The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

You've conflated people busting ass who can't keep up with those following their passion in the arts voluntarily. Those don't feel anything like the same thing to me. I don't think I'm alone in a perspective that if you keep taking more from me I'll stop contributing all together, and we'll all fail. The ultra-rich and others with means to avoid picking up the tab have already done so.

Start traveling, talking to other cultures, and stop being dismissive and defensive.

Are you in the top 1%? If so, you can afford it. If not, then I don't think your taxes should go up - I think Bezos' taxes should go up, and there should be a wealth tax for high net worth individuals.

You already are, it's just going to the ultra wealthy and pension fund kids, while you slave your life away making that stock go up because you believe there should be no other choice.

Yet that doesn’t mean I want to see other people making less art. On the contrary: I wish other people could create more great stuff that makes me happy, and I’m also happy if my tax euros (and my private consumption) help pay for that.

What I’m trying to say is that this idea of “I don’t get to do it, so nobody else should either” seems completely foreign to creativity. It’s not a zero-sum game.

It's when you start making fabulous amounts of money, and can park it in all sorts of shelters, whether that's straightforward things like real estate or, as HN commenters point out every time this comes up, by not ever even earning income or investment gains and so you can drive your tax towards zero (by doing things like taking out loans against your assets for money to live on).

I'm not sure what the answer is, but a North Star, in my mind, would be that as you have more you pay more, a truly progressive scheme, because every additional dollar you earn (through income or investment gains, realized or unrealized), as you get richer, actually is less critical to your livelihood. Who am I to say that? I'm not talking about some nebulous concept. I'm saying that if you make $1 million dollars per year, in total, a dollar extra matters less to you than it does to someone making $100,000 so I'm purely speaking on a relative basis (cue someone saying "how do you know it matters less? That person could live in a HCOL location, or have 12 kids or..." Hopefully we can avoid that because it misses the point; those things are choices people make. How much you're taxed is not a choice for the most part though can be to some extent (move from a high-tax state to a low one, etc.).

That's not it at all. There are already tons of people doing it, so many that the incremental value of one more person is small. The low pay reflects that; it's a signal that you should consider other jobs that are more in demand.

In my country, from the customer to the persons net paycheck, a bit over half goes to the government (vat, 2x different benefits, income tax).

Every time someone mentiones taxes, the rich and the poor over here, the average (ie. people earning around average income) get taxed more, the rich on paper earn nothing, and the poor get taxed the same (because there's nothing more to take).

I'd much prefer a system where an average joe would pay a lower percantage of taxes (ie. a tax break), and people like bezos would actually get taxed at the same rate instead of paying zero throug loopholes).

So what does this have to do with income inequality? If you try to make a living from a business and the revenue you get from it is not enough to keep it afloat, what does it say about it's viability and income inequality?

Of course people usually try to draw the UBI Venn diagram such that they are a net receiver of funds.

Your reply was a strawman arguments, and fails to address OP's point. The point is quite simple and straight-forward: if your argument for UBI is that people could hypothetically pursue their interests, why should I have to be the one having to work to pay the taxes required to finance this income redistribution scheme only to have others, perhaps less talented and dedicated than me, pursue my interests at my expense?

Why are you pay for other people to use the roads or have their fires put out or have health care? Because society is more pleasant overall if everyone can assume a baseline availability for those things.

why should I have to be the one having to work to pay the taxes required

You're not. You are not the only person paying tax. And far more of your tax bill is going toward subsidizing people and industries who are already rolling in money than helping relieve the burden on the poor.

I'm not saying you should pay more tax, you should probably be paying less. But we should reorganize the economy away from rewarding ownership of property as if it were productive economic economy activity in and of itself.

Are you suggesting the US should fund a global UBI?

Also, all the people who cant do what you do, should they just curl up and do fentanyl? What do you propose they should do?

Besides, why do you want to live in a world with less artists and full of people who hate their jobs?

Consider two toy economies: One in which purchasing power is fairly evenly distributed among the population, and one in which it's concentrated via a power-law distribution into the top 1%, and 0.1%, etc.

