What adds salt to the wound is that the money was taken from the IRS who would’ve used it to hire more auditors so they can audit more wealthy people who’ve been cheating on their taxes.For every $1 spent for auditors, they return an average of $12.
So we really lost $168bn in federal income that could’ve helped the public.
They don’t want people knowing where their money goes.
The Pentagon can’t/won’t account for trillions of dollars that they’ve been given, which adds more salt to the wound.
I’m pretty sure that bill only passed the house then the companion bill stalled out in Senate committee. Neither Senate Dems or Biden fell for that bait.
Well that’s great news. Thank you
Source? I thought only the house bill, which was DOA in the senate, included that. Don’t mean to sound confrontational, I’d just like to know and haven’t been able to find anything myself.
You’ve got more information than me, I wasn’t aware it died in the Senate. I just assumed the figure in the post was referring to that same House Bill.
Brought to by the “if you didn’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to fear” crowd.
It’s not mystery money, it’s Modern Monetary Theory. Republicans are invested in hiding that fact that we can afford to do all the good stuff and fund the military at the same time
And if putting “too much” fiat currency into circulation is a real problem, then tax the shit out of the rich. Republicans under Eisenhower were OK with that in the 1950s. If that’s unpalatable, why can’t we tax corporate revenue instead of profit? It’s not like I only pay taxes on what’s left over after I’ve paid all my bills (though there is a standard deduction for individuals).
I heard a very good theory on how to combat inflation.
The government collects an increased tax amount from the wealthy and holds on to that money, effectively taking it out of circulation, and over the course of the next 10 or 20 years you trickle it out into public services.
Boom, suddenly you took money out of circulation and helped people at the same time.
Reminds me of something Will Rogers wrote about Herbert Hoover:
This election was lost four and five and six years ago not this year. They dident start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickled down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the dryest little spot. But he dident know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands. They saved the big banks but the little ones went up the flue.
That’s how trickle down economics should actually work.
It’s important to be clear about “they” here. Most of the Democrats in Congress and President Biden tried to pass money for education and health care, but they were blocked by all the Republicans and a couple Democrats. If John Fetterman had been elected in 2020 instead of 2022, there’s a decent chance we could’ve gotten it. Not a sure thing, but decent.
On the other hand, almost everyone in Congress supports military spending because it almost always benefits their constituents directly because military contractors have shrewdly built production facilities in nearly every state.
If we can give Biden another term (moderately difficult against Trump, hard against anyone else), expand the Democratic lead in the Senate (difficult), and flip the house (probably easy), we can probably get some education and health care spending. Maybe even a minimum wage increase and a permanent expansion of the child tax credit. Maybe a small UBI. Lots of things!!
(And yes the lavish spending on the military will certainly continue.)
Even with a majority in both chambers Biden and Democrats will not pass any of that.
If you look at elections you will see the Democrats like having only a slim margin in control and they always have someone who will fall on the sword and vote against things if it looks like something progressive will pass.
Hell they put money into Republicans to beat progressive Democratic candidates.
Only way you going get any of that is when we get rid of the two party system. Like with rank style voting.
100%
Real change requires real change
This is why I vote single issue for voting reform. If a Democrat supports IRV, I’ll vote Democrat. If not, I vote third party.
“But Explodicle, you’re effectively just voting for Republicans! This is the most important election ever, past and future.”
No. I’m not voting Republican either. People who do vote Republican have not voted twice. We’ve been voting lesser evil for decades and it does not work. “Buying time” for nothing to change does not work. Giving Democrats the house, senate, and presidency does not work. They refuse to even try to expand the Supreme Court. We’re being played.
The Democrats need to go and we need an actual leftist major party. Each candidate can either get on board with that, or wait for revolution to become our only choice.
I agree lets start a third progressive party and start taking over towns and city elections. Hell we can probably get Congress if we try hard enough.
Democrats have no support in red states like here In Oklahoma. They can’t win but a good third party could.
They only had a majority on paper thanks to Manchin and Sinema. But sure, let’s blame them for falling to squeeze blood from a stone.
“Only democrats have agency” is an interesting trope.
You’re gonna have to explain that one to me.
Unless you’re trying to say Republicans aren’t evil robots who automatically oppose everything Democrats do, but that makes no sense.
I think it’s sometimes called Murc’s law.
Part of it is blaming Democrats for things, but when Republicans are huge assholes accepting it as like just a force of nature.
So like, democrats fail to pass a law to such and such. That framing ignores that Republicans took action to foil it.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/03/andrew-gelman-on-murcs-law talks about it a little. Or https://whereofonecanspeak.com/2023/03/02/youve-probably-never-heard-of-murcs-law-but-youve-seen-it-in-action-lots-of-times/
Ah, I see. I thought you were disagreeing with me.
when the issue is assuming the radicalization of the Democratic Party’s platform? ya, or would you argue that republicans should be working to help democrats pass their legislation
I’ve posted this a few times but it fits here:
This country spent $8 Trillion on two wars over 20 years! That’s $400 billion each year.
