the New Deal was born, and with it came social security, better labor standards, the right to unionize, a national minimum wage, an eight-hour workday. And over the next two to three decades, America became the most prosperous country on earth. Productivity skyrocketed and wages rose with them. Extra profits weren't just redistributed to employees, but their employers were proud to do it. They would brag about how lucrative it was to work for them. Look, 37% of profits went to our employees last year because this is a team effort, and when we win, they win.

In 1943, Johnson & Johnson puts out this mission statement that's like, "Here's our list of priorities in order." "Customer's number one. We gotta make good products. Employees' number two. Everyone who works here needs to feel valued and respected. Our community, number three. We all wanna live in a better world, and as a company of our size, we feel like it's our responsibility to contribute to that however we can. And finally, all the way at the bottom, our shareholders can just have whatever's left." Of course, we need to make a profit to survive and grow, but that should just come naturally as a byproduct of focusing on these three tenets. Compared to modern corporate standards, this is all such a foreign concept that it almost sounds like it's coming from a fictional universe. But this actually happened. This was just America 70 years ago.

Now, during this time, what do you think the tax rate was on the wealthiest Americans? For reference in 2025, the highest income tax bracket is supposed to be around 24%. But because of how many ways there are to circumvent the rules, it often ends up being as little as 3%. For someone like Elon Musk who doesn't take a salary from Tesla and instead just owns a large percentage of its stock, as long as he doesn't sell any of that stock, then technically, there's no income to tax him on. Now, he can still leverage the value of those stocks to make purchases, you know, like how money works, but it's still not taxable because of the rules. This is how people like him and Jeff Bezos can be, in terms of net worth, two of the richest people on the planet. And in some years, pay $0 in tax.

In the middle of the 20th century, the tax rate on the ultra wealthy was not 3% or 20%, or even 50%. It was between 70 and 94%. It honestly sounds crazy, but even a lot of the people being taxed understood that it was necessary for society to continue to exist. And having a strong middle class was a crucial investment into the future of the country. But I don't know, man. I just think it's kind of interesting that during what's referred to as the Golden Age of capitalism, the government did a bunch of socialism. During the period of time that birthed the idea of the American dream, the government was taxing the absolute shit out of the richest Americans and using that money to provide jobs and welfare programs for everybody else. A single-income household working a regular job could afford to start a family, buy a house, send their kids to college, and retire at a reasonable age. No wonder people who grew up then gush about capitalism the way they do because for them it was great. But at this point, it is disingenuous to use that time period as the example for why capitalism works, because that version of it stopped existing a long time ago. The generation of people who started as beneficiaries of a more equitable system changed the rules once the roles were reversed and they had the power.

So what the hell happened? Everything was going great. What changed? Well, there were a lot of things, obviously. But one of the first big dominoes was the US' involvement in the Vietnam War, which was expensive and deadly. But to be fair, also accomplished nothing. And this had long-term ramifications. America had been diverting so much money away from manufacturing and towards defense that it opened the door for other growing industrialized countries to surpass them. More and more products were becoming cheaper to import than they were to produce. This led to factories getting shut down, unemployment starting to creep back up. A recession hits, and we're now facing a pivotal fork in the road in the late '70s. Either we could go back to what worked in the past, prioritize the work in class, reinvest into our own infrastructure, try to help lift people out of poverty they've fallen into through no fault of their own... Or?

(Drew sighs) Or we say, "Fuck the government!" We don't owe you shit. We're stupid, isn't that right? I don't even know my own name. Exactly. The deal is, you pay taxes, and we don't do anything. And you like that, right? They like that? Sounds good to me. The prevailing philosophy throughout the '80s became trickle-down economics. The logic being, "Oh man, these rich people are really handcuffed. You know, I bet if we lower the corporate tax rate from 70 all the way to eventually 28%, then companies will use all that extra money to pay their employees more." I mean, if there's one thing we know about rich people is that they're always looking out for the little guy. Now, for some reason, this hasn't worked out yet, but it's only been 55 years. So, the jury's still out.

See, I would argue that part of the reason why companies in the '40s and '50s we're so generous with their extra profits was because the tax rate was so high. I mean, think about it. If you're faced with the decision between giving a huge chunk of money to the government or redistributing it back to the employees who helped you earn it in the first place, you would be much more likely to do the latter, because it's an investment in your own company. It's a mutually beneficial exchange. Well compensated workers are proven to be more loyal and more productive, and those are two things that you want. Now, there were other factors as well loosening a lot of anti-monopoly regulations, the legalization of stock buybacks, but this dramatically lower tax rate is a big reason why the '80s serves as the dividing line on just about every economic graph you could look at. This was the beginning of a long and continuous transfer of wealth from the working class to the top 1%. And while it would be very easy to just blame all of this on then President Reagan, that would only be mostly true. Sure, this new approach opened the door for more exploitation and greed, but you still needed a few scumbags willing to go through that door for the evolution to be complete. And nobody sprinted through it faster than one man. The real life cartoon villain who designed the blueprint that most modern CEOs are still following to this day. His name was Jack Welch, and he's often referred to as the man who broke capitalism.

