Meme Policeman
To protect and serve against false and misleading memes.
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▪️This meme makes it seem like 60% of Americans are destitute, but that’s not what lies beneath the headline. This comes from an analysis from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), which is an activist group for low and middle income families. Their reason for existence is to be a perennial Debbie Downer on the plight of the middle class, so keep that in mind, although they do make some fair points.

▪️LISEP has a metric they call Minimal Quality of Life Index (MQL) which imo is misleading. I’d call it the decent quality of life index. It’s the income they consider necessary to afford a reasonable standard of living in America, beyond just essentials.

▪️For a couple with 2 kids, the MQL is $120,302, which doesn’t appear to include taxes, so would equate to a salary of ~$130-150K. Now, that’s probably what it takes for a family to have a decent QOL today, but it’s certainly not a poverty line or minimum standard.

▪️For example, this allots $27,875 ($2,322 per month) for transportation. One could certainly eclipse this with a few family airline trips, but this budget should easily provide for 2 decent cars with gas, insurance and maintenance. The MQL also budgets for college savings. This is comfortable middle class territory.

▪️LISEP likes to highlight that the MQL has declined since 2001, but it’s also risen considerably from the lows in 2011-13. So one could spin this to say things are considerably better than a decade ago.

▪️Basically, the MQL got steadily better from 2013 until peaking around 2018-19. Then there was a downturn in 2022-23, where the data ends. This was during the high inflation in the early-to mid part of the Biden years so not surprising. However, inflation moderated in the last Biden year and through Trump’s first months so it’s likely the MQL has leveled or reversed trend since.

▪️This headline should read, “A majority of Americans unable to afford a comfortable middle class lifestyle.” Which has always been the case here, and everywhere else in the world.

Link to the MQL, graphs in comments:
https://www.lisep.org/mql

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As with the leftist freak out over “banned books” this is not banning books, it’s still easy to get Harry Potter and bookstores should be able to limit whatever books they want for whatever reason. But not only does it show a double standard, the rationale is far less justifiable than removing certain content from school libraries. At least there the justification was the content of certain books are inappropriate for children, clearly not every book should be available in a school library. Here, there’s no argument about the content they just don’t like the author’s politics!

Story:
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-pop-culture/san-francisco-bookstore-stops-selling-jk-rowling-titles-due-harry-pott-rcna215255

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Because news came out about his letter to the FBI, revealing he was a nutcase. The letter was rambling and incoherent, claiming he was trained by the US military off the books, and that Walz had instructed him to kill Amy Klobuchar so he could run for Senate. None of it made any sense (Walz is not running for Senate) and none of the assassinations made any sense, even in a diabolical way.

Nearly all of his hit list was Democrats (including Walz) and abortion clinics, but he was supposedly working for Walz?! Plus, one of the guys he killed wasn’t even on his list, and others were no longer in office or deceased. None of it makes sense from any coherent angle.

Basically, it appears the guy was mentally ill and neither the left or right can use the incident to push their agendas anymore, so the story was dropped.

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This is so dumb. First, this means LA began as Spanish land founded to support Spanish missions (i.e. colonialism). Which contradicts their entire premise. But the reality is that Los Angeles is a quintessential American city.

▪️When the US acquired California in the 1840s, LA was a small town of less than 2,000 people. It was basically nothing. It became large only after the gold rush and the railroads completed in the 1870-80s, which brought thousands of new settlers and a booming commercial center.

▪️But LA had a major issue limiting its growth, no water. It wasn’t until Mulholland found a water source and built an aqueduct down from Northern California that LA had the infrastructure to grow into a major city.

▪️Then, a combination of oil, real estate and the film industry caused it to boom in the early 1900s. Post WWII, industries like aerospace continued its spectacular growth. Calling this “Mexican land” is a brain dead take. Neither the Mexicans, Spanish nor ...

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