In the first case, the quantities of mass-market products demanded will be much larger, because more people can afford to purchase them. This means demand for things like cameras, cell phones, breakfast cereals, movies, video games software, etc, go up. However most of these are also things where economies of scale makes production more efficient as order quantities increase. Factories can invest in jigs, automation, and high-throughput lines to make enough quantity for everyone. The jobs that produce these goods also become better-paid, and easier to secure investment for, because order quantities are higher and less volatile. And doubly so for intangible goods like software, ebooks, music, and video games: production can scale to infinite demand, so there can never be a production shortage, but people who work in these industries can be better rewarded for their efforts because a bigger audience can afford to pay more.

So order quantities grow, and so do incomes, but inflation is relatively low because of the increasing efficiency of production. This means real GDP per capita increases greatly, and the population as a whole becomes materially more wealthy. Even though wealth is being distributed away from top earners, there are huge material rewards available to anyone able to supply goods and services to the masses, because the masses are able to pay for those goods and services.

In the wealth-concentration economy, those mass-production industries have to fight for scraps, because the top 1% has as much purchasing power as the bottom 99%, and the top 0.1% has more purchasing power than the 1% below them. More purchasing power is directed towards luxury goods: golf courses, supercars, yachts, country club estates, Rolex watches, art, private jets, and real estate. Production quantities are low and inefficient, and in the case of land, production is effectively impossible. Prices go up for these assets, but there is little productive benefit to the economy. The excess wealth of the 0.1% is put towards buying political influence, buying news media, and so on, which becomes another negative for society as a whole. Meanwhile an entrepreneur might identify a pressing need among the bottom 25% of the populace, where very simple things (eg. vitamins or eyeglasses) could create an incredible increase in social welfare, but they will not be able to secure investment nor be rewarded for such efforts because there is no profit in it; the poor cannot afford to pay.

Therefore the government can tax the office worker and use the proceeds to buy the artists paintings and utopia is here!

The US has used cheap labor globally for decades, why would the blue collar worker in Indiana qualify more than the blue collar worker in Indonesia? Both are making goods for American billionaires and both are struggling.

Equality to them means them getting more material goods, not them giving up more material goods.

The rich are able to keep larger portions of their income, and then eventually leverage that to be patrons of political power and set the rules for themselves.

You are also not in the same category as the super rich, so theres an unspoken blurring of the terms here as well - theres no sense in considering a normal perso, or a rich person against someone like Bezos, who has the wealth of several countries.

What they are really saying is "I don't want anyone to be richer than I am but fine with people being poorer". So the default human position on things.

I cannot do that.

But given that we need the labour of about 10% (give or take) of people for society to function, we need to change our economic arrangements

I think we should fund the basic meat hook realities for the common person. Accommodation, food, health care, shoes...

That is a UBI - Universal Basic Income

It will simplify so many aspects of modern life, increase our taxes, and open up many opportunities

The current system has failed to deliver anything like economic justice and needs rethinking

This will mean that people are able to "focus full-time on things where they can't make a living", rather than hustle for crusts. That is a side effect, not the purpose

No. I'm not sure if you failed to understand the question or you tried to avoid it. My question refers to the core argument involving any economic system: fairness and equity. Why are you trying to avoid touching on the topic?

> You're not. You are not the only person paying tax.

Yes, I am. Everyone is forced to pay taxes, and I am no different. In income redistribution schemes such as UBI you get a chunk of your salary taken straight from your pay check to finance other paychecks. So far this sort of scheme is used to cover salaries representing social safety nets such as pensions, disability, and temporarily for unemployed. UBI radically changes that, as it goes well beyond the role of social safety net and unconditionally extends this to everyone. So now you are faced with a scenario where you have two classes of people: those who sustain the scheme and make it possible, and those who only consume it's resources.

Even if you try to argue there's a net benefit to society, you must face the problem of lack of equity. For instance, how do you justify to people like OP that they should continue working at their jobs so that others can have the privilege of pursuing their personal interests? If you argue that OP is also free to quit his job to pursue his interests then you're advocating for an income redistribution scheme that presssures participants to not contribute to it and instead consume the resources it manages to mobilize.

Taxes are a great way to fund culture, sort of like an index fund: I don’t have to try to pick winners now, I’ll get the accumulated benefit eventually.

That's fantastic. So let's build upon your personal belief, and as the system is universal then your recommendation is extended to everyone subscribing to the service.

Now please explain how you expect to finance an income redistribution scheme where all participants do not contribute back and instead only expect to consume from it.