During his tenure as CEO of General Electric, he turned the once quintessential American company that reshaped people's lives and supplied hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs all across the country into a worthless carcass and a joke of a corporation, all while he became one of the richest people on the planet. In the century before Jack Welch took the reins, GE invented things like X-ray machines, jet engines, TVs, radios, and just about any kitchen appliance you can think of. In the 1980s, Jack invented laying people off. That was his big idea. What if we just fire a bunch of people, and then we don't have to spend as much money? It seems so simple and obviously very commonplace today. But before Jack, companies were not doing this. It was almost seen as un-American to fire somebody, unless you absolutely had to. But Jack didn't think like everybody else. He was a pioneer. He bravely instituted the rank and yank system where every year the bottom 10% of employees would get laid off no matter what, not because they all deserve to be fired, but just because they fell on the wrong side of a spreadsheet. "What's that? You were three years away from retirement, and now you no longer qualify for pension? Okay. Then die." And to be clear, the layoffs were also not because the company wasn't profitable. It very much was, but it just wasn't profitable enough.

See, when you routinely shut down entire facilities, you uproot thousands of lives, you create a toxic and selfish work environment where loyalty is replaced with fear. And if you're a company with the size and influence that GE had at the time, you can almost single-handedly destroy any semblance of a middle class across all of America. But this number gets a little bit bigger. So it's kind of a fair trade. GE was at the forefront of this countrywide philosophical transition from an economy that cared about making things and rewarding the labor it took to do so, to an economy that only cared about shareholder value and would prioritize anything it could to make that number go up. But the thing about the stock market is, it's mostly just about perception. As long as something seems to be growing in value, then people will be more likely to invest in it, which will, in turn, cause it to be more valuable, even if it shouldn't be. A lot of what Jack did during his time as CEO did not make the company better, but it did make it bigger. And in the eyes of Wall Street, that was all that mattered. I mean, come on, a business that relies on something boring, like selling products, can only grow so much, but a company that's constantly acquiring other companies simply has no ceiling. I mean, they could be worth infinity dollars when you think about it. So that's what they did. Over the next few decades, GE bought and sold hundreds of companies, and Jack was lauded for his brilliance because from the outside everything seemed to be working. I mean, sure, they were becoming a bloated, nonsensical hodgepodge of unrelated businesses, eroding the company's infrastructure and prioritizing constant quarterly gains over any long-term sustainability, but no one gives a shit because the stock price has never been high. They've stumbled upon an infinite money glitch. They're just alchemizing value out of thin air. It gets to a point where the company founded by Thomas Edison doesn't even make their own light bulbs anymore. Eh, it's cheaper to get 'em somewhere else. Who cares? All they care about now is their ballooning financial division. They're issuing high interest loans, they become a massive holder of subprime mortgages, a famously good investment to make in the early 2000s. Literally whatever it took to juice the numbers, that's what they would do.

After about 30 years of short-term decisions that received instant gratification from shareholders but were gradually making things worse for the company and its dwindling number of employees, GE had become severely overvalued. And it wasn't until right after Jack retired with his $400 million severance package where his successors stepped in and were like, "Wait, this doesn't make any sense." The time bomb jack planted explodes in their faces, and GE spends the next 20 years slowly bleeding out. And at this point, they couldn't fall back on just like selling microwaves because they'd been cutting corners on production so long that nobody wanted to buy any of their shitty garbage anymore. And, of course, they had fallen way too far behind on innovation because they spent all their money on acquisitions instead of research. By 2021, the company that helped bring electricity to America was mercifully laid to rest, split into three separate institutions, none of which have come close to the dominance or influence that GE once had over the American economy.

But here's the thing. You know who isn't affected at all by the cataclysmic downfall of General Electric? Jack Welch. Because he's dead now. He already got to live his entire life of luxury and adoration without ever having to deal with the fallout caused by his actions. He took control of a building with a rock solid foundation and just kept scrapping it for parts until the only thing left for it to do was collapse under its own weight. But by that point, he was long gone. I believe that this is the goal of those who now follow in his footsteps. They don't need to care about whether or not what they're doing is harmful or unsustainable. As long as the facade can be maintained long enough for them to reap the rewards, it doesn't matter that the ship is sinking behind them because they have a lifeboat. It doesn't matter that America spent the past 60 years exporting all its jobs and decimating the economies of small towns all across the country because a few hundred people responsible for those things already got to live long, happy lives. They don't give a shit.

