True, and people on both the left and right would be very naive to think that 'Nazis' are the only target of the far left. They also want to target normal Republicans and in the long run 'Liberals Get The Bullet Too' as the graffiti says.
Virtue signalling is the conspicuous expression of moral values done primarily with the intent of enhancing standing within a social group.[1] The term was first used in signalling theory, to describe any behavior that could be used to signal virtueâ"especially piety among the religious.[2] In recent years, the term has become more commonly used as a pejorative characterization by commentators to criticize what they regard as empty, or superficial support of certain political views, and also used within groups to criticize their own members for valuing outward appearance over substantive action
Which applies to Twitter making a big fuss about removing the blue checkmark from someone like Spencer. Spencer is someone who can't fill a meeting room for a talk and is widely despised on the right and, as I said, removing his checkmark or even banning him will do absolutely nothing to change anyone's mind about him. Most people who know about him know he's a literal national socialist. His tiny fan club think that is a good thing and everyone else think he's almost as bad as the Communists.
If anything the left building him up to into a boogeyman, failing to counter his arguments and condoning AntiFa commies rioting outside his talks is helping him recruit people. Though, like I say, I think most people on the right are a lot closer to Ben Shapiro's Reagan Republicanism than the are to Richard Spencer's National Socialism and White Nationalism. And, given Spencer wants to expel Jews from his Ethnostate, I think it's fair to assume that you can't simultaneous like both. Given a choice, it's clear who most people on the right would pick.
If it was disturbing after Charlottesville when the media came out in support of the masked mobs of black-bloc "anti-fascists" who "seek peace through violence" (CNN), it was downright Orwellian when that support faded after yet another episode in Berkeley, where Antifa attacked random passers-by with an advantage of sometimes ten-to-one. But the weirdest part is how the group has been condemned.
Vox is worried that "deploy[ing] violence . . . could seriously backfire"; The New Yorker is concerned Antifa is "helping Donald Trump"; and the Guardian thinks the group is "undermin[ing] the Trump resistance." A New Republic writer whose camera and phone were "jacked" "felt sorry" for his attackers, who had "real pain in [their] eyes" and seek "to stop [white supremacist] hate." All across the funny papers, the message is clear: If there is a Trumpist rally in your town and you see a group of people with bats just whaling on somebody, their hearts are probably in the right place - they just haven't thought hard enough about the "bad faith" right-wing arguments, based in "false equivalencies," that their actions will legitimate.
This line is almost as disrespectful to Antifa itself as it is to the everyday reader or viewer wondering what to make of an angry mob beating the tar out of someone. After all, the group has kept neither its tactics nor its values a secret. Its members did in Berkeley what they always do. Last winter, when they attacked a crowd outside a Milo Yiannopoulos event, they took sticks to people passed out on the ground and spray-painted "Liberals get the bullet too" around town. Liberal journalists, refusing to take them at their word, happily shared videos of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. All that's changed is that Antifa's message is finally starting to sink in, and liberal journalists are figuring out that they're next.
Jack Dorsey obviously looked at this famous incident where the Commies airbrushed Yezhov out of a photo after his execution and thought 'Gee, that's a good idea'.
He seemed so sane and rational to me and in no way a literal national socialist. And his idea of setting up an ethnostate would in no way cause civil war and ethnic cleansing. But then he lost his blue check mark and now I don't trust him."
Said no one ever.
People who follow Richard Spencer - and they're not very many of them if you look at the low turnout in for Unite the Right in Charlottesville - are not going to change their opinion of him because he lost his blue check mark.
And the vast majority of people who think setting up an ethnostate means turning America into Yugoslavia in the mid 90's weren't going to listen to him anyway.
But I'm sure Twitter will get praised for this latest bit of virtue signalling.
The "all whites are racist" stuff belongs to the lunatic fringe. "All whites are privileged" is what you're actually looking at, and that';s pretty much true.
The NYT run this horrible article a couple of days ago, though of course they'd be outraged if anyone run an article by a white person questioning whether his children could be friends with black people
The irony is of course that the sort of people who write for the NYT are privileged. Not because of their race but because of their wealth and the fact that people like them have a monopoly of access to the media. Their sort of views are all over the place, and the views of people critical of them are completely purged out both old media - the NYT and the TV networks and new media - the Internet.
