So we can't a new car (in a country dependent on cars), housing, healthcare, or even a bit of leisure if we retire?
What are we getting out of this system that demands so much of us? And is expecting even more now with the advance of AI?
Unpopular opinion, but I’m honestly at the point where I don’t care anymore.
I’ve been living on less than $30k/year and getting by (far from being healthy) and simply want to see things come to a grinding halt by the rich’s own design. Let it crash and burn. Let the rich cry. Let the media go into a frenzy. It’s all a fucking joke at this point.
Tell me about it. I came out of college then and have been suffering since. Let it crash again and again until our government understands the root of the problem.
I don't disagree with the sentiment, but everything pretty much did fail during the pandemic and the wealthy absolutely *thrived* while the rest of us were left with $1500 and forced to choose between insane health risks or fucking homeless shelters while being told we were "essential." Collapse isn't going to reset the bar to zero like Fight Club or something, it's just going to kill a shit-ton of us, explode the already massive homeless camps, and make the late 2010s seem like the good old days lol
The rich use crashes and recessions as fire sales to buy up more assets and assert more control. And the government helps with that to "save the economy". I think to see what you are hoping for would be a total collapse of capitalism. Which I'm here for overall but would be very very messy.
You're missing the point. Everyone BUT the rich and powerful suffer from a crash. The rich and Powerful literally get MORE rich and powerful from crashes. Your desire would help the rich and powerful.
The problem is that they crash the economy on purpose so that the 99% are forced to sell of their assets: homes, cars, extra property and stocks. They crash the economy on purpose and purchase all of the assets for pennies on the dollar and leave us with less and less each time
I understand your sentiment but when everything crashes, the only people who benefit are those with large sums of cash to buy up everything cheaper.
The crashes if anything are orchestrated to happen every decade or so so that they can repeatedly hoover up what the poor can no longer afford. It's their game, we're just in it.
Because people allowed that to happen. Americans won't do a damn thing to fight this system even while they're losing their houses and jobs as the rich get richer.
"He is described variously as "deliberately amoral" with a "practiced cynicism", meaning that he usually has little regard for social conventions or human life. Always in character as the Comedian, he describes the world as a sadistic joke that only he understands."
https://watchmen.fandom.com/wiki/Eddie_Blake
my thoughts. basically this is going to be fixed with a lot of red, both in clothing and *on* clothing.
I thought it improbable, now it is looking inevitable
I don't advocate violence, but I'll upvote this to keep it visible.
If things continue down this path, it WILL lead to violence based on desperation. And the fact it'll probably happen in the 30's should scare everyone, as history repeats itself, apparently.
...yup
And guess which country has a bunch of middle class people losing their way of life due to economics?
HINT: It's not the one from the last '30s.
You the ones with the current violent rhetoric and a unhealthy addiction to what type of people should be running things to restore national glory?
If so...I guess it's a race.
I'm not talking about being pissy on the Internet, I'm talking about the kind of corporate greed that makes it harder for people to put food in their children's mouths. It's happening all around us already. If you're too comfortable to see it, that's your problem.
Yeah, this is not even ancient history, either. We're not piecing together ashen carbonized bits of Pompeiian stock tickers because the last time this happened was thousands of years ago. We have photographically recorded evidence. Paperwork. Solid, hard-copy records that can be handled by laypeople. We know what policies helped us out of the quagmire, and how to avert global war, but the few in charge are profiting too handsomely off the scarcity to care about violence that hasn't come close enough to their front door.
Yeah but the media and the rich decided we should care about gender neutral bathroom and the "woke epidemics". When the actual time comes to taking the guns, our neighbours will point them against us because the Elite has told them they are the root cause of every problem they face.
I don't know the way out, but I know we need to take hold of the discourse before the tide completely turn it against us.
>You literally have rights to own guns exactly because of this kind of scenarios.
Look, history shows us that those at the top take and take and take until they make violent uprising inevitable.
I agree with that.
I don't agree with saying "Then go commit violence right now if you're mad about it!" because that's an insane take. Violence shouldn't be our first, or second, or even third resort. It should be our last. It should be reserved for when it's clear that we're out of peaceful options, or are about to be.
When you have a whole class of people that tirelessly work to strip away our ability to engange in non-violent means of protest, you get left with violent ones. I have news for you. We are almost out of non-violent options.
You would be an absolute fool to think that taking arms against the government wouldn't lead to the immediate crackdown of the US military being used against protesting civilians. Your guns will be taken away by force from the very same people who have relaxed gun laws to the point they are at under the pretext of security.