This cutthroat corporate culture that Jack pioneered is still seen all around us today. And through the magic of time, it's only getting worse. CEOs make a thousand dollars every second while their employees have to in water bottles so they don't fall behind. Routine layoffs, regardless of if a company is even struggling, are so normalized that it's just something we've come to expect. The stock market rules the world. Every major decision is dictated by this inherently volatile and shortsighted metric. And look at where that's gotten us. Millions without jobs, an enshitification epidemic, and a concentration of wealth that should be seen as a threat to humanity. Even while owning everything, billionaires live in fear of losing it, so they weasel their way into politics, they influence elections, they buy policy changes. They use their wealth to reshape the world to benefit them even further. They try control narratives by buying up news outlets. They can dictate what's on our social media feeds. They spend an enormous amount of resources on pitting us all against each other, so we're too distracted to see that the real problem is them.

- Should the human race survive? - Everything kind of sucks right now. And as a result, most people are justifiably pretty angry. But for media outlets and politicians, that anger is their single most powerful tool because they can tell you where to direct it. And they don't even really care who it is, so long as it's not them. That's why it changes all the time. Sometimes it's trans people, sometimes it's immigrants. Most recently, it's been poor people. There's been this whole war going on over food stamps because when the government shut down, 42 million Americans lost access to SNAP benefits. Now, that's an objective piece of information, an inarguable statistic. But depending on how it's presented to you, it may lead you to draw a drastically different conclusion than somebody else.

For some, it might put into perspective how dire the situation has gotten. Like, surely there's underlying issues with a system that's allowed 12% of its population to be unable to afford food. Alternatively, you might hear that and think, "Wait a minute, my tax dollars are paying for these greedy freeloaders? I'm busting my ass over here to barely make ends meet, and these leeches are using my money to buy cookies? That's not fair." And all it takes is highlighting a story or two of someone taking advantage of the system to make you think there's this rampant issue, that you are expected to feed all of these people with money you barely have enough of to feed yourself. This narrative has been used since the '70s because it's very effective. You work hard, they're lazy. This program is bad. It's easier than ever now to push this narrative because you can just AI generate a video of a fat lady screaming in Walmart and get everyone pissed off.

But in order to properly analyze this, let's take a look at the data. First of all, SNAP only makes up about 1.5% of the overall federal budget, less than an eighth of what we spend on defense and an eighth of what we spend just on interest on the debt that we owe. By my math, cutting this program would only save the average taxpayer a couple hundred dollars a year. And, of course, that's assuming that if they were to cut it, they would send you a refund in the mail. No, I'm pretty sure they would still take the same amount, but instead of reinvesting it into the economy, which is what SNAP ultimately does, they would just buy some more missiles or send a pile of cash to Argentina. Second of all, by definition, the majority of SNAP recipients fall under the umbrella of elderly, disabled, veterans, full-time caretakers, or just temporarily unemployed. Remember, not everybody who isn't working does so because they don't want to. It is very hard to find and keep a job right now. The fact that SNAP spending ebbs and flows so closely with the overall state of the economy should be proof that this program is primarily used for temporary relief. Even still, many of the people on SNAP do work, and about 70% of the ones that do work full time. That doesn't seem like a laziness problem, that seems like a wage problem. They need supplemental income to survive because of how little they're being paid.

Of those full-time employees, their two most common employers were McDonald's and Walmart, who combined to earn $23 billion in profits last year. $23 billion, and you're telling me they can't afford to pay their employees enough so that they don't need government assistance? See, what that means is you wouldn't have to help pay for these people's food if their employer, a nearly trillion dollar corporation, just paid them a livable wage. You're more upset at the people using the program than the companies who have put them in a position where they even need it in the first place. Also, Walmart double dips here. The majority of food stamps are redeemed at Walmart. So not only do they save money by underpaying their staff, but their revenue then gets subsidized by this program because that's where people tend to use it. Final statistic, about a third of SNAP recipients, over 12 million of them, are children. What's the argument there? Are they not working hard enough? "What, you don't want to get a job just because you're seven?" Like, can we stop for one second to think about what you're saying here? You have let somebody convince you that in this situation, the only way to make your life better is if 12 million children starve. So I want to ask, who is more to blame here? A bunch of kids who got born into poverty or CEOs with more money than anybody could spend in a thousand lifetimes who expect you to solve the problem that they helped create.

