Well, their interpretation is at odds with reality, and they should reconcile that. Regardless of what they told or what they believed, they paid into a system where they were forced to subsidize current recipients, while the system itself could be revoked at any point, leaving them high and dry, and not running into 14th Amendment issues or anything like that. See Flemming v. Nestor, 1960 - quoting Wiki:

Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603 (1960), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of Section 1104 of the 1935 Social Security Act. In this Section, Congress reserved to itself the power to amend and revise the schedule of benefits. The Court rejected that Social Security is a system of ‘accrued property rights’ and held that those who pay into the system have no contractual right to receive what they have paid into it.[1]

Note that I’m not saying anything “should” be one way or another, besides that people should be fully aware how the current system works in law.

Social Security’s “trust fund” is an empty pit of debt obligations. Benefits to current recipients are paid with incoming payroll taxes. Any difference is made up with additional taxes or monetary inflation, by way of Treasury bonds. They “reinvest it in the economy” if there’s ever a surplus, e.g., through military contractors. It finances the national debt.

Putting aside the quirks of that setup, the basic function is that the taxes you pay in now are not an investment in your own future, you’re basically just paying for the retirement of older people now. The expectation is that someone down the road will then pay taxes to finance your retirement. Hence, how SS was able to start paying benefits almost immediately (3 years) after payroll taxes started being collected.

What is your prediction for what will become of it, though. GDP growth stops and people start bursting into flames? You know we’ve actually observed this before, right?

Now, if you do mean “capitalism” not in the plain definition of “an economy based around private ownership”, but the more specific version where control of capital is highly centralized - there’s some truth to the idea that economic decline can cause people to start looking to reform that system. True of any system, really, because people generally don’t want to see their quality of life decrease. But that’s very different than an economic system “requiring” it to function.

Capitalism does not “collapse” with 0 or negative GDP growth. I don’t know where people got this idea. You only really see any sort of “collapse” if the social structure breaks down - the basic behaviors of trading continue even in extreme crises, insofar as a society operates with property assigned to individuals like that. Not counting “bubbles” and such as a “collapse”.

Unfortunately our own pensions and such are also getting wiped out by the same forces. And with less access to insider information.

According to…that woman with a book about his wealth? Article says 70 to 200 btw, not 200. Sources elsewhere guess much lower (tens of billions).

US GDP is 27.72 trillion. That’s the movement of money annually.

Yes, Putin’s in charge, with his one hundred million dollars (sarcasm, not exact figure) and zero sway over the entire Western economic establishment.

If you look at the entire span of all cultures and all history, I think there’s tons of random examples of essentially one form or another of religious or ideological thinking that caused massive atrocities. Genghis Khan comes to mind as someone responsible for millions of deaths through, as the author of your first link puts it, a kind of “mouth with a bottomless pit” mentality of devouring everything. Hitler is distinguished in part by the mechanization of his efforts, but that is true of every imperialist genocide of the 20th and 21st centuries. The people he killed in open genocide don’t even scratch a tenth of the total killed by both sides in that same war - which really begs the question, what is the distinction between war and genocide? Combatants vs. non-combatants? If someone is talked into fighting, does their life suddenly stop having any value? Is it less a crime in ethical terms, not legal terms, to kill an average soldier? It gets justified by saying the other side of a conflict had some devastatingly evil ideology, but is killing someone actually the best way to deal with them having evil ideas? I’m more inclined to take the stance uh, I think Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” The deepest evil is the people leading us to slaughter each other, not the people we’re slaughtering.

Bro… Not historical Nazis? You mean the ones that committed the most despicable evils in all of humanity’s written history?

Just reading that a few times and I think, how exactly do you determine that? The number of deaths? Because the genocide of indigenous people in the “Americas” exceeds it several times over. You think about the “Congo Free State”, it had deaths on the same order of magnitude and a system of total enslavement and mass mutilations/executions based on failing to meet work quotas. Not to trivialize one, but to make sure others aren’t ignored. When it comes to the genocide conversation, it seems like European imperialism in Africa just gets completely left out.

History will look back at the American empire and judge all its complicit civilians equally. It’s Democrat vanity that makes them think they’re not in the same genocidal boat as Republicans. You may think of yourselves in another class, but your politicians were complicit in the same crimes.

Had that same conversation with a coworker many years back. He pitched the “time is money” theory. Really, I’m salaried, this is off-hours work, I actually find it interesting and enjoyable, and save a fortune doing it, so that theory doesn’t apply very well.

Just practically speaking, hard work alone doesn’t cut it. You need to figure out how to get enough money out for the labor you’re putting in. Goes without saying, for many people that’s impossible, especially with no financial wiggle room. On top of whatever inequalities are inherent to capitalism, the government’s also gone out of their way to completely rig the rules of the game.

That’s the part where it gets really interesting. The right mindset when approaching those tasks means doing the research to do the job professionally, yourself. You meet that threshold, and actually start going through and reworking what was already done - you start to notice all the little shortcuts and weird decisions and bodge jobs that the professionals in the past did. And now, armed with the knowledge and basic tools to do the job - you’re not talking about $200 to pay a plumber to come out and fix one leaky elbow on your pipes - you know how to isolate it, drain it, cut it, deburr it, flux it, solder it, and clean it up, for like $3.00 in parts (and for what I said specifically, a minimum of maybe $50 in tools - cutter, blowtorch/propane, deburring tool, flux brush, emery cloth). For example. And for what could be a $5000 job, you can do it yourself for maybe $1000 in materials.

