The halls of Congress are filled with individuals who at some point abandoned almost everything they once believed in. More often than not, it’s a cushy, post-political corporate job or lobbying position that might have led them to give up on whatever led them to enter politics in the first place. Rarer is the person who’s done it out of pure, unbridled political ambition.
Such appears to be the case with Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic senator from Arizona who recently went viral after cheerfully voting against a $15 minimum wage hike that would have helped reduce poverty for millions of children and working parents. Unlike fellow congressional spike strip Joe Manchin, Sinema doesn’t have a conflict of interest that might explain her vote; according to disclosures, her only extracurricular activity is a $25,000 a year adjunct teaching job at a local university. Nor has Sinema, who consistentlyranks among the least wealthy members of Congress, appeared to pair her journey up the political ladder with a windfall in her own personal fortune.
So what is it that led Sinema to do a complete 180 on almost every position she ever took on almost any issue, from war to inequality to government spending? The answer is that she shifted right little by little, at each moment when her political ascent demanded it, a death by a thousand compromises that has turned Sinema into a right-wing Democrat who makes a virtue of defying not just the party’s Left but even its center.
Sinema Vérité
The powerful story of Sinema’s early life has been core to her political identity, however much the latter has shifted. Born into a middle-class household in Tucson in 1976, she was soon plunged into bitter poverty when the recession that closed out that decade put her father out of a job. He filed for bankruptcy while their home went into foreclosure, and Sinema, her brother, and her soon-to-be-divorced mother moved to Florida, finding themselves broke, homeless, and relying on food stamps and the charity of her stepfather’s Mormon church to survive.
As Sinema would often tell audiences, the family lived for years in a converted gas station, with no running water or electricity. What ultimately helped her escape these dire conditions was education. After finishing high school as valedictorian, she graduated college and became a social worker in a heavily immigrant- and refugee-populated part of Phoenix. A master’s in social work followed, as well as a law degree, which saw her work as a “defense attorney who represents murderers,” as she put it — a quote that would later haunt her.
Nikolai Petrovsky was scrolling through social media after a day on the ski slopes when reports describing a mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China caught his eye. It was early January 2020, and Petrovsky, an immunologist, was at his vacation getaway in Keystone, Colorado, which is where he goes most years with his family to flee the searingly hot summers at home in South Australia. He was soon struck by an odd discrepancy in how the pneumonia cases were portrayed. Chinese authorities and the World Health Organization were saying there was nothing to worry about, but locals in the area, he says, were posting about “bodies being stretchered out of houses in Wuhan and police bolting apartment doors shut.”
Petrovksy is a professor at Flinders University, near Adelaide, and he is also founder and chairman of a company called Vaxine that develops immunizations for infectious diseases, among other projects. Since 2005, he’s received tens of millions of dollars in funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to support the development of vaccines and compounds called adjuvants that boost their effects. After Chinese scientists posted a draft genome of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the disease culprit in Wuhan, Petrovksy — who by this time had put skiing on the backburner to work from his Colorado home office — directed his colleagues down under to run computer modeling studies of the viral sequence, a first step towards designing a vaccine.
This generated a startling result: The spike proteins studding SARS-CoV-2 bound more tightly to their human cell receptor, a protein called ACE2, than target receptors on any other species evaluated. In other words, SARS-CoV-2 was surprisingly well adapted to its human prey, which is unusual for a newly emerging pathogen. “Holy shit, that’s really weird,’” Petrovsky recalls thinking.
As Petrovsky considered whether SARS-CoV-2 may have emerged in lab cultures with human cells, or cells engineered to express the human ACE2 protein, a letter penned by 27 scientists appeared suddenly on Feb. 19 in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. The authors insisted that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin, and they condemned any alternate hypotheses as conspiracy theories that create only “fear, rumors, and prejudice.”
Petrovksy says he found the letter infuriating. Conspiracy theorists is “the last thing we were, and it looked to be pointing at people like us,” he says.
