For the last fucking time Stalin and Mao are not socialists they were authoritarian dictators. The starvation was because in both cases they believed in lamarckian evolution and they did dumb shit like double plant.

Anyone who told them that was dumb got killed because they were dictators not socialists.

The good news is your side one and the right wing now dominates all of humanity. Let me know how that turns out for you. Putting authoritarian dictators in charge of everything that is.

In other words, I hope you have the day you voted for.

That's a republican trick used to dismantle social programs to improve society.

There's a major mental trick that's been used here that you're completely unaware of

Noticed that you call everything welfare. You've been trained to think of getting help from society as something that you only deserve if you are extremely disadvantaged or completely destitute.

The idea that society exists for making everyone's lives better is something you're not allowed to think. It's outside the Overton window.

I think you're just barely close to figuring that out which is why Ubi interests you but you still can't think outside the Overton window yet.

When UBI has been done as a test that is in tandem with massive amounts of government subsidies all over the place.

One of the major problems America is having is that we have been a more or less Democrat socialist country for 50 years but we didn't tell anyone.

Instead of just giving people houses and food and free college we hid the subsidies on the back end in various places. This was extremely inefficient because it meant we had to basically spend an extra 20% to 40% lining the pockets of the ultra wealthy and that of course eventually bit Us in the ass when they used that money to dismantle our institutions.

If you own a house it's because of the government. The government came in and did all the extremely expensive land prep like leveling and grading the land and running all the utilities. If you want to college and you're over 45 the government paid 80% of your tuition. If you eat food the government is paying a huge amount of that through a complex series of subsidies most notably and famously the farm bill although there are many others.

And that's before we talk about how the military industrial complex is used to prop up our economy or how our monetary policy globally is used to prop up the value of the US dollar so that we can bring in trillions and cheap imports.

It's like the old joke about libertarians aren't like house cats. Convinced of their abuse Independence while being completely dependent on a system they neither understand nor appreciate...

Oh my God I'm not talking about effort dumbass I'm talking about the amount of preparation in the soil coupled with the amount of water needed to grow them.

Yes we had to have the kind of humid high water conditions and the kind of soil needed to grow bananas in parts of America but not at the scale that Americans consume bananas.

I don't understand why you can't understand something that simple. I mean for fuck sakes you have Google you could look this up it's not hard.

The problem isn't that we can't grow them the problem is we can't grow enough of them to meet demand. That's going to cause prices to skyrocket.

Check your clock it's stuck on 2015. It's 2025 and Kamala Harris lost the election after Biden was forced to drop out.

At the bottom right of your computer screen there's a little clock and if you click on it you'll get the option to fix it. I think you can find guides how to do it online too

They did a massive push for unionization that would have drastically raised the wages of young men. They were ignored because of all the moral panics about woke and trans and other nonsense. It is difficult for the Democrats to compete because the billionaire right-wing extremists bought literally all of the media.

I will admit they wasted too much time on the abortion issue but not because that shouldn't be a good issue but because it's not. America selectively enforces laws and if we didn't then women and men both would be freaking out about the lack of reproductive healthcare access.

But if you're a middle class American or even a upper working class you can still get an abortion for your wife for yourself if you need it by just going to the next state over or by finding a doctor that will do it and counting on the fact that prosecutors are going to leave you alone.

Selective enforcement of laws means the Democrats can't use abortion as an effective issue.

But it's hard for them to fix the economy because frankly the things we need to be doing to fix the economy are all socialist-y and Americans don't like that because propaganda works

This is why I hate americans. We have absolutely no nuance.

Yes with a lot of effort and in certain places in America you can grow a few bananas. But you're not going to be running a banana plantation here without significant cost that will raise the price of bananas well beyond what anyone can afford.

You don't just need the right climate you need the right soil and conditions and you need lots and lots of water.

So yes America could grow bananas if you're okay with paying, I mean it's one banana how much could it cost $10?

But even a senile old man can sign the paperwork project 2025 puts in front of his desk every day.

Trump is just a figurehead. There are evil and very intelligent men behind him doing terrible things to us all

They are members of the ruling class. They are the chosen ones. So now we don't fire those guys. You don't fire them any more than you fire your king or your emperor.

People have this dream that the ruling elite are going to be hurt by the collapsing economy.