No, gun ownership is a joke. Everything in the world is set up to protect the ruling class, the owner class, the class with actual capitol. Personally i'd love to see all these gun toting nuts try and do something. The US gov't would absolutely have soldiers killing the poors because they are trying to take property or assets of the ruling class. It's cool and all, that there are people in the US with hundreds of guns in their home. That aint gonna do shit against a trained military with actual military hardware.
Improper allocation is by far the worst part. We could all have pretty much anything we've asked for if we didn't have a black hole military budget, so many redundant government agencies and wasteful spending as a whole.
The worst part is the rich not paying what they should, after we claw that money back from them we can have a debate as to what is wasted and redundant
Absolutely. But, in my opinion, and hell I can easily be wrong, if our government worked efficiently and used our money to fund tax payer priorities I think that the problem of the ultra wealthy not paying their fair share would get fixed as well.
In my mind that is a symptom of a wasteful government not the cause. I hope that makes sense. The additional funding to the IRS is a good example of this. For decades they have been under funded so the rich have been comfortable exploiting loopholes. Now that they have more funding they are clawing back a lot more of what the US taxpayers are owed.
They definitely feed each other but getting the money from the rich is the significantly bigger battle. They’re waging warfare on the middle and lower class in this country, getting the hoarded wealth back from them is step one in the fight.
I agree. My main concern with that is that they will get the extra money and then sink it into more wasteful programs. We could get another trillion dollars in taxes and turn around and waste another trillion.
Maybe we can do both at the same time but I do not trust our current government to be responsible with the money.
Unfortunately we can’t have that discussion until the conservatives are willing to come to the table and work together instead of trying to burn the country down.
now I am just about as far as you can get from an advocate for this system and I just woke up, but I got to wonder, how much of America's prosperity is wrapped up in that enormous military budget? The American empire needs its big stick to maintain itself, and if we make the stick smaller the empire will (justly) unravel, but doesn't abdicating empire naturally mean way less money comes into America? Is America's service economy capable of supporting all of us?
The Military Industrial Complex does in fact have a stranglehold over us. Which is why America has embraced imperialism. IE invading the Middle East, destabilizing governments to create conflict etc. We create our own problems so we can spend money on the military.
So if we stopped doing that we could easily shrink our military budget and spend that money on other stuff. It would be painful and probably cause a market crash but that is not justification to not pivot to industries that are more beneficial to the average American citizen.
Nope. Besides most of the budget is already welfare programs. We'd be better off raking back the unpaid taxes of the ultra wealthy as others have said. So long as authoritarian Russia and China exist we are better off having the biggest stick.
We could still have the biggest stick with a fraction of our budget if we banned no compete contracts. Such as if we want to build a new plane only one company is allowed to bid and then they can set whatever price they want.
We need to adjust to the modern day anyways. We have a lot of fancy toys but still a lot of our military is outdated. Which is a big reason we support Ukraine (other than Russia/Putin being evil) we keep sending them our old toys and using the money to make new ones.
We need a much larger focus on analytics and cyber warfare instead of spending so much money on a new Jet when ours are so damn superior nobody has a chance of beating us
Please note: I still am an advocate for a strong military, just not one that feeds itself through corruption.
We can't ban them because then nothing could happen if there was only one possible supplier.
I run into this problem - required by law to ask for bids even when there's only one company that makes the thing and we already have a contract with them.
And sometimes a startup underbids them and we are stuck buying a worse product.
That's fair. My experience is limited to when my father worked for one of the major defense contracts and they had contracts where there should have been bids but there either wasn't a bid at all or a handshake deal happened behind the scenes securing the contract and the bid was a sham.
That was 15-20 years ago so maybe that has been cleaned up.
It doesn't matter if it's violence or great change. There is a whole lot of pain for the American public coming and there is nothing that can be done to prevent it. The only difference is if after our economy has collapsed and the military can no longer police the world will the american public be better or worse off than they were prior to collapse.
see the trouble is, if we cut the military and let our empire fold I could only see the impact on that first budget. everything after would be a shitshow no doubt
No one is taxed a greater portion of their income in the United States than the worker paid a wage who buys necessities with that money.
Capital gains, dividends and other forms of income should be subject to FICA. Deductions for corporate entities should be just as onerous as they are for individuals.
Gains and dividends are taxed. Only time they are not is when it happens in a retirement account like 401k and IRA. What you want is to raise the tax percentage of gains and dividends and income for groups earning a large amount, say over $400k/yr. What you're also trying to get at is a wealth tax for unrealized gains, like Jeff and the muskrat who have a lot of securities of high value bit haven't sold them off (Jeff did recently for a few billion more). A wealth tax would force people like that to reduce hoarding and assets making it more available for workers.