Last month, a team of international scientists completed a month-long visit to Wuhan to investigate SARS-CoV-2’s origins. Convened by the WHO, and closely monitored by Chinese authorities, the team concluded initially that a lab leak was so unlikely that further investigations of it were unnecessary. The WHO’s director general later walked that statement back, claiming that “all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and studies.” A group of 26 scientists, social scientists, and science communicators — Petrovksy among them — have now signed their own letter arguing that WHO investigators lacked “the mandate, the independence, or the necessary accesses” to determine whether or not SARS-CoV-2 could have been the result of a laboratory incident.
The surge in inequality since 1980 has been driven from above, by the top 10 percent, and even more so by the top 1 percent and the even smaller fractions of pharaonic wealth. The other 90 percent have not all been impoverished, but they have been abandoned. This has given rise to a bitter journalistic and academic literature in the Global North, an interesting counter-position to consultancy and development bank dreams of the “rising middle class” of the Global South.
To stiffen bourgeois resolve in this moment of crisis and liberal self-doubt, Torben Iversen and David Soskice’s Democracy and Prosperity (2019) presents a homage to “advanced capitalist democracies” (they show more deference to capitalism than to democracy, which is held responsible for the inequality). “The essence of democracy,” they aver, is “the advancement of middle-class interests.”
Iversen and Soskice, both prominent institutional economists, argue that the middle class is aligned with capital via two key mechanisms. One is “inclusion into the wealth stream” created by capital accumulation. The other is the welfare state: the tax-and-transfer system ensures that the gains of the knowledge economy “are shared with the middle classes.” It is precisely this “inclusion” and “sharing” between capitalists and the middle class that is found by recent inequality research to be terminating.
In the beginning, the neoliberal dispensation did favor middle-class interests. The opening up of public services to private business provided some gains for lucky segments of the middle class. Public funding of free private education places, through a voucher system as in Sweden today, gave middle-class parents a welcome chance to send their children to well-kept schools with few immigrant or working-class children. Corporate care has been less popular, and prone to public scandals, but is still accepted by many as a familiar accompaniment to austerity and the scarcity of public provision.
On the other hand, the exclusion of the middle class from prime urban housing continues apace, and income and wealth gaps are widening. Meanwhile, environmentalism is making ever-deeper inroads into the educated middle class, explicitly putting planetary survival and ecological sustainability above the interests of capital.
Falling Behind
As the median is the exact middle of a distribution, the ratio between the incomes of the top 1 percent and the median is a good measure of the distance separating the upper from the middle class. In the United States, this ratio jumped from 11:1 to 26:1 in the years 1980–2016. In the UK and Sweden, it rose from a relatively low 3:1 to around 10:1. In Germany the ratio also climbed, whereas in France it fell slightly from an already high 11:1.
This week a journalist in Hong Kong is on trial, accused of violating the Road Traffic Ordinance; she was arrested for accessing a public database, in a case that’s raising questions not about traffic laws but the city’s freedom of press.
Bao Choy, a veteran investigative reporter, was arrested last year, shortly after the broadcast of her high-profile documentary about a key episode in the city’s widespread anti-government protests the previous year: the mob attack at the Yuen Long train station. On the night of July 21, 2019, a group of white-clad men attacked pro-democracy activists and bystanders with rods and sticks, injuring dozens. Despite hundreds of emergency calls made during the assault, the police took nearly 40 minutes to respond, arriving just after the mob had left the station, leading some pro-democracy supporters to accuse the authorities of colluding with the triad gangs behind the attack.
For her documentary, “Hong Kong Connection: 7.21 Who Owns the Truth,” Choy examined CCTV footage and conducted searches on the city’s vehicle registration database in an attempt to uncover the identities of the attackers and to identify plainclothes police officers who might have been in the area before the attack.