The China model is that you have a bunch of factories making stuff but no IP. I.e. no trademarks and no patents.
So one factory makes a hoverboard, and the others copy it because of no patents and no copyright. However some of them mess up and make something which shorts out the batteries and catches fire. The problem is that then the consumers have no idea if a given hoverboard is from one of the good companies or one of the bad ones. So consumers get wary, and most likely regulators step in and ban them. E.g. they're banned on the NYC subway.
So a product which could have been pretty popular doesn't.
Now the US model is different. You have copyright and patents. Most importantly you have trademarks and brands. So you can work out which brands are reliable and buy from them. And patents and copyright mean those brands can't be cloned. Well regarded brands can sell their stuff at a hefty markup from raw materials because people trust them. And copyright and patents mean that the inventors might even get compensated. In China if something sells the guy who owns the factory makes money and the inventor gets nothing.
Copyrights, patents and brands mean that for an iPad much of the profit stays in the US, even though the hardware is assembled in China and the chips made in Taiwan or Korea.
Take the iPad, which America imports from China even though it is entirely designed and owned by Apple, an American company. iPads are assembled in Chinese factories owned by Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm, largely from parts produced outside China. According to a study by the Personal Computing Industry Centre, each iPad sold in America adds $275, the total production cost, to America's trade deficit with China, yet the value of the actual work performed in China accounts for only $10. Using these numbers, The Economist estimates that iPads accounted for around $4 billion of America's reported trade deficit with China in 2011; but if China's exports were measured on a value-added basis, the deficit was only $150m.
The chart shows a geographical breakdown of the retail price of an iPad. The main rewards go to American shareholders and workers. Apple's profit amounts to about 30% of the sales price. Product design, software development and marketing are based in America. Add in the profits and wages of American suppliers, and distribution and retail costs, and America retains about half the total value of an iPad sold there. The next biggest gainers are South Korean firms like Samsung and LG, which provide the display and memory chips, whose profits account for 7% of an iPad's value. The main financial benefit to China is wages paid to workers for assembling the product and for manufacturing some inputs-equivalent to only 2% of the retail price.
Of course this probably isn't lost on the Chinese. The US had very lax copyright laws, up to the point authors lobbied to tighten them up. Dickens complained his books had no copyright protection in the US. The same thing happened to Edgar Allen Poe when his books were not copyright protected in the UK.
While on tour Dickens often spoke of the need for an international copyright agreement. The lack of such an agreement enabled his books to be published in the United States without his permission and without any royalties being paid.
This situation also affected American writers like Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's works were published in England without his consent.
Dickens first realized that he was losing income because of the lack of national in international copyright laws in 1837 when The Pickwick Papers was published in book form. At times the novel was reprinted with
Still, that analysis confirms that, after all federal taxes are factored in, the U.S. tax system as a whole is progressive. The top 0.1% of families pay the equivalent of 39.2% and the bottom 20% have negative tax rates (that is, they get more money back from the government in the form of refundable tax credits than they pay in taxes).
I can sort of understand why slashdot filters unicode, because it's too much work to find a safe subset that doesn't mess the page up, even though I'm sure there's a Perl module to do just that.
But I can't see any reason why it filters some html character entities. Unicode would lead to trolls posting nasty abominations like Zalgo Text or flipping everything so it reads right to left. Html character entities seem like they don't allow for stuff like that.
Still slashdot seems to filter everything but a very narrow whitelist. I've no idea why.
And you're confusing accumulated debt with deficit spending.
The debt is just the sum of the deficits.
We can easily afford universal health care simply by implementing a fair equitable tax system so that the rich pay their fair share.
The top 2.7% pay 51% of all individual income taxes collected. And the top 0.1% pay 39.2% of all taxes collected. It's hard to imagine how they're not already paying 'their fair share'.
In 2014, people with adjusted gross income, or AGI, above $250,000 paid just over half (51.6%) of all individual income taxes, though they accounted for only 2.7% of all returns filed, according to our analysis of preliminary IRS data. Their average tax rate (total taxes paid divided by cumulative AGI) was 25.7%. By contrast, people with incomes of less than $50,000 accounted for 62.3% of all individual returns filed, but they paid just 5.7% of total taxes. Their average tax rate was 4.3%.
