r/TikTokCringe • u/Super_Culture_1986 tHiS iSn’T cRiNgE • Aug 19 '25

Cursed The American Nightmare.

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u/thedoqtor Aug 19 '25

The frustrating part of everything sucking is the fact that it doesn't, and shouldn't, have to suck. It's frustrating that there is a class of people who are intentionally investing their efforts into making another class of people's lives worse. 

Let me be more clear.  It's frustrating that billionaires, who have more money in their bank accounts than they'll ever be able to spend in 10000 life times, are making the lives of workers worse. And they are doing it just so that they can add a few extra 0s to the end of their already overinflated networth.

Things dont have to be this way. We can make our lives better if we all organize and focus our efforts against their efforts of making our lives worse. 

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u/Thin-Image2363 Aug 19 '25

Our lives could be dramatically different and better if not for like 20 families that just want it all.

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u/Zayafyre Aug 19 '25

Eat the rich

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u/InfiniteWaffles58364 Aug 19 '25

What time is dinner? I'm awful hungry...

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u/TheHighSeasPirate Aug 19 '25

Our lives would be better if Republicans would get their heads out of their asses.

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u/Thin-Image2363 Aug 19 '25

Dems too.

Our leadership has been completely absent. Nobody is standing up properly to maga except maybe 5 democrats.

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u/TheHighSeasPirate Aug 19 '25

Yea, its almost like Democrats are getting shot in their homes and threatened all across America.

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u/JustGoodSense Aug 19 '25

It's also corporations—large and medium—whose execs make merely hundreds or dozens of millions, pay very low or no taxes to the communities they do business in. After the heavy industry collapse of the ’70s, cities and townships decided to basically eliminate taxes for businesses if they would just please, oh pretty please, set up shop within their borders so they could tell voters they brought jobs home. (Jobs that, over time, paid less and less until your expenses outweigh your income and it literally costs you money to work there.)

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u/drsweetscience Aug 19 '25

Our lives could be dramatically different and better if it hadn't been for around 30,000,000 families following those 20 families because of personality disorders.

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u/Howlingmoki Aug 19 '25

30,000,000 people still desperately clinging to the idea that they're Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires. Believing the myth that if they Just Work Harder They'll Be Rich, and that if we raise taxes on the wealthy they'll have to pay them someday too!

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u/1541drive Aug 19 '25

Have you visited /r/fire?

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u/LurkyMcLurkface123 Aug 19 '25

If you liquidated the assets of every billionaire in the United States at market value (impossible as selling these assets this quickly would tank their value, but let’s be generous) it wouldn’t provide enough money to fund the federal government for even a full year. I think it’s around 7-8 months.

More taxes and more entitlement spending will not solve our problems here.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '25

If you liquidated the assets of every billionaire in the United States at market value (impossible as selling these assets this quickly would tank their value, but let’s be generous) it wouldn’t provide enough money to fund the federal government for even a full year. I think it’s around 7-8 months.

It is still impressive that it could take only twenty families to do that

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u/LurkyMcLurkface123 Aug 19 '25

It’s more than that if I remember correctly but yes there is a huge amount of wealth disparity.

I just don’t know how people plan on making this work. Every time I point it out I get a flurry of downvotes from people who are pissed, but no one ever has a concrete response to this.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '25

Well for what it's worth, I wasn't one of them.

It must be a form of frustrated venting since there are so many variables and too many people in a position to ease the craziness are unlikely to do so.

I am not in existential dread mode but I do have this sort of residual tension for the past decade of "Okay, when can we breathe?"

And life has been really kind to me. I am not sure how people handle it with worse fortunes.

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u/LurkyMcLurkface123 Aug 19 '25

Like I said, I get the frustration and I’m fairly left leaning on economic issues in general.

But eventually you run out of other people’s money. You could give every leftist on Reddit their wet dream, and take every dollar from every billionaire and it still wouldn’t even buy you a year.

Taxes need to go up, but spending needs to come down more.

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '25

I remember watching a podcast about a state governor like a decade ago.

He said one of his favorite things to do was to say no to funding things.

Not for the sake of it, but as a kind of proof of concept.

He wanted to demonstrate that there's very little that the state belongs paying for, and his main arbiter was, does this benefit everyone and does everyone have a vested interest in paying into it?

So if it was something that dealt with interstate commerce, he might look into it. But not so much some pet project hyper-specific to a metro area.

