“The top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all the tax revenue, and the bottom half pay 3%,” Bezos said. “I don’t think it should be 3%. I think it should be zero.”
“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. Not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes,”
“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.”
WT-absolute-F? I think he got oxygen-deprived in space.
Not the main issue of course, but I found this fun:
Both YouTubers said the exposed database records indicated significantly lower customer interest than previously reported. According to Coffeezilla, internal order identifiers suggested roughly 30,000 total orders associated with around 10,000 unique customers, far below earlier public estimates claiming nearly 600,000 reservations.
So this grift will only net them ~$3M, not sixty. My heart weeps for them.
Modi has not held a traditional solo press conference since taking office in 2014, and has rarely answered questions from journalists on his trips abroad.
If not then, when?
part of a deal to resolve President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.
Yup. The sitting president was suing an agency of his own executive branch, folks. A lawsuit he filed – checks notes – four months ago. They’re barely even trying at this point.
Not to mention state and local governments. One of the dirty little secrets of our economy is that undocumented workers have a significant direct and indirect tax burden, but other than schools (which are for literal children, lest we forget) they’re excluded from almost all benefits that require any sort of, well, documents.
So you’ve got a permanent underclass who are paying into the system but literally aren’t allowed to reap all the benefits. Now, on the one hand, I kind of get how that’s a devil’s bargain they were willing to make to get to the US from countries with more immediate issues, but to argue that they’re a drain on the country and need to be hunted down post-haste, and not treated as the human beings they are, that’s just evil on so many levels, but one of them is that it upends the economic deal America tacitly made with them by accepting their labor. They literally pay a huge tax to be in the country at all. Even the business owners used to understand that. I assume most of them still do, but none of them will pick this hill to die on.
It doesn’t help that immediately after the gospels are Paul’s angry, regressive, and authoritarian letters to all the congregations he was trying to dominate, followed by the late-first century anti-Roman millenarian fever dream of Revelations.
“I was in an extraordinary personal crisis because I didn’t want to be vaccinated. At the same time I certainly didn’t want to let my team down at the Olympic Games.”
Barely one layer deep, there’s an almost impressive level of IDGAF energy here: “You see, the thing is, somebody wanted me to do a thing I didn’t want to do, but I had this other thing that I did want to do, so being the type of person that I am, I lied about the first thing and it all worked out for me.”
Fair enough, LOL. Just love that it’s “oh I pay TONS of taxes, but asking me to pay more in taxes won’t help anything.”