The notion that increased IRS resources would primarily go to crack down on the rich is contrary to current and past IRS practices, as well as basic logic.
▪️The rich use accountants to file taxes. They know precisely how to find all of the legal tax breaks and avenues to shelter income. If audited, they have a professional to defend them. Very few rich people would jeopardize their wealth by violating tax law, especially when they can find legal avenues to lower them.
▪️It’s the poor and working class who are far more likely to cheat on their taxes. The gig workers, tip workers, doing jobs for cash off the books, fledgling small businesses, etc. They have an incentive to hide income from the IRS, but are also much less sophisticated at it, and usually have no one to defend them in an audit.
▪️Thus, if you are an agency trying to find unpaid taxes, fraud is far more likely to be found among poor and working class tax returns, Plus, they will be largely unable or unwilling to defend themselves in a tax case. It’s far more lucrative to target them, that is the reality of the incentives at play.
▪️Note: this isn’t suggesting a moral failing among the poor/working class. Especially if you believe taxation is theft/coercion, not paying taxes is simply trying to keep your own money. But it is a legal failing and something the IRS can take action on.
▪️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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▪️I was playing around with the new Grokipedia and it already seems much better than Wikipedia (which admittedly isn’t saying much). I was looking for a topic that is politically polarizing that I also knew a lot about, so used “Kenosha unrest shooting” to compare the two.
▪️A key component to the shooting was understanding the broader context behind the Kenosha riots and who Kyle Rittenhouse ended up shooting. Wikipedia simply says that Jacob Blake was shot by police and was paralyzed, thus unrest. Grokipedia gives a much more in-depth account so the reader can see that Blake was a serial criminal with a warrant who had a knife and was resisting arrest while fleeing with children in his car.
▪️When it comes to those who were shot, Wikipedia just gives the names and ages. Grokipedia goes in-depth on each person and about their violent criminal history and mental instability that night.
▪️Part of the left wing mythology over Rittenhouse was removing the context and ...
