finance

Meet Our Needs, Stop Borrowing, AND Pay Down The Debt…

by MyBaconPress

So, here’s a thing I recently learned. It took the United States of America 240 years for our national debt to reach $20 trillion dollars. That’s just a huge amount of money, isn’t it? Naw, that’s chicken feed. We’ve managed to double that number in just ten short years. Our national debt just passed $40 trillion dollars. That is a LOT of borrowing.

Now, quick question: who was President for most of those ten years? Which party was in power for most of that ten years? You can only win if you’re not a self-deluded MAGA because the answers are 47 and the GOP and, as a MAGA, you couldn’t even consider that the republicans and Donald Trump have done so much damage so fast. $20 trillion dollars added to the debt – in ten years!

The driver, always, is the tax cuts for the rich. They just keep coming. AND…they keep coming from the GOP. Then we have to borrow money to cover our costs – AND our debts. The party of fiscal responsibility has been extremely irresponsible and the greatest business man in the history of history – in his own mind, at least – really sucks at managing budgets.

They have a pretty great story, though, and FAR too many rubes just accept it at face value without ever even considering that it may not be true. Rich people are telling working people just how great the economy is. For them? Maybe. Not for most of us. Not for the world. They’re mistake is obvious. The stock market is up, hovering around 52,000 points. I’ve done this before. Apparently, it bears repeating.

The stock market is not the economy. The stock market is not the economy. The stock market is not the economy. (One has to say it three times for some reason.) They’ll tell you to look at your 401k, those of you who haven’t raided it to buy a tank of gasoline to get to that job that pays you so little and your boss so effing much. You may be trying to look at the stock market, but your eyes are full of tears from the grocery shopping trip you just took where you had to choose between milk and medications.

None of this is an accident, either. This has been the plan since the 1970’s. Rich people have been perpetrating it on the nation since 1980, when Evil Ronnie introduced Voodoo economics and people believed him. Tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts for the rich. I guess I have to add that they usually include some tidbit for the working class. But I’ve noticed the cuts for workers tend to be small – and temporary. The cuts for the rich tend to be large – and permanent.

There’s something we need to understand. There are two kinds of income in this once-great nation: earned and unearned. Working people know all about earned income. They know what goes into earning a living, doing a job and getting paid for it. You know, work. People who don’t work? Yeah, they live on unearned income. Unearned. UN. EARNED. They didn’t “earn” diddly squat.

They just keep it. They get their money from the labor of others. That’s important, too. The parasite class likes to whine, “Why should I give up the money I earned?” as though that’s some kind of an affront. The answer is that they didn’t earn it. Someone else did. So why shouldn’t they pay more in taxes on the money they took? Easy come, easy go, right?

Do you want to save the economy and the nation? Tax the rich. Tax them a lot. Tax them at the rate they extract from society. If those guys control 97 percent of the wealth, they should pay 97% of the taxes. Oh, yeah, that’s one of the tricks they use to deceive. You’ll hear people tell you rich people already pay the lion’s share of the taxes. That’s a word game.

Of the taxes received, yes, rich people pay more than the working class. But the taxes received do not reflect the amount that SHOULD be coming in. There was a time when the highest incomes were taxed at 92%. The rate stayed above 90% for most of the years 1944 – 1963, the so-called “golden years” of America. That’s not a coincidence. That was the economic engine that made America great in the first place. And they weren’t taxed at that rate on every dime they made.

In 1944, they were only expected to pay that rate on everything over $200,000. Yeah, that doesn’t sound like much today. But the 2026 equivalent to 1944’s $200,000 is $2.8 million dollars. Remember, we’re talking ANNUAL income, here. And outside of entertainment, most of it, nearly all of it, is unearned income. If you’re bringing in more than $2.8 million dollars every year, you’re not exactly struggling. Hell, you might not even CARE what the gas prices are.

But these days, rich people are taxed at a lower rate than the working class. The top marginal rate is 37% for everybody, but that’s for earned income. Rich people pay taxes on their unearned income at a rate of about 15% – 20%, depending on filing status. That’s just wrong. There is no time when unearned income should be taxed at a lower rate than earned income. But that’s what we’ve been doing in the US for the last nearly 50 years and we’re circling the economic drain as a direct result.

The US doesn’t really have a debt problem, if the measure is our ability to pay. If we DID tax the wealthy at an honest rate, we could meet our needs, stop borrowing, AND pay down the debt. But we don’t. We measure our debt problem by our desire to pay – and the rich people, those with the money, are not on board. Because they own Congress, they don’t have to. It’s just pure, straight-up greed and as we all know by now, greed kills. And it’s about to kill the United States of America…

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Okay, I just want to tack this bit on here at the end. That moron is now running around saying that his stupid effing arch is really a weapons storage facility. He expects less resistance if it’s for military use. Now it will come complete with sniper facilities on the roof and plaza. Nothing says “Freedumb” (with a ‘b’) like snipers on the roof. He DID add that, “There will be no facility like this anywhere in the world.” Yeah, no doubt. It’ just such an incredibly stupid idea from every conceivable angle, no other nation on Earth has even considered it. My gods, he’s an embarrassment…

One Fraud After Another…

by MyBaconPress

Wow, the latest report is that job growth is VERY low and unemployment is up. Whaddaya know? And remember, he fired the last person who put together that report and replaced her with a toady yes-man who would massage the numbers. So AFTER massaging the numbers, the best he could do was 22,000 jobs?!? My gods, I wonder what the real number is…

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Yeah, yeah, there’s crime everywhere. But the oh-so-clever trick that seems to be deceiving so many MAGA out there? He finds a city he doesn’t like (Democrat run, preferably black mayor) and announces it’s the worst, crime-riddled city in the world. (It isn’t.) He sends in a bunch of troops who do some gardening and stand around a while. Meanwhile, whatever work those troops were supposed to be doing goes undone. THEN Donny declares the city “cleaned up” and withdraws the troops.