By definition, the median person only has a mediocre ability to “protect his interests”.

To take a simple example: within a country, if you send the UBI money to a local government for disbursement and the local mayor/governor just pockets it, he's still ultimately subject to the legal system of that country and can be jailed, etc. There's no international equivalent of this. If you send some UBI money to Poor Country X for disbursement and the local governor pockets it, there's nothing you can do except not send any more money.

> So why not have the worker get/keep more of his money, instead of giving it to a different group of "others"?

The quote is implying: "rather than tax people and give that money to others, just have people keep the money they make."

My point is that this would not necessarily help the taxi driver much, since he probably doesn't pay much in taxes anyway. His issue is that his wage is not high enough.

One could argue that taxi driving shouldn't exist or should be relegated to some impoverished underclass, or one could argue that the issue is with the taxi driver's lifestyle expectations and not with the low wage, or that taxi drivers should find other employment, thus reducing the supply of drivers and either raising wages or "rightsizing" the driver workforce.

In any case, I don't agree with the parent poster's implication that lowering taxes is a viable alternative to tax-funded universal basic income.

Lowering taxes benefits most those who pay a lot of taxes, and those are the people who are least directly affected by the removal of tax-funded welfare programs. Sending the money to "others" is the point.

Keep in mind that the taxi driver is just a made up example, and I myself am not sold on the idea of universal basic income.

No. Your argument is that other people exist. That's great, everyone had the right to exist. But in the meantime, why do you think that just because someone else exists that means I am obliged to work a job to pay off their bills? And if you answer with a puerile and superficial "but you can also quit your job" then who exactly do you expect to foot the bill? Age you envisioning a society where no one contributes to it?

Some people think if you fund people's ability to live, so that they aren't killing themselves going to multiple jobs, not sleeping, not raising their kids, remove fears like 'insurance is tied to this job so I can't leave it', etc, you will encourage an economic renaissance, just like VC funding has created a renaissance for the pocketbooks of VC funders.

That's where many of the practical issues come in of course.

I'm not going to personally argue they're not solvable, but many people will argue the requirements of basic shelter and sustenance being far higher than what they actually are, and in our current system, the landlords would take the cash anyways.

Of course, if we all end up jobless due to robotics and AI enhancement, which again isn't something that's necessarily going to happen, UBI or similar might be the only positive path out of that mess.

You're not talking about long-shot bets in a system where everyone is expected to produce. You're talking about income redistribution schemes. This means today's salary is used to finance today's benefits. Please explain who do you expect to foot the bill when the system pressures those who sustain it to abandon that and instead add to the pool of consumers.

It’s a common framing, but UBI does not have to be that. Another may be that of a just compensation for giving up access to land.

> Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice

And the super rich simply can't consume that much. Bezons isn't eating a thousand times as much as a millionaire. If his kids spend their lives being unproductive, it's only a tiny handful of wastrels. Mansions, yachts and large private airplanes might be a bit of a resource sink I guess .... but how does paper wealth cost society real resources? It's like being made at someone with a rare monkey gif

The important quote you want here is: “If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what [Alan] Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.”

Software developers are not Alan Greenspan.

Why would I ever want to let others decide for me if I get art or food today?

Sure, some people waste it. Some are just passive consumers, even shopping around between multiple educations without ever completing a degree. Some drop out half-way. Some get impractical degrees with few real job opportunities.

But enough people go on to become doctors and engineers and software developers and so on, and then have long careers that ultimately pays back the venture capital to the state, in the form of taxes. Most also work a side-job while studying to supplement the "basic income" stipend.

I don't personally believe that the majority of people will become unproductive consumers with an UBI. I think that societal pressure to contribute, the wish to enjoy luxuries, and to get status is enough for the majority to still work. I think that the added safety net of the UBI will also allow more people to take a risk on a dream, and perhaps make it big in art, in inventing new stuff, in science or in politics. And, as in VC investments, the few big hits will hopefully pay for the failures.

I advocated for workers to keep more of their money.

It's not about protecting interests, leverages, political powers, etc., it's just more net pay at the same gross pay for the workers. Why choose where the workers money goes, if they can keep more, and just pay the artists by visitng concerts or buying their music? Why does government have to be involved?

One invented means of propping up art isn't necessarily especially legitimate or natural compared to others.

