Gofundme Ceo: Economy Is So Bad His Customers Crowdfund to Pay for Groceries
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The CEO of GoFundMe reports that many users are crowdfunding to pay for basic needs like groceries, sparking discussion about the state of the economy and wealth inequality.
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Not writing disingenuous feelgood bullshit, pretending that I work for some kind of greater good, while actually I'm pushing my own company, and trying to shift burden onto the "young digital natives". For a start.
Your business plan for America:
1. Live in an unknown country Z that's not the US, about which you don't know much.
2. Do volunteer work in Z, consisting of doing highly unknown stuff X for a secret number of minutes per year Y.
3. ...
4. Imply unknown profits for Z
5. The US implements a copy of the unknown volunteering in unknown country Z
6. ...
7. Imply enough unknown profits for the US to fix all of its unspecified problems.
Am I missing something, like known or unknown unknown?
Hey, learn how to have a nice discussion first then you can tell us about your morale compass.
One would think that in 2025, in one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, we could at least solve food insecurity.
If they are in the U.S. and wealthy, they pay relatively little. That's why the U.S. has a problem funding these things.
cynicism is a pernicious emotional illness IMHO
He might have given up on the country at this point.
Trying not to blame the GOP-controlled Congress in this time of stomp-on-the-critics politics?
What are the odds, knowing what business cares about first and foremost?
The war caused energy prices to go crazy, Europe needed gas and was willing to pay a premium, and the laws of supply and demand meant the price went up for everyone.
I used to live in a country where the government subsidized the price of oil (including petrol). When they needed to cut that subsidy, people knew the price of oil would go up, and that affected the price of everything else, my reasoning was because all the trucks transporting goods needed petrol, but it's probably because everything needs energy to accomplish..
Covid virus didn't make you poor, it was the government's response to it of shutting down large parts of the economy(and not others) plus printing endless money and dumping it on the market(mostly on rich people/businesses running on debt) distorting the market and creating hyper-inflation that wiped out your savings and wages.
Same with the war in Europe, they weren't forced to give up on cheap Russian gas that was the base of their economy, they voluntarily chose to do that to save Ukraine, with the obvious effect their prices would go up and standard of living would go down.
People need to start holding their elected governments accountable for their actions of putting too many thumbs, arms and legs on the economic scales that cause wealth transfer form the poor to the rich under the pretext of every crisis("never waste a good crisis"), and for the "let the peasants eat cake" response they get in return.
It was utterly bizzare seeing the podcasters and media just gaslight everyone that disagreed with "US is doing great" narrative.
Does the media acknowledge that? The leading cable channel and broadcast TV stations are Republican-controlled, so now they pretend “US is doing great.”
You mean November 2024? It has not even been a full single year, never mind "a couple"
Problem is, the inflation that already happened was still there. And that part is what people notice immediately.
But right now, a part of what is happening is that Trump has been blowing up parts of the economy with his tarrifs and erratic actions. The effect of that is still happening and likely will get worse.
Similarly, in education if it was just a few prestige schools it’d be easy to believe that Harvard and Yale were hiking their base rates to exploit international students while finding credits for some of the others, but the trend is across the board even at less prestigious state schools and I’d want to see data that it’s not better explained by other factors like schools maximizing revenue from student aid.
This sounds like something you were told by right-wing social media. It certainly isn’t what you’d have thought from the extensive discussion of that in the mainstream media or during the campaign when the candidates were talking about real problems affecting millions of people.
The closest you’d come to being factual were the pieces correctly noting that the U.S. economy was doing better than many other countries at recovering from the pandemic but that’s another way of saying “less bad”.
Oh and bird flu can do a number on egg prices.
Reality is fucking far away from averages and we know it. "The economy is doing great/terrible" is an almost worthless indicator unless the person you're talking about actually has business relations into every corner.
Yes, there are interdependencies, but they do not justify that we pretend numbers are so expensive we can only print two of them (mean, sd) at a time. Let's finally stop drinking information through a 2 mile straw and instead show high resolution 2d data at least.
[edit] this is of course not a criticism of parent or OP, it's a systemic problem that we all are guilty of.
At the same time - and I think you agree with this and it's probably implicit in your comment - we have to beware of anecdata as well. "Two of my friends asked me for money" means very little, except that your friend group is having a rough time. The meso-scale, your "high resolution 2d data", is where to look if you want a textured picture of what's really going on while at the same time avoiding observer bias. Unfortunately, that kind of data is not always easy to get, or to interpret.
We're also now fairly openly in a 21st century "Great Game" if not multipolar Thucydides Trap including ongoing proxy war, so deflationary impulses from the Eurasia to the west in energy, goods and labor have been partially choked off in various ways, leaving the working class with the double whammy of energy/goods/services inflation along with the preexisting asset price inflation.
- For food, this was caused by supply shocks. First COVID, then Ukraine, now tariffs and the trade war. And on top of that, excessive price-setting power in some highly concentrated sectors of the food industry.
- For housing, this was caused by a supply shortage, i.e. bad housing policy. A housing shortage gives property owners price-setting power, which allows them to keep raising the price. However, while we've made it very easy for owners to profit, we've made it harder for developers, feeding the shortage.
- For healthcare, we decided to let many middle-men profit. A decent portion of spending could be cut without harming pharmaceutical innovation or new drug development.
These problems all have causes, and the cause is bad policy that benefits a minority while harming the country. And "tax the rich and give to the poor" does not fix these; the government is gonna need to get involved in directly fixing these broken markets, not just giving money to the poor so they immediately hand it over to the existing rent-seekers.
Houses and stocks got cheaper per ounce of gold last 20 years. But in terms of dollars they got way more expensive... inflation has been robbing us for more than 2 decades.
