Pucky Freak
Well-known member
Each individual person is responsible. When 70-75% of the adult population fails in that responsibility, however, it ends up costing everyone in society. That is the reality on the ground in the US today. If we make it really easy for everyone to mess up financially, it ends up being my own personal loss, even if I am not the one making foolish decisions.2. Financial independence/financial health is not the responsibility of anyone but the individual person. It's not the government's role, the employer's role, etc. Individuals who don't have enough discipline, hustle, work ethic, etc. will continually have their income ceiling defined for them. Those with a little hustle can define their own income ceiling.
The way we have decided to manage our capitalist economy since 1980 has been to facilitate the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the huge corporations. Credit cards, ARM’s, HELOC, 0% down payments, unsecured loans, subsidized student loans, Citizens United, 401(k), Roth, subprime lending, and a dozen other financial traps have crippled middle America, while the number of individuals with 100M to 10Bn net worth has exploded, largely through the those same mechanisms.
Like most other financially successful adults, I have leveraged debt and harnessed compounding interest to put myself in a great position. Calculated risks, and hard work are two other handy mechanisms employed by many more. No one deserves anything except to reap what they have sown. Everyone should follow this formula, but I am short-sighted if I leave it at just that.
I have become a big proponent of things like wealth tax, a functional estate tax, dumping TBTF, universal healthcare, antitrust, subsidized healthcare, collective bargaining, overhauling the carceral State, affordable housing, socialized long-term care, and other solidly left ideas not because they are right thing to do, or because anyone deserves them, but because I am sick of personally paying the price for our society’s numerous systemic economic failures. There is nearly always a way to pay for such things through erasure of the financial loss already incurred by their current absence, like our 182Bn carceral State, and our Health care that costs twice as much as it does everywhere else in the world.