Police alleged that Choy made a false statement in obtaining license information from an online vehicle registration database, an offense under the Road Traffic Ordinance that could be punishable by up to six months in prison. The database allows users to get the name and address of a car’s owner by typing in a vehicle registration plate. However, police said Hong Kong laws allow people to search the database for only “transport-related matters” and accused Choy of using the data outside the scope of the permission. Choy has pleaded not guilty.
Investigative reporters have used government databases in their work for decades, particularly the company registry and land registry, which show who owns companies and assets in the city. Those have often been crucial in uncovering scandals. Law firms and businesses often have to check information from the databases as part of their due diligence investigations, and NGOs can obtain data in their areas of interests. David Webb, an activist investor, has used the databases extensively to create a website that provides transparency to the business affiliations of public figures.
“I fear that this case would set a precedent that would allow other public document registries or other tools of journalism to slowly disappear,” said Sharron Fast, a journalism and law professor at the University of Hong Kong. “Law firms and civil society groups often look into these databases for important information. … If this type of information is starting to be hidden, it should cause alarm to the business community.”
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has dismissed concerns that Choy’s prosecution was aimed at silencing investigative journalism. “Press freedom is protected by the Basic Law, and we will not suppress press freedom,” she said, referring to Hong Kong’s mini-constitution. “But media workers, of course, have to abide by the law.”
In response, two progressive Democratic lawmakers have authored legislation cracking down on tax evasion.
The new Internal Revenue Service figures compiled by Syracuse University researchers show that in the last eight years, there has been a 72 percent drop in the number of audits of those making more than $1 million. In all, 98 percent of those making more than $1 million did not face an audit last year.
There has also been a 55 percent drop in the number of audits of America’s largest corporations. In 2012, almost all corporate giants were audited. In 2020, however, almost two thirds of those corporations were not subjected to audits.
Amid this decline in scrutiny of the rich, a letter to the Biden administration from 88 progressive groups pointed out: “Since 2011, audit rates for millionaires, who are disproportionately white, have dropped more than twice as much as for taxpayers claiming the (Earned Income Tax Credit), who are disproportionately people of color. Audit coverage is now the heaviest in many low-income majority-Black counties.”
The sharp reduction in audits of the rich contributes to the tax gap between the amount of taxes owed and paid. In 2012, audits of wealthy individuals and large corporations recovered roughly $29 billion of revenue. Eight years later, the far fewer audits recovered less than $7 billion. IRS referrals for criminal prosecution and Justice Department tax convictions have both hit an all-time low.
“At a time when Americans face growing economic inequality and financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the IRS is letting billions of dollars in tax revenue slip through its fingers,” wrote Syracuse researchers. “As public attention focuses on how the country can restore faith in our democratic institutions, one area that should not be overlooked is how the nation can better ensure that our income tax laws are fairly and effectively administered.”
“High-income taxpayers are generally not a collection priority”
The situation is the result of both agency priorities and funding cuts.
A recent report from the Treasury Department’s inspector general concluded that at the IRS, “high-income taxpayers are generally not a collection priority, nor is there a strategy in place to address nonpayment by high-income taxpayers.” As evidence, the report showed that the agency failed to recover more than 60 percent of the $4 billion in back taxes owed by those making more than $1.5 million.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy took charge of the United States Postal Service less than a year ago and began a process of running it into the ground. Now, he wants to accelerate that process.
If President Biden does not take the necessary steps to begin the process of removing DeJoy from his position, the postmaster general’s austerity agenda threatens to ruin the USPS at a point in its 246-year history when the service is every bit as essential as it has ever been.
The urgency of presidential action was illustrated Tuesday when DeJoy announced a 10-year “reorganization” plan for the Postal Service that would slow down delivery times for first-class mail, hike postage rates, and reduce hours for post offices. The postmaster general and his cronies tried to portray the proposed changes as a streamlining project, but The Washington Post correctly characterized it as a strategic initiative “that diminishes delivery standards and raises prices.” The effect of those changes makes this, in the words of Chuck Zlatkin, the legislative and political director for the New York Metro Area Postal Union, “DeJoy’s 10-year plan for the de facto privatization of the post office.”
