More than 50 people stood outside the Enoch Pratt Library’s Southeast Anchor branch on a recent spring morning in Baltimore. Parents with small children, teenagers, and senior citizens clustered outside the door and waited to hear their ticket numbers called.
They weren’t there for books—at least, not at that moment. They came to shop for groceries.
Connected to the library, the brightly painted market space is small but doesn’t feel cramped. Massive windows drench it in sunshine. In a previous life, it was a café. Now, shelves, tables, counters, and a refrigerator are spread out across the room, holding a mix of produce and shelf-stable goods.
Why would you want to get rich in the first place if you believe that it’s more important to feed the poor? You’d be no better than the people you profess to hate, and you could easily avoid getting robbed by just donating anything you don’t need to charity.
Bro that’s crazy has it crossed your mind that I don’t want to be rich? Put me in that position and I’d be paying for ads and shit to get the government to tax people like me more.
Your not gonna catch me on any of that “Oh so you think wealthy people shouldn’t exist” bs either btw. In a vacuum I think people should be able to make a lot of money from stuff they do but billionaires shouldn’t exist full stop. The amount of good you can do with merely one billion dollars is genuinely kind of inconceivable and we have multiple multi-billionaires, and not anywhere close to enough good being done by them. They simply shouldn’t exist. They’ll be just as happy being multimillionaires though I’d quite like taxes to dramatically ramp up once your in the 10 millions, even that is far above where middle class is meant to be.
Why on earth would you do that when you could just skip the middle men and give the money directly to the poor? That seems a lot more efficient.
Philanthropy is ineffective, that’s our current system and it’s not working
Weird, I could swear I’m paying taxes for social security, medicare, and food stamps, yet somehow, most of the money ends up in the military industrial complex.
But I’m sure that if only the government had more tax revenue, they’d spend every extra dollar on welfare programs, right?
If we stop electing conservatives yes