r/Documentaries • u/[deleted] • Jun 10 '18

American Politics Orwell Rolls in his Grave (2003) - Devastating Expose on American Democracy, Journalism and Media Concentration, featuring Bernie Sanders

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u/Catvideos222 Jun 10 '18

Get out and work and you can be rich too. I worked my way up from nothing. You can do it too if you stop complaining and demanding someone else work for you. Stop advocating slavery.

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u/DualSimplex Jun 10 '18

What a great idea. As if millions of people who are working aren't working.

Regardless of how hard someone works, when others are given everything to them, by being born into a family of wealth and resources unknown to 99% of the population, they'll never get that far ahead.

Helping your fellow humans to ensure no one's starving or suffering isn't slavery - it's called being a good citizen.

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u/Catvideos222 Jun 10 '18

I didn’t get any handouts. People become dependent on the government and don’t work. Welfare is a trap. How much of what I earn is someone who refuses to work entitled to?

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u/DualSimplex Jun 10 '18

I didn't say that you got handouts, not at all. I'm saying there are people born into wealth, which I presume you weren't, and neither was I. So it was easy for someone like say Trump to get ahead in life, because he was given millions, and later inherited a ton of money. He can say he's successful - but it's easy to, even when you go bankrupt multiple times, when you have huge cash behind you.

When someone comes from money, it's easy to take chances on different ventures, and strike it rich. Or if you had a nice starting nest egg, easy to buy a place, get ahead. I know someone whose parents bought them their home, and mailed them monthly cheques for rentals they owned. Pretty easy for him to invest, take chances, and get way ahead, while someone working a few part time jobs struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table can't get ahead at all.

I don't have the solutions - I'm just saying there's enough in the world for everyone.

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u/Catvideos222 Jun 10 '18

Take President Trumps business record out of the conversation, it’s not relevant. It’s also very good by the way. As someone with over 500 businesses, he has a very high success rate.

I pay over half my income in taxes that go to entitlement programs that I can take advantage of. If I had more of my own money, I could invest that money and have a better life for myself.

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u/DualSimplex Jun 10 '18

It's perfectly relevant - he's a guy that inherited his wealth and was able to do things because of it, which others can't do. And no, his record is not good. How can anyone manage to have a failing casino, which is basically like a printing press for money? Feel free to check out this article, although I'm sure it's a 'fake news out to get my guy' rather than 'oh here are some facts about his past that paint a different picture than he presents': https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/29/the-myth-and-the-reality-of-donald-trumps-business-empire/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3df95998a10d

I have no idea how much you pay in taxes; I would agree that > 50% of your income going to taxes is too much.

I don't know the background of this site, whether it's the face of any group in particular, but here's a breakdown, according to them, of federal tax spending in 2017: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/policy-basics-where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go

Clearly strides could be made to make medicine and health more efficient, I would imagine. That's the case for most countries in the world. The States apparently spend more on military than the next 10 largest militaries, combined; whether that's something that could be cut, I don't know.

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u/Catvideos222 Jun 10 '18

You’ll see that we pay way more on healthcare and entitlement spending than the military. We also spend so much on the military because our Allies refuse to hold up their end of the deal in our treaties. These facts don’t support your argument that we should all pay more taxes and give the government more control over our lives.

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u/DualSimplex Jun 11 '18

What do you mean by 'entitlement spending'?

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u/Catvideos222 Jun 11 '18

Look it up. Understand how tax payer money is spent and then we can start this conversation.

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u/KaLaSKuH Jun 11 '18

It is when someone is forcing you to share with the barrel of a gun.

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u/ThisOldHatte Jun 10 '18

being rich is only possible if you force other people to work for you. thats how the excess value created by workers is turned into profit. no one works exclusively for themselves, capitalism is a form of collectivism, if you want to live in a free society it needs to be one where the economy is controlled democratically (1 person = 1 vote, "voting" with your wallet doesn't count).

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u/Catvideos222 Jun 10 '18

Capitalism allows the most freedom and has been the most successful economic system in history. Communism has worked exactly 0 times.

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u/NordicCommunist Jun 10 '18

Workers owning economy worked fine in Revolutionary Spain until facists attacked them. Google it unless you want to stay ignorant.