I assume you mean low cost broad market index funds when you write 401k, but what other mechanism has offered financial security to so many other than having lots of productive and well networked kids that believe in helping you when you are old?
There is, of course, taxpayer funded retirement benefits, but that is just taking from others’ kids.
What do you think pension funds invest in if not the same things as my 401K?
Pensions are useful to individuals, because they support you until you die (while your 401K will either run out before you die, or will 'waste' money in the bank if you die before it runs out). But they aren't a magic money tree. They are the exact same formula. Money in, money out, it just gets distributed a little better.
The pensions that are so underfunded (either due to corruption or bad math) they need repeated bailouts from federal taxpayers? Hope you’re in a sufficiently politically influential union.
If federal taxpayers are going to bail out old people, might as well be the whole stock market so it’s not just a few politically influential unions that get bailed out.
Union members not in an insufficiently influential union can have their benefits cut:
Depending on how you measure, not as bad as the one we had a few terms ago. There was a pandemic, which should have been a unifying event the president just had to straightforwardly lead us through while letting the domain experts at agencies handle the details. But instead he must have thought he was still campaigning or something, and staked out some edgelord position that we should just ignore the public health emergency. Predictably, this caused a lot of societal chaos from people who weren't good at thinking for themselves following nonsensical direction from an authority figure. I'm sure glad that guy was only around for one term. I remember him being a pretty sore loser too.
Did you mean to take that course on human sarcasm?
I can understand how a one or two sentence comment that is wholly sarcastic is readily misinterpreted, ala Poe's Law. But my context should have been pretty clear.
Idk. That loser still had guardrails on for 80% or his term. He might have even been re-elected if he didn't use his election year to pretend millions weren't dying.
A morbid part of me wonders if hisnl "advice" literally killed off enough of his voters to swing the election.
I personally think he would have had a shoe-in second term if he had simply led through Covid. Got on TV, told people things were hard but we'd get through it, then spend the rest of the day playing golf or hanging out at whatever the new spot is after the island got shut down.
Conversely, arresting people going paddleboarding and filling skate parks with sand was a totally sane reaction. Good thing we didn't overreact to Covid and completely fuck up the economy and the education progress of millions of children.
Your "domain experts" are often chronically incorrect sociopaths.
Let's not even get into the categorical and coordinated censorship campaign.
Shocking that people even support the covid response that happened. Much less make light through smarmy sarcastic shitposting.
I'm a libertarian, but you've got to be honest with yourself about how much nuance you can actually expect from bureaucrats. If we didn't have a large contingent of social-media fueled rebellion against the idea of any sort of restrictions, there would have been more regulatory bandwidth to spend making exceptions for privately-owned outdoor establishments like skateparks and paddleboarding (which included the need to figure out things like equipment rental/cleaning protocols).
Note that only half of US states had any kind of "lockdown" (ie stay at home order with the force of law), and they were predominantly red states. I'd say that bigger crowd control problems caused larger overreactions. The state I was in merely had a firmly worded suggestion to stay home. I'd call that the sweet spot.
TDS (edit: Trump Derangement Syndrome) actually pretty well describes the cult following Trump has. His charisma and messaging cause literal derangements in their thinking. Every accusation is an admission, yet again.
Is there really any correlation between tax revenue and spending at the federal level anymore? It seems the U.S. government is willing to spend at huge deficit levels. If everyone stopped paying federal taxes I suspect nothing would change.
What would change is the government would need to greatly increase their debt. In 2025 the government got about $5.23 trillion in tax revenue and spent about $7 trillion. So most of the government spending is financed by taxes. Remove that and the rate of debt quadruples (and by extension inflation).
Fact is US is able to run up 39 trillion and counting in debt because it prints the god damn monopoly money. No one would offer a loan to someone with that financial history. Shit really went off the rails after Bretton-Woods, huh?
Up to now, I would have agreed with you. However, many residents of cities victimized by ICE see paying federal taxes as money that goes directly toward an enemy that is destroying their communities. I will happily pay my city and state taxes, but I no longer feel that my my federal tax dollars are helping much.
I live in Minneapolis, MN. The Federal government has cut public health grants, Medicaid, laid off a large portion of he Department of Health, cut Department of Human services, cut school funding, cut University of Minnesota funding, cut heating assistance, cut flood mitigation, cut USDA programs, and cut SNAP. This is just the things I can remember! Our city hosts Hennepin County Medical Center, which provides emergency care to the entire state, and it is risking closing due to federal cuts.
Minnesota has historically paid more in federal taxes than other states, and contributes more than it gets back. I think it's time for a change.
>The Federal government has cut public health grants, Medicaid, laid off a large portion of he Department of Health, cut Department of Human services, cut school funding, cut University of Minnesota funding, cut heating assistance, cut flood mitigation, cut USDA programs, and cut SNAP.
Not paying taxes isn't going to re-fund these things. In fact, it will ensure they don't get funded.
There are always people who don't agree with a particular government's funding priorities; if we didn't pay when we don't agree, government would happen when we do support its priorities.
What if you were keeping the $1000 in a bank account and I will invest $900 into a scholarship to pay for someone's education. You can invest $0.90 into roads. Now the example has a collective benefit for both of us.
You keep making these silly examples that are not how taxes work. Try again with everyone investing $0.90 into roads, and everyone investing $900 into education.
And does our government do that? It seems we have one party that wants to pay for theatrical law enforcement and another party that wants to pay for performative DEI nonsense
That's good, love how you're co-opting anti-semitism for your own political ends.
"Blood libel" refers to a specifically anti-Jewish trope of alleging that Jews murder Christians, especially children, to use their blood for religious rituals. Grandparent comment is 100% not blood libel.
There's no lemonade to be found here at this time. What there is to be found are a bunch of tone-deaf people who seem utterly ignorant and indifferent to the war's reality.
Obviously there is, you just refuse to recognize it. I think this war is terrible, Trump is the worst president of American history by a wide margin, and yet, I can still be happy that we are able to glean insight from learnings that came about as a result of forces not under my control.
Finding good among the bad is such a commonplace occurrence that my native tongue, English, has many metaphors for it. I already mentioned making lemons into lemonade; there is also "every cloud has a silver lining," "every dog has his day," "light at the end of the tunnel," and "April showers bring May flowers"
I suspect you would respond, "but Mayflowers brought genocidal white settlers!!!!"
As a Mayflower descendant I would scarcely say that. But the fact that you offer cheap platitudes and tales from hundreds of years ago to justify why it's OK to consider why the current bombing and slaughter is good for our work-life balance remains astonishingly tone-deaf. This is absolutely a you problem.
"We" did not vote for him. Some of y'all did.
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