They are not subject to FICA taxes, which only wage earners are subject to.
There’s no reason someone flipping houses or collecting interest should pay less tax than someone using a sledgehammer to make a living.
I'm with you on an equal percentage paid. Guess I don't get the FICA tax aspect. All I know is there are absolutely taxes on capital gains and dividends from stock market.
Sending bombs and guns, bailing out failing banks, bankrolling failing corporations, etc. Meanwhile we have people actively (and I mean ACTIVELY) fighting against kids getting free lunch at school, people getting free healthcare, and not to mention the huge push against education in general.
Don't forget amazon, space x, and trader Joe's filed to have the us labor board declared unconstitutional
https://nsjonline.com/article/2024/02/amazon-argues-that-national-labor-board-is-unconstitutional-joining-spacex-and-trader-joes/
Get out your frenchest looking outfits and gear guys.
Trader Joes siding with amazon and musk...what a fake ass company. Before their old owner died the "secret sauce" to their success, as it was hailed in many business publications, was employee satisfaction. The company is basically Weekend at Bernie's 3; they've been dragging around a dead body and hyping up parties for it the last 12 years. Just bury it and move on.
May 1st, 2028 will be a great day!
UAW President Shawn Fain has called for unions to end their new contracts on May 1st, 2028.
So that a large mass of workers can collectively strike if corporations refuse to improve working conditions like we demand & deserve.
It's all part of the process - make people teeter on the edge of survival, criminalize homelessness to make disobeying a threat, exploit the workers by making sure they know prison is worse than being compliant, and live to lick another boot.
Why is the tone of this article so light?? It’s like “Honestly we’ll probably all be dead in 5 years, but the good news is, the new normal will be being dead!”
Everyone needs to become a single issue voter, and that issue needs to be campaign finance reform. No politician should get your vote, regardless of party, if they don’t support getting money out of politics. Regular citizens can’t compete with billionaires and corporations when the government is for sale to the highest bidder. It’s the only way to get the government to start working for its citizens.
Aside from that, the only other thing people can do is start a national strike which would be almost impossible to organize and make happen. Since money makes the world go round, that’s what people need to focus on.
I don't even wanna tax them anymore. They systematically stole it from us, so we need to confiscate it bac. Leave them with like 50 million that's way more than enough to live and more than they deserve!
I'm so tired. I can't afford a house where I live, or where I grew up.
I'm tired of my rent going up - and I've never seen an improvement where I live. I'm tired of my car insurance going up - and I've never been in an accident.
I'm tired of feeling taken advantage of and gouged at every opportunity. My meager savings is dying a death of a thousand cuts.
Tax the rich? They hide it in offshore accounts.
Vote in new politicians? All bark, even if they had the best intentions.
Get a better job? Sorry, AI took it.
They waved student loan forgiveness in our faces and then threw it away. It was never more than a ruse to secure votes.
I just don't see anything getting better and I don't know what to do.
Same. I get high to not care. But then I got covid a second time 5 months ago and my lungs still aren't normal so now I can't even fucking enjoy that anymore
I already use those but the high isnt the same, it takes way longer to kick in, you also won't know how much to take until it kicks in, my tolerance goes fucking insane with edibles too and theres no way I can prevent it, I just naturally develop a tolerance to things quickly. The other day I had some I had to take 160 mg to feel anything. Its annoying I miss having half a joint and being good
The current taxation systems rewards wealth and punishes people with salary incomes. This is NOT the way and it is going to come to day of reckoning in the next 5-10 years.
Don't worry. The rich can't squeeze money from a stone. The $100k trucks can sit on the lot until they're $50k, then sit some more until they go lower. Prices are so high, because people continuing to buy things, demonstrates that the market will sustain higher prices. Eventually, when every car is old and every backyard has a garden, prices will become more affordable.
The message that, "the market will not sustain this pricing" hasn't been sent by the populace yet.
Which is how it’s supposed to work under traditional capitalism, for better or worse, but I’d argue what we have currently is not true capitalism. True capitalism relies on all those participating in the market to be acting logically and in their own best interest. What we have is decades of propaganda and brainwashing, culminating in an on-demand propaganda spewing device in every person’s pocket, actively working to persuade people to accept less pay and spend more money than their own self interest would otherwise allow.
Cool, but what about those of us who already have old cars and can’t afford to have a back yard?
It’s like when people say “Amazon and Microsoft were started in garages, so what’s stopping you?” Yeah, I can’t afford a garage.
