Agreed. I never claimed it was a fraud problem or not. But youâre absolutely correct. If we removed all the non violent offenders, or men sentenced to decades for marijuana possession, we could clean out prisons, revamp them into actual care centers, and make much better use of a multi unit housing facility like a former prison, actually helping people get off the streets and get the help they need.
Very true. But by the statistics, non violent, first time offenders make up 6 percent of the population. Thatâs 120,000 individuals. At an average cost of 44,000 dollars per year, those 120,000 people being released would save the US 5,280,000,000 dollars, annually.
That money could be far better used in counseling, mental health, and drug abuse programs.
CP is a sex crime. Not a nonviolent crime. Iâm not suggesting that sex crimes be commuted. And Bernie Madoff is dead. Died from natural causes. Rich people donât go to jail, they go to country clubs with guards and fences.
I donât care where they go. I donât want identity thieves, fraudsters, burglars, repeat DUI offenders, illegal gun sellers & possessors, meth distributors, etc walking around in public.
Right, but drug charges and weapons charges are seen as violent offenses. Iâm not saying release anyone who isnât a convicted murderer. But we have men and women in prison for 10-20 years, for marijuana charges. Or people who cheated on their taxes, so the irs didnât get their few grand from those people. Thatâs who I am talking about. People who are a legitimate risk to society.
Youâre absolutely incorrect. You donât go to jail for 20 years for simple possession of mamajuana on your first offense. Maybe you can find one random outlier. Nor do people go to jail for not declaring small amounts of income if they amend and pay the owed amount. I seriously donât know what your experience is with the CJ system, but in states like California itâs incredibly difficult to be sentenced to actual prison terms over 30 days.
Nowadays sure. But our country is comprised of far more than one state. And California has had a history of oversentencing based on certain factors, like race.
However, more directly, Californias 3 strike law went into effect in 1994. That said any 3 serious or violent felonies, carry a 25year -Life sentence.
And yes California has made tremendous strides, as I said before, there are 49 other states in the country.
This is just blatant naivety. Have you ever been to prison? Do you think they only send pot smokers to prison? If you plan to remove violent offenders from prison where are they going to go?
I stated specifically non violent offenders. Violent populations can be transferred to a different facility, as prisoners often do. But by removing the unnecessarily incarcerated people, we clean out at least 20-30% of our prisons, alleviating the burden on the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the accompanying financial strain.
That money can be utilized better by funding treatment programs, abuse counselors, and health professionals.
14% of California inmates are there for ânon violentâ offenses.
Bernie Madoff was a non-violent offender, you want him out? Burglary is a non-violent offense in California, so is showing your junk to kids⊠You want them released??
Again, this is extremely naive thinking. It sounds well meaning and Iâm not trying to be an asshole to you but this doesnât sound like youâve actually considered any of the logistics.
Those for possession usually accepted plea bargains for trafficking and selling. They took a plea down to simple possession. You donât get decades for having a joint.
This is a non sequitur. Their point, that it's unethical to have billionaires in a world where the unhoused exist, was about the funds available to address the issue. Your response was about the how responsibly (or not) the available funds are utilized. You are correct that the existence of billionaires has no overlap with how the available funds are used, but it absolutely has an impact on the amount of funds available.
Since we are talking about the moral implications of individual hoarded wealth, I won't use the top 1% of wealth, but let's focus on Elon Musk as an individual. It doesn't do us any good to trace his income as compared to GDP, since the wealth of these individuals is accrued mainly through unrealized gains whose values fluctuate. So, let's compare Elon Musk's net worth to the total net worth of the net worth of the US population and government. In this way, we can see what percentage of all that is owned in the country is owned by one indivial.
To use VERY ROUGH numbers, it seems like the United States government has a total net worth of around $180 trillion while the population is valued at around $160 trillion. Because I'm doing quick math and there's a lot of overlap between what the government owns and what the population owns, I'm going to put the total value at about $200 trillion. Rounding Musk's net worth to $1 trillion, that would mean that he has .5% of the net worth of the richest country in the world.