The relative tax burdens borne by different income groups changes over time, due both to economic conditions and the constantly shifting provisions of tax law. For example, using more comprehensive IRS data covering tax years 2000 through 2011, we found that people who made between $100,000 and $200,000 paid 23.8% of the total tax liability in 2011, up from 18.8% in 2000. Filers in the $50,000-to-$75,000 group, on the other hand, paid 12% of the total liability in 2000 but only 9.1% in 2011. (The tax liability figures include a few taxes, such as self-employment tax and the "nanny tax," that people typically pay along with their income taxes.)
All told, individual income taxes accounted for a little less than half (47.4%) of government revenue, a share that's been roughly constant since World War II. The federal government collected $1.54 trillion from individual income taxes in fiscal 2015, making it the national government's single-biggest revenue source. (Other sources of federal revenue include corporate income taxes, the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, excise taxes such as those on gasoline and cigarettes, estate taxes, customs duties and payments from the Federal Reserve.) Until the 1940s, when the income tax was expanded to help fund the war effort, generally only the very wealthy paid it.
Since the 1970s, the segment of federal revenues that has grown the most is the payroll tax - those line items on your pay stub that go to pay for Social Security and Medicare. For most people, in fact, payroll taxes take a bigger bite out of their paycheck than federal income tax. Why? The 6.2% Social Security withholding tax only applies to wages up to $118,500. For example, a worker earning $40,000 will pay $2,480 (6.2%) in Social Security tax, but an executive earning $400,000 will pay $7,347 (6.2% of $118,500), for an effective rate of just 1.8%. By contrast, the 1.45% Medicare tax has no upper limit, and in fact high earners pay an extra 0.9%.
All but the top-earning 20% of American families pay more in payroll taxes than in federal income taxes, according to a Treasury Department analysis.
Still, that analysis confirms that, after all federal taxes are factored in, the U.S. tax system as a whole is progressive. The top 0.1% of families pay the equivalent of 39.2% and the bottom 20% have negative tax rates (that is, they get more money back from the government in the form of refundable tax credits than they pay in taxes).
Even if you confiscate 100% of all wealth from all the billionaires you'd get $1.7 trillion, and only once.
I've heard a bunch of Democrats tell me that the parties switched sides. Aka 'our party used to be evil but now it's good' and the Republicans adopting the Southern Strategy.
See Ben Shapiro debunk the 'Southern Strategy' talking point here.
Alford's story is entirely believable. She was an attractive, naive recent graduate of Miss Porter's School. Miss Porter's was also the alma mater of Jacqueline Kennedy and of a slightly older White House secretary named "Fiddle" with whom Kennedy was also having an affair, or so the First Lady believed--there was also a purported dalliance with Fiddle's close friend "Faddle," a secretary in the press office--and it isn't lost on Alford that this descendant of Boston's lace-curtain Irish had a thing for Social Register girls. Her fourth day on the job she was invited upstairs to the private residence. Kennedy led Mimi into his wife's bedroom (the First Lady was away), unbuttoned her blouse, touched her breast, pulled down her underwear, dropped his pants, climbed on top of her, and fucked her. When she told him she was a virgin he became a bit more compassionate, but neither in that sexual encounter nor in any other did he ever kiss her on the lips.
This part of Alford's story doesn't really add anything to what we already know about Kennedy. Nor does it really change my opinion of the 35th president. But this part does:
Dave Powers was sitting poolside while the President and I swam lazy circles around each other, splashing playfully. Dave had removed his jacket and loosened his tie in the warm air of the pool, but he was otherwise fully clothed. He was sitting on a towel, with his pants leg rolled up, and his bare feet dangling in the water.
The President swam over and whispered in my ear. "Mr. Powers looks a little tense," he said. "Would you take care of it?"
It was a dare, but I knew exactly what he meant. This was a challenge to give Dave Powers oral sex. I don't think the President thought I'd do it, but I'm ashamed to say that I did. It was a pathetic, sordid, scene, and is very hard for me to think about today. Dave was jolly and obedient as I stood in the shallow end of the pool and performed my duties. The President silently watched.
