Imagine blaming corporations for the tax code when it’s the govt and politicians who are responsible for it.
▪️The irony is if you proposed a truly simple tax code, like everyone owes 10% on whatever they make, the Jon Stewarts of the world would howl and call it unfair. Instead, in the name of fairness, they want a progressive tax code, with a bunch of different brackets.
▪️But wait, having children is a financial burden. Ok, let’s carve out a child tax credit loophole to help parents. What about homeowners, we want to help them, right? Ok, let’s have a mortgage deduction. Wait, that’s unfair to those who rent, so let’s add a renter’s credit, too. And student loans? Those are also burdensome, let’s let borrowers deduct them.
▪️What about childcare expenses? Ok, add another deduction. And it’s unfair people who are self employed have to shoulder business expenses, so let them deduct business expenses. Same with healthcare expenses. And what about people who take care of their elderly parents? Surely they deserve a deduction, too. Heck, let’s just include a standard deduction, just so no one is left out, and let people add up a hundred things to see if they can itemize.
▪️And we want to encourage people to save for their retirement, right? Ok, let’s have a 401K where their contributions aren’t taxed. But limit it to $23K/yr. Oh, but $30.5K for people over 50. Let’s also add loopholes for individual retirement accounts (IRAs). People can contribute, say, $7K, but of course we’ll let those over 50 shelter $8K. Unless they make over $161K/yr.
▪️Surely, we also want people to donate to charity, right? Ok, let’s add a charitable deduction. But only to approved charities, which have to be recognized by the IRS and file their own tax returns. We’ll make a whole new tax code for them so there’s no funny business.
▪️But what about climate change?! We need to move towards renewable energy. Ok, anyone who buys an electric car can get a…$7,500 tax credit. And if you put solar panels on your home…1/3 of that can be a credit. Of course, only wealthier filers can take advantage of these things, but there’s a climate emergency going on.
How dare the corporations make things so complicated!
The reality is that politicians love having a complicated tax code because it ensures special interest lobby them for favors and carveouts. If the code was truly simple, they’d have no power to dole out favors. And while it’s true that poor people don’t get a lot of loopholes, it’s because most poor people pay zero in federal income tax.
▪️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 ...