This is coping that they're using to deal with the fact that our institutions are collapsing and need to be reorganized but nobody wants to do that because folks like things to stay the same.

The ruling elite understand that the institutions they depend on are collapsing and they are building new institutions to keep themselves in power. You are not part of those institutions.

The system they are building is called techno feudalism and it is not good for you.

I'm a socialist and good. It's a scam that some members of the ruling class have put forward because they don't think they can sufficiently control the bottom 99% using their regular combination of voter suppression, propaganda and threats of violence.

UBI is only ever seriously proposed in the context of eliminating all other government programs and regulations.

If I throw you into dog eat dog techno feudalism and then kick you even $5,000 a month that's worthless because the oligarchs are just going to use their monopolies to drain that right back out of you in the form of rent seeking and high prices from their monopolies and trusts.

In other words, if I give you a billion dollars a month then charge you $2 billion dollars a month to live you are still in debt to me every month. The actual number is don't matter.

UBI is a pipe dream people try to use to wallpaper and spackle over our failing economic system rather than address the underlying causes. Because addressing those causes requires deconstructing cherished sacred cows and they don't want to do that.

If one is gridlocked then they cannot do anything rapidly. They have lots of time to think. If you mean answering a call, then you do do with the usual hands free options.

These are ultra high interest short-term loans for people who can't get credit cards because they make so little money or they have so much debt or more likely both.

We have been collapsing the economy for 40 years maybe 50. It's coming to a head finally. Bad things are going to happen and we're not going to escape it.

Yeah people are already going to the food banks but they are running out of food. I don't mean they're running out of the good stuff I mean they just don't have anything.

Meanwhile the big beautiful bill that is almost certainly going to pass the Senate will slash food stamps and funding to food banks. It's also going to slash funding to combat bird flu so you can expect egg prices to skyrocket soon. Tax cuts for billionaires soon to be trillionaires have to be paid for somehow or the bond markets freak out...

I don't think the people here on this forum truly understand how desperate things are getting out there. And we haven't even seen the worst of it yet. That's all scheduled for right after the midterm elections...

Adjusted for inflation most non college graduates make about half what their parents made. An entry-level job that wasn't fast food from 20 years ago paid $15 an hour. That same job now pays $15 an hour. We also have a massive housing crisis fueled by baby boomers buying up all the houses to try and rent seek because they couldn't save enough money for retirement. Higher wages give them a high quality of life but they are out living their savings..

As a good example my kid is making roughly the same with a four-year college degree from a good University as their grandparents did in the same field without college degrees. I am extremely pissed off about that since I've had to bail my kid out a few times due to some medical bills. Oh and that's another thing part of that inflationgot taken by automation not outsourcing.

I think the biggest problem our country has is we have too many old people who refuse to admit that things are worse than when they were kids. And because of that they refuse to do anything to solve any of the problems except make them worse.

There is a human tendency to want to freeze the world the way it was when you're 12. 12 years old seems to be the point where people want everything to stop changing and they will do anything to make that happen.

That gets exploited by wealthy psychopaths to do all sorts of horrible things.

oh and here is where you come up with a bunch of neoliberal bullshit to indicate that wages are increasing. They are not. Over the last 5 years there has been a small increase in wages at the very very bottom because several states have passed minimum wage increases. It's noticeable in the statistics because we've relegated so many people to minimum wage and because the 10 million or so gig economy workers earning sub minimum wage don't show up in the statistics

You're being lied to but you are allowing yourself to be lied to because you don't want to acknowledge that the world is changing faster than you want it to. So you're going to let everything burn to the ground rather than do the societal changes that need to be done to prevent it.

The thing is thanks to modern medicine you are probably going to outlive your savings too and end up homeless or killing yourself in gig economy work.

I wonder, when that happens you will blame your predicament on not valuing savings.... Or if you will blame one of the popular moral panics of the time.

One of the features of human beings though is we never learn. Socrates shit all over the kids thousands of years ago and old people just keep repeating that again and again and again and again. The same tricks used to control us work in every country and we never see the pattern. We never learn

That is true.

That is false. The prior administration was also corrupt, only a lot less corrupt than this administration.

All of Europe? I think most politicians everywhere are corrupt, but "all" is a strong word.

Whoops! You went off the rails there.