Afterwards, Alford says she was "deeply embarrassed," and as she climbed out of the pool she "could hear Dave speak in as stern a tone as I ever heard him use with his boss. 'You shouldn't have made her do that,' Dave said. 'I know, I know,' I heard the President say. Later, a chastened President Kennedy apologized to us both." Alford believes that Kennedy showed "his darker side... when we were among men he knew. That's when he felt a need to display his power over me." Kennedy didn't just have a thing for Social Register girls; he had a thing for humiliating Social Register girls. He also had a thing for humiliating his fellow Irishman, Dave Powers.
Also DU is an important resource used to prevent the spread of the Iraqi Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, now mostly extinct. Still DAESH, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah and so on are still in operation - though in DAESH's case only barely so. You don't even need to convince them to buy it, you can just hose them down with it from a Gatling gun whether they want it or not. I'm sure they'll even helpfully start shit so the US doesn't have to.
Hell in a battle with the Iranians or Hezbollah the US could stay out and sell DU rounds to the Israelis or Saudis.
They didn't condemn JFK or Clinton both of whom molested their employees. Clinton may have raped Juanita Broaddrick. Or Ted Kennedy, who left Mary Jo Kopecne to drown.
Though arguably the H1B visa allow companies to have indentured servants. I'm surprised the Democrats haven't suggested illegals getting three fifths of vote.
Slashdot Mirror
True, and people on both the left and right would be very naive to think that 'Nazis' are the only target of the far left. They also want to target normal Republicans and in the long run 'Liberals Get The Bullet Too' as the graffiti says.
There's nothing wrong with the term. E.g. Wikipedia describes it as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Virtue signalling is the conspicuous expression of moral values done primarily with the intent of enhancing standing within a social group.[1] The term was first used in signalling theory, to describe any behavior that could be used to signal virtueâ"especially piety among the religious.[2] In recent years, the term has become more commonly used as a pejorative characterization by commentators to criticize what they regard as empty, or superficial support of certain political views, and also used within groups to criticize their own members for valuing outward appearance over substantive action
Which applies to Twitter making a big fuss about removing the blue checkmark from someone like Spencer. Spencer is someone who can't fill a meeting room for a talk and is widely despised on the right and, as I said, removing his checkmark or even banning him will do absolutely nothing to change anyone's mind about him. Most people who know about him know he's a literal national socialist. His tiny fan club think that is a good thing and everyone else think he's almost as bad as the Communists.
If anything the left building him up to into a boogeyman, failing to counter his arguments and condoning AntiFa commies rioting outside his talks is helping him recruit people. Though, like I say, I think most people on the right are a lot closer to Ben Shapiro's Reagan Republicanism than the are to Richard Spencer's National Socialism and White Nationalism. And, given Spencer wants to expel Jews from his Ethnostate, I think it's fair to assume that you can't simultaneous like both. Given a choice, it's clear who most people on the right would pick.
And Nazis is defined as "anyone who isn't an AntiFa" I presume. "Liberals get the bullet too", remember?
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
If it was disturbing after Charlottesville when the media came out in support of the masked mobs of black-bloc "anti-fascists" who "seek peace through violence" (CNN), it was downright Orwellian when that support faded after yet another episode in Berkeley, where Antifa attacked random passers-by with an advantage of sometimes ten-to-one. But the weirdest part is how the group has been condemned.
Vox is worried that "deploy[ing] violence . . . could seriously backfire"; The New Yorker is concerned Antifa is "helping Donald Trump"; and the Guardian thinks the group is "undermin[ing] the Trump resistance." A New Republic writer whose camera and phone were "jacked" "felt sorry" for his attackers, who had "real pain in [their] eyes" and seek "to stop [white supremacist] hate." All across the funny papers, the message is clear: If there is a Trumpist rally in your town and you see a group of people with bats just whaling on somebody, their hearts are probably in the right place - they just haven't thought hard enough about the "bad faith" right-wing arguments, based in "false equivalencies," that their actions will legitimate.
This line is almost as disrespectful to Antifa itself as it is to the everyday reader or viewer wondering what to make of an angry mob beating the tar out of someone. After all, the group has kept neither its tactics nor its values a secret. Its members did in Berkeley what they always do. Last winter, when they attacked a crowd outside a Milo Yiannopoulos event, they took sticks to people passed out on the ground and spray-painted "Liberals get the bullet too" around town. Liberal journalists, refusing to take them at their word, happily shared videos of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. All that's changed is that Antifa's message is finally starting to sink in, and liberal journalists are figuring out that they're next.
