The trouble with being screwed by capitalists is that you don’t know they are doing it to you. It just depends whose propergander you believe. Check your statistics before you quote figures.
Basic tax rate in the UK is 20%. In Scotland we have free health care, free university tuition, free bus travel for over 60's ( this wouldn't work in the US as there are very few buses). US citizens kid themselves on that they have a low tax economy. When you add income tax,state sales tax, health insurance, property tax ( far higher than our council tax) it is probably about the same as the UK
Is that for everyone, or is it a cap for the rich? Like Cortez's proposal for a 70% tax AFTER the 10 million dollar mark?
Cortez's proposal almost sounds like a penalty for becoming successful.
@RobertMartin To me it sounds like those with more than they could ever need should give a little more, once they exceed 10 million dollars per year. Especially considering they are not the ones breaking their bodies and dying at 55 from overwork.
"Successful" in this sense sounds to me like a self-flattering word for "exploitation".
Do you think an executive who sits in meetings deserve tens of million while thousands of his employees earn too little to afford food, rent and medicine?
Also, you didn't answer my question.
@RobertMartin success. It’s not that we can’t feed the poor it’s that we can’t satisfy the rich. Just how much cavier can they eat or cold big Mack’s for that matter
The gasoline figure is interesting. Why are the other taxes listed as percentages, but gas in in dollars? They use dollars in Germany? No. Euros are used.
Last I checked, German minimum wage was equivalent to $10/hr. So generally there is more buying power. Due to strong unions many skilled workers make well above minimum wage.
The gas price appears to be thrown in to confuse folks, raise alarm, and stop us from thinking critically about what is supposedly presented in the graphic.
First off cut our military budget in half, cut funding to foreign countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia, cut corporate welfare, only give tax breaks to companies that pay a living wage, create a tax system that is balanced and closed the loopholes, stop with the tax refunds ( they’re nothing more than our government pacifying it’s citizens so that they won’t seek civil disobedience )
And finally the population of the European Union is 513 million we’re at 321 million so you’re comparing countries with a lower taxable population so all we really need is to create more jobs incorporate more citizens and our tax base will be more than enough to support social programs.
Oh and if tax dollars are paying for it then the shits not free so that free shit rhetoric is simply that rhetoric and the last I checked in states where it snows their citizens tend to benefit from the use of all of those socialist snowplows.
And for everyone else it’s schools, buses, parks, police, fire departments and hell even lifeguards at the beach. Just saying that attempting to compare us to Europe would be inaccurate and assuming that we don’t already have active forms of socialism in America would be even more ignorant.
Get one serious illness, you win living in a card board box. If the big, unexpected stuff was covered, people could do very well on the day to day
And yet somehow, Europeans don't live in abject poverty... It's almost as if these were misleading, possibly even deceptive statistics. It's ALMOST like someone wants to convince us that Europe is just a conglomerate of failed states that just refuses to acknowledge that they've failed. Hmm?
@Elganned really? Freedom from deadly worry that one illness will ruin your life?
@Elganned I know you were being sarcastic, but i try to think of Everybody reading a post.....
I learned a lot supporting Bernie!
@Elganned I know. If I didn't have the awareness that I was one medical emergency from financial ruin (or ANY emergency for that matter), I don't know where I'd find the motivation to keep putting my nose to the grindstone...
@ghettophilosopher I hear you! I have totally been in that situation, watching the savings dwindle, being able to say which month will be The End (assuming some other damn thing doesn't happen!)
Just horrible...sure doesn't help with the "getting well" part.....