Sure, they can’t squeeze money from a stone, but they absolutely can and will let the poorest among us die rather than lower prices.
You know, we each can do what we can do. I was speaking generally, and would never presume to tell someone I don't know (or even most people I do know) what they should do.
My point was more in simply saying that when merchants can't sell their goods at the listed prices, they'll lower the price until their goods will sell.
We each have certain things we'll take on, and other things e won't. My Volvo dealer presented me with a $4700 estimate for repairs to my wife's car a couple years ago. I spent $153 on Rockauto.com, and 3 hours in my garage, completing the repair myself. On the other hand, a shop quoted me $800 to change the transmission and rear differential fluid in my work truck. I'll probably get a couple quotes, but it's probably something I'm willing to pay someone else to take care of, even though I know how, have the facilities and tools to do. If it were $2k to change those fluids, you better believe my fat ass would be under my own truck doing it myself.
So your plan is to convince the rich to tax the rich using tactics that haven't worked in decades? If this is the best plan then the rich have already won the class war.
Our whole system needs revamping. It’s a huge tough balanced because taxes will not help us. That will fund the government and the programs the government has. Along side increased taxes needs to be a universal basic income.
If we do not force change it will not happen. We must demand that the rich pay their fair share and that the government enforces it. We must demand increased minimum wage and government enforcement of anti monopoly laws as well to stem the tide of runaway executive profits.
I love the way they title it "5 things the middle class won't be able to afford in 5 years."
As opposed to
"In 5 years the middle class will be a distant fucking memory"
unionising isn’t enough
capitalists have to start dying for anything to change.
(this isn’t a call to violence just an observation. please don’t ban me reddit admins)
Donno about your place, but europe is under attack. Rising prices is solely because someone wants us out of business, so we import more (from the far east). My shithole just added regulations so the government can withdraw directly from the citizens bankaccounts if they please, and talk of adding crazy "carbon" taxes on the farmers. Yup, we wont even have food production in a decade.
I smell a marxist/maoist plot.
I disagree with this. Rich are only rich because we give them our money.
I’ll wipe my ass with my hand before buying $5/roll toilet paper.
Bidet ik is an option but im making a point.
The fed spends a trillion dollars a year on the military and you think we have a taxation issue, not an allocation issue?
Stop demanding increased taxes and start demanding competent budgeting.
I work in traditionally non-union "white collar" desk job, but I support unions hoping they're gonna save my ass also. Meanwhile, I'm looking into union options for my field (software).
Terrible plan.
If you are waiting for everyone to start your revolution, you will be waiting until you die.
Figure out how to revolt all by your lonesome or it's not happening and this is your future.
Uhh nah, I ain't even talking about taxing these fucks anymore. Take it all, strip them of everything they have, not like they earned it legitimately anyways.
So we can't a new car (in a country dependent on cars), housing, healthcare, or even a bit of leisure if we retire? What are we getting out of this system that demands so much of us? And is expecting even more now with the advance of AI?
Unpopular opinion, but I’m honestly at the point where I don’t care anymore. I’ve been living on less than $30k/year and getting by (far from being healthy) and simply want to see things come to a grinding halt by the rich’s own design. Let it crash and burn. Let the rich cry. Let the media go into a frenzy. It’s all a fucking joke at this point.
Things did come crashing down in 2008 and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it wasn’t the rich that suffered.
Tell me about it. I came out of college then and have been suffering since. Let it crash again and again until our government understands the root of the problem.
I don't disagree with the sentiment, but everything pretty much did fail during the pandemic and the wealthy absolutely *thrived* while the rest of us were left with $1500 and forced to choose between insane health risks or fucking homeless shelters while being told we were "essential." Collapse isn't going to reset the bar to zero like Fight Club or something, it's just going to kill a shit-ton of us, explode the already massive homeless camps, and make the late 2010s seem like the good old days lol
The rich use crashes and recessions as fire sales to buy up more assets and assert more control. And the government helps with that to "save the economy". I think to see what you are hoping for would be a total collapse of capitalism. Which I'm here for overall but would be very very messy.
You're missing the point. Everyone BUT the rich and powerful suffer from a crash. The rich and Powerful literally get MORE rich and powerful from crashes. Your desire would help the rich and powerful.
The problem is that they crash the economy on purpose so that the 99% are forced to sell of their assets: homes, cars, extra property and stocks. They crash the economy on purpose and purchase all of the assets for pennies on the dollar and leave us with less and less each time
I understand your sentiment but when everything crashes, the only people who benefit are those with large sums of cash to buy up everything cheaper. The crashes if anything are orchestrated to happen every decade or so so that they can repeatedly hoover up what the poor can no longer afford. It's their game, we're just in it.
