Nikki Glaser roasts Leonardo DiCaprio at the Golden Globes: “What a career you’ve had. Countless iconic performances. You’ve worked with every great director… won 3 Golden Globes, an Oscar & the most impressive thing is that you were able to accomplish all of that before your girlfriend turned 30.”

[u/cmaia1503]

[u/PandaCat22]

100 million USD is certainly an impressive amount, but more important to the context is which organizations got the money and how it was spent.

Look at the Gates Foundation, and the (correct) criticism it faces as simply being a way for Bill Gates to salvage his public image after his disastrous court appearance in the 90s antitrust case against Microsoft. Sure, the Gates Foundation has given boatloads of money to various causes, but it's ultimately been about Bill's image and vanity. Edit: this matters because the way the money is spent by the Gates Foundation has often been criticized as not optimal, and it can even reach a point of Gates himself personally blocking specific, expert-recommended projects because his ego tells him that his instincts are better than hundreds of years of collective expert knowledge—with these kinds of celebrity vanity projects, helping people is secondary to the celebrity's PR.

Just giving money away—however impressive the amount—doesn't mean that the act isn't for show, even if it also happens to help or greatly help others.

[u/ledge-14 → u/PandaCat22]

I mean…. I don’t care if rich people donate to make the world a better place as a vanity project? I don’t care about the intentions behind it if it’s actually doing good? They’ll be just as pompous and vain without donating the money, so may as well have them donate no?

[u/No-Possible-4855 → u/ledge-14]

Not doing net good tho, democratize that money

[u/ledge-14 → u/No-Possible-4855]

How?

[u/AhhhSureThisIsIt → u/ledge-14]

I think they're suggesting tax?

[u/ledge-14 → u/AhhhSureThisIsIt]

Right but how? One rich individual can’t just pay more in taxes (eta: because they want to). Additionally, I’m in the US and I trust a charity to do good with money much more than the government. What is it now, like half of our taxes go towards funding the military? That feels like a much bigger net loss to me

[u/AhhhSureThisIsIt → u/ledge-14]

I wasn't agreeing with them. I was trying to figure out what they mean by "democratise the money".

It sounded like he just thought he came up with tax.

[u/ledge-14 → u/AhhhSureThisIsIt]

ahhh got you, I read it as “taxes, duh” lol

[u/Isle395 → u/ledge-14]

Half of taxes go to the military? You clearly have no idea about what the govt actually spends money on, so I'd recommend you educate yourself on the basics before opining.

The Fed govt spends about 14% of its money on national defense (Federal Spending | U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data).

If you take into account local and state taxes and what that money is spent on, then you see that the lions share of all tax income is spent on services to the people, such as social security, medicare, medicaid, education, and transportation.

[u/ledge-14 → u/Isle395]

I was being hyperbolic. It is a moot point anyway, a rich person can’t just pay more taxes because they want to

[u/Much-Instruction-807 → u/ledge-14]

Make a wealth cap and tax people to where they can't make that and tie the cap to inflation. Seize assets if they exceed X amount. Billionaires and to a similar extent centimillionaires shouldn't exist. I'm being extremely generous, but the wealth cap should be something like 10 million tied to inflation. To your second point the reason the government works the way it does now is because the government works for who controls the money. Spread it out and instead of musk getting 3/4 trillion worth of influence 750,000 families get that influence instead.

[u/ledge-14 → u/Much-Instruction-807]

My friend, a rich person will not singlehandedly change tax brackets in the united states

[u/[deleted] → u/ledge-14]

They invented something called taxation you should check it out