Even if DeJoy’s slashing and burning do not immediately lead to the dismantlement of the agency, it will do severe harm to the Postal Service, and to the communities that most rely on it. “Cuts to service standards for first-class mail, limiting hours at local post offices, and making it more difficult for people to access postal products would adversely impact USPS customers across the nation, including in rural and underserved communities,” explains Senator Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the committee with oversight responsibilities for the Postal Service.
Save the Post Office, a coalition of labor and progressive groups, offered a blunter response: “Asking Louis DeJoy to make a ten year plan for the post office is like asking the fox to build a better henhouse. After his record of destruction, incompetence and self-dealing over the last nine months, the only plans he’s qualified to make at this point are his own retirement plans.”
Unfortunately, DeJoy, an ally of Donald Trump whose efforts to dismantle the Postal Service during last year’s debate over voting by mail sparked national outrage, is not showing any inclination to retire on his own. Asked recently about how long he intends to remain at the head of the USPS, DeJoy recently told the House Oversight and Reform Committee, “A long time. Get used to me.” DeJoy’s hubris is rooted in the fact that he is not directly accountable to President Biden or Congress. He serves at the behest of the nine-member Postal Board of Governors, a bipartisan board that is still dominated by Trump appointees.
The officer, Brian D. Sicknick, who had been guarding the west side of the Capitol, collapsed later that day and died the next night. Little had been known about what happened to Officer Sicknick during the assault, and the previously unpublished videos provide new details about when, where and how he was attacked, as well as about the events leading up to the encounter.
Two rioters, Julian Elie Khater and George Pierre Tanios, were arrested on March 14 and charged with assaulting Officer Sicknick and two other officers with chemical spray. The investigation is continuing, and federal prosecutors haven’t ruled out pursuing murder charges.
Here’s what the videos show.
Mr. Khater and Mr. Tanios arrive near the police line on the west side of the Capitol at 2:09 p.m., more than an hour into the battle between rioters and police officers, according to an F.B.I. affidavit. An independent video journalist at the scene films Mr. Khater shortly after he arrives. Mr. Khater observes the fighting as tear gas and chemical spray waft through the crowd, then turns back toward where Mr. Tanios is standing.
At 2:14 p.m., he and Mr. Tanios huddle just a few yards from the police line, according to the F.B.I. Part of their conversation is captured in a separate video.
“Give me that bear shit,” Mr. Khater tells Mr. Tanios, most likely referring to a canister of bear repellent spray that prosecutors say Mr. Tanios purchased earlier that day.
He appears to retrieve something from Mr. Tanios’s backpack. After Mr. Tanios tells him to wait, Mr. Khater responds, “They just sprayed me.” He holds a white spray canister in his right hand.
On Monday, federal prosecutors alleged in court that Mr. Khater and Mr. Tanios were carrying Frontiersman bear spray, which is manufactured by Sabre, a company that makes self-defense products including pepper spray and stun guns. Though made from the same ingredient, bear spray can be many times more powerful than pepper sprays sold for self-defense and is not meant for use on humans.
Images of the bear spray sold by Sabre appear to be similar to the canister seen in Mr. Khater’s hand at one point in the video.
By 2:20 p.m., six minutes later, Mr. Khater has returned to the police line, where Officer Sicknick and his colleagues are standing behind a row of bike rack barricades. He stands just a few feet from Officer Sicknick, who can be seen wearing a blue Capitol Police jacket, bicycle helmet and black coronavirus face mask.
Whether that is true or not, now Biden is inarguably breaking his promise. Under pressure from moderate Senate Democrats, he has reportedly agreed to cut down the formula under which the checks will be sent out. In the previous packages, the amount started phasing out at $75,000 in income for individuals and $150,000 for joint filers, and vanished entirely at $100,000 and $200,000 respectively (as of 2019). Now the phase-out will start start in the same place but end at $80,000 for singles and $160,000 for couples.