This country could have paid for all the chemotherapy 80 times over
OR we could have paid for rebuilding/fixing this countries infrastructure for a 1/3 of that cost.
OR America could have built out a National high speed rail
Or many many other things.
instead we killed thousands of people and got what in return???
With a national healthcare payor negotiating the cost of care you could possibly pay for all of it with that money.
Hey now, for a beautiful moment we created value for the rayethon shareholder. And thays all thay matters
My only issue is that your estimate of the number of people killed is missing 3 zeroes. It’s more like millions.
still quite a bit away from “millions” the HIGHEST (by a significant margin) for Iraq is 1.033 million, and that is total excess death, not casualties and for Afghanistan it barely reaches 200,000 in 20 years
so no, Hundreds of thousands is correct, Millions is Soviet territory
More than a million is “millions”. And if we’re talking about total historical deaths attributable then the US has the USSR beat by a lot. Neoliberal capitalism is just as bloodthirsty as state capitalism, except the US had more time and power to kill people.
Yeah. It drives me nuts when the media talks about misinformation as if they didn’t help lie us into a war that’s lasted most of my life. Clearly none of the bad things that we all see happening daily are the reason we’re all sad and angry right?
Old men keep dreaming of battles for young men to fight.
-The Chariot, Daggers
My fiscally conservative friend made a point to bring up Biden spending his children’s legacy on Ukraine aid every time conversations would turn political. Then the Isreal bombing happened, and he won’t touch it. His wife is Jewish.
Lmao rules for thee but not for mee
Israel needs that help! There are still some living children in the land they’re about to steal.
The thing that keeps that happening is people themselves. Best we can do is bitch and moan on social media. Of course they will continue doing nothing for us.
While true, when the representatives that you keep voting for keep advancing corporate interests instead of helping their constituents, it starts to feel like the democratic process has failed us.
What would fix a lot of this would be a mechanism where the people could vote to remove someone from a federal position, because the people have no recourse but to wait a few years and hope enough people still remember the bad things the incumbent did.
Term limits would help too.
What would fix a lot of this would be a mechanism where the people could vote to remove someone from a federal position
A vote of no confidence and we get to reelect Congress?
Term limits would help too.
Term limits only help when you make politics about the issues rather than who has the most money to get noticed. Make the term limits too short and all you do is give it to the people with the most money considering our politicians currently spend half their time fund raising for their next election.
democratic process has failed us
This isn’t the fault of the democratic process, but allowing money to be speech, companies to be people, and the oligarchy to take over.
Just for a little context, keep in mind that “military aid” be it to Ukraine or Israel is almost entirely spent in the US. We ship missiles and bombs from stockpiles, and pay Raytheon to make some more.
So this money is being spent to the benefit of Americans, just the military industrial folks and their shareholders.
It’s still resources that could be spent towards something else, something ultimately more productive.
Building a house takes a lot of work, so why spend that effort into building a bomb that destroys many such houses, instead? What does this achieve for humanity?
Because building houses lowers the value of all the real estate the wealthy already own.
Worth mentioning that there are well paying, stable jobs in the MIC for the other 99%. I work for a sub (in IT, and spend most of my time on the commercial side of the business) in such a company. While I resent our biggest revenue maker, it does enable the company to fund scientific research and commercial space endeavors.
I wouldn’t call myself a bootlicker, per se, but I do enjoy my job, despite what I’ve started viewing as a necessary evil — the pay and benefits are highly competitive, I’m 98% WFH, layoffs and turnover are rare (there are regularly people retiring who had entered straight from college and worked directly on Apollo missions), the job is challenging and I’m given a long leash.
Did they at least give you a nice dog collar for that leash?
But China is eating your pankake
To get good governance and policies, we must advocate for the Gold Standard.
The middle and working classes have been strip-mined by the likes of Wall Street, big banks, corporations, the Federal Reserve, and the government itself (via destructive policies). Under the Gold Standard, the middle and working classes were relatively better off than they are now and America was an industrial giant. After Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold in 1971, the decline of the middle and working classes followed leading to both classes collectively losing their economic wealth and political influence. Consequently, those of us who are non-trillionaires, non-billionaires, and non-millionaires have virtually no power in these United States (I mean we can vote, protest, and do advocacy work but at the end of the day, moneyed interests win more often than not).
To get sound policies that are beneficial for We the People, and the country itself, we have to economically re-empower the working and middle classes by implementing the Gold Standard.
Edit: rephrased last paragraph to make it clearer
Hey what percent is $14 billion of the $4.3 trillion Americans spend on healthcare?
You mean over spend? If the government handled healthcare it would be cheaper.
0.325%. Where the fuck did all that money come from?
At that scale money doesn’t actually exist. It’s just agreements between banks and nations.