In other words, they’ve outed themselves as a Randroid and their opinion on matters of economics and public policy is worth just as much as Ayn Rand’s: Nothing, or even less.

Humanity doesn’t really know how to do global policy, even if there are massive potential benefits.

I do not like the proposed system where people chose what they produce, and I am compelled to pay for it whether I want it or not.

So, if you believe consumption is the issue, rejoice! It seems to be a problem that will resolve itself in a generation or two.

We taxed our top earners 90% in living memory, which was naively high and absolutely caused distortions, but their current crazy low tax rates are a ridiculous policy failure. We could absolutely fund a small basic income by fixing this alone.

>Taxes

If you have taxes, you already have a system which redistributes wealth to places that society requires, so government is already involved.

So the question becomes how the government is involved.

In any system with competing interests, a no holds barred contest favors the most willing to maximize their advantages. Wealth even concentrates even in video games.

To ensure a system where there is some degree of fairness between humans, to ensure that your position in society is not locked in to your inherited fate, or even to ensure that fewer taxes are taken from workers, you need the power of a shared government.

Also: The American position is usually to have no trust in government, which is encouraged by having a right wing media sphere that is dedicated to inserting as much distrust into the system as possible.

So by default in an American context, it’s hard to conceive of a government with high trust, and the default is to never give money to it.

Your example has absolutely nothing to do with UBI, other than the fact that a small minority gets paid a stipend. It's not universal as it's conditionally granted only to a very small subset of society (students) throughout a limited time (5 years). At best it's another social safety net that is granted to people who would otherwise have no access to higher education.

Yet, in your example you already acknowledge that even when granted to a very specific subset of society which is motivated and mobilized to seize that opportunity to fund personal growth, it is also abused in ways that go exactly against it's purpose as it provides perverse incentives that attack equity at it's core.

> I don't personally believe that the majority of people will become unproductive consumers with an UBI. I think that societal pressure to contribute, the wish to enjoy luxuries, and to get status is enough for the majority to still work.

I'm afraid your personal hopes are misguided and based only on wishful thinking. There are plenty of examples in areas such as social housing where benefits are linked with immunity to "societal pressure to contribute". Providing a resource unconditionally represents a clear incentive to eliminate whatever incentives there are to secure it.

Do you understand your comment is a textbook example of moving the goalpost?

I am not "framing" anything. I am describing to you exactly how a universal basic income scheme works. Even the argument presented by UBI proponents to counter the problems with equity and perverse incentives is that the net benefit comes from eliminating all other types of incentives and the overhead they require to validate and prevent fraud.

> Another may be that of a just compensation for giving up access to land.

I don't think you read the source you're citing. It proposed inheritance tax that funded only a very basic social safety net program that at best covered retirement pensions only to those who outlived life expectancy and only around 1/3 of the income of an average agricultural labourer. That is very far from what any UBI proposal required in terms of the sheer volume of income that has to be redistributed.

So even in your example you are faced with the challenges of math and budgeting. Where does the money come from? Apparently income redistribution and the fundamental problems of equity and fairness is not it, and the alternative you proposed would come very short of even covering a pensioner's basic needs. So where do you think the money comes from?

Your comment would only make sense if somehow you failed to understand the basics of the issue and fooled yourself into believing the system would only feature consumers and there were no producers at all. Everyone receives free money from the state, and thus it's all good. Right?

But think about it for a second. That money that everyone consumed, where do you expect it to come from? Who pays the bill? It's an income redistribution scheme, but whose income is subtracted do that there is money to pay someone else's income?

Once you figure that out, you will them be in a position to actually start thinking about the actual problem of equity and fairness: what incentive is there for anyone to generate the income that others require?

No, it's quite the opposite actually: you clearly do not care about society if you see it as an ATM to unconditionally fund your whims and cravings all while rejecting any need to contribute back.

I'm asking s very simple question you are trying to avoid answering: why is it fair for those who actually sacrifice themselves to work to fund those who opt to not work. Explain exactly what is fair in having workers support actual freeloaders in society? I mean, you are not talking about social safety nets. You're talking about unconfitional basic incomes. You do nothing, and you get a salary in return. Explain in clear terms how is it fair to those who actual work to see their labor appropriated by those who choose not to work, which might very well be their own colleagues. Explain where is the fairness and equity in this.

