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The poor have no money individually, but in aggregate they have some. $1 from a million poor people makes one millionaire.

IMO the main thing they extract from the working poor is time - what they're stealing is the excess value between their labor and the value is creates, and technology has made it easy to do this at a massive scale. So it's less $1 from each person, it's 8 hours per day from a million people makes 1 person a billionaire.



You don't get $400B by stealing pennies from poor people.

For one, there aren't 100m poor people in the US. Not even close.


Somewhere around 45m in poverty in the US (2023), already counting around 1m homeless.


First - "poverty" is up to $14k per year. Many of those people are "poor" - but probably not the majority, and definitely not even close to all.

Second, billionaires have almost $7T in wealth - the top .1% are at about ~$20T.

They didn't get any meaningful percentage of that by taking pennies off of 45M. You'd need to take thousands. And they just don't have it. That's almost $450k per "poor" person.

That's more than the median HH wealth in the US.

If you look at the "actual poor" - you're likely looking >$1M per person.

You simply cannot "steal" that from the "poor" (who have almost nothing to steal, by definition).

Even if you amortize that over decades - it is just not how it happened.




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