Do you think the underclass in America will revolt someday?

trickle down lies wrote:

inherited wealth tends to dilute every generation until it’s gone

sorry, i'm not familiar with that phrase. you mean to say that the following generation tends to piss away their inheritance?

The underclass is the underclass because they are the laziest people on the face of the earth. They don't have the work ethic to revolt.

The US isn't like third world countries where you can be hard working and smart and still be poor. We are in the land of economic opportunity. If you are poor in the US, you are either lazy or stupid or both.

trickle down lies wrote:

Discuss.

There are more and more billionaires in America every year. Can anyone possibly spend that much in their lifetime? Passing it on to kids never leads to good outcomes (read a history book—inherited wealth tends to dilute every generation until it’s gone). Meanwhile our homeless population is legit out of control. Is there not a way to house everyone and have a decent basic life for all people?

They already are.

Nope.

I'm dirt poor.

I work a low wage job and help my elderly mother and another not-so-well relative.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon have saved me trips to pet stores for cat food, long grocery trips, the shopping rush, and have allowed for almost anything to be delivered. Their drivers even wear masks. I've seen it.

The CEO of Ginny's has allowed Christmas gifts to be delivered.

Bill Gates put a lot of money into the vaccine effort.

They have saved lives during this pandemic.

I'm on their side.

Billions for saving us? Sure!

No. The low class Americans are too often focused on fighting each other, along with the middle class, to gang up together.

Of course not. The minimum wage class is too busy to work their three jobs and the "middle class" is too busy to keep up with the Joneses.

Close.

Trump is a symptom of the 13 year old dummy revolting.

They have the anger but lack vocabulary and grammar.

Pity them.

Stoppit Smith wrote:

Nope.

I'm dirt poor.

I work a low wage job and help my elderly mother and another not-so-well relative.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon have saved me trips to pet stores for cat food, long grocery trips, the shopping rush, and have allowed for almost anything to be delivered. Their drivers even wear masks. I've seen it.

The CEO of Ginny's has allowed Christmas gifts to be delivered.

Bill Gates put a lot of money into the vaccine effort.

They have saved lives during this pandemic.

I'm on their side.

Billions for saving us? Sure!

You have listed your two favorite billionaires.

I have not read or heard either of your two favorite billionaires advocate for tuition free education in U.S. from age 3 to age 23 plus tuition free medical school.

I have not read or heard either of your two favorite billionaires advocate for high speed rail to connect every U.S. city greater than 1/2 million population. Please note: rail is safer than autos or air planes. Rail travel can be greener than much of current auto travel and rail is greener than air travel.

I have not heard or read either of your two favorite billionaires advocate for reducing U.S. military by 3/4ths. U.S. military once contributed to growth of U.S. economy. There are those who work for or make money from Military Industrial Complex but U.S. military is a net drag on U.S. economy.

I could type 10000 words beating up on your two favorite U.S. billionaires. What about the other roughly 650 U.S. billionaires that you may not like? Most of the other U.S. billionaires in U.S. pressured U.S. politicians for income tax cuts. Tax cuts they do not need. Income tax cuts do not make billionaires more productive. Austria leans socialist. They do not have Bezos or Gates. Austrian citizens will still get their vaccines. As I stated, there are only about 650 billionaires in U.S. Capitalism only functions as a system due to capitalist stooges. Capitalist Stooges are those in bottom 50% net worth who apologize and embrace billionaires.

sdfkjbndsbvksndfklvnskdfvkj;sdfnvdfslvbn wrote:

trickle down lies wrote:

inherited wealth tends to dilute every generation until it’s gone

sorry, i'm not familiar with that phrase. you mean to say that the following generation tends to piss away their inheritance?

Yes. Not in every single case, but the majority. The wealth dilutes (gets poorly invested or spent) with subsequent generations. Very very few people take great grandaddy’s 100 million and turn it into 200 million.

Isn't Trump just that? The poor and the uneducated happy to stick it to the rich?

trickle down lies wrote:

Discuss.

There are more and more billionaires in America every year. Can anyone possibly spend that much in their lifetime? Passing it on to kids never leads to good outcomes (read a history book—inherited wealth tends to dilute every generation until it’s gone). Meanwhile our homeless population is legit out of control. Is there not a way to house everyone and have a decent basic life for all people?

You're describing the kind of conditions that led to the French Revolution and the overthrow of the Ancien Regime. It would be nice to see a few billionaires in the tumbrils - but while the serfs keep voting for Trump they don't know who's oppressing them.

Compared to other countries, the so-called underclass in the U.S. is living pretty well. Few homes do not have a cell phone, cable or satellite TV, and other nice to haves beyond the basics to sustain life. With respect to the so-called homeless, I recently read a newspaper feature on a homeless encampment in a mid-sized state capital city. Many of the "residents" said they preferred to be "homeless" because it better suited their lifestyle, they did not trust landlords or neighbors, and they enjoyed the freedom of no responsibilities. Whether you own or rent a home, or are provided one by the government, you have obligations to maintain it, clean it, and behave responsibly in it. So long as a person can find free food and basic shelter like a tent and a place to pitch it, there is no incentive to strive for more if they don't want more.