The $1,400 promise clearly implied at least that the checks would go out according to the previous formula used under Trump. But now singles making between $80,000-100,000 and couples making between $160,000-200,000 will get nothing. The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reports that roughly 17 million people who previously got checks now will not.
The supposed justification here is that moderates want the aid to be more “targeted.” In fact this formula is horribly inaccurate, because the income data the IRS uses is from the year before the pandemic (unless people have already filed their taxes — and by the way, if your income decreased in 2020, you should do that immediately). This formula is therefore doubly wrong — there are no doubt millions of people who have lost jobs and should qualify but won’t, and a smaller number that have gotten raises and shouldn’t qualify but will. And this change will only save a pitiful $12 billion.
The survival checks are one of the most popular government programs in American history. Polls have them at something like 4-1 approval. “Moderation,” for Senate Democrats, apparently means breaking their party’s promises in the service of unpopular, pointless actions that make their president seem less generous than Donald Trump.
If you’re making $80,000 a years do you really think you need the$1,400 or do you just feel entitled to have it.
The yearly income figure is based on tax returns from BEFORE the pandemic. There are people who were making $80k a year before the pandemic, but lost their job or suffered a severe reduction in income.
Even if the eligibility requirements weren’t based on tax returns before the pandemic, $80k a year isn’t enough to live in a lot of cities, especially if you’re a single parent with children.
Here’s a screenshot from the Family Budget Calculator, showing the cost of living for a single parent and two kids living in Seattle (a city near me):
As someone who lived in Seattle in college, and who has lived in the areas surrounding Seattle in my adult life, I can tell you, that monthly housing figure is probably a LOW ESTIMATE.
Here’s figures for New York Metro area:
Here’s for San Francisco:
And Honolulu:
But please, tell me allllll about how people making $80k a year don’t need the money.
If someone doesn’t need the money, the government can always tax it back later. Means-testing is ineffective and ultimately, inhumane, as people who need assistance will inevitably fall through the cracks created by these requirements. But IF you’re going to insist on a cut-off point (which I DO NOT SUPPORT; I’m in favor of universal programs that apply to everyone and I think we all should’ve been getting at least $2k a month since the BEGINNING of the goddamn pandemic), it SHOULD NOT be $80k. It should be whatever the cost of living is in the most expensive city / area in the country, which IS NOT $80k, not even close.
ALSO this money isn’t just about helping starving people get food. It’s also about stimulating the economy, allowing people who maybe DO have enough money to buy the essentials to spend a little extra money on restaurants or clothing or whatever. In my mind, as long as the money is spent in the economy (not necessarily immediately, because maybe people are saving up for a car or a house or some other big purchase, which can take multiple months of planning), not just sitting in someone’s bank account, then that’s a good thing. Businesses are being shut down because of decreased consumer spending, which further causes people to lose their jobs. There are restaurants I know of who have closed permanently. Stimulus checks to Americans might’ve been able to save them.
Not to mention, if Biden is saying that the $600 check was part of the $2000 check he promised to give people (which is itself a lie), then you CANNOT change the eligibility requirements. Doing so admits this is a completely separate check / assistance package, which is opposite to what the Biden administration is saying.
People are/were depending on those checks to afford food. Now some of them won’t get them.
Here’s some articles for you to read that explain why your pro-austerity argument is a bunch of bullshit. Please educate yourself:
I don’t have time to respond individually, so I’m
going to compile some common (shitty) arguments and respond to them here:
1. “Why are you blaming Biden for this? He’s not
responsible. Manchin (or another conservative Democrat) is responsible.”
We blame Biden because Biden did not do everything in his
power to get us stimulus checks. It’s okay if a politician tries and fails. It’s
not okay when a politician can’t be bothered to put forth even minimal effort.