For some people, it doesn't matter what you say about capitalism, they will still go to war for it, even if it's not working for them. Statistically speaking, it's probably not. You'll try to criticize a multi-billionaire who's not paying enough taxes, and people will defend them like, "Hey, it's not their fault. They're just taking advantage of loopholes like any smart business person would." And you're like, "Okay, so then we agree there's a problem with the rules, right?" If they're just exploiting the system, then maybe the system shouldn't be so easy to exploit. We've reached a point where a lot of the core principles of a free market no longer apply. Like, the idea that you can vote with your dollar. I get to pick which businesses I support, therefore, the best ones will succeed and the worst ones will fail. Yeah, except when one company is allowed to corner the market and price out all their competition, suddenly, there isn't any.

- And we would have small businesses tell us if they walked into a Walmart or a Costco, the retail price at those stores, the price on the shelves at those stores is lower than the wholesale price a small business is getting. - And that's now feeding into itself, right? The more dire the economy is for everyone, the less freedom they have when they're deciding what to pay for. Amazon is certainly not the only place to buy things, but historically speaking, it's almost always the cheapest and most convenient. So how do you convince somebody who's also been forced to pinch pennies due to their own circumstances that they need to spend more time and money buying that same thing from a local mom and pop shop when they could just click three buttons and have it magically appear at their door in three hours? It's not even really fair to impose that because that person also struggling. But then the cycle continues. The small business closes, Amazon and Walmart extend their reach even further. And once all competition is defeated, then they can just raise the prices to be whatever they want. They can train an algorithm to charge you the maximum price they think you'll pay at any given moment.

Now, one of the most common counter counterarguments you'll hear if you bring up the idea of raising taxes on the ultra wealthy is that, "Well, if you do that, they're just gonna leave." First of all, no, they're not. That's a bluff they've been using for years, perpetuated by media networks owned by, you guessed it, rich people who don't want their taxes to go up. Sure, a few of them might leave, but the kinds of people who are willing to go to the trouble of moving their entire business from New York City to, like, Kissimmee, Florida, are probably already doing everything they can to avoid paying any taxes at all. It doesn't seem like a very productive mindset to cater to this parasitic minority at the expense of everybody else. Second of all, oh my God, can we grow some fucking balls here? "You don't understand. They're not gonna like it if we raise their taxes." Do you hear yourself? Do you hear how pathetic you sound? Okay, so what? We can't do anything then? That's it? It's over, they won? Your plan is that we should just give up and let the billionaires have whatever they want. Buddy, we've already tried that, and that's not working either.

Third of all, this criticism is predicated on an idea that taxation essentially has a bell curve to it where, after a certain rate, your overall revenue actually decreases because people will lose the incentive to work as hard, or, like you're saying, move away. With this in mind, there have been studies done by economists who believe that every country has its own ideal rate for maximum efficiency. However, the implication that raising taxes would cause the overall revenue to go down would only be true if we were on the tail end of this bell curve. And we are nowhere close to that. So if your main concern is to maximize total revenue, it's pretty clear which direction we should be moving in. Otherwise, the very metric your point is referencing contradicts the argument you are trying to make.

Now, even having said all of that, I'm not gonna sit here and act like just raising taxes is an immediate fix to all of our problems, because we'd still have to rely on elected officials to actually use that money in a sensible way. I'd be happy to contribute more if I knew it was going to better healthcare or nicer parks or public transportation. But if my money's just gonna be used to blow up a hospital on the other side of the world, then, yeah, maybe I'd rather just give it to a food bank. I don't know all the answers because, at the end of the day, no matter how hard I try to expand my legacy beyond it, I'm still just the roadwork ahead guy. But I do know that this amount of wealth inequality that's showing zero signs of slowing down anytime soon is not sustainable. Turns out that actually every single thing in the world becoming a for-profit commodity, from housing to healthcare, is just a way to enrich a few people at the cost of many. And I have to wonder if we've finally reached a point now where the greed has gone too far, that it's now so impossible to ignore that no amount of gaslighting about how the economy is good, actually, will convince people who are dying because they can't afford to go to the doctor, that this is just how life should be. History shows that, unfortunately, sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. And if this is what it takes for a return to class solidarity, then I guess at least we're closer to that than we've been in a long time. We just need to put down our phones, set aside our differences for a little bit, and unite on this one issue. They want us divided because they're afraid of how strong we would be if we stood together. Do not fall for it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go argue on Reddit about how "Ghost of Yotei" is woke because they didn't make the main character hot enough for me. Thank you for watching.