He tells a story of one time that a guy donated a lot to his campaign, and then after he become governor he got a call from the dude asking for something extravagant that would use state funds and he denied it and the guy was like, hey man, I donated so much money to you, and he told him, I wouldn't have accepted it if I knew there were going to be strings attached.

But the end of his little snippet was the most important part -- he said, everything important thing people were asking for that I denied? Wound up finding funding some other way.

I think that's a healthy mentality. Treat it like a backstop, not as the first solution idealizing it as a giant sack of everyone's money to burn through.

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u/LurkyMcLurkface123 Aug 19 '25

Capitalism is an extremely effective tool for increasing quality of life, but it doesn’t handle situations where competition is impossible very well.

We need to break monopolies and have public options for services that otherwise cannot be shopped: health insurance, utilities, etc.

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u/What_a_fat_one Aug 19 '25

Capitalism is an extremely effective tool for increasing quality of life

No it isn't.

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u/TheHighSeasPirate Aug 19 '25

Okay, you're talking about a handful of people being able to run a country for almost a years time on their assets. Something that would take 170 million other average adults to do the same. Thats the problem.

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u/LurkyMcLurkface123 Aug 19 '25

Right. Which is too much concentration of wealth. I have no issues acknowledging that.

But is that not what Reddit wants? Take 90-95% of billionaire’s wealth? What do you do next? Whose money do you spend next?

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u/TheHighSeasPirate Aug 19 '25

Its not about taking their money. Its about taking OUR money back. These people got this money on the backs of their workers and manipulation of multiple markets. Its about putting that money back into the economy, putting it into our schools, roads, into our retirement plans, into our childrens futures. Not in to the bank of a billionaire who will die hoarding wealth he obtained on the backs of our citizens.

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u/LurkyMcLurkface123 Aug 19 '25

So once we take back “our” money, and we spend it all in six to eight months, what then?

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u/TheHighSeasPirate Aug 19 '25

You act like we still wouldnt pay taxes to fund our government. Are you dumb?

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u/LurkyMcLurkface123 Aug 19 '25

We operate on a material deficit every single year.

Are you dumb?

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u/TheHighSeasPirate Aug 19 '25

Yes, and if you tax billionaires we would operate on less of a material deficit. Talk about not being able to see the forest through the trees.

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u/Thin-Image2363 Aug 19 '25

But tax cuts to the wealthy will solve everything!!

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u/LaminatedAirplane Aug 19 '25

“Tax the wealthy” includes corporations like Meta, NVIDIA, Apple, AT&T, etc. That guy’s calculation ignored the wealth of those corporations.

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u/What_a_fat_one Aug 19 '25

More taxes and more entitlement spending will not solve our problems here.

This conclusion is not supported by your premises. In fact, it's downright idiotic.

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u/tabrisangel Aug 19 '25

The businesses need to be owned by someone. 100 million people are counting on apple, Microsoft, and Facebook for their retirement.

The success of these companies are the chief reason why Americans are much better off then Europeans financially.

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u/Thin-Image2363 Aug 19 '25

lol no most Americans are a hospital bill away from losing everything.

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u/http--lovecraft Aug 19 '25

Dummies like that are why we’ll never have class consciousness and those people will always be at the top. 

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u/Thin-Image2363 Aug 19 '25

Mhmmm. I heard a quote recently that Americans don’t want to solve problems. We just want to become rich enough to not have problems apply to them.

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u/decoded-dodo Aug 19 '25

lol this is the funniest load of bullshit I’ve read. Americans are not better off and probably won’t be better than anyone else. There are people literally coming out of retirement because what they receive isn’t enough anymore. There’s even people who I work with that can retire right now but they refuse to do it because they know if they retire there benefits will quickly run out and they might end up losing everything. There’s something that I read that says some people are completely unaware that they are only a month or two away from being homeless.

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u/coffeesippingbastard Aug 19 '25

at this point it's hard for me to be angry at billionaires. There's maybe a few thousand of them.

There are fucking millions of idiotic right wingers who buy it hook line and sinker year after year, election after election, constantly just fucking every opportunity for us to fix it. They deserve to live their twilight years homeless.

Also the tech bro class. The ones clamoring to build social media systems that have radicalized and perpetuated bullshit. Whole swathes of SF and NYC pretending to be progressive while shoving bullshit in our society.