The issue is, things that are tied to debt will go up first: housing, cars, etc. Stock inflation occurs because inflation forces people to speculate to stay ahead of the inflation rate.
To fix inflation when using a debt based currency, you’d need high interest rates (a high price of money), or you’d need the government to pay off debt which takes money out of circulation. Neither of these will happen as the politicians in power would cause serious short term pain. They all have an incentive to kick the can and hope the next guy is in power when it all falls apart.
What we are seeing now is the result of the price of money having been lower than the inflation rate for over 20 years. Effectively free money. This subtly skews the perception of risk, and therefore increases dollar velocity and drives inflation even higher.
Pain doesn't buy anything, by the way.
We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mode.
The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax.
All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me.
The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.
If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60%
That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000
So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k
One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead
I appreciate that this is a complex topic, but the point I tried to make in response was that these things are rarely as simple as people make them out to be. Increasing taxes on wealth transfers could have all sorts of side effects which are not easy to link as nothing in the economy happens in isolation. I thought the UK was perhaps a relevant example, as France and Sweden have been recently as well.
The economy is not a zero sum game, and the rich can get richer while the poor get richer as well. Maybe this is not a fair representation of what is going on, and I am certainly no expert on the US economy, but the whole "just tax the rich" mantra does not seem obviously true or effective to me.
I agree though that the system as a whole feels broken.. but also, because it is "small club, and we ain't in it". Wealth has a significant influence on policy...
(Or there was another change to the privileged treatment of farms and family businesses, but again, you're not talking about a huge change.)
Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem.
The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.
It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
The main problem being, you can’t operate the bunker yourself. How do you ensure the non-billionaires on your staff don’t murder you and use your bunker themselves? This is assuming a catastrophe that forces a move to a bunker and changes the rules of society.
It’s an intractable problem, billionaires are reliant on the rest of us to do their bidding. That does not change in a crisis/catastrophe.
* If you think taxes and donations will solve the problem with people who struggle with basics, you are wrong. Again look at the world, places like France.
Keynes said, let the memory leak and just get more memory. This works until it doesn't, which is still a bigger win than losing multiple times.
Meanwhile Gesell said, if you want finite memory, then you must penalize memory consumption.
The amount of memory that an economy needs depends on the total number of transactions (total throughput) and how fast each processor is (sequential throughout).
Many slow processes means you need more processes in parallel, which means you need more memory.
Curiously, transactions are taxed by the government. This means that taxation minimisation implies delaying and minimizing transactions. There is an inherent bias towards being slow. It seems like tax policy is completely backwards in most countries.
As long as we're discussing it on this level, why tax transfers of wealth instead of wealth itself?
Free market Capitalism is dead in the USA, winners are getting picked. Coal over solar. Who knows, perhaps it's right, but I suspect not.
- Lots of small and mid-sized firms.
- Lots of cutthroat competition with resulting price pressure.
- Virtually all firms are subsidized by direct government investment to some extent, but the government doesn't pick winners.
- Red tape and barriers to entry are generally low, regulation mostly affects larger firms. (The CCP doesn't want companies getting too big for their britches, but there are too many small firms to harass, and the government doesn't want people unemployed.)
- Civil legal liability is anywhere from 10x to 1000x less of an issue. I'm not exaggerating. The courts are fast, decisions are usually reasonable, and "access to justice" costs very little.
In the US you have this scheme where barriers to entry are insanely high thanks to regulatory capture, and the courts are a weapon that large firms use against small ones, almost exclusively, as smaller companies can't afford the costs associated with litigation. This is without even getting into "winners getting picked," which is obviously a problem.
And it's not some law of reality or the goodness of the CCP or some raced based bullshit that underpins is. The US was like this too, 75yr ago.
But for several generations we've been throwing more power behind both public and private institutions that reduce the tempo of economic activity and it sure fucking shows.
In real China winners get picked by networks of ccp members, to profit from them.
You might more accurately call it an incentive for success of enterprises, so that the networks can get their spoils.
It's not the state driving it. It's the party networks.
And it's not pretty. They can expropriate via cancelled licenses if you don't play along. Etc..
A smarter approach is to cherry pick the best elements from every model and redesign the parts that don't serve us
Not everything should be for profit, if you don't value society and collective welfare, it's meaningless:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/2...
You'll be forced to rethink that model anyway once post-scarcity hits
Abundance breaks capitalism, profit cannot thrive when there's plenty for everyone
Capitalism is a dead end, don't get too attached to it, it served us well, time to move on
There is a reason why Gesell only suggested the three core policies free money, free land and free trade. Once you have that you can cherry pick whatever you want, without any contradictions.
If you want austerity and low unemployment, high wages, low inequality and so on, the system is set up to support that.
How is that possible? Because most important thing realization of Gesell was that the system is not in equilibrium. You have to bring it into equilibrium through equilibrium encouraging policies.
The standard neoclassical framework treats the economy as if it was always in equilibrium and governments are the ones ruining equilibrium, which means you can abuse the economy and hack it and destroy it as much as you want and it will still work anyway. If anything, a neoclassical economist will even think that it will work better when it is in shambles.
So in a way, the policies that bring about equilibrium will appear as if they are a panacea. They do impossible things that people who are living in the old way of mandatory contradictions would never believe, when in reality all they did was reduce the obvious dysfunction staring down on them.
With the job market being the shittiest I've seen and more ladders being kicked out than ever I think this crash will end up being possibly one of the most violent ones. We might see a return to the early 1900s era of union vs corporate violence as corporations have gotten more brazen than ever to try and stop any sort of concerted effort by labor.
GoFundMe CEO: We Could Use A Few Fun Ones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIsXEkR5OVs
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