Someone could kidnap and drug you, and months after you wake up with an IV bag attached to you arm, you literally start becoming someone else.
Or something else.
If the lame suburban kids wait long enough, the fashion will change back again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Jack Dorsey obviously looked at this famous incident where the Commies airbrushed Yezhov out of a photo after his execution and thought 'Gee, that's a good idea'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Marx was right in his comment history repeats itself, "the first as tragedy, then as farce"
So your argument is that if his side commits violence your side can too? That sort of thinking leads to civil war.
He seemed so sane and rational to me and in no way a literal national socialist. And his idea of setting up an ethnostate would in no way cause civil war and ethnic cleansing. But then he lost his blue check mark and now I don't trust him."
Said no one ever.
People who follow Richard Spencer - and they're not very many of them if you look at the low turnout in for Unite the Right in Charlottesville - are not going to change their opinion of him because he lost his blue check mark.
And the vast majority of people who think setting up an ethnostate means turning America into Yugoslavia in the mid 90's weren't going to listen to him anyway.
But I'm sure Twitter will get praised for this latest bit of virtue signalling.
uBlock Origin in "I am an Advanced user" mode is awesome.
To be fair everything is Facebook's fault though. Facebook did 9/11, caused the Holocaust and is the reason your dog got hit by a car and died.
The "all whites are racist" stuff belongs to the lunatic fringe. "All whites are privileged" is what you're actually looking at, and that';s pretty much true.
The NYT run this horrible article a couple of days ago, though of course they'd be outraged if anyone run an article by a white person questioning whether his children could be friends with black people
Can My Children Be Friends With White People?
The irony is of course that the sort of people who write for the NYT are privileged. Not because of their race but because of their wealth and the fact that people like them have a monopoly of access to the media. Their sort of views are all over the place, and the views of people critical of them are completely purged out both old media - the NYT and the TV networks and new media - the Internet.
The China model is that you have a bunch of factories making stuff but no IP. I.e. no trademarks and no patents.
So one factory makes a hoverboard, and the others copy it because of no patents and no copyright. However some of them mess up and make something which shorts out the batteries and catches fire. The problem is that then the consumers have no idea if a given hoverboard is from one of the good companies or one of the bad ones. So consumers get wary, and most likely regulators step in and ban them. E.g. they're banned on the NYC subway.
So a product which could have been pretty popular doesn't.
Now the US model is different. You have copyright and patents. Most importantly you have trademarks and brands. So you can work out which brands are reliable and buy from them. And patents and copyright mean those brands can't be cloned. Well regarded brands can sell their stuff at a hefty markup from raw materials because people trust them. And copyright and patents mean that the inventors might even get compensated. In China if something sells the guy who owns the factory makes money and the inventor gets nothing.
Copyrights, patents and brands mean that for an iPad much of the profit stays in the US, even though the hardware is assembled in China and the chips made in Taiwan or Korea.
https://i.imgur.com/gMTYvBE.pn...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Take the iPad, which America imports from China even though it is entirely designed and owned by Apple, an American company. iPads are assembled in Chinese factories owned by Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm, largely from parts produced outside China. According to a study by the Personal Computing Industry Centre, each iPad sold in America adds $275, the total production cost, to America's trade deficit with China, yet the value of the actual work performed in China accounts for only $10. Using these numbers, The Economist estimates that iPads accounted for around $4 billion of America's reported trade deficit with China in 2011; but if China's exports were measured on a value-added basis, the deficit was only $150m.
The chart shows a geographical breakdown of the retail price of an iPad. The main rewards go to American shareholders and workers. Apple's profit amounts to about 30% of the sales price. Product design, software development and marketing are based in America. Add in the profits and wages of American suppliers, and distribution and retail costs, and America retains about half the total value of an iPad sold there. The next biggest gainers are South Korean firms like Samsung and LG, which provide the display and memory chips, whose profits account for 7% of an iPad's value. The main financial benefit to China is wages paid to workers for assembling the product and for manufacturing some inputs-equivalent to only 2% of the retail price.
