In the US the top 1% pay more in income tax than the bottom 90% combined. Of course they aren't the only ones paying tax, but the top 1% pay for a very significant percentage of the US budget.
Considering the national debt (not even including state/municipal debt) has surpassed $27 trillion[1], it would seem like a significant percentage of the US budget is simply not getting paid.
To the bottom ~40%, tax is a significant portion of their income be it VAT or or otherwise as it directly affects their daily choices in a real sense of Do I buy a loaf and milk or do I buy 2 loaves, butter and milk.
Isnt VAT supposed to be imposed on all regardless of their income status? So a loaf of bread has same vat for a homeless guy and a millionaire ? Income taxes are direct taxes. You earn money, you are supposed to pay it.
A rich person invests in a company which buys a yacht (that they can use). They don't pay VAT because the company can claim it back if the yacht is used for business purposes, which of course it will be because the rich person will use it to have business meetings with all their other rich friends on.
Whatever the actual situation is, and whether it's good or bad, this is the absolute worst form of journalism. It just screams bias; the author injects their own political opinions, they tell the reader what to feel and believe, they twist words and exaggerate in order to sell their political message, it pulls the usual tricks around trying to imply that Trump was directly responsible, and that you should hate Trump like the writer does - this is the complete opposite of any sort of respectable impartial journalism, it's a blatant political hit piece.
In my mind this type of journalism, this article itself, is one of the biggest threads to our country, it's so ironic. Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't have freedom of speech, or that they shouldn't be able to write what they want. I'm just saying it's possible to write horrible, damaging, biased, political hit pieces, and that is what this is.
It's really disheartening. Until recently I lived in Capitol Hill, Seattle, 4 or 5 blocks away from CHAZ/CHOP. I saw with my own eyes what was happening. I saw with my own eyes buildings get set on fire multiple times within a block of my apartment. I saw with my own eyes the riots, looting, violence, nightly political shows of force. Just two days ago they were molotov cocktailing a police precinct. There's even video evidence of all of this.
Yet all I read about on mainstream news is how it's actually mostly peaceful. I see Facebook friends who live 2000 miles away from Seattle re-posting news articles about how there's nothing really going on in Seattle. But I've seen with my own eyes what's going on.
It's really approaching a 1984 level of situation, where we're expected to just believe whatever we're told, even if we obviously see the problems. Where everybody is supposed to just accept what the media is telling us, rather than what we can see is happening. If they want something to disappear (like rioters throwing molotov cocktails) they just don't report on it, and it ceases to exist. But you can bet if a Republican starting throwing molotovs for their political beliefs it'd be front-page CNN for days on end. It's all so political and so manipulative.
It's not that I don't believe you, it's that I would love to see the videos of this happening and not just you promising me super hard that you saw it with my own eyes (which you somehow dropped 4 times in your post)
I've had people online tell me that I definitely could not have seen the numerous peaceful protests that have happened in Portland, and that I'm a lying shill for observing that the city I live in is in fact not a burnt-out hellhole patrolled by antifa death squads.
I mean, I've been seeing out of my window in downtown Seattle hate groups marching on a nearly nightly basis, the difference with these hate groups being that they burn down vehicles, buildings, and other properties and violently clash with the police in order to forcefully enact their hateful/racist political policies, that hate me because of the color of my skin and the political polices I support. But sure, there was one time an entirely peaceful demonstration by people on the other side of the aisle, that was so hateful! They have to be banned, deplatformed, censored, removed, destroyed. But the people roaming my city, setting fire to the building opposite of mine a few weeks back because the owner is an "evil white capitalist"? They're good to go, no hate there.
The problem is that it's such a slim majority of the people that care. The sad truth is that the vast, vast, majority of people are completely uninformed. A significant percentage of them wouldn't even understand your concerns if you tried to explain it. All they care about is what vehicle has a big shiny entertainment screen, where the salesman has promised a low enough monthly payment. That's it.
99.99% of people buying a car don't care what the drivetrain is, what differentials are in it, what engine is in it, how anything works, nor do they care. I wonder what percentage of buyers know whether the car they just bought is a FWD/RWD/AWD/etc vehicle, or even know the difference.
I think the sad truth is that because of this there's no market pressure to do things right. There's also the problem of regulation and vehicle manufacturers basically being forced into doing stuff like this as time goes by.
If we were a space-faring people with automated robots doing space mining, collecting and processing materials, if there was no shortage of resources and nearly everything was automated - then sure, fine, people can have their utopian space-communism, culture-series, setup where everyone gets free money and can have whatever they want, and do whatever we want.
But we're so many lightyears away from that situation. Our resources are very much limited. If people don't keep producing, we just stagnate and decay. We're nowhere near the point we need to be.
You could make the same argument about the normal flu, pre-covid, which kills many tens of thousands of people in the US every year. The normal flu has killed many multiples the number of people that WWII did. And we never completely locked down the country for the flu. We never explicitly destroyed the economy for the flu.
What about how many people other infectious diseases kill? What about how many people other sources of preventable deaths kill? Why haven't we thrown away our civil liberties in the past, or destroyed our economy, to tackle those problems?
As an analogy, opening my window increases my chance of getting skin cancer by letting more light in. Should I therefore always keep my window closed? Is the increased risk of cancer worth the benefit of having my window open? Should we all be forced to live underground, because that would definitely save a multitude of lives from skin cancer.
Sports events will always increase deaths, even in non-covid times. More people will die from the regular flu and other non-covid disases. More people will die from the increased travelling and accidents from that. More people will die from the extra pollution associated with the extra amount of traveling. More people will die when stressing themselves physically to perform at a high level at the sport event. The same arguments can be made about anything humans do.
Where are these rates coming from? They seem absolutely absurd. Are you suggesting that 17% of the US population is going to have permanent heart damage, and that 3% of the population is going to have a stroke, from contracting covid? That seems completely disconnected from reality.
3.5MM people in the US (at least) have already tested positive. Are you trying to imply that over 100,000 of these people have had a stroke?
More related to the article - isn't the latest IFR estimate from the CDC even less than 1%?
If the complications are a serious problem, as you claim, then I have a few follow up questions:
1) You're making some significant claims, and should therefore have significant data and evidence to back up your claims. Over 3 million people in the US have tested positive for covid. What percentage of them needed to have a limb amputated? That should be easily verifiable. What percentage of them had a blood clot and serious damage? What percentage of them currently have persistent long term damage? If you're making the claim that these things are such a serious problem, you should have data that backs up how common the problem is, and how bad it is.
2) How different are the complications from the normal complications that the flu/pneumonia/etc. can give? Tens of thousands of people get the flu, have complications, and die every year. Tens of thousands of elderly people get the flu, and have long-term damage for the rest of their life. As a society we don't care about that at all. Are you saying covid does more damage, or has more complications? If so, where's the evidence comparing the level of damage/complications?
It's my theory at the moment that this "complication" talk is just another viral "meme" that's mostly driven/spread by people just repeating what other people said, which spreads like wildfire, but never has any actual data backing it up. Of course there are people that have had serious complications. But there's people that have had serious complications from every disease. And it says nothing about how common it is. For example, if 0.00001% of people that get covid have to have a limb amputated, yeah that's horrible, and yeah it'd be great if we could just snap our fingers and make that not happen, but is it really something to focus on?
Those are great questions, the crux of it is that having two flus going around simultaneously is just as bad as it being no different than complications with the flu. And then the possibility that its worse should be just enough to say "look over there and corroborate the concerns".
> Over 3 million people in the US have tested positive for covid. What percentage of them needed to have a limb amputated? That should be easily verifiable.
