Controversial Take 😡
6d 53m ago by lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/diffaldo in Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com from lemmy.dbzer0.com
NO POLITICS!!! 😡😡
I don’t mind if a homeless person spends money on things other than the bare essentials.
Then how are we gonna be millionaire if we give handouts to everyone 😡 /s
Pull harder on your bootstraps! Duh.
Bent: over.
Buttcheeks: spread.
Bootstraps: pulled.
Ready, Cap'n! 🫡
Spreading cheek and pulling bootstraps at the same time?? You’ll go far!
How does one grab one's bootstraps without spreading cheek?
They ripped off, fuck!
Also: I'd rather pay the government for healthcare than pay an insurance company, who then pays the doctors.
I’m happy to pay for the supportive housing, prescriptions and dental for individuals experiencing homelessness.
Damn I'm not experiencing homelessness but I sure as hell can't afford dental or medical care. Mostly because I'm paying for a place to live. I haven't had my teeth even looked at in 22 years. We need programs for the struggling working class too. I feed the homeless and often they're telling me about their doctor visits and I'm thinking how priveleged they are.
Yes please. Public option.
Question why there are any hungry and homeless.
What are you some kind of commie? Next you are going to ask why we have the orphan crushing machine probably
...and even if we could turn off the orphan crushing machine, how then would orphans be crushed??
Because we haven't eaten them yet
I don’t mind if my taxes go to funding people who want to doss around making weird art, impractical furniture and/or shit music all day
Its 100% better than taxbreaks to AI
Hell yeah!
The world needs more of those things. Especially weird art.
shit music
I feel seen
Or feeding the homeless and housing the hungry.
What I DON’T want my tax money going to is rich people and corporations why don’t fucking need it.
Mutual aid rules
I dont care if there are lazy unmotivated people getting food and housing with my taxes.
I'd prefer it quite frankly above everything else.
We should have a well thought out and agreed upon list of priorities and everyone eats and sleeps inside should be the first things. The money should all go there first
Hell, I don't mind if my taxes destroy the housing market entirely. A housing market should not even exist until everyone has a house.
There's a bit of a capitalist propaganda over here (even if unintentional). The underpriviledge class in many ways exists because of wealth inequality. And statement like this normalizes putting the burden of the underpriviledge class back on to the working class (this underpriviledged class is often also part of the working class). This will further create wealth inequality.
So yes, we should support underpriviledged class but we should also understand the bigger picture and demand that these supports should come from the owning class either through wealth tax or by increasing the minimum wage etc.
One problem at a time. First we stop the working class and the underprivileged classes from fighting with each other. Then we all team up against the oligarchy.
Shut up tankie!!! /s
But if we help one group, other people in need might want help too. /s
Right. And it might cost us the ability to build three or so supersonic foreigner killing rockets. Gotta prioritize ability to create pain and suffering over basic human decency. (Hopefully this is obviously sarcasm.)
I mean whos gonna kill brown kids if we stop making them?
Same. I’d rather my taxes help people survive than disappear into waste and excuses.
Thats exactly where I want my taxes to go.

Woah why are you being so political!!!!!
Im sorry, it was mistake! MODS DELETE THE POST! 😡
I'm super concerned they'll be used to kill kids for being brown or murder me for being queer or fund cops who will hold the train doors open at every single station harassing passengers to the point there's a disclaimer on arrival times now.
If I thought they might get used to feed and house and educate and doctor people, even if it wasn't super efficient; I might even pay them. Hell I'd probably pay extra. Try to work for the government or something. If that's what the government did.
Anyway I'm still an illegalist.
My coworker does ... he said the poor make more money than me or him and if we quit our jobs we'd be making just as much. I mean, we're in tech, I highly doubt the "poor" are as "rich" as he thinks. I had to tell him that I'm not a DOGE/Musk fan even though we live in Canada ... I said I'm very much a progressive. However, I asked him (since I don't have any kids and he does) if he'd like to cut me a check for all the tax dollars I've lost due to educating his children ...
I always find that argument hilarious.
"They have it so easy! They make so much money!"
You do it, motherfucker! There's literally no barrier to entry.
do "poor" exist in canada ?
I'd gladly pay more to have everyone be able to eat and sleep comfortably.
If we got rid of the extra 50% profit all these companies charge us, we could easily pay for all the things we need and more.
I have no problem paying more to help people, but we are paying more to hurt people now and it doesn't make sense.
Even if it does, I will still occasionally give them a little bit extra when the time and opportunity comes.
Fucking Commie! /s
I mind if my taxes don't go to it!
Nerd communist / MMT economics time:
Your taxes don't pay for anything actually. States can create arbitrary amounts of currency (USD in the USA, GBP in the UK, Yen in Japan...), they don't need your taxes to pay for anything.