Of course this probably isn't lost on the Chinese. The US had very lax copyright laws, up to the point authors lobbied to tighten them up. Dickens complained his books had no copyright protection in the US. The same thing happened to Edgar Allen Poe when his books were not copyright protected in the UK.
https://www.charlesdickensinfo...
While on tour Dickens often spoke of the need for an international copyright agreement. The lack of such an agreement enabled his books to be published in the United States without his permission and without any royalties being paid.
This situation also affected American writers like Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's works were published in England without his consent.
Dickens first realized that he was losing income because of the lack of national in international copyright laws in 1837 when The Pickwick Papers was published in book form. At times the novel was reprinted with
As awful as they are I'd find it hilarious if Apple registered the Cult Of Mac as a religion for tax purposes.
I just come to these 'AI takeover' threads to post Terminator references.
So not only is he shilling for SkyNet, he gets a tax break for doing it?
Roll on SkyNet I say, as a Ripley observed in Aliens of the eponymous beasties "You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage".
Well Pew did that and found
Still, that analysis confirms that, after all federal taxes are factored in, the U.S. tax system as a whole is progressive. The top 0.1% of families pay the equivalent of 39.2% and the bottom 20% have negative tax rates (that is, they get more money back from the government in the form of refundable tax credits than they pay in taxes).
That's weird.
ð produces ð
þ produces [Nothing]
Þ produces [Nothing]
It's the same with ° which produces [Nothing]
I can sort of understand why slashdot filters unicode, because it's too much work to find a safe subset that doesn't mess the page up, even though I'm sure there's a Perl module to do just that.
But I can't see any reason why it filters some html character entities. Unicode would lead to trolls posting nasty abominations like Zalgo Text or flipping everything so it reads right to left. Html character entities seem like they don't allow for stuff like that.
Still slashdot seems to filter everything but a very narrow whitelist. I've no idea why.
And you're confusing accumulated debt with deficit spending.
The debt is just the sum of the deficits.
We can easily afford universal health care simply by implementing a fair equitable tax system so that the rich pay their fair share.
The top 2.7% pay 51% of all individual income taxes collected. And the top 0.1% pay 39.2% of all taxes collected. It's hard to imagine how they're not already paying 'their fair share'.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
In 2014, people with adjusted gross income, or AGI, above $250,000 paid just over half (51.6%) of all individual income taxes, though they accounted for only 2.7% of all returns filed, according to our analysis of preliminary IRS data. Their average tax rate (total taxes paid divided by cumulative AGI) was 25.7%. By contrast, people with incomes of less than $50,000 accounted for 62.3% of all individual returns filed, but they paid just 5.7% of total taxes. Their average tax rate was 4.3%.
The relative tax burdens borne by different income groups changes over time, due both to economic conditions and the constantly shifting provisions of tax law. For example, using more comprehensive IRS data covering tax years 2000 through 2011, we found that people who made between $100,000 and $200,000 paid 23.8% of the total tax liability in 2011, up from 18.8% in 2000. Filers in the $50,000-to-$75,000 group, on the other hand, paid 12% of the total liability in 2000 but only 9.1% in 2011. (The tax liability figures include a few taxes, such as self-employment tax and the "nanny tax," that people typically pay along with their income taxes.)
All told, individual income taxes accounted for a little less than half (47.4%) of government revenue, a share that's been roughly constant since World War II. The federal government collected $1.54 trillion from individual income taxes in fiscal 2015, making it the national government's single-biggest revenue source. (Other sources of federal revenue include corporate income taxes, the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, excise taxes such as those on gasoline and cigarettes, estate taxes, customs duties and payments from the Federal Reserve.) Until the 1940s, when the income tax was expanded to help fund the war effort, generally only the very wealthy paid it.
Since the 1970s, the segment of federal revenues that has grown the most is the payroll tax - those line items on your pay stub that go to pay for Social Security and Medicare. For most people, in fact, payroll taxes take a bigger bite out of their paycheck than federal income tax. Why? The 6.2% Social Security withholding tax only applies to wages up to $118,500. For example, a worker earning $40,000 will pay $2,480 (6.2%) in Social Security tax, but an executive earning $400,000 will pay $7,347 (6.2% of $118,500), for an effective rate of just 1.8%. By contrast, the 1.45% Medicare tax has no upper limit, and in fact high earners pay an extra 0.9%.