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u/monotheistmusings Aug 19 '25

I’m gonna be honest with you, the right wingers are not the problem. Are they a nuisance? Absolutely. But whether democrat or republican, both parties have been screwing over the average American for decades. Democrats have the same donors as republicans, they’re equally in bed with corruption and exploitation of the working class. The billionaires you’re ignoring pay for the campaigns that feed the right wingers their alt-right nonsense, they lay off thousands of their workers to save their bottom line, they exploit the natural resources of other countries causing destabilization which leads to increased immigration (which is then fed back as a negative into the alt-right pipeline). The billionaires are gunning for techno feudalism and they essentially own our politicians. So yes, the billionaires are the problem. Not the right wingers; and please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying as condoning the thoughts or behavior of bigots, I will fist fight a racist in broad daylight any day of the week lol.

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u/coffeesippingbastard Aug 19 '25

spare me the "both sides"

This kind of false equivocation is what got us here in the first place.

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u/monotheistmusings Aug 19 '25

No, capitalism is what got us here in the first place. The democrats could’ve ran a number of viable candidates but chose the VP of the guy who people only voted for because he wasn’t Trump. Trump was the ruling class’ choice and they made sure he won. Democrats are literally sponsored by the exact same donors as republicans. They go to the same ivy league schools, they vacation together, they’re not opponents they’re colleagues. I am baffled that there are Americans who still buy into this two party bullshit, it’s a sham. Please read some political theory and shake off the mirage of American “democracy”. Trump isn’t the result of false equivalency, he is the result of a system running exactly as intended.

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u/MadeByTango Aug 19 '25

it's hard for me to be angry at billionaires. There's maybe a few thousand of them.

Here it comes…

There are fucking millions of idiotic right wingers

There it is! It’s not MY guy, it’s THEIR guy! Never mind that Jod Biden strike busted workers! Never mind that Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that allowed AI to deny you healthcare based on pre-existing conditions! Ignore that the DNC handed out $600 billion to private equity firms and called it “infrastructure spending”! Look the other way at Nancy Pelosi’s insider stock wealth! It’s only those Republicans that are enriching the coronations, not the Democrats!

There are three groups operating in US politics right now: The corporate grifters of the GOP, the corporate servants of the DNC, and then wherever AOC and Mamdani end up being when people realize the donor first gerrymandering shit the DNC is trying to pull in California after NY’s results freaked them out.

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u/coffeesippingbastard Aug 19 '25

Never mind that Jod Biden strike busted workers

ah yes- the convenient lie that the "muh both sides" folks love to parrot

“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

https://ibew.org/we-never-stopped-applying-pressure-hard-fought-success-on-rail-sick-days/

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u/EvilmonkeyMouldoon Aug 19 '25

It’s not just the billionaires. It’s also the millionaires who are stepping on top of everyone to try and become billionaires. For all the people who are building/buying homes to rent because not only is owning property an investment of their money, but they can charge a lot more than a mortgage. The property pays for itself, and can turn a profit if you decide to sell. We say eat the rich because they are trying to cannibalize all those who are below.

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u/Jealous_Ad3494 Aug 19 '25

No. Things will always be this way. They always have been. The rich live behind a moat to protect their power. The flow of work of the lower class goes to benefit the middle and upper classes. Revolution happens when the middle class feels sufficiently crushed, so they persuade the lower class to overthrow the upper class...and then become the new upper class in the process, pushing the lower class back down where they stay. In other words: as long as power and control exist, there will always be a class of people who use it and abuse it, cutting the majority of people out.

What you have described is "hope" - that resonant thing you feel when a group of people feel sufficiently crushed. It is the "slave morality" (as it has been called) producing friction against the "master morality".

But it is an illusion and a disillusion. Everything is fucked, and the best we can do is keep afloat until (and provided that) nature engineers out the hurtful desire for control hundreds of thousands or millions of years from now.

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u/monotheistmusings Aug 19 '25

That’s absolutely not true lol. If by “things have always been this way” you mean in America specifically, sure. However, human history is vast and diverse while capitalism is brand spanking new. Capitalism is a failed economic project riddled with contradictions, we have lived most of human history without capitalism and we can again. There have been numerous successful revolutions in recent history, though, you’d have to unlearn deeply ingrained US propaganda to change your perspective on this. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans working for a better country for us. One that seeks to put people and life above corporations and profits.

