Narrator: It was too socialist.
I just wanted to reply to this, because as someone from Illinois, I’m ecstatic that Underwood won this election. Her opponent, Jim Oberweis (Oberweis ice cream dude) basically ran all his ads quoting Underwood saying ‘the protests were beautiful’ and then showing photos/videos of some small scale looting, which was one of the most misleading ad campaigns I’ve ever seen. And then he declared victory election night being up 1,000 votes without mail in votes being counted. And now he’s down 4,000 votes. Fuck him.
9 Likes
If you guys want to have your minds blown, just ask some friends/relatives how tax brackets work.
Two people I thought were surely informed enough to understand marginal tax brackets both thought that your highest bracket applied to your entire income and thus making $399,999 under Biden’s plan was better than making over $400,000.
Like I think 80% of the country doesn’t understand this concept.
2 Likes
Of course they don’t. Republicans have been hitting them with anti tax propaganda for their whole lives. All tax increases are described as the government taking money out of your pocket. The word “tax” has been stolen, like the word “socialism”.
2 Likes
One thing I’ve tested aggressively and very successfully is that you can get a truck driver to want to actually tax the rich in <2 minutes of persuasion. People in middle two quartiles are very aware that rich people aren’t paying their share.
You just say something about the Panama Papers and how obviously tax laws aren’t real for rich people… and then shut up and let them do the rest of the work. They’ll be selling me by the end of the call. I’ll reluctantly close by saying that yeah I pay a lot in taxes and it bugs me that they don’t too just because they’re friends with politicians.
The problem is words like ‘tax’ and ‘socialism’. They’re like embedded hypnotic commands or something. Real brainwashing stuff.
3 Likes
I don’t think I can talk him down to just taxing them instead of eating them. This argument only works one way lol. I’m pretty confident I could get someone from tax the rich to eat the rich too?
Just convince him there’s not enough BBQ sauce in the world to make them tasty. Once that backs him off eating them, you’re well on your way.
I have huge reservations about pouring more money on the ‘you can see it from space’ size trash fire that is the cost of higher ed in the US… but yeah obviously we need to figure out how to not require people to go into 50k+ in debt to go to a state college with a part time job. It costs 15k a year at this point + living expenses when your earning potential is at it’s very lowest relative to living expenses.
The federal government should definitely be in the business of making sure there’s an option that’s affordable to everyone, and I think that means attaching some significant strings wrt admin expenses to the federal money that already goes out on higher education. Tuition at a public university shouldn’t ever be a larger number than the max size Pell Grant. If that means the business school has worse architecture and the dorms don’t have modern fixtures so be it.
The rich can keep their fancy private schools with their huge endowments. Taxing those endowments would be a pretty good way to get those public university tuition expenses down. I have no idea how we let them scam us into giving out federally backed student loans to private and for profit colleges. Huge mistake. Huge.
1 Like
I think a percentage of student debt should be forgiven rather than an amount. it’s not fair to the person who sold a bunch of stuff and now is debt free only for everyone else to be forgiven
Yeah I get those people got screwed. I don’t know how to fix it for them really. Honestly if I was trying to do a stimulus I’d probably start by giving everyone who paid student loans two years of payments or something as a lump sum. A nice chunk of change to make them as happy as the people whose student loans just got forgiven.
But of course I’d do a lot of things if I was god emperor. They wouldn’t be alone in it. There would be a gigantic street festival going on over on the wrong side the tracks I guarantee you that.
The #1 belief I hold about how to make things better in 2020 is that we need to flatten the compensation structure quite a bit. The top people should be sitting at 75-100x the median household income and net worth. That’s still extremely well off and a very very nice lifestyle complete with servants. I’m OK with societies leaders having all the comforts… but I’m not OK with them sitting on this dragons hoard telling me that I can’t have affordable healthcare because I’m self employed. I’m also not OK with them telling me that we can’t afford to do something about climate change. I’m not OK with the massive homeless camps in my city (and every other relatively nice city) being a thing. I’m not OK with the fact that we don’t really even have a mental healthcare system in this country. There are a whole bunch of these obviously pressing priorities where these people are basically saying ‘yeah that sounds nice but have you tried making the gini coefficient bigger instead?’
It’s not fair that the person had to sell a bunch of stuff to pay off student loans in the first place, the unfairness is being corrected for people in the future so they don’t have to do the same thing. Obviously some people won’t look at it like that and will think oh I had to suffer or go thru this shit to pay off my loan and everyone else should too
2 Likes
He inherited all that stuff he sold so yeah, it is fair.