Biden is President. He has the bully pulpit. Not only that,
but we KNOW that he’s not afraid to be confrontational when he feels like it
(he has a history of being extremely confrontational to voters who ask him questions
he doesn’t like). He has the ability to put immense pressure on his Senators to
get them to fall in line. He could’ve called Manchin
into his office and told him, “If you don’t support my legislation, I will endorse
a challenger in your next primary race. I will go to your state, I will hold a
ton of town halls, and explain to your constituents what you’ve done. I will
literally ruin your career and your reputation forever, if you fuck over the
American people.” He could rally the base to put pressure on Manchin to
change his mind. And if Manchin didn’t cave to the public pressure, then
so be it. But he could do his best to make sure Manchin went down, just
like the legislation he refuses to support. If politicians refuse to support
good legislation, you make them pay a political price.
Joe Biden did none of this. It’s
been reported he didn’t even attempt to negotiate with Manchin AT ALL. He changed
the eligibility all on his own. It’s not a fucking demand Manchin made. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure Manchin is thrilled that the eligibility
was changed to fuck over more Americans, but he wasn’t really demanding it, because
there were NO TALKS with Biden.
I’d be willing to give Biden
the benefit of the doubt if he had used his executive powers to push for more
change. But he hasn’t. He simply DOES NOT CARE. Stop defending a guy that doesn’t
give a shit if you live or die.
The fact that people DO NOT
understand how the game of politics CAN and SHOULD and IS played is beyond
pathetic.
2. “Okay, Biden isn’t great. But why isn’t this
article / your post blaming Manchin?”
We DO blame Manchin. I’ve got dozens of fucking posts on my
blog that document what trash Manchin is. But not every single post is going to
be about him. Nor is every single author going to write about him. No one is
saying that it is ONLY Biden’s fault. This article just happens to be about
him.
If you create a post that is critical of Trump, I don’t automatically assume it means you’re cool with McConnell. People simply don’t have time to make every single post about every single thing. Duh.
3. “You’re being dishonest because the cutoff point
is $80k for unmarried adults. Dependents get checks, so actually a single
parent with two kids would get more money.”
I’m not being dishonest. The person I was responding to was
pretending to be stupid and acting like if you make $80k a year, it’s
unfathomable how you can’t afford to live. I was pointing out to them that IF
YOU HAVE KIDS, it’s actually hard to afford basic necessities on $80k a year in a lot of cities.
But here’s the thing. Even with the additional checks for
your dependents, it’s STILL NOT ENOUGH TO COVER THE COST OF LIVING FOR A MONTH
IN ANY OF THOSE CITIES. And these checks are supposed to last us multiple months.
The monthly cost-of-living in Honolulu for a family of three
(one adult, two kids) is $8856. But a single parent with two children will be
getting a total of $4200 in stimulus. Hey morons, $4200 is LESS THAN $8856. I
wasn’t being dishonest. I just assumed y’all could do basic math. Jesus Christ.
4. “This package isn’t perfect, but you can’t
please everyone.”
Yeah, I don’t really care about pleasing everyone. I care
about making sure everyone who needs assistance, gets assistance. That bill
doesn’t do this. I’m not okay with that. You are. Difference in morality.
And look, even if I was personally cool with the change in eligibility, you know who is really pissed off about it right now? The people who got that initial $600 check, and now won’t get the remaining $1400 because the rules changed. Electorally, this is about the stupidest decision the Dems could’ve made. A lot of you people claim to want to stop Trump and the GOP AT ALL COSTS, but you don’t actually care about winning, do you? If you did, you’d be screaming at Biden and the rest of the Dems that this isn’t good enough. With this decision, Dems are on track for an absolute electoral bloodbath during the next midterms.You don’t break campaign promises like this and NOT pay a political price; we’ve seen it happen time and time again. How do you think we got Trump in the first place: in large part, Dems failing short of their campaign promises.