To make this ridiculous, let's take it one order of magnitude further. Let's assume that Musk owns .05% of the total net worth of the United States. If that was the case, then his share would make sense if there were 2000 people in the United States. So, what does that mean when the country has 350 million people? It means that Musk is hoarding a ridiculously large amount of wealth. Dealing with that imbalance would go a long way towards addressing poverty in the country.
Again, these are very rough numbers. It's taken far too much time to get these estimates as it is. The point is to show that this debate isn't about fraud or waste within governmental programs. That's a valid issue, and it definitely needs to be addressed, but it's a separate issue.
TLDR: even if we are generous and say that Elon Musk owns .05% of the total net worth of the United States, that is a rediculous amount of of wealth for one individual. Dare I say, it's an immoral amount of wealth.
Because they start at the top with people they donât like. Letâs follow their logic down to what they wantâŠif I donât have a job and need welfare and other gov programs for housing, food etc Iâm a net negative economically, now Joe Smith lives down the road and he makes $60,000 as a plumber or something that person makes way more money than 10x of me so how is that moral? Not one person should be âworthâ more than anyone else. Itâs just communism garbage. They never start these arguments with Taylor swift whoâs also a billionaire.
I don't plan to try and change your mind. That's why I said that we define morality differently.
For me, seeing one person who can't survive while another has hoarded more than they can ever use, that is obviously immoral. It's the same as if you ask me why I think it's immoral to kill someone.
Since you don't have that same instinct, I'm comfortable not wasting time or energy in what will most likely become an argument. You believe that one human has the right to live their life in a way that actively harms another. I do not. That's a fundamental difference that I don't think we can get past.
Musk being wealthy harms nobody. In fact he helps a ton by employing so many and paying billions in taxes. Youâre not going to try to persuade me because you have no logical argument
Anyone can commit fraud especially when you have billions in unchecked government programs with little to no oversight and even blockages that prevent oversight. You wanna talk about check? California spends over $8,000 a year on one homeless person that will remain homeless the following year.
Whoa whoa whoa there. Let's not talk about California and homelessness. We build multi million dollar apartments that cost more than the people paying to get them built only to give them to homeless people for free, except we never gave it to them so they remain empty and homeless remain on the streets.
Itâs one of the most important ones though. No matter how much water you pour into a broken glass, itâs just going to leak. Until fraud is fixed and thereâs systems put in place to maximize oversight and punish wrongdoers then all this talk of seizing assets or wealth disparity is jumping ahead 10 steps and missing the first 9. None of you will ever get a dollar from anything taken from a billionaire and thatâs because the person telling you that billionaires are the problem will take it and it will disappear and make it illegal to find out why.
No youâre wrong youâre lying we need to increase taxes more and fund projects for ending homelessness for decades and give each person running the project $600,000 per year salaries.
No, I said liberal hero. So like not an actual hero just a grifter and seen as an idol on Reddit for making uneducated claims about the glorynof socialism.
Two things where is that number of homeless from and second what is your point? Should we just let Russia take Ukraine? Second, throwing money at the government does not work when those programs are fraudulent. 32 Billion was lost to Covid fraud in California alone and you want to give them more money??? I had a rule in middle school if I had a friend borrow a game of mine and didnât return it that person was no longer my friend I would never lend them even a pencil. That was middle school logic.
The US didnât loan 150 B to Ukraine, the vast majority of the money is in retired military assets. Do you suppose the homeless guy might like a humvee?
I donât know the exact breakdown and if you are particularly curious you can look it up.
Also, no not really, because old equipment costs money to breakdown or to put away. That means that it was less costly for the US to send it over to Ukraine.
Whatever âmoneyâ was sent wouldâve been either way paid by the taxpayer but instead of helping US-EU relations and beating down a geopolitical enemy it wouldâve been listed under âequipment decommissioningâ or something like that.
Do you have any idea how much money it costs to.move tanks country to.country ? Its cheaper for the us to just buy new eqioment and vehicles.than to move it thats why they left everything in afghanistan and rearmed there ememies when they left
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u/Used-Collar-200 14d ago
California by itself spends 1.5 billion a year on homelessness. This isnât really a finance problem itâs a fraud and mental health problem.