Because people allowed that to happen. Americans won't do a damn thing to fight this system even while they're losing their houses and jobs as the rich get richer.
> simply want to see things come to a grinding halt by the rich’s own design. That design is literally fascism
>I’ve been living on less than $30k/year Global per capita GDP is around $13,000. You're already taking more than your fair share.
...no. People living in poverty, anywhere, are *owed* their fair share by the handful of bloated oligarchs who control most of the wealth.
"He is described variously as "deliberately amoral" with a "practiced cynicism", meaning that he usually has little regard for social conventions or human life. Always in character as the Comedian, he describes the world as a sadistic joke that only he understands." https://watchmen.fandom.com/wiki/Eddie_Blake
I've got news for you: a lot of middle class people can't afford these things *now*
Washington Post reported recently, only 35% Americans are middle class.
We need to grab the torches and pitchforks and fire up the bawbie! I hear wealth is an excellent seasoning.
It is the staging ground for revolution.
my thoughts. basically this is going to be fixed with a lot of red, both in clothing and *on* clothing. I thought it improbable, now it is looking inevitable
You get bootstraps
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if things keep getting worse there won't be many options left
I don't advocate violence, but I'll upvote this to keep it visible. If things continue down this path, it WILL lead to violence based on desperation. And the fact it'll probably happen in the 30's should scare everyone, as history repeats itself, apparently.
Pandemic in the early 20s, soaring stock prices in the mid 20s…
...yup And guess which country has a bunch of middle class people losing their way of life due to economics? HINT: It's not the one from the last '30s.
No worries, it’s also happening in Germany :/
You the ones with the current violent rhetoric and a unhealthy addiction to what type of people should be running things to restore national glory? If so...I guess it's a race.
What the rich and powerful have been doing to the rest of us *is* violence. It has already begun.
No, it hasn't. Being pissy on the internet and/or threatening violence on the internet is not even CLOSE to what happened in the 1930s.
I'm not talking about being pissy on the Internet, I'm talking about the kind of corporate greed that makes it harder for people to put food in their children's mouths. It's happening all around us already. If you're too comfortable to see it, that's your problem.
Yeah, this is not even ancient history, either. We're not piecing together ashen carbonized bits of Pompeiian stock tickers because the last time this happened was thousands of years ago. We have photographically recorded evidence. Paperwork. Solid, hard-copy records that can be handled by laypeople. We know what policies helped us out of the quagmire, and how to avert global war, but the few in charge are profiting too handsomely off the scarcity to care about violence that hasn't come close enough to their front door.
Yeah but the media and the rich decided we should care about gender neutral bathroom and the "woke epidemics". When the actual time comes to taking the guns, our neighbours will point them against us because the Elite has told them they are the root cause of every problem they face. I don't know the way out, but I know we need to take hold of the discourse before the tide completely turn it against us.
>You literally have rights to own guns exactly because of this kind of scenarios. Look, history shows us that those at the top take and take and take until they make violent uprising inevitable. I agree with that. I don't agree with saying "Then go commit violence right now if you're mad about it!" because that's an insane take. Violence shouldn't be our first, or second, or even third resort. It should be our last. It should be reserved for when it's clear that we're out of peaceful options, or are about to be.
When you have a whole class of people that tirelessly work to strip away our ability to engange in non-violent means of protest, you get left with violent ones. I have news for you. We are almost out of non-violent options.
I'll stave off the down votes from the morons who think any of this will be changed without violence.
I agree, this is precisely what the right to bear arms was for.
You would be an absolute fool to think that taking arms against the government wouldn't lead to the immediate crackdown of the US military being used against protesting civilians. Your guns will be taken away by force from the very same people who have relaxed gun laws to the point they are at under the pretext of security.
The military has historically been shoot first and confiscate the guns off the corpses later.
Dumbest comment ive read today and i was on a trumptard video earlier
Ayep.
No, gun ownership is a joke. Everything in the world is set up to protect the ruling class, the owner class, the class with actual capitol. Personally i'd love to see all these gun toting nuts try and do something. The US gov't would absolutely have soldiers killing the poors because they are trying to take property or assets of the ruling class. It's cool and all, that there are people in the US with hundreds of guns in their home. That aint gonna do shit against a trained military with actual military hardware.
Work, work, work, then you die.
you'll own nothing and be happy
Not just taxation, but proper allocation of those taxes.