All but the top-earning 20% of American families pay more in payroll taxes than in federal income taxes, according to a Treasury Department analysis.
Still, that analysis confirms that, after all federal taxes are factored in, the U.S. tax system as a whole is progressive. The top 0.1% of families pay the equivalent of 39.2% and the bottom 20% have negative tax rates (that is, they get more money back from the government in the form of refundable tax credits than they pay in taxes).
Even if you confiscate 100% of all wealth from all the billionaires you'd get $1.7 trillion, and only once.
https://www.quora.com/How-much...
US has about 425 billio
I've heard a bunch of Democrats tell me that the parties switched sides. Aka 'our party used to be evil but now it's good' and the Republicans adopting the Southern Strategy.
See Ben Shapiro debunk the 'Southern Strategy' talking point here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://newrepublic.com/articl...
Alford's story is entirely believable. She was an attractive, naive recent graduate of Miss Porter's School. Miss Porter's was also the alma mater of Jacqueline Kennedy and of a slightly older White House secretary named "Fiddle" with whom Kennedy was also having an affair, or so the First Lady believed--there was also a purported dalliance with Fiddle's close friend "Faddle," a secretary in the press office--and it isn't lost on Alford that this descendant of Boston's lace-curtain Irish had a thing for Social Register girls. Her fourth day on the job she was invited upstairs to the private residence. Kennedy led Mimi into his wife's bedroom (the First Lady was away), unbuttoned her blouse, touched her breast, pulled down her underwear, dropped his pants, climbed on top of her, and fucked her. When she told him she was a virgin he became a bit more compassionate, but neither in that sexual encounter nor in any other did he ever kiss her on the lips.
This part of Alford's story doesn't really add anything to what we already know about Kennedy. Nor does it really change my opinion of the 35th president. But this part does:
Dave Powers was sitting poolside while the President and I swam lazy circles around each other, splashing playfully. Dave had removed his jacket and loosened his tie in the warm air of the pool, but he was otherwise fully clothed. He was sitting on a towel, with his pants leg rolled up, and his bare feet dangling in the water.
The President swam over and whispered in my ear. "Mr. Powers looks a little tense," he said. "Would you take care of it?"
It was a dare, but I knew exactly what he meant. This was a challenge to give Dave Powers oral sex. I don't think the President thought I'd do it, but I'm ashamed to say that I did. It was a pathetic, sordid, scene, and is very hard for me to think about today. Dave was jolly and obedient as I stood in the shallow end of the pool and performed my duties. The President silently watched.
Afterwards, Alford says she was "deeply embarrassed," and as she climbed out of the pool she "could hear Dave speak in as stern a tone as I ever heard him use with his boss. 'You shouldn't have made her do that,' Dave said. 'I know, I know,' I heard the President say. Later, a chastened President Kennedy apologized to us both." Alford believes that Kennedy showed "his darker side ... when we were among men he knew. That's when he felt a need to display his power over me." Kennedy didn't just have a thing for Social Register girls; he had a thing for humiliating Social Register girls. He also had a thing for humiliating his fellow Irishman, Dave Powers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Plutonium isn't waste. It's a valuable resource to prevent the spread of the Chinese Communist Party. Sell it to Japan and Taiwan!
As far as the DU goes, you could burn it in one of these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Also DU is an important resource used to prevent the spread of the Iraqi Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, now mostly extinct. Still DAESH, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah and so on are still in operation - though in DAESH's case only barely so. You don't even need to convince them to buy it, you can just hose them down with it from a Gatling gun whether they want it or not. I'm sure they'll even helpfully start shit so the US doesn't have to.
Hell in a battle with the Iranians or Hezbollah the US could stay out and sell DU rounds to the Israelis or Saudis.
They didn't condemn JFK or Clinton both of whom molested their employees. Clinton may have raped Juanita Broaddrick. Or Ted Kennedy, who left Mary Jo Kopecne to drown.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Or Harvey Milk
https://www.politicsforum.org/...
Aren't the left supposed to be against corporations using money to corrupt the political process?
Democrats haven't been able to buy people since Republicans passed the 13th Amendment
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Though arguably the H1B visa allow companies to have indentured servants. I'm surprised the Democrats haven't suggested illegals getting three fifths of vote.