When grocery stores are seeing upticks in shoplifting of basic caloric needs, something has gone wrong. When our Congress decides that $1200 is all that our neediest need for the entire year, something has gone wrong.
Boost food stamps and get another $1200 to the people. I don’t even want that money because at least I’ve gotten an online job. Send that money to someone who needs it.
I'm not sure this works out. So I found a 2018 estimate of the number of adults and we have 253,768,092, compared to the ~330m people (2020 is closer to 350m but this is close enough for our rough estimates). So let's say 256 million adults.
256e6 * 3e3 = 768e9 (billion).
I frequently check out the Forbes list out of curiosity (especially to know what people made during the pandemic). The big winner is clearly Bezos. Since April Bezos made 69 billion (nice). Elon had one of the biggest gains! Going from ~25bn to ~137bn (diff of 112bn). If you know a little about Pareto you should start to be suspicious here. You're probably familiar with the 80/20 "principle" from Pareto. So if Musk and Bezos were two of the biggest winners and their total gain is $181bn, which is pretty far (23.6%) from our required number, you should be pretty suspicious that the rest will make it up. Since it is not a controversial statement to say that wealth gain follows a power law.
NOW..... If we were saying every person got $1000, that's only 256bn and now we're 75% of the way there, that makes the tweet pretty believable. Although neither Bezos's or Musk's (definitely not Musk's lol) is really liquid and could be moved that way but yeah it is a fun thought experiment regardless.
yesIamamillenial on December 11st, 2020 at 21:34 UTC »
Getting $3000 would literally change my life and give me hope for the future.
zanderf87 on December 11st, 2020 at 22:32 UTC »
When grocery stores are seeing upticks in shoplifting of basic caloric needs, something has gone wrong. When our Congress decides that $1200 is all that our neediest need for the entire year, something has gone wrong.
Boost food stamps and get another $1200 to the people. I don’t even want that money because at least I’ve gotten an online job. Send that money to someone who needs it.
godelski on December 11st, 2020 at 23:59 UTC »
I'm not sure this works out. So I found a 2018 estimate of the number of adults and we have 253,768,092, compared to the ~330m people (2020 is closer to 350m but this is close enough for our rough estimates). So let's say 256 million adults.
256e6 * 3e3 = 768e9 (billion).
I frequently check out the Forbes list out of curiosity (especially to know what people made during the pandemic). The big winner is clearly Bezos. Since April Bezos made 69 billion (nice). Elon had one of the biggest gains! Going from ~25bn to ~137bn (diff of 112bn). If you know a little about Pareto you should start to be suspicious here. You're probably familiar with the 80/20 "principle" from Pareto. So if Musk and Bezos were two of the biggest winners and their total gain is $181bn, which is pretty far (23.6%) from our required number, you should be pretty suspicious that the rest will make it up. Since it is not a controversial statement to say that wealth gain follows a power law.
NOW..... If we were saying every person got $1000, that's only 256bn and now we're 75% of the way there, that makes the tweet pretty believable. Although neither Bezos's or Musk's (definitely not Musk's lol) is really liquid and could be moved that way but yeah it is a fun thought experiment regardless.