You'd still be getting a lot more than the ones that do nothing. I doubt you'd stop working just because 5% of your income gets given away if the option is to live on 10% of what you're getting by working.

The US’s CGT base cost uplift on death is insane, and only does not get repealed because it enables the super rich to never pay tax via the ‘buy borrow die’ strategy.

The US’s carried interest rules for hedge funds and private equity partners are insane and only exist because the affected individuals bribe lawmakers and presidents.

I don't trust the government. Why? Because they can't properly operate with the money they're given by us, the workers. Same goes for many recepients of that money, especially the ones outside of "social help".

Yes, we fund art, we have public tenders, artists apply, they get a few thousand euros, produce something to fit "the current political theme" (eg. everybody is talking about ecology, let's make a performance where they throw trash at eachother), 10, 20, maybe 30 people see that, mostly family and local homeless people coming for the free wine, papers are stamped, checkmarks on all the right places, and money has exchanged hands. I would much rather live in a system where workers get to keep that money and spend it for art in whatever way they want. Even in a "semi-mandated" way (eg. tax benefits if you spend X euros yearly on art stuff).

And that's just peanuts compared to other stuff our government spends money on, our healthcare system is beyond broken, forcing you to pay government healthcare insurance (deducted by your employer, at 14.92% of your gross pay + 37.5eur extra, around 5keur yearly per average worker) but when you need an ultrasound for possible kidney stones... well, the waiting times are 6 month, but if you pay out of your pocket for a private clinic, somewhere around 100 eur, you can get one today or at the latest, tomorrow. If you're sick for up to 28 days, your employer covers your sick pay (80% of normal pay), if longer than 28 days, the government pays for that... sounds ok, right? We have people on sick leave for two, three years (24-36months * 80% of ~2500eur average monthly gross) waiting for eg. a knee surgery, that costs 3-5k eur at a private clinic, even less at a government one, but because our government insurance decided to pay only for 20 such surgeries yearly, and the waiting line is 70 people, you're screwed.

So yeah, I don't trust the government. I trust an average homeless alcoholic more with money management, especially because he's operating with his own money for his own benefit, and he'll make sure to get the most booze for whatever he managed to gather and not spend more than he has.

You’re obviously educated and on HN, so you can appreciate how much harder showing causation is.

Sadly, that does mean, the citizens need to get together and make their system more trustworthy. Getting more money in the hands of workers will not result in a better overall system.

Or in simpler terms - Distrust in the government is the enemy, and all the factors that cause it, real and perceived. Corruption, weak information economies, weakened judiciaries, depleted citizen capacity to build consensus.

We need those systems to work.

The government has the monopoly on violence. We pay the government, we pay the people that should check that they didn't do anything bad/wrong (police, anti-corruption services, etc.), we pay the court system, but they don't do anything. Things that work in every corporation (eg. procurement offices and oversight over them) are broken in many if not all governments, including ours.

If the government wants trust, then they must earn it. So far they haven't. And I'm talking about the whole pyramid, from the top politicians, to the lowest traffic police officer not doing his/her job. And in the system where a politician steals money, the investigators dont investigate and the courts don't prosecute, we can reduce the money they get, because they obviously are not doing the jobs we are paying them for. Jail 10, 20 politicians, and I'll gladly support more investigators (paid by the taxpayers). If they don't, we don't need the ones we already have.

Either way, no one is coming to save you, other than your own ability to understand the system, its tolerances, and to effect change / build alliances.

You can even achieve this by doing something small, like cleaning up a local spot, or other parts of your daily routine.

We learn how to operate very complex systems regularly.

Americans also have never really lived under a heavy handed government, and that's reflected in the tone here of frustration of market failure. But when the government fails, it's not frustration that takes hold, it's fear. Are you willing to risk that?

A billionaire consumes less of their income and invests more than a regular person. Wealth is power, but virtually everyone would spend on the same things.

The point of my source was not so much the economic argument, which, after all, talks about a reality several hundred years ago. Perhaps I should have linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism instead, to focus on the moral side of it.

I do think however that a modern take, especially if it turns out that recent AI developments will have sizable impact on the demand for human labor, could very well turn out to result in a dividend that is actually livable. Paine talks about land, but we should really consider all commons: Land, carbon emission rights, patents, copyright, trademark protections, electromagnetic spectrum, ip4 address space, dns names, the list can be made pretty extensive.

