And here's your answer:
139Context for uninitiated and vision impaired:
In the background, a man is sat atop a pile of cookies behind two other men who are seated at a table. This man is Rupert Murdoch, a former Australian and now American; the owner of a large swathe of right-wing journalistic and entertainment media whose empire has contributed to the distrust and downfall of democracy across the Anglosphere.
Pictured on the left is a dark-skinned and bearded man sat looking despondently down at the empty table in front of him. Across from him is an Anglo-Australian man who is wearing a safety helmet and hi-vis vest - a nod to the working class of Australia - with a plate and a single cookie on it. Rupert is saying to the Anglo man: “Careful mate… that foreigner wants your cookie!”
It’s a fantastic political cartoon and a great nod to the way that right-wing media and politicians have consistently convinced significant amounts of working class people to turn their frustrations at their lack of share in capital towards immigrants and foreigners as opposed to the billionaires who hoard all the wealth.
39Assuming the guy with the cookies is Rupert Murdoch (~$18B wealth), who he kinda resembles, and the construction worker is the median American household (~$120k wealth), then the pile should be 150,000 cookies.
I'd estimate the visible part of the drawn pile, if it's roughly a cylinder, at about (17 *3.14 * 20) 1,068 cookies. Presumably there's more invisible below the table so maybe 2000 cookies. But still, it should be 75 times bigger.
1
Meanwhile people are concerned that the post office isn’t turning a profit.
72Which has never made sense to me. It's a government service. It's not supposed to be profitable. It just needs to be affordable and reliable.
67And yet they used to turn a profit. Until Republicans passed a law requiring them to prefund retirements for 75 years out with the USPS Fairness Act. Fairness Act, which imposes this burden on the USPS while no other federal agency (or private business) is required to prefund retirement benefits...quite fair.
37
"People" aren't. It's regressives that are trying to disenfranchise mail in voters. Then they put a regressive in charge of the USPS who is trying to run it into the ground so they can be like "oh gosh look how bad it is!"
35Republicans want to privatize every public work. USPS isn't supposed to turn a profit. It's supposed to be a public good that is sold at cost so we all benefit. It used to be subsidized.
Republicans want to turn it into a new industry a la UPS, FedEx, etc, so it'd cost way more to send a letter. The love of money is the root of all evil. It's also the root of the Republican party.
10
This might seem like a minor quibble, but that money doesn't really come from taxpayers, and understanding what seems like a very technical financial thing is really important if you want to understand geopolitics in general. Here's an except from the beginning of David Graeber's Debt: the First 5,000 years, easily one of the single most interesting and enlightening books I've ever read:
Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re- payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined — mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending. This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much — even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.
So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as "empires," and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire — but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these pay- ments as "loans" and not as "tribute" is precisely to deny the reality of what's going on.
67So it's not coming from US tax payers, this is saying? It comes from Japanese taxpayers, German taxpayers, South Korean tax payers, etc. on top of US tax payers.
That really does not change the situation. It still is a massive amount of money out of US pockets, and the rest is out of US allies' citizen pockets. It also doesn't change the failing to pass audits. It also doesn't change their massive collection of known BS actions done in the past.
43What it does change is that the availability of the money and the military machine are linked. It's not just that American taxpayers are footing the bill; it's that our military machine is funded by tribute, which we pretend is "debt" that we're totally going to pay back one day. It's one system.
To be clear, it's bad. I hate it. I just think it's important to understand how the thing we oppose works.
12
arguably the entire worth of the dollar as a currency comes from it being what taxpayers pay in, so yeah it kind of does come from taxpayers
also, money is fungible with other money, so "this stream of money doesn't come from there" doesn't make sense
23arguably the entire worth of the dollar as a currency comes from it being what taxpayers pay in, so yeah it kind of does come from taxpayers
Not at all. The dollar’s valuation comes primarily from:
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Its backing by a stable economic and governmental system and the projected power of the military controlled by that government
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Its status at the global reserve currency
Tokyo, Lisbon, and Santiago don’t hold debt and equity in USD because Phil from Bozeman paid the IRS in that currency.