The reason wealthy people become more wealthy is the reason they became wealthy in the first place. They are ambitious and self-motivated. The numbers simply become numbers after a while, and its more pleasing to see numbers go up rather than down.

If nothing trickled down, then eventually we would have a barter economy something like that of the Appalachian frontier circa 1770 where people only ran to catch food or escape from being food.

What you are describing is the proletariat, and I find it difficult for a violent revolution to occur in the US. Our institutions are very strong, even with the increasing economic inequality I don't think lower-class America will be unified enough to actually produce a force. I do believe there will be a "revolution" through our democratic system that pushes us much further towards the social democratic realm. As some posters referenced a view similar to social Darwinism, I encourage you to look at the US's gini coefficient, the Great Gatsby Curve, and maybe even read "The Power Elite" by C. Wright Mills to fully understand the income mobility of our country.

Nope. As long as enough people buy into the systemic racism narrative, the underclass will be its own worst enemy.

No. There is no conception of a different or better life that a large enough swath of American's share.

Communities don't exist. Organized labor does not exist. Local politics do not exist. Without a coherent shared ideology + working organizing tools any revolution is dead. Just look at how quickly BLM petered out this summer.

Netflix + cheap food seems to be enough to keep the masses in line.

Stoppit Smith wrote:

Nope.

I'm dirt poor.

I work a low wage job and help my elderly mother and another not-so-well relative.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon have saved me trips to pet stores for cat food, long grocery trips, the shopping rush, and have allowed for almost anything to be delivered. Their drivers even wear masks. I've seen it.

The CEO of Ginny's has allowed Christmas gifts to be delivered.

Bill Gates put a lot of money into the vaccine effort.

They have saved lives during this pandemic.

I'm on their side.

Billions for saving us? Sure!

Oh boy. Saving us from from what? Our local economies? From being able to earn a decent living? Saving us from personal freedom? Saving us from other dirty poor people? If you have not looked around, they have not saved us from this virus, just profited off of it. They have not saved us from anything. They are the Morlocks waiting to harvest you for dinner.

The BLM protests and riots were pretty close to a revolt. But it was a revolt against the abuses of the criminal justice system and did not extent very far past that. That is why you saw all the big businesses embracing BLM with donations, pro-BLM PR campaigns. Amazon donated $10 mil because it was afraid that BLM would expand out to include economic justice issues.

The current political elites have done an excellent job (objectively speaking, not normatively) of creating political narratives that keep the working class from uniting and revolting against the economic and political system. Trump convinced the working class that the reason they did not have jobs was because of China and immigrants and that Dems only cared about identity politics. There was a kernel of truth in all of that, but Trump never had any intention of actually doing anything because Trump's big business supporters love free trade and cheap illegal immigrant labor. So, Trump just put on a show with a tariff here and being cruel to immigrants there, but accomplished nothing. This is largely why Trump lost. He did not deliver and enough people saw through his dog and pony show.

Dems have pretty much embraced the old conservative narrative that people are individually to blame for their circumstances because they did not do well in school and deserve to have less than the people who went to good schools and became professionals. The centrist Dem answer for everything is to embrace the meritocracy and make it more equitable with half measures like tax credits for community college tuition and to soften the blow of the markets with minimal safety net programs like WIC.

The Sanders/AOC wing of the Dems offers the only real political voice for revolutionary change, but they have failed to get working class voters to come out and support their movement. This is mainly because the working class has largely accepted either the Trump narrative or the centrist Dem narrative and either believe that the system is just fine and we just need to do something about China and immigrants or that they deserve their lot in life because they did not do well in school. But most are just apathetic because over the course of their lifetime they have never seen an example of the government delivering any benefit to the working class or the working class ever using the power of withholding their labor to gain power and concessions from the ruling class.

So, the answer is that until the working class realizes that their labor is power or the progressive dems get enough power to deliver real progressive programs, you will not see any sort of wide spread revolution in the US. There will be spasms here and there, but people are too divided (purposefully) and to beaten down to get any ideas about taking action against those who oppress them.

trickle down lies wrote:

Discuss.

There are more and more billionaires in America every year. Can anyone possibly spend that much in their lifetime? Passing it on to kids never leads to good outcomes (read a history book—inherited wealth tends to dilute every generation until it’s gone). Meanwhile our homeless population is legit out of control. Is there not a way to house everyone and have a decent basic life for all people?

No. Just give us our drugs and we'll keep living the average piss life.

A modern revolution would need to entail significant cyber warfare. Target supply chains, etc. cyber attacks paired with physical attacks on server farms, AWS, etc.

That’s not going to happen. Relatively few people have that skill set, and they’re virtually all wealthy. They also generally have significantly different views than the segment of the population who possess firearms, which would most likely preclude the sort of cohesive, coordinated movement that would be necessary. More reasonable would be seeking the help of other countries (ie China, Russia) to contribute destabilizing cyber attacks. Also seems unlikely due to the general distrust of those countries.

Bottom line is that the only people who have real reason to revolt, the extreme lower class and maybe some minorities, do not have anywhere near the capability to do so.