Then he, wait, I hear a noise. Hang on. OH MY GOD, there are space aliens out in the yard. They’re killing all of my neighbors. It’s a horrifying bloodbath. We need a hero! Wait, I’ll get my pea-shooter. That’ll do it. BAM! POW! ARGHH! OOF! Oh, thank the gods, I got them all. They’re all dead. I, Mark Bacon, just saved the entire planet from a space alien attack with my trusty pea-shooter! You’re welcome. Gimmie my noble prize now.

See how easy that was? All I had to do was describe it. Now I expect adulation. MY story, after all, is every bit as true and accurate as all that “crime fighting” the First Felon is doing in target cities. And I didn’t only save a city from “crime.” I saved the entire planet from space invaders…

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I sure hope the video of that boat being blown up by the US off the coast of Venezuela is AI because if the video isn’t faked, the act is straight up murder, isn’t it? CAN you just blast a boat out of the water and declare it was full of drugs later? Quick question: what if it was a boatload of drug enforcement agents taking a load of seized drugs out to the deep ocean for disposal? What if it was Gilligan? The Skipper, too? A millionaire and his wife? What if it was a movie star? Or the Professor and Mary Ann?

The maladministration can’t describe the people on the boat. No info on the pretended drugs. How many people were aboard? Genders? Ages? How did they know it was a drug run? It was off the coast of Venezuela. How did they know it was going to the US?

I guess he’s STILL trying to look tough and I readily acknowledge my lack of a JD but I don’t know of any authority anywhere that allows the US to go blow up private boats for the “sin” of simply being in the water hundreds of miles to the south of the US. ‘Will murder to distract from Epstein,’ I guess…

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His lie during the campaign was that he would fix the economy on day one. HIS words, not mine. Of course, that lie blew up in his face and the economy started tanking. So he did what he always does, he lied about it. The worse it gets, the greater he declares it. Oh, and he updated his timeline. First the economy would boom later this year, then it became next year. Most recently, he has move the timeline to 2027 before the economy responds.

All he has to do is keep pushing off the timeline and MAGA will stay loyal and enthralled, so that’s what he’ll do. That boy NEVER delivers. He just pushes off the deadline and the deadline never comes. So by 2027, we should ONLY expect he’ll be promising happier days by 2028. But even at 2027? At the rate he’s going, at the rate prices are going up because of him, at the rate jobs are being lost because of him, businesses are being hurt because of him, income is down because of him do you think you’re going to be able to survive until 2027? I think it’s a fair question…

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Wealth taxes in Norway are under fire. In an effort to enlist the support of people who will NEVER pay the wealth tax, rich people have put out an advertisement with a little song. The message of the song is, “Don’t come to Norway, we will tax you till you’re poor, and when you have nothing left, we will tax you a little more.” Does that sound like anything you may have heard before?

“Tax the rich. Feed the poor. Til there are no rich no more.” That’s from ‘I’d Love to Change The World’ by Ten Years After. It’s not a risk. No one is talking about taxing rich people into poverty. But it’s a common lament from rich people – and people who pretend they might become rich like that some day soon. It’s ALWAYS a lie, but it gets sold to low information voters over and over and over again.

A wealth tax is a tax paid on the value of an asset. People pay taxes on the income from an asset but in most countries they don’t pay a tax on the value of the asset itself. So if you have a million dollars in stocks, you pay a tax on the dividends you receive but not the value of the stock themselves. A wealth tax fixes that.

It’s calculated by adding up the value of properties, savings, investments and shares, and deducting any debt. Private companies count as part of their owners’ wealth. There are discounts – for example, only 25% of the value of citizens’ primary residence is taxable. In countries where a wealth tax exists – and there are only three in Europe – it’s often the only tax the richest people pay – so it ensures they pay something.

Rich people like to pretend they’re “self-made.” They’re not. The closest you could get to an actual self-made millionaire would be an entertainer but even they have teams of people who help them. NO ONE is “self-made.” Rich people benefit from the societies in which they live. They get educated employees from the schools they don’t want to pay for, they move their goods on roads they don’t want to pay for, they get a stable society in which to conduct their business they don’t want to pay for, they’re protected by police and firefighters they don’t want to pay for.

We should have a wealth tax here in the US. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have each proposed such a thing but, of course, the rich have many minions in this once-great nation. And as we’ve all seen a million times, what we SHOULD do, we rarely actually do. It’s really rather embarrassing…