Even if that’s taken in the worst possible light, it still wouldn’t make the top 50 reasons why Biden is doing so bad right now with young people.
lmfao you guys love boot
We’re currently on the inflation part of the evening. Biden is so fucked.
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This is fascinating:
https://twitter.com/Forever_Wario/status/1730726318319325211
It’s true on one hand that there’s an army of libs out there pointing at graphs like “shut up, stop complaining, you are fine, the data says you’re fine, so fuck your lived experience”. But on the other hand, there is a concerted Republican effort to feed the “actually the economy is terrible” narrative to defeat Biden next year. Which is the dominant reason for the gap we see in that graph?
The data blows. Seriously.
All the wealth is being siphoned off by the .01%. Just spend like 3 days in Europe and this is very obvious. By objective measures their economies are far inferior but regular people there have astronomically higher quality of life. We pay enough in taxes to fund free college, medical care, retirement, etc., it just gets robbed by the health care and defense industries.
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my guess is that people hear “inflation has come back down” and see that prices haven’t gone down (even though they’ve stopped rising) and get mad.
We pay enough, the rich do not. I do pretty OK for myself which means I pay a decent amount in taxes… I simply do not understand how more people in my tax bracket are not absolutely ENRAGED at the idea of people at least tens of thousands of times richer than us paying lower all in tax rates than we do. It’s just a giant joke. Instead they get angry about paying taxes at all because we’re the ones paying nearly all the total taxes and for what we pay the benefits we get in return suck. Meanwhile our acquaintances think of us when they think of rich people when if literally anything goes wrong with my brain I will 100% die homeless with only an extra step or two.
Everyone I know who is actually good at capitalism and didn’t start the game rich (and how can you even say you’re good at capitalism if you never had to beat the hardest level?) is a socialist/communist. Everyone. That’s because being good at something means understanding it and even the most basic level of understanding of capitalism makes you aware that there are a small group of wallets that are getting an absolutely absurd portion of the value produced every year and that portion is growing every second of every day. How fast? Take the average real rate of return of financial products and compare it against the real GDP growth rate. Their portion is growing by however much the first thing exceeds the second thing. They tell you it’s complicated but it isn’t.
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It’s pretty simple: they’re going to be raking it in hand-over-fist someday and don’t want to pay a bunch of taxes once they become billionaires.
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Nah, even at that income level most people are idiots who don’t pay attention to anything.
The irony is that anyone making less than $100k almost can’t tax cheat to any significant level. Their income is all reportable, they can’t really get ahead on deductions with the current rules, etc.
Most they will get is a letter claiming they owe $x dollar more because they didn’t report some stray 1099 they got.
But yeah, the car dealer in town got busted for tax fraud and had to pay a $500k fine so omg omg omg the IRS.
(I think the IRS makes a mistake with that first letter since they adopt the tone of “we are right, you are wrong” position. They shouldn’t act like a private collection agency until the 2nd or 3rd attempt to get a response.
Yeah it’s this. If we’re to believe that data, the US is the only country on the graph who has had a recovery? And our confidence levels just so happen to almost perfectly match the expected and actual levels in other countries?
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It doesn’t help that you’re basically presumed guilty when it comes to your taxes and are required to prove your innocence, unlike the entire rest of the justice system (theoretically) works.
this doesn’t quite track. EU has higher taxes than US, as a percentage of GDP, by something like 10-15%. List of sovereign states by tax revenue to GDP ratio - Wikipedia
And has higher defense spending as a percentage of GDP, by 1 or 2%. like US is 3.5% and Japan is the lowest of developed countries at like 2%.
you have a better point with healthcare, but even that 18% for US vs next highest EU country is Germany at 13% doesn’t quite track. it’s not apples to apples, because US spends a lot of private money on healthcare, while Germany spends mostly tax revenue on it.
strictly by the numbers US can just tax more and fund free college, medical care, retirement, without spending less on defense. in healthcare they need better regulation plus government purchasing and negotiating power.
When he says “We pay enough in taxes to fund…” the statement is true if by “we” you mean the vast majority of Americans.
And I don’t feel like diving into it right now but your defense spending as a percentage of GDP claims seem off, perhaps because our definition of “defense spending” is manipulated (isn’t the DOD budget like twice our “defense” budget?). But just one apples to apples, the UK spent $46 billion on defense against a GDP of $3.13 trillion. Our GDP is $23.32 trillion, which is 7.45x higher. So to be proportional we’d be spending 7.45 x $46 billion = $342 billion. But our defense budget was $801 billion, and like twice that to DOD. But using that $801 billion we’re spending 2.34x what the UK is, proportionally.
So when you talk about spending, proportionally, 134% more on defense than the UK and we’ll use your numbers - 38% more on healthcare than Germany, and for worse healthcare I’m sure, that REALLY adds up.
If we spent the same on defense proportionally as the UK and the same on healthcare proportionally as Germany, we’d save $459 billion + $1.222 trillion = $1.681 trillion a year. That’s like $5,100 per American that could be spent on other stuff, whether private or public, without raising taxes on the rich.
Using your numbers, increase taxes by an extra 10% of GDP, and target it on the rich. there’s another $2.332 trillion a year. Now we’re up to an extra $12,175 per American that we could decide how to distribute. That pays for a lot of free college, better schools, nicer parks, etc, etc.
need to include all the private money spent on healthcare, lack of pension, etc.
Especially now that employers push a big chunk of the insurance cost to the workers.
We pay tons of hidden dollars. But yeah, our taxes are “less”.
it’s not, but if you find the hidden defense spending, i would be very interested in reading that analysis. many people think of it as much too expensive, but it’s actually a small part of the govt budget, and even smaller of the economy. defense spending alone does not make US soc sec and medicare suck.
even when you account for extra defense/healthcare portion that US is spending, it is still less than the tax gap between US/europe, perhaps 5-10% depending on country. there’s just no way US is already paying as much in total taxes compared to the EU countries that riverman is visiting.
18% in US healthcare includes things like medicare/etc, i don’t know the breakdown, but let’s call it half. so 9% of healthcare spending is via “private” money, which in EU countries would be mostly “tax” money. so, it might offset 1/2 or 3/4 of the tax gap, but not all of it.
my point isn’t that US is efficient, just that technically no, US doesn’t already tax enough, and yes, the shortfall is mostly in the top brackets.
Your claims about proportional defense spending to GDP clearly is because just a quick comparison to the UK illustrates the opposite of your claim.
My interest level in continuing this discussion until you base it in reality is none.
Probably more useful to think of that meaning the US is spending 30-100% more than saying it’s just a 1-2% difference. Granted I not really paying close attention to the discussion
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