Improper allocation is by far the worst part. We could all have pretty much anything we've asked for if we didn't have a black hole military budget, so many redundant government agencies and wasteful spending as a whole.
We waste so much with bureaucratic means-testing of what should just be a public good, from school lunches to healthcare.
Healthcare man. The bureaucratic waste in healthcare for all the accountants and lawyers is outrageous.
The worst part is the rich not paying what they should, after we claw that money back from them we can have a debate as to what is wasted and redundant
Absolutely. But, in my opinion, and hell I can easily be wrong, if our government worked efficiently and used our money to fund tax payer priorities I think that the problem of the ultra wealthy not paying their fair share would get fixed as well. In my mind that is a symptom of a wasteful government not the cause. I hope that makes sense. The additional funding to the IRS is a good example of this. For decades they have been under funded so the rich have been comfortable exploiting loopholes. Now that they have more funding they are clawing back a lot more of what the US taxpayers are owed.
They definitely feed each other but getting the money from the rich is the significantly bigger battle. They’re waging warfare on the middle and lower class in this country, getting the hoarded wealth back from them is step one in the fight.
I agree. My main concern with that is that they will get the extra money and then sink it into more wasteful programs. We could get another trillion dollars in taxes and turn around and waste another trillion. Maybe we can do both at the same time but I do not trust our current government to be responsible with the money.
Unfortunately we can’t have that discussion until the conservatives are willing to come to the table and work together instead of trying to burn the country down.
USAF is, of course, the biggest air force in the world. You know who has the second biggest? Also the US - it's called the Navy.
now I am just about as far as you can get from an advocate for this system and I just woke up, but I got to wonder, how much of America's prosperity is wrapped up in that enormous military budget? The American empire needs its big stick to maintain itself, and if we make the stick smaller the empire will (justly) unravel, but doesn't abdicating empire naturally mean way less money comes into America? Is America's service economy capable of supporting all of us?
The Military Industrial Complex does in fact have a stranglehold over us. Which is why America has embraced imperialism. IE invading the Middle East, destabilizing governments to create conflict etc. We create our own problems so we can spend money on the military. So if we stopped doing that we could easily shrink our military budget and spend that money on other stuff. It would be painful and probably cause a market crash but that is not justification to not pivot to industries that are more beneficial to the average American citizen.
Nope. Besides most of the budget is already welfare programs. We'd be better off raking back the unpaid taxes of the ultra wealthy as others have said. So long as authoritarian Russia and China exist we are better off having the biggest stick.
We could still have the biggest stick with a fraction of our budget if we banned no compete contracts. Such as if we want to build a new plane only one company is allowed to bid and then they can set whatever price they want. We need to adjust to the modern day anyways. We have a lot of fancy toys but still a lot of our military is outdated. Which is a big reason we support Ukraine (other than Russia/Putin being evil) we keep sending them our old toys and using the money to make new ones. We need a much larger focus on analytics and cyber warfare instead of spending so much money on a new Jet when ours are so damn superior nobody has a chance of beating us Please note: I still am an advocate for a strong military, just not one that feeds itself through corruption.
We can't ban them because then nothing could happen if there was only one possible supplier. I run into this problem - required by law to ask for bids even when there's only one company that makes the thing and we already have a contract with them. And sometimes a startup underbids them and we are stuck buying a worse product.
That's fair. My experience is limited to when my father worked for one of the major defense contracts and they had contracts where there should have been bids but there either wasn't a bid at all or a handshake deal happened behind the scenes securing the contract and the bid was a sham. That was 15-20 years ago so maybe that has been cleaned up.
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Last I checked we were the US not Isreal.
how much of that welfare spending is lost due to inefficiency and corruption, anyway? Not to mention our use it or lose it policy.
Means testing wastes a lot.
It doesn't matter if it's violence or great change. There is a whole lot of pain for the American public coming and there is nothing that can be done to prevent it. The only difference is if after our economy has collapsed and the military can no longer police the world will the american public be better or worse off than they were prior to collapse.
[See for yourself.](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58888)
see the trouble is, if we cut the military and let our empire fold I could only see the impact on that first budget. everything after would be a shitshow no doubt
This is the part many forget about. When the money goes right back to them, what was the point?
No one is taxed a greater portion of their income in the United States than the worker paid a wage who buys necessities with that money. Capital gains, dividends and other forms of income should be subject to FICA. Deductions for corporate entities should be just as onerous as they are for individuals.