2-
The fungibility isn't what's at issue. The link between the money stream and the military is a system that can't be understood separately. Thinking of it as taxpayer funded doesn't make sense.
arguably the entire worth of the dollar as a currency comes from it being what taxpayers pay in, so yeah it kind of does come from taxpayers
I encourage you to read the book. It really changed my perspective on what value even is and what it means. I don't think you'll think this after reading it.
1
Anytime a journalist thinks about covering this they probably die in a tragic accident suddenly.
57Yeah, by shooting themselves twice in the back of the head.
Those crazy journalists.
16“ He fell down an elevator shaft. Onto some bullets.”
15
But it’s unpatriotic to question spending dropping multi million dollar bombs and using expensive tech to wage war in impoverished countries.
47Yes. Also it’s anti-Semitic to object to genocide.
15
We need the Karen's to combine their might and talk the the Mega Manager.
28I'm scared it might work. Or excited. Can they talk the Mega Manager into using bunker-penetrating bombs to get Putin?
9The Karen Bunker Buster is a secret weapon only the Elder Karen's can nag enough to summon.
13
We're all outraged but theres no customer service complaint phone number for the black hole that all of our taxpayer dollars disappear into
23Just call
9110118 999 881 999 119 725 … 3. I'm sure they'll help get you sorted.Edit: Forgot the new emergency services number even though it's so easy to remember.
9Aw you didn't need to write down that phone number for us. Everyone has that memorized. So easy. 😆
3Fore!
3
It's funny because the audit process for FedRAMP approval businesses is an absolute nightmare.
15What’s a FedRAMP?
9It's the authorization a company has to have before their systems can access/store federal government data.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has the 800-53 which is a ~500 page document that's just a list of controls that must be followed, and companies have to get audited once a year to make sure they complied with the controls the previous year.
The fun part is that most of the controls are worded super vaguely, and you're at the mercy of the auditor's interpretation of them.
18
One day the Pentagon will just drop warp drives and energy 2 out of nowhere and the world will be like "what?"
13Probably used to throw million dollar bombs on countries like mine
10I'll have you know they're fifty thousand dollar bombs, inflated to million dollar bombs because the taxpayer is paying
3
Been there, done that. It goes to other assets.... and probably to the CIA for funding Regan's Iran/Contra deals.
7the outrage will not be televised
4Shut up, Robert Greenwald! I'm busy shouting at people who believe different things than me!
4Well, the military has a lot of projects and operations the public doesn't, and shouldn't, know about. If you see about a sting in Syria on CNN, so do the hostile insurgents, or whomever are the enemies du jour. But how can you expense the operation on a public budget sheet, if the operation can't, for security reasons, be public? The answer is simple: you spend $10,000 on $10 toilet seats, and the $9,990 now accounted for dollars are paying for equipment, ammunition, transportation, training, payroll, and benefits for something that officially never happened.
3Do you really want to know what it takes to do and keep our borders safe? horrible acts, espionage and targeted strikes. You uhh see any mission reports from the Navy SEALs any time? no. you don't want to know they are murdering people. i dont. but they do and are. and that costs money. Dirty Deeds are not done dirt cheap.
-2Which is funny because the audit process for FedRAMP compliance is a fucking nightmare.
-2I mean, that's like $6/year on my taxes. As long as I'm not getting nuked I really don't care what they do with it.
-20800 billion dollars divided by 165 million taxpayers is $4,848. That's if it were split evenly over all income brackets, which it is not, but unless your in the bottom tax bracket it's probably more than 6$
8Aren't you taxed for everything you buy?
2There isn't a US federal sales tax. Most states have a sales tax but that goes to the state government not the federal government. New Hampshire and Oregon have zero state sales tax too (with some exceptions like eating out).
Generally speaking in America the Feds regulate foreign affairs and interstate matters. Intrastate (within one state) things are left up to that particular state.
1