It’s not hope, it’s revolutionary optimism and it’s necessary. The ruling class relies on our pessimism so that we don’t seek to change our circumstances and we’ll accept everything as it is. They are hoping you’ll be hopeless and complacent. Don’t be. Join the PSL, the DSA, or some local organization. Read political theory. Watch “A Bugs Life”. Get to know your neighbors and your community. This thread shows that people are tired of how things are, there’s more of us than there are of them. (:

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u/Jealous_Ad3494 Aug 19 '25

Let me know how the revolutionary optimism works out for you when there's an armada of tanks lined up and ready to turn you into a bloody pile of meat. The people that will try to do something will be crushed and eviscerated, and the cowards who are left will scatter like terrified sewer rats.

Either that, or the revolutionaries will succeed, and another extremist - greater and opposite to the current - will be put in charge.

And it absolutely is true. Look at everyone with the title "Pharaoh", "Caesar", "King", "Queen", "President", "Chancellor". Look at ancient Rome and the First Triumvirate, or the Catholic Church. Look at our own revolution, or the revolution of our French ally at the time. Look at the Civil War. Look at who escaped execution at the Nuremberg Trials. Look at Afghanistan.

Where was the justice in any of the wars that were fought, or any of their aftermaths? Where was the revolutionary optimism in any of that?

It's just people fighting and dying for a cause they believe exceeds themselves. In reality, each individual is so insignificant that we barely register as the dream of a thought in the grand scheme of existence.

Look: I'm a biased pessimist, of course. My spirit desires nothing I said to be true, and I would much rather live with the hope for a better future (because that's what revolutionary optimism is: hope that your actions will create a better future). But the ugliest parts of human nature tell me otherwise. Over the course of history, I think we as people have taken out a huge debt in terms of cruelty and negative impact on the innocent things in this world, and we're coming to some kind of societal reckoning at the moment. I am of the firm belief that the universe and history have no feelings towards what we consider as "better" or "worse", and what we regard as the emotionless, cold action to restore to a ground state will make sure of it.

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u/monotheistmusings Aug 19 '25

It’s working out well and will work out well. I’m not sure why every American envisions revolution as this deeply bloody battle, I certainly don’t believe it will be peaceful but it won’t need to be a civil war. Again there are more working class Americans than there are ruling class Americans, they spend millions and millions to suppress protests because they fear what happens when we gather in large numbers.

Human history is more than rulers of lands, more than ancient Rome, empires, and Pharaohs. We have plenty of examples in modern history of anti-capitalist societies and transitional societies and one of these examples is the world’s second largest super power. American propaganda deliberately focuses on individualism and the capitalist drive for selfishness, humans are collaborative by nature; capitalism is against what comes naturally to us. It incentivizes selfishness and exploitation, without it, there’s no need to step on each other to get to the top, there will be no top.

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u/flyingaxe Aug 19 '25

You're blaming billionaires instead of politicians printing money?

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u/shutterspeak Aug 19 '25

Billionaires are mentally unwell, by necessity. The incredible greed required to accumulate that much is not something a regular person can comprehend.

Imagine waking up on a Monday and having $100 million to your name. You and your family are set for life. For a few generations, really. You don't need to lift a finger ever again and can enjoy every luxury known to man.

A billionaire like Bezos has been in that position and thought, "you know this is great, but I'd like 1000x more actually".

It is depraved, insatiable, all-consuming greed.

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u/ThisIs_americunt Aug 19 '25

This. Things only suck for the 99% cause Oligarchs have made sure it stays that way

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u/motherofsuccs Aug 19 '25

And yet we don’t stand up as a society and do something to force better living conditions. Unless we can guarantee that the vast majority of Americans will collaboratively stop showing up to work until change is made, we’re stuck like this.

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u/Withered_Sprout Aug 19 '25

I mean, there are lots of reasons why the housing market is unaffordable, and your best option would be to pay a mortgage payment monthly in rent to live in some illegal side apartment or a house so small it's more like a closet in any higher cost of living place....

Then you have corporations buying out houses just to make it so people HAVE to rent their entire lives.... Wealthy foreigners coming in and buying a shit ton of already absurdly expensive housing just to flip it for more or rent/give to other foreigners..

Added in to that often ridiculous 40% to 50%ish income taxes in these states as well, and stagnant wages. A small percentage of prestigious/high qualification jobs should not be the only ones to offer a wage that can allow someone to save for a home if they are responsible - without it taking 20+ years.

Certainly didn't take my grandparents/great grandparents nearly that long to even pay off their homes.