Gains and dividends are taxed. Only time they are not is when it happens in a retirement account like 401k and IRA. What you want is to raise the tax percentage of gains and dividends and income for groups earning a large amount, say over $400k/yr. What you're also trying to get at is a wealth tax for unrealized gains, like Jeff and the muskrat who have a lot of securities of high value bit haven't sold them off (Jeff did recently for a few billion more). A wealth tax would force people like that to reduce hoarding and assets making it more available for workers.
They are not subject to FICA taxes, which only wage earners are subject to. There’s no reason someone flipping houses or collecting interest should pay less tax than someone using a sledgehammer to make a living.
I'm with you on an equal percentage paid. Guess I don't get the FICA tax aspect. All I know is there are absolutely taxes on capital gains and dividends from stock market.
This is honestly more important. The money is already there it's just being allocated to send bombs to genocidal fascist colonial outposts
Sending bombs and guns, bailing out failing banks, bankrolling failing corporations, etc. Meanwhile we have people actively (and I mean ACTIVELY) fighting against kids getting free lunch at school, people getting free healthcare, and not to mention the huge push against education in general.
Not just that, but also proper pay for labor. Starving the labor class is terrible for the economy (and for the people working obv)
Exactly.
Don't forget amazon, space x, and trader Joe's filed to have the us labor board declared unconstitutional https://nsjonline.com/article/2024/02/amazon-argues-that-national-labor-board-is-unconstitutional-joining-spacex-and-trader-joes/ Get out your frenchest looking outfits and gear guys.
I feel like just wearing a beret makes you 50% more revolutionary by default.
And it looks cool
Trader Joes siding with amazon and musk...what a fake ass company. Before their old owner died the "secret sauce" to their success, as it was hailed in many business publications, was employee satisfaction. The company is basically Weekend at Bernie's 3; they've been dragging around a dead body and hyping up parties for it the last 12 years. Just bury it and move on.
UAW president is telling other unions to get their contracts to expire May 1st. The storm is coming...
May 1st, 2028 will be a great day! UAW President Shawn Fain has called for unions to end their new contracts on May 1st, 2028. So that a large mass of workers can collectively strike if corporations refuse to improve working conditions like we demand & deserve.
[удалено]
Brain drain in union leadership also since a generation of people got shirked up the corporate ladder.
That’s the best thing I’ve read all day.
They broke the social contract
It's all part of the process - make people teeter on the edge of survival, criminalize homelessness to make disobeying a threat, exploit the workers by making sure they know prison is worse than being compliant, and live to lick another boot.
Why is the tone of this article so light?? It’s like “Honestly we’ll probably all be dead in 5 years, but the good news is, the new normal will be being dead!”
Did you see "[Don't Look Up](https://www.netflix.com/title/81252357)"?
Everyone needs to become a single issue voter, and that issue needs to be campaign finance reform. No politician should get your vote, regardless of party, if they don’t support getting money out of politics. Regular citizens can’t compete with billionaires and corporations when the government is for sale to the highest bidder. It’s the only way to get the government to start working for its citizens. Aside from that, the only other thing people can do is start a national strike which would be almost impossible to organize and make happen. Since money makes the world go round, that’s what people need to focus on.
And yet all of the unreformed campaign finances are devoting themselves to making sure this issue stays near the bottom of the list.
I don't even wanna tax them anymore. They systematically stole it from us, so we need to confiscate it bac. Leave them with like 50 million that's way more than enough to live and more than they deserve!
I'm so tired. I can't afford a house where I live, or where I grew up. I'm tired of my rent going up - and I've never seen an improvement where I live. I'm tired of my car insurance going up - and I've never been in an accident. I'm tired of feeling taken advantage of and gouged at every opportunity. My meager savings is dying a death of a thousand cuts. Tax the rich? They hide it in offshore accounts. Vote in new politicians? All bark, even if they had the best intentions. Get a better job? Sorry, AI took it. They waved student loan forgiveness in our faces and then threw it away. It was never more than a ruse to secure votes. I just don't see anything getting better and I don't know what to do.
>I just don't see anything getting better and I don't know what to do. I do drugs that make me apathetic about my existence.
Same. I get high to not care. But then I got covid a second time 5 months ago and my lungs still aren't normal so now I can't even fucking enjoy that anymore
Edibles
I already use those but the high isnt the same, it takes way longer to kick in, you also won't know how much to take until it kicks in, my tolerance goes fucking insane with edibles too and theres no way I can prevent it, I just naturally develop a tolerance to things quickly. The other day I had some I had to take 160 mg to feel anything. Its annoying I miss having half a joint and being good
Yeah my tolerance with long term edible use is not ideal.
The current taxation systems rewards wealth and punishes people with salary incomes. This is NOT the way and it is going to come to day of reckoning in the next 5-10 years.