5. “Do you want Trump to get a check??!?!?!?!”
I already said we can TAX BACK the stimulus check from any
rich assholes who really don’t need it, Trump included.
I’m not interested in fucking over the average American so
that I can deny Trump $1400 that can easily be taxed back later.
You people would literally let people starve to own Trump,
lmao.
6. “$80k isn’t that much in some parts of the country,
but it is in others. The federal government doesn’t cater to regions, so this
is how it has to be.”
Precisely because this bill DOES NOT cater to regions (which
btw, I would be totally okay with; sure, go ahead and give people who live in
lower cost-of-living areas less stimulus money) is why it needs to set a higher
floor.
7. “If you make $80k last year, you should’ve saved
up money.”
Did you literally not look at the cost-of-living in those
areas I showed you? Saving money how? If you made $80k, all your money is going towards expenses
necessary to life. Even if we assume that those aren’t perfect estimates, I
doubt they’re that far off. But if they are, then please cite credible sources
that show the average cost-of-living in Seattle for a family of three is
significantly less than $88k a year. I lived in Seattle. That number is a low
estimate.
In fact, I ran the numbers for a single adult living in the area I live in (not disclosing because of privacy concerns), and it is WAY TOO LOW. I know, because I live in the area. Good luck finding an apartment for one person for $800 a month. The lowest you’ll be able to find is around $1200. If you earn the minimum wage in my state, you would be unable to live on your own, even if you use the estimates provided by the budget calculator.
And remember, “cost of living” is NOT the same thing as “amount of money you need to earn in order to live in an area”. Why? Because of TAXES. Someone may have a salary of 80k a year, but that’s not their TAKE HOME PAY. You need to account for taxes when you think about the amount of wages/salary needed to cover cost-of-living expenses.
8. “You don’t have to live in an expensive city.
You can just move.”
Moving costs money, a lot of money (I’ve moved several times). Most jobs don’t pay for moving costs. Also, you might not be able to get a job
in a rural town. I grew up in a rural town. Employment opportunities were slim. After college, I went back to live in my hometown. I was unable to get employment in town and had to work remotely from a company in California, and eventually ended up moving because of job opportunities elsewhere. I would’ve moved sooner, but again, it’s expensive to move.
9. “People making $80k a year don’t need stimulus. I make $50k a year and can afford everything *I* need, so why can’t other people?”
As the statistics show, some do need the money. Some of the most populous cities in the US are insanely expensive to live in. It’s amazing to me that people don’t understand that the value of a dollar VARIES depending on where you are in the country. You are extraordinarily stupid, so please shut up. Words cannot express how dumb some of you are.
Even so, as I already explained, this isn’t just about helping people afford
food. Stimulus checks are ALSO about stimulating the economy. People using
their stimulus checks to buy food from restaurants, or clothes from a clothing
store, or booze from the liquor store, is GOOD. Why? Because it allows these
businesses to stay open, which in turn allows people (a lot of whom are LOW WAGE
WORKERS) to be employed. They need the employment, because we’re not giving
them proper assistance through a recurring stimulus check program. It’s actually a good thing if we can keep people in their jobs.
10. “Anyone who is earning a normal salary shouldn’t
get a stimulus check. This should only go to people who lost their jobs because
of Covid, not for any other reason.”
“Normal” salary isn’t necessarily a living wage. Why are you
okay with people going hungry? We literally spend SO MUCH MORE MONEY on killing
brown people in other countries, but a fucking stimulus check is what people want
to fearmonger about. Just admit you hate poor people and move the fuck on.
11. “We could just let places re-open.”
Places ARE re-opening. My state has been doing an excellent job of gauging when to shut things down, and when to slowly re-open (we’ve had to go back and forth throughout the pandemic). However, financial damage has been
done to the American people. That’s not something that can be solved overnight.
Businesses that shut down won’t magically re-open when their local government
lifts restrictions. Those businesses are gone for good. It’s going to take time
to re-build the economy, create more jobs, etc. It’s the government’s
responsibility to make sure people don’t starve in the meantime.
