look, libertarian's have the right idea when they say that people should be able to decide themselves what they do with their own bodies. they never follow through with the shit to the end though. the no government/no taxes thing is fucking ridiculous.
well if the revolution doesn't come and move everything towards socialism and communism, where the fuck would it go? full on fascism? we're already pretty fucking right as it is.
Ideal revolution would lead to a multi-party parliamentary system led by individuals who still value civility in governing.
The Trump administration is considering a plan that would cut federal taxes on investment income, a change that independent analysts say would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans.
An analysis earlier this year by the Wharton School found the proposed cut would reduce tax revenue by more than $100 billion over ten years. Sixty-three percent of that money would flow to the pockets of the top 0.1 percent of income earners, those who had adjusted gross incomes of at least $7.31 million in 2015, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Another 23 percent of it would go to the next 0.9 percent, those with adjusted annual gross incomes of more than $1.48 million.
All told, 86.1 percent of the tax cut, or well more than $80 billion, would be captured by the top 1 percent of earners, with the next 4 percent of earners receiving nine percent of the cut. The remaining five percent of the cut would be distributed among the bottom 95 percent of the population.
The change would allow investors to account for inflation in calculating how much they’ve profited off an investment, a change that would typically reduce the total amount of taxable profit. But the change is still being debated internally, and some in the White House believe they lack the authority to make such a change without an act of Congress.
Supporters of capital gains tax cuts argue that the move would juice the economy by incentivizing the wealthy to sell assets and make new investments in ways that would ultimately benefit even lower-income Americans. But many economists point out the super-rich already have vast financial resources — particularly in relation to everyone else.
Data from the World Inequality Database, for instance, shows that the share of national pretax income captured by the top 1 percent of earners roughly doubled between 1980 and 2014, while the share flowing to the bottom 50 percent fell by a similar amount.
The share going to the top 0.1 percent, meanwhile, has more than doubled, and if current trends continue, it will surpass the share going to the bottom 50 percent in the next several years.
These shifts aren’t happening by accident. Over the past 30 years, federal policymakers have made a number of changes to the tax code — including reductions in top income tax rates, capital gains tax cuts and estate tax cuts — that have resulted in a massive redistribution of national income from the poor to the rich.
The tax cuts signed into law by President Trump late last year — containing reductions to the corporate tax rate and lower rates for top earners — appear likely to accelerate these trends. An analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that through 2025, roughly 65 percent of the cuts in that bill will benefit the top 20 percent of earners.
Following the signing of that bill last December, Trump told guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort “you all just got a lot richer.”
Pimpernel Smith
‘We are Q’: A deranged conspiracy cult leaps from the Internet to the crowd at Trump’s ‘MAGA’ tour
During President Trump’s rally on July 31, several attendees held or wore signs with the letter “Q.” Here’s what the QAnon conspiracy theory is about. (Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
by Isaac Stanley-Becker August 1 at 6:43 AM Email the author
On Tuesday evening, the dark recesses of the Internet lit up with talk of politics.
“Tampa rally, live coverage,” wrote “Dan,” posting a link to President Trump’s Tampa speech in a thread on 8chan, an anonymous image board also known as Infinitechan or Infinitychan, which might be best described as the unglued twin of better-known 4chan, a message board already untethered from reality.
The thread invited “requests to Q,” an anonymous user claiming to be a government agent with top security clearance, waging war against the so-called deep state in service to the 45th president. “Q” feeds disciples, or “bakers,” scraps of intelligence, or “bread crumbs,” that they scramble to bake into an understanding of the “storm” —the community’s term, drawn from Trump’s cryptic reference last year to “the calm before the storm” — for the president’s final conquest over elites, globalists and deep-state saboteurs.
What Tuesday’s rally in Tampa made apparent is that devotees of these falsehoods — some of which are specific to faith in the president, others garden-variety nonsense with racist and anti-Semitic undertones — don’t just exist in the far reaches of the Web.