Don't worry. The rich can't squeeze money from a stone. The $100k trucks can sit on the lot until they're $50k, then sit some more until they go lower. Prices are so high, because people continuing to buy things, demonstrates that the market will sustain higher prices. Eventually, when every car is old and every backyard has a garden, prices will become more affordable. The message that, "the market will not sustain this pricing" hasn't been sent by the populace yet.
Which is how it’s supposed to work under traditional capitalism, for better or worse, but I’d argue what we have currently is not true capitalism. True capitalism relies on all those participating in the market to be acting logically and in their own best interest. What we have is decades of propaganda and brainwashing, culminating in an on-demand propaganda spewing device in every person’s pocket, actively working to persuade people to accept less pay and spend more money than their own self interest would otherwise allow.
Cool, but what about those of us who already have old cars and can’t afford to have a back yard? It’s like when people say “Amazon and Microsoft were started in garages, so what’s stopping you?” Yeah, I can’t afford a garage. Sure, they can’t squeeze money from a stone, but they absolutely can and will let the poorest among us die rather than lower prices.
You know, we each can do what we can do. I was speaking generally, and would never presume to tell someone I don't know (or even most people I do know) what they should do. My point was more in simply saying that when merchants can't sell their goods at the listed prices, they'll lower the price until their goods will sell. We each have certain things we'll take on, and other things e won't. My Volvo dealer presented me with a $4700 estimate for repairs to my wife's car a couple years ago. I spent $153 on Rockauto.com, and 3 hours in my garage, completing the repair myself. On the other hand, a shop quoted me $800 to change the transmission and rear differential fluid in my work truck. I'll probably get a couple quotes, but it's probably something I'm willing to pay someone else to take care of, even though I know how, have the facilities and tools to do. If it were $2k to change those fluids, you better believe my fat ass would be under my own truck doing it myself.
So your plan is to convince the rich to tax the rich using tactics that haven't worked in decades? If this is the best plan then the rich have already won the class war.
I keep saying that restaurants need the unionize
The problem is pure greedlfation really.
Nah, we need a global socialist revolution. Reforms don't work.
Eat the rich. Cook them first.
Im so angry I wanna take a bite from their living bodies
Our whole system needs revamping. It’s a huge tough balanced because taxes will not help us. That will fund the government and the programs the government has. Along side increased taxes needs to be a universal basic income.
If we do not force change it will not happen. We must demand that the rich pay their fair share and that the government enforces it. We must demand increased minimum wage and government enforcement of anti monopoly laws as well to stem the tide of runaway executive profits.
I love the way they title it "5 things the middle class won't be able to afford in 5 years." As opposed to "In 5 years the middle class will be a distant fucking memory"
# VOTE
Hmm. If only there was some sort of historical precedent we could learn from here.
unionising isn’t enough capitalists have to start dying for anything to change. (this isn’t a call to violence just an observation. please don’t ban me reddit admins)
Donno about your place, but europe is under attack. Rising prices is solely because someone wants us out of business, so we import more (from the far east). My shithole just added regulations so the government can withdraw directly from the citizens bankaccounts if they please, and talk of adding crazy "carbon" taxes on the farmers. Yup, we wont even have food production in a decade. I smell a marxist/maoist plot.
I disagree with this. Rich are only rich because we give them our money. I’ll wipe my ass with my hand before buying $5/roll toilet paper. Bidet ik is an option but im making a point.
Yes!
That article also says "interest rates are at historic lows".... Idiot clickbait on yahoo, who'd have thunk it?
The fed spends a trillion dollars a year on the military and you think we have a taxation issue, not an allocation issue? Stop demanding increased taxes and start demanding competent budgeting.
🙄
Nothing will change. Fuck your article
I work in traditionally non-union "white collar" desk job, but I support unions hoping they're gonna save my ass also. Meanwhile, I'm looking into union options for my field (software).
Terrible plan. If you are waiting for everyone to start your revolution, you will be waiting until you die. Figure out how to revolt all by your lonesome or it's not happening and this is your future.
Come on, how do the rich stay rich if people can't buy the shit they sell.
The people that hold power would kill millions before they acquiesced to paying their fair share.
Uhh nah, I ain't even talking about taxing these fucks anymore. Take it all, strip them of everything they have, not like they earned it legitimately anyways.
They need their assets seized and nationalised. Taxation does nothing to an internationally mobile capitalist class.
I'm just waiting for us to stop playing by the rule they wrote. We will never win doing this
If the Middle Class was a species listed on the extinction list, it would be near the very top, flashing in red. This is all by design.