Perhaps it should end there. We could establish the idea of cooperatively owned legal entities representing various commons. These entities can collect rent in exchange for allocating parts of the commons to private use. I have a feeling it would make sense to take it a step further though, even if the details are probably over my head at the moment. It's already the case that pension funds function as a cooperative ownership of a part of all capital assets. And then there is home ownership and its connection to loans and wages. There probably will need to be some creative restructuring of this situation.

Personally I think LTCG should be taxed as income and not at a flat 20%, but because that might actually work nobody proposes it and our lefties want a "wealth tax" instead.

Society can make you go to war and die, which is way more unfair. Society can do anything up to and including that.

A billionaire has the power to affect policy in a way that the average consumer doesn't, and is more likely to use that influence to make themselves richer than to push policies that benefit everyone.

Velocity of money matters. Builds. Bezo's sucking up wealth instead of paying workers retards the economy.

There is a reason Smog the Dragon is 'villian' prototype told by humans since forever. I get modern American conservatives think it is a model to emulate and is actually the highest for of being, but it's not.

Oh, I knew somebody would go there. My personal hopes are at least as valid as the blanket statement that everybody will automatically fall to the lowest denominator and contribute as little as possible given the chance. I'm just honest enough to prefix my predictions with "I believe."

And of course the Danish education stipend is not a real UBI. Nobody has implemented a real ubiquitous and unlimited UBI. But there have been trials, like the one in Finland involving 2000 people over two years. Compared to that, I think the Danish "trial" may be closer to the real thing. It has run since 1970 and involves all students of higher education in the country in that entire time frame.

If I was a researcher trying to figure out what happens if you give a group of people a monthly stipend with very few requirements and no stipulations about how the money are going to be used, then I at least would regard that as valid data.

If "everyone" lives on $X - Y% * $X for an entire year the loans are fully repaid each year and the government isn't "losing money" on its "loan terms" and is meeting the subsidies people expect from their government. That's not a "losing" situation. (It's not a likely scenario either, because at least some people are always going to want more than $X - Y% * $X dollars a year for their lifestyle or their dreams or their investments or their philanthropy or their vices.)

(ETA: It's also not directly an assumption in every form of UBI that Y% is less than 100%. There are UBI schools of thought that because of the time value of money, some charged interest is not only possible, but potentially a good idea as an incentive to invest the UBI payment in more than just mortgage/rent/lifestyle, but also something that does appreciate you with interest, such as the opportunity cost of accepting a job or a basic savings account. I tend towards the Y% <= 100% feelings, but I understand the Y% > 100% crowd.)

To be specific: let's say that you own $1.1B worth of stock, $1B of which is unrealized long term capital gains. If you sold it all today, you'd owe $200M. Let's say that you're 40, you spend $5M a year, and you die at 80. So, you need $200M to finance your lifestyle, and then the remainder is a part of your estate. If you just sold $240M today, you'd pay $40M in tax, and had $200M after tax cash in your checking account to spend over the next 40 years. If you instead borrow $5M a year against your stock at very attractive terms like interest rate of 5%, and no payments until your death, you'll owe $200M on interest over these 40 years. Just paying the tax would have saved you $160M! It's even worse if you get more realistic terms, because 5% rate on a personal loan is too good to be true, and you'll need to borrow even more to make the regular payments.

What about the remainder of your estate? Depending on whether you just sell as you go, or borrow to finance your spending, your estate is left with something between $500M and $800M. Guess what, now they owe estate tax, which is 40% of this sum (minus $30M exemption). Oops!

You can avoid the estate tax, though, but the kicker is that all of the ways of doing that do not allow you to step up the basis upon death: they just allow you to avoid the gift tax, but they do little to escape the capital gains income tax. No free lunch here either.

Yes, I am.

OK buddy

Second because the second order effects of reverting American society to Victorian slums would be incredibly bad for the economy and your tax burden.

Because somehow a plurality of Americans seem to have been convinced by the guy stealing all their money that it's someone else's fault and you should stone them to death instead.

Because letting large portions of the population starve to death slowly is just a bad thing in general?

Because it would be good for everyone including you.

Because you'd wish that someone else wasn't a smug asshole with an "I got mine" attitude and gave you help when you need it.