Believers in “QAnon,” as the conspiracy theory is known, were front and center at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall, where Trump came to stump for Republican candidates. As the president spoke, a sign rose from the audience. “We are Q,” it read. Another poster displayed text arranged in a “Q” pattern: “Where we go one we go all.”
The symbol appeared on clothing, too. A man and a woman wore matching white T-shirts with the YouTube logo encircled in a blue “Q.” The video-sharing website came under criticism this week for unwittingly becoming a platform for baseless claims, first promoted on Twitter and Reddit by QAnon believers, that certain Hollywood celebrities are pedophiles. A search for one of those celebrity’s names on Monday returned videos purporting to show his victims sharing their stories.
Audience members at a Trump rally on July 31 in Tampa wear T-shirts referring to the “QAnon” conspiracy theory. (The Washington Post)
The prominence of the “Q” symbol turned parts of the audience into a tableau of delusion and paranoia — and offered evidence that QAnon, an outgrowth of the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory that led a gunman to open fire in a D.C. restaurant last year, has leaped from Internet message boards to the president’s “Make America Great Again” tour through America.
“Pray Trump mentions Q!” one user wrote on 8chan. He didn’t need to. As hazy corners of the Internet buzzed about the president’s speech, his appearance became a real-life show of force for the community that has mostly operated behind the veil of anonymity on subreddits.
Trump himself has at times been a purveyor of conspiracy theories, most notably in refusing for years to back down from his false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He also asserted without evidence that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, peddled the debunked idea that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote and associated the father of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas with the assassin who shot John F. Kennedy.
But viewing their message boards, it’s clear that QAnon crosses a new frontier. In the black hole of conspiracy in which “Q” has plunged its followers, Trump only feigned collusion to create a pretense for the hiring of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is actually working to expose the Democrats. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros are planning a coup — and traffic children in their spare time. J.P. Morgan, the American financier, sunk the Titanic.
In the world in which QAnon believers live, Trump’s detractors, such as Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, wear ankle monitors that track their whereabouts. Press reports are dismissed as “Operation Mockingbird,” the name given to the alleged midcentury infiltration of the American media by the CIA. The Illuminati looms large in QAnon, as do the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish family vilified by the conspiracy theorists as the leaders of a satanic cult. Among the world leaders wise to satanic influences, the theory holds, is Russian President Vladimir Putin.
QAnon flirts with eschatology, fascist philosophy and the filmmaking of Francis Ford Coppola. Adherents believe a “Great Awakening” will precede the final storm foretold by Trump. Once they make sense of the information drip fed to them by “Q,” they will usher in a Christian revival presaging total victory.
The implication is that resolving the clues left by “Q” would not just explain Trump’s planned countercoup. It would explain the whole universe.
When “Q” is absent for long stretches of time, followers take note.
“Please tell me where to go,” one wrote last month. “I feel lost without Q.”
Some big names have bought into the fantasy. Roseanne Barr, the disgraced star of the canceled ABC revival that bore her name, has posted messages on Twitter that appear to endorse the QAnon worldview, fixating on child sex abuse. She has sought to make contact with “Q” on social media and has retweeted messages summarizing the philosophy built around the online persona. Among QAnon’s promoters are also Curt Schilling, the former Boston Red Sox pitcher, and Cheryl Sullenger, the antiabortion activist.
There is a component of QAnon that can be interpreted as a direct call to action, which has already had real-life consequences.
The Newport Beach Police Department said recently it was looking into the presence of a man outside Michael Avenatti’s law office after a link to the lawyer’s website and images of his office building appeared in QAnon threads. This spring, armed members of Veterans on Patrol stumbled on a homeless camp and demanded that authorities investigate it as a site of child sex-trafficking, NBC reported. They later thanked QAnon followers for taking up their cause.
Eh, not really. I couldn't find 10 people in all the United States comfortable with Hillary. But you've already noted that, because comfortable and likeable are synonyms in this case.
doghouse
i'm surprised you haven't shown more excitement for the asbestos revival.