Military numbers seem grossly undervalued
$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.
Oh dang, missed the part of this monthly.
Yup. FML
Right I thought the average size of a congress approved defense budget was just under a trillion lol
We don’t know their dark money shush fund income or expenditure, and guess who’s never passed an audit?
I would be shocked if they were earning a significant amount compared to federal funding. This is monthly, if you missed that like OP.
The US has a problem of representation. Specifically and especially since the Citizens United decision, corporate interests can easily flow money towards politicians to make them do just about anything they want. This exacerbated an existing problem with the corporate tax rate and has now brought it into laughably low territory.
That’s all an oversimplification of course, but it’s not that Americans haven’t “figured it out”. It is far more complicated than that.
Thank you. I’m getting quite tired of people posting the most fucking obvious takes about problems in the US, then going “why haven’t americans fixed this? are they stupid?”, when we have exceedingly small control over the actions of our shitass policy makers.
It’s some real “everyone is dumb except for me” energy.
Yet somehow most Americans think they are a democracy
Someone defending the US few weeks ago said: “decisions are made by those who show up and vote”.
No, decisions are made by those who hold economic and political power. That is NOT the citizenry of capitalist dictatorships. Having elections also serves a lot of ideological functions like:
- Building consent / subservience for the capitalist dictatorship.
- Creating the illusion of democracy.
- Being an entertaining and distracting theatre piece.
- Serving as a platform for capitalist ideas and talking points, making everything else seem “illegitimate”
- Being used as a tool of western chauvinism, labeling any other system (even substantive people’s democracies) as “undemocratic”.
exactly ,
Passiv Income has 100% of the Delegates and the 2 Major partys ,
while Active Income has no Represenative at all…
An astounding amount of our government goes towards taking care of old people, yet it still feels like there is basically no safety net for them.
USians spent 4.5 TRILLION dollars on healthcare in 2022.
Or 375 billion/month, given the month scale in the above image
It was really bothering me that I was pronouncing this “YOO ESS-EEANNS” in my head every time I saw people using it. I just realized it can definitely also be “YOO-ZHIANS.” Which is obviously far superior.
Oh, we’ve known. There just isn’t anything we can do about it.
You can organize.
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Of course it’s not as simple as just saying organize, I never said it was. Organizing remains the only path out, and it is possible.
You invented what now ?!
Like we did with Occupy Wall Street or are doing now for Palestine?
No, harder. Much, much harder.
OWS crumbled in ways right out of various leaked three letter agency guides to disrupting grass roots movements.
I’d love to see it get another try, with how news sources have become far more decentralized. Less opportunity for major news orgs to kill the momentum.
Full disclosure, the destruction of OWS is pretty much the one thing I allow myself to go “full tinfoil hat” over.
Covid protests and jan6… There is a always some fed running this things even ifntheu start organically.
OWS was not well-organized. Palestinian solidarity groups are doing better. The key difference is in being able to coherently make informed decisions as a group and then act on them as one.
Every OWS encampment was basically 5-30 orgs all doing their own thing and then fighting about horizontalism and being naive about how the cops and City Hall would treat them. We need to be able to act like 1-3 orgs (even if there are more), politically educate so we can avoid mistakes, and create good structure as early as possible so that expectations are set and time isn’t wasted and bad decisions are avoided.
The US left is basically slowly relearning the basics of organizing. Get involved and make it go faster!
I’m not American, but generally exploite people can’t afford to miss work.
The bolsheviks managed to, as have other revolutionary groups.
If you are doing this shot at a gun point, you are no better than the regime you are fighting
What a clown take to glorify Bolsheviks’ crimes.
How is this anymore acceptable than “people voted for Hitler” shit?
If you are doing this shot at a gun point, you are no better than the regime you are fighting
Oppressed people have the right to use violence to liberate themselves. Were the Haitian Slaves wrong for killing their Masters? Was John Brown wrong for killing Slave Owners? Were the French wrong for killing the Monarchy? Were the Bolsheviks wrong for killing the Tsar? Are Palestinians wrong for killing the IDF?
Violence is a tool that should be used sparingly and carefully, yes. It should be avoided, if possible. However, if non-violence is proven to not work, then that leaves violence, or threat of violence, as the remaining path.
The idea that using violence against oppressors makes you “no better than them” is useless moralism used to justify an extremely violent system that daily beats its subjects.
What a clown take to glorify Bolsheviks’ crimes.
Was it a crime to liberate Russia from the brutal Tsars and pull Russia out of the highly unpopular and bloody World War I?
How is this anymore acceptable than “people voted for Hitler” shit?