Taxes have several purposes, the main ones being:
-
Forcing people to use the state's currency by forcing taxes in that currency. Without dollars to pay your taxes denominated in dollars, you go to jail, so the currency you definitely need are dollars
-
Removing money from certain sectors or people to reduce inequality. Taxing the richest businesses and companies can lead to decreases in inequality and to a more level playing ground.
-
Removing money from the private sector economy altogether. Too much money in the private sector can, in some circumstances, lead to inflationary tendencies in market economies or to shortages in planned economies (though the relationship is more complicated than neoliberals want you to believe)
-
Disincentivizing certain behaviours. Easy example is a sugar or alcohol tax.
The state can invest arbitrarily big amounts of money feeding the hungry or housing the houseless without the need for taxing this money first. The relationship between state deficit and inflation is not straightforward, and in fact there's no serious empirical evidence suggesting that, in developed economies, deficit is a good predictor of inflation. Inflationary episodes mostly can be explained through supply shocks, more easily than through state deficit (where deficit means the state pouring more money into the economy than it pulls out through taxes).
For more nerdy communist / MMT economics, reply to this comment 😎
My libertarian friend says this same thing. Taxes are a scam and they just print the money they need.
But is it true ?
Taxes bootstrap the value of the currency, and are a crucial inflation control mechanism.
The accounting connection between tax revenue and funding provided by a national government is entirely specious and imaginary.
OK, so every person should just stop paying them right now. What are they gonna do if we all do it ?
I wish.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point. Organizing the working class in well-lubricated organizations with the common goals of improving the material conditions in which we live is something I applaud. However, I wouldn't start tackling taxes first of all. Income taxes maybe, at most, account for 50% of your income. However, surplus value stolen from workers by companies is closer to stealing 80% of your income (depending on a lot of factors). Companies earn a lot more money from our labor than they pay us back, and I would argue for the abolition of this private employer - employee relation altogether. What do you think?
Also, cool username
Totally agree ,
Thanks!
Probably send the IRS after the biggest offenders, paid for with money they printed.
As with any complex concept, incomplete information tends toward imprecise interpretation, and as such I encourage further exploration.
Taxes are not a "scam" in as much as they serve the purposes I outlined above. However, knowing that it's definitely not taxes funding things like healthcare or education, it's good to examine all taxes with a critical lens:
Should we tax the poorest of workers at all? If one of the main goals of taxation is decreasing inequality, why do we charge income taxes at all to workers earning below the average for example? You could argue that we need to remove money from the economy for macroeconomic purposes such as inflation, but then let's do it from the richest and not the poorest?
Fun fact: you can tell your libertarian friend that the DPRK (aka North Korea) abolished income taxes in 1974. If they hate taxes so much, they're free to move there!
I'm trying to figure out what else my taxes should be spent on. Maybe schools, infrastructure, and elder care?
I don't disagree at all with the statement, but this really isn't a meme in any form, not even a political one.
I'm fine with housing and feeding the homeless, like block apartments and staples.
... but everyone will despise it. Low-income housing of any kind seems to create an entire new set of problems.
How does your country handle it? If you made this the law of the land in the USA it would immediately explode. The feds are not to be trusted, I mean, look at it. What a shithole.
Low-income housing of any kind seems to create an entire new set of problems
Segregating people by income creates problems. The solution can be
A) Don't have such inequality to start with
B) Don't build social housing isolated from the rest
Concentrating people of little means into a small area ostracizes them and removes them from areas with opportunity, arguably making them more desperate.
Poor people need to be mixed in with everybody else. The areas with the highest rates of social mobility in the US have the most mixing between classes. People in need will get support from people of means if they are seen as their neighbors and community members. And interacting with middle/ upper class families demonstrates to poorer kids how to manage money, how to seize opportunity, how to walk the walk and talk the talk of affluence, etc.
That would increase the costs astronomically, I don't see how that's feasible... and I've been very poor, and would still chose to live in a poor neighborhood with poor prices and cheap food.
Dropping me off in the middle of Park Ave, where a sandwich can cost $20 or more? No thank you.
Vienna has over 60% of people living in government subsidized affordable housing. California has less than 5% of people living in government subsidized affordable housing. Do you think that Vienna just has more money to spend on affordable housing than California?
Money is not the problem. This is an already solved problem. The only reason homelessness exists is because a few wealthy people benefit from high housing prices. All we need to do is just copy Vienna's homework. Instead, right wingers are copying USA's homework and now homelessness has increased in Vienna for the first time in a decade.
When wealthy people go move into walled off gardens, yes they price everything to keep people out. But in a mixed community, you end up with mixed and middle-of-the-road retail prices. We're not talking about dropping two impoverished people into Park Avenue; we're talking about a community that is reflective of the county's socio-economic distribution.