wat0n wrote:Even doing that, just confiscating all the wealth of the top 1%, wouldn't cut it. It's estimated to be at $45.9 trillion while the funding gap for SS and Medicare over the remainder of the century stands at $75 trillion. We'll all have to foot the bill in one way or another, the only question is who'll pay a larger cost.
There are economic models of all sorts. The reality is that all models state that if you don't cope with clean water, clean energy and clean earth and clean air and you do not take those mountains of trash and you don't recycle everything you can down to the last tiny bit of metal and plastic and compress it all and BUILD on it, and you take every last drop of fertilizer that is healthy and you don't deal with plants and being efficient at calculating how you can grow things efficiently and how to store and solar based energy and recycling everything to the maximum degree? You will not have a damn chance.
But the vultures got to go...I do not cry for any of them. Besides that is not true Wat0n. All you need to do is pool all the resources and start calculating based on what is reasonable. They did that with the McDonald's corporation. They make money being the world's biggest landlord. It is not really getting rich selling Big Macs. They calculated that if they distributed the profits for McDonald's equitably and well? All the employees would have living wages and a lot of benefits and would work less hours on top of that. Total security for those industry workers. They could live middle class lives just doing that. If you break down all the industries with a lot of worldwide workers and break it down equitably? You get to live decently. Worldwide.
Elon Musk lives in a 50k comfortable house that is decent and not expensive. People need to aspire to that stuff Wat0n. People have to have decent standards and peace. There is enough trash, enough discarded material that can be reused for building materials for every family that needs a decent home with good insulation, good ventilation and good quality of life. Tiny homes, recycled homes, Earthbags, adobe homes from recycled materials, clay, straw, and every material in between, well planned and executed it can happen!
Tons of investment not in instruments of war and death but in cleaning air, cleaning water with massive water treatment plants that benefit nature. It is out there. I have studied it for years and years. You would be surprised how creative the world we live in is. It can happen. It is all being held back by one thing. GREED and lack of political will. You have to remove those two or you will never solve a damn thing.
It is almost BIBLICAL. A big horrible DEMON is in the way. GREED. Got to get rid of that problem. It is the reason there is pollution, nuclear bomb threats and war materials being produced en masse. It is the reason there is poverty, homes being foreclosed on, and homeless families, unemployed people and hunger and lack of basic needs being met like kids dying of diarrhea. That has to go.
Get rid of the greed. Profit motive crap is not going to solve a crisis of epic proportions. What will work is a huge cooperation plan between dozens of nations to the point of 195 nations doing inventories and planning exchanges and saying, how much do we have here to give and recycle and do so that we can solve these enormous problems. Send the experts from x nation and y nation. Get their asses over here. SOLVE this OBSTACLE.
That is how that is done. Not selfish and indifferent crap and a bunch of elitists fleeing to hide behind walls full of barbed wire fences and security guards with machine guns. That is not going to work.
The Amish do not want any part of the modern world Wat0n. It is corrupt and evil for them. And they are right about that. But the people living outside the Amish community polluted the land and did the corrupt thing and the Amish share air, water, and earth with the corrupt ones they have never shared their lives with. But they are connected to the corrupt ones. How? By breathing, drinking, eating, and being human. All of us are one. The actions of the outsiders and the ones outside our borders are supposedly some remote and distant people.
They are not. Everything they do affects the whole. All are one. Got to accept that the solution is also going to be ALL ARE ONE and together. Fight for the unity. And not the separation. Because it might depend on that mindset to not go extinct.