What on Earth are you talking about? Why are you comparing liberatory violence with voting in Hitler?
After they killed the czars, they turned on the people.
That’s the part tankie won’t teach you folks but a quick Wikipedia search should explain to you what they did to the peasants, esp in Ukraine and Kazakhstan
After they killed the czars, they turned on the people.
Yea, they helped the people by ending famines, doubling life expectancy, getting to 99% literacy rates, provided free college and healthcare, and democratized government.
That’s the part tankie won’t teach you folks but a quick Wikipedia search should explain to you what they did to the peasants, esp in Ukraine and Kazakhstan
Are you genuinely under the impression that Marxists somehow spent their entire lives avoiding western narratives around the USSR, read dozens of books on history and theory, and somehow have never once seen the western point of view? Are you specifically referring to events, or their entire history?
As an example, prior to the current Russo-Ukranian conflict escalating in 2022, in 2019 62% of Ukranians said they were worse off then, than under Communism. Ukranians enjoyed being a part of the USSR more than they do being a part of the current Ukranian State. Similarly, Central Asia (including Kazakhstan) is not without Soviet Nostalgia either.
This is, of course, after you said using violence against oppressors makes you no better than them, which automatically makes you anti-Palestine, pro-Confederacy, anti-Haitian Slave Revolt, anti-French Revolution, and against all violent liberatory movements, if we assume you to be morally consistent.
Imagine if americans were as excited to shoot politicians as they get about shooting kids in school
Yeah I can’t figure it out. All those gun rights. You’d think they’d do more with them
There is a reason why one happens and the other doesn’t.
buissness is getting squezed . also the current minority…
Estate taxes is woefully small. There should be a 100% death tax on all assets after $1M, excluding a single home.
The tax formally known as “inheritance tax”.
Have to keep everyone poor to control them
I’m not sure I understand your point so if I’m off base let me know.
Firstly, inheriting $200k - $1M doesn’t keep anyone poor. It doesn’t even stop wealth from concentrating at a level that harms others and warps society - it just prevents that level of wealth from passing down to people who did nothing.
Secondly, if everyone was poor who would be controlling them? You have to keep most people poor and a much smaller group of people unassailably wealthy to control them. That’s exactly the problem that high death taxes address.
In my part of the world $1m (even for USD, add 40%)is not even enough to buy a small house. A million dollars is a FUCKLOAD of work but you can’t buy shit. At best you get a country shack with maintenance required, no insulation kind of thing, and no money left over.
Maybe that adds some context.
And is that $1m cap per person or for the whole estate? Either way people aren’t gonna interit anything that worthwhile
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TBF taxes on billionaires would go under individual taxes. And corporate taxes are relatively easy to fudge because corporations aren’t real except on paper.
TBF you should really put more effort into “figuring it out” because you did not figure it out …
i will give you a hint:
who is getting represented ?
It’s a technical detail people might not have been aware of, and I’ve pointed it out. I’m going to disengage rather than defend a viewpoint I don’t even necessarily hold.
but who is getting represented ?
aktive income
or passiv income , just guess , or is it scary… ?
Most have, increasingly so, they just lack strong orgs. As Imperialism decays, more will be forced to grapple with reality.
This graph gives the false impression that federal taxes actually pay for anything.
The people are in debt… to themselves
And as long as people have confidence in our currency, the debt we owe to ourselves really doesn’t matter
This idiotic logic is how we got 34 trillion of debt and nothing show for it lol
We have a fair amount to show for it (like over 750 overseas military bases), it’s just that very little of it is for the working class.
Thank you.
Thought MMT was recently disproved.
No sources. Thought the recent inflation showed it to not model things. It would be great if MMT worked though.
MMT isn’t a tool for modeling all of inflation’s factors. It’s simply a description of how sovereign fiat money works. Some people mistakenly (or knowingly, for disparagement or promotion) attribute things to MMT that it just isn’t.
That National Defense slice looking like it could be decimated, also
It isn’t cheap being “leader of the free world”.
The poorest Americans are constantly fighting with the bureaucracy to get assistance, this is by design to make them hate it.
Any addition to the expansion of the state will be met with hostility.
there is a Ingroup that the Laws shall protect but never hinder , and ther eis a Outgroup that the laws shall hinder, but never protect.
I’d like to see one of these for the UK tax system
No matter how you tax there isn’t 300+ billion of income to find. Endless new debt isn’t sustainable.
Endless US debt is fine, provided there keeps being interest in the US dollar as a reserve currency. The US national debt is simply the difference between money printed and money collected. As long as the US dollar “disappears” into the global economy (which it does), inflation is kept under check.
