this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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With 3 million dollars in liquid assets (ie: not a house), you can bring in about $120k from the safest of investments. Just a high yield savings account. Fully insured.
With an index fund, you can bring in $300k.
That's enough to live on, given how many people live on that much or less from their job.
So some millionaires may work, but they're not really the same.
But most "millionaires" are paper millionaires — they have a house and a car and a retirement fund and an emergency fund. Upper-middle-class, for sure, but they're still working or retired from a lifetime of working.
That's why I specified liquid, not-a-house, money.
Investment returns are by definition the fruits of other people's labor.
And yet ultimately that's what every retirement and disability system of any kind has to be based on. Whether you're talking traditional methods of just letting your old or sick relatives live with you, state-run pension systems or disability, or private retirement accounts and disability insurance, it's all ultimately the same deal. The systems vary extremely in their effectiveness and equity. But ultimately there's no getting around the unavoidable truth. If you want to live in a world where the elderly and disabled are simply not abandoned to die, some of the labor of the young and healthy will be siphoned off to support the old and infirm.
If you want to live in a world where you yourself will not be cast out onto the street to die when you are too old to work, then for some of your later years you will depend on the labor of others, just as you did when you were a child.
There's a fundamental distinction to be made to the below point of yours:
I strongly disagree with your first point, but maybe you misunderstood me. Investment returns are basically letting other people work for your profits, with nothing given in return. I.e. a form of wage theft (or other shenanigans like messing up the environment for profits or exploiting resources or funding a totalitarian regime).
Your second point - while correct - has nothing to do with my criticism of (stock / fund) investment returns: That could be (and was for a few decades, at least in Germany) a generational contract, where society manages to pay out pensions from which elderly / retired people can afford living & care from the GDP. Those pay-outs have been paid in advance by those needing them because they funded the old and retired people at the time they were still in work.
For that system, you do not need any kind of finance products. Of course that doesn't keep our corrupt governments from spending our retirement money elsewhere and investing in shady funds for private profits and shitty retirement payments. So in today's world, in practice, yes, people rely on finance product returns for their retirement savings and most of us have no choice in that. But it wasn't always like that, and it should not be, because it's a pyramid scheme.
That's just retirement
Yup. 3 million and my husband would not work at all. hed handle whatever he wanted and I'd work from home as I do now, maybe a less stressful job. A lot would be donated and given away to those in need.
For the vast majority of millionaires, their wealth is mostly home equity, not liquid funds.