It’s amazing how the left invented and now believe the myth that Elon Musk reneged on his promise to end world hunger. It always leaves out that he said “it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent.”
▪️He was calling the World Food Program’s (WFP’s) bluff, while responding to a tweet pointing out that the WFP already raised $8.4B in 2020 yet didn’t solve hunger! He literally says if the WFP could show how $6B would end hunger he’d sell Tesla stock and do it.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1454809318356750337?s=20&t=HS0-NSrVF8EwW80k_Xgpag
▪️Musk highlighted what should be obvious, that $6B given to the UN wouldn’t solve world hunger. The US alone gives $11B to the UN every year. Michael Shellenberger wrote a piece at the time showing it was hopelessly naive to believe $6B would help 42M starving people.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/13/elon-musk-is-right-world-hunger-cant-be-solved-with-6-billion/
▪️The most obvious reason UN food aid doesn’t solve hunger is that it gets stolen, usually by local warlords/govts to buy arms. Starving people are almost exclusively found in war zones or areas with hostile political turmoil. How would the UN get food to those in Afghanistan or Yemen?! This is why Musk asked for open source accounting.
▪️Notice that there is never a similar objection to something like the student loan forgiveness plan, which will likely cost well over $500B. This could supposedly solve world hunger 100 times over according to the same logic, but the “logic” is only reserved for ammunition against billionaires.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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