rjkennedy98

This article said something quite plain and obvious: Obama when in office despite his rhetoric was an enabler and propagandizer (willing and not) of expanding middle eastern conflict. That is just objectively true despite how painful that may be for Obama supporters. Trump was not. The only "conspiracy" here is the speculation that it is a reason for the intelligence community disliking him. If you think that is a "pizza place pedo conspiracy" than I don't know what to tell you, except that Glen Greenwald is one of the foremost experts on US Intelligence and has seen tens of thousands of documents that few people have seen.

> I'm not sure whether people understand just how big of a problem this is.

I'm usually the last to defend the construction of the US economy, but I think this is a bit of an overreaction. The stock market is not the economy. Big Tech bubbles are bad, but this isn't 2008 where people lost their houses because of financial engineering.

I think the bigger story (and issue) is just how few people are involved in and benefiting from Tech. These companies have massive market caps because they employ a tiny amount of people relative to how much money they make. For every one tech worker making high six figures there are a 50 people doing low-level healthcare service work. The vast majority of Americans own trivial amounts of stock, so they don't even benefit indirectly from the Tech bubble. All of this is just exacerbating the radical divergence of the haves and have-nots in our economy.

Taxes aren't the issue. It's how people are taxed. Income tax is just one way people are taxed and they aren't the ONLY type of tax on income (despite people using the word tax to mean income tax). We have social security tax, payroll tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, estate tax, property tax, and (maybe possibly a wealth tax in the future). And that's just individual taxes.

People say this all the time and it is false: California is a high tax state. No it isn't. It is a high Income tax state. It is an extremely low property tax state.

To put this in perspective, I live in Boston and my mom lives in California. She owns > $3 million dollars worth of property that she pays 1% tax on when she bought it (for around 500K total) so an effective property tax rate of .16%. In Texas she would be paying 3% property taxes which 1800% percent more. She also gets depreciation on the rental property that is marked up to when some it got transferred to her so she gets depreciation amortized over 18 years at ~2.5 million valuation. She also collects social security, a pension from a previous government job, and rental income. All unearned. Some of the rental income comes from Section 8 and other welfare programs (paid for by young workers). Let alone medicare which she will certainly get way more out than she ever put in.

I on the other hand, make ~190K a year. One year I got lucky with stocks/bitcoin. I've been paying in the 250K income tax bracket for 3/4 years. I've also paid >5% state income taxes every year on that money. I've paid double or triple my mom's taxes every year despite her making total earnings including investments way above me. ON top of that I have high payroll taxes, sales taxes, and no deductions. I live in a crappy apartment (near a bunch of frat houses) that costs 2K a month (a little less than my mom's mortgage on a house worth $1.7 million).

For young people that have no property and income we are in an awful position. All we hear is increase income taxes, but that is the only way we are moving up the socio-economic ladder. We have many types of inequality in the US, but the most extreme is age-related inequality. Older people have almost all the money in America. The largest generation now is the millennials and they hold <10% of US wealth. Millenials are now in their prime working years and income is the primary way they will acquire wealth as they hold almost none of the assets in this country.

Its no wonder that younger and middle class people are flocking to places like Texas where they can afford a house (because property taxes prevent money flooding into real estate), and can actually get ahead because of little to no state income taxes.

It isn’t in all states. Jessie Ventura changed the rules for that when he became governor of Minnesota.

Yeah, Apple doesn't pay taxes, they sure got the last laugh.

We have to go all the way back to 2000 when Bush v Gore happened and Democrats claimed the election was stolen. Actually no, we just have to go back literally to just the last election when Hilary asked for recounts after conceding and then the Democrats used false claims of Russian interference to discredit the election. Heard of the Muller probe? This is a highly unorthodox election due to the high number of mail-in ballots. We have unprecedented censorship of social media by corporations that function as arms of a political party. Trump has a right under law to challenge it. Hillary asked for recounts very late in the process in just the last election with no evidence of corruption. It is not a coup to challenge under law an election process and refuse to concede till then. It’s happened literally multiple times in US history. You are not from the US but you may be surprised to learn the US is not a direct democracy but has a system in place called the electoral college which is there for managing electoral disputes.