There are actual methods that the professionals have developed to be certain they did the job correctly - you just have to learn them.

It’s all doable with some basic tools and a little bit of willingness to endure suffering, that’s my point. And for the more specialized ones, wading through documentation and codes enough to do a job correctly (can’t emphasize that enough). Framing, roofing, plumbing, electric, siding, insulation. Can save a fortune and know exactly how well the job was done.

Try fixing something major, with dramatic improvements to your quality of life.

Remember when Bush pushed the “No Child Left Behind Act”, and we all realized the federalization of control over education was deeply problematic and removed democratic control over education? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

The government not handling every social function in society isn’t scary on its own. That in combination with the people as a whole having no control over the economy is when that becomes nasty (i.e., economic inequality). That is of course the vision of the ruling class.

Whatever.

Yes, because you were all voting for politicians who were complicit in that genocide. Then the election happened, and the quasi-ceasefire (really, relocation of hostilities to the West Bank, until they almost inevitably resume in Gaza again) happened. And you’re all still clinging to the “it was a spoiler designed to cost Dems the election” and yet you’re still completely failing to ask the absolutely fundamental question of why the Democrat politicians would rather give up an election than give up being complicit in genocide.

The sheer fact that you write “genocide” in the “I’m an idiot” up-and-down caps, by the way. It meets the legal definition of genocide. It means the intent of laws authored against genocide. It meets the structural characteristics of past genocides. You have to be a truly sick person to trivialize it like that. It’s really striking how much trivializing the genocide like that goes hand-in-hand with blaming its critics for the Democrat’s loss - it’s always the same people doing both. Are we not living in the same planet, where genocide is literally the worst crime imaginable, besides causing the extinction of the entire human race or all life of Earth? Does a politician’s complicity in genocide not completely discredit everything they say or do as a facade to gain power and wealth? Does it not reveal an absolute deception that’s fundamental to our entire social system? Be honest, have you even thought about those questions?

You guys really want to shift the agenda to something else, but I’m going to describe this exactly as it is. This system is fucked and completely captive, Ds and Rs both. Whoever you think is to blame - at the end of the day, it’s not even relevant, because we need complete systemic change. The fact that both parties were near-unanimously complicit in a genocide and the genocidal incitement mythology around it should have been an absolute clarion call to the public for absolute rejection of the people in power. But instead you’re all still dicking around playing partisan politics, downplaying that genocide, and trying to relocate the blame for the crumbling society to the general public. The problem here is that we live in a deeply fascist, totalitarian system, at the heart of a global military empire. The mass murder our politicians - across the aisle - commit abroad is a reflection of the inherent immorality and exploitation inherent in this system. Now they’ve put the “bad cops” back in power after the “good cops” absolutely threw the election, and guess what, it’s the “we’re tightening our belts, abolishing a bunch of civil rights, and making this even more of a police state” routine again. Not just confined to the last…two weeks under Trump’s rule, but oh-so-coincidentally, the same totalitarian police state shit that was already completely rearing its head under George W. Bush and Obama. There was not some sudden shift to fascism in the last two weeks. We’ve been under it. They’ve been hammering it in bit by bit our entire lives. This is an objective truth - between the NSA mass surveillance, the PATRIOT Act, FISA surveillance, CIA black sites, targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens, everything. None of this is new. So revise your explanation of this society, because it’s not correct.

Components of the delusion in this worldview:

1. That it’s “our” government, not “their” government. This has been at best an aristocratic and at worst a totalitarian government for the entirety of U.S. history. Where was this democratic control during the Biden administration, when overwhelming resistance couldn’t influence them to stop a genocide? Where was the democratic control during the Obama administration, when we couldn’t stop unconstitutional PATRIOT Act enforcement, or end the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, but rather, witnessed a continual expansion of the Middle Eastern invasions/military theater into other countries like Libya and Somalia?

2. Putin is behind the Trump presidency, not the same American oligarchy behind every single presidency. Please provide real proof of this. I have yet to see any. Something a hell of a lot more concrete than a “he said she said” or “funding for ads or bots came from Russia.” It’s my working theory that the “blame everything on Russia” is a propaganda line used to insulate Democrats from ideas that contradict their worldview.

3. Assumption of a nefarious scheme to change the nature of the federal government, or institute a “takeover”, versus the facade of one in a situation where it’s already been taken over. Again, I think I phrased this same question to you yesterday - explain the consensus in SUPPORT of the Palestinian genocide. How does both the openly fascist party, and the so-called “opposition”, SUPPORT that? Not asking you to justify it, or defend it, or say “tough shit those are our choices” - I want an explanation. How does something so insanely evil become a bipartisan political consensus, in the absence of central management? See point 1. My working theory is that this pretense is simply being used to expand control of the state over the individual while promoting the partisan D vs. R narrative.

4. That USAID is some kind of net positive instead of a tool of U.S. imperialism. Read something like this - https://www.blackagendareport.com/weaponizing-aid-how-usaid-and-global-fragility-act-sustain-us-imperialism-libya or some of the Wikipedia overview of its weird history of association with espionage and U.S. empire building - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development#Controversies_and_criticism

As usual your takes seem to be rooted in the Dem party line as opposed to a solid, objective, anti-imperialist viewpoint.

Almost like they’re not trying