12. “Those budget calculations mean nothing. What
does it even mean by “other necessities?””
Other necessities include clothing, essential non-food items like cleaning
supplies, school supplies, etc. Not that hard to understand. How privileged must you be, that
you don’t understand people need to buy things other than food to live? Do you
have a butler or mommy that just buys this shit for you, never requires you to
get it yourself, so you think it just magically appears in your house?
13. “My mom was a single parent with two kids and she
made it on less than $80k.”
Good for you. That’s not everyone. A lot depends on the area
of the country in which you live. The logic of, “Well I didn’t experience it,
so it must not be valid,” is laughably self-centered and dumb.
14. “The eligibility requirements are based on 2019 or 2020 tax returns.”
A lot of people haven’t filed their 2020 returns yet. Good for you if you file immediately, but nobody is legally obligated to do so. They just need to meet the deadline, which isn’t until April (pretty sure we’ll be getting checks before then). As someone who worked as an independent contractor for a few years, I can tell you that it’s not uncommon for people in that employment situation to file taxes closer to the deadline, simply because the process is insanely complicated and takes a lot of time. It’s even more confusing if it’s your first time filing that way.
Of course, I would encourage people to file as soon as they can, as a general rule. But also, there’s a lot of reasons people might wait and it’s not really my place to pry or shame them for not filing their taxes immediately. I don’t know them. I don’t know their situation.
15. “If you live in a high cost-of-living area, but are poor,
the $1400 isn’t really going to help you anyways because everything is so expensive, so who cares?”
Not help? $1400 could buy you food so you don’t starve. Like what the hell is this logic?
16. “I pay more than $1400 a week in taxes, and don’t
want my money going to poor people.”
If you pay that much in taxes per week, then you’re making
AT LEAST ~$230k a fucking year (likely more because the math assumes you didn’t take advantage of any of the loopholes or benefits available to rich people in our tax code). No one cares about your opinion.
And it’s not as though you’re going to somehow pay less in taxes if we deny people help. It’s not as though you’re going to get your tax dollars back. But I suppose you’d rather your money goes towards making shitty fighter jets and subsidizing fossil fuels, instead of helping people out in the middle of a pandemic.
The money isn’t the point, because this rich asshole would not be losing any money; we’re not taxing him more (Biden has sworn not to raise taxes on people making $400k a year, iirc). The cruelty is the point.
I’ll also note that most working Americans pay more in taxes
per year than they’re getting back in stimulus money. Including “poor people”.
The average American isn’t actually taking money from anyone, they’re just getting their
own goddamn tax dollars back.
To be clear: I’m fine with someone needing government
help, and taking more from the system than they put into it in tax dollars. The issue isn’t welfare spending. It’s all the other shit we spend our money on, like the goddamn defense budget.
It’s obvious to me that people simply DO NOT read the links I posted. A lot of them explain why means-testing is wrong, which would’ve avoided the inane comments shrieking about, “But what about rich people?”. If you don’t read the post, then you really shouldn’t respond. People who do so have no interest in even engaging in proper debate, they simply want to spread pro-austerity propaganda. In short: READ THE FUCKING LINKS BEFORE YOU FUCKING COMMENT.
As well, anyone who is pro-austerity (especially for the pseudo-intellectual reasons provided, where it’s clear you’re frantically trying to justify your pro-austerity stance - coming up with a dozen shoddy reasons as why it’s cool to deny needy people assistance - and still feel like a moral person) should stop calling themselves a leftist. You cannot be pro-austerity and still call yourself a leftist, because pro-austerity is literally a tenet of hardcore right-wing ideology.
And I’ll remind people: not everyone who has more money than you is your enemy. When we talk about “the rich”, we’re referring to people who earn at least hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, not $80k. Earning $80k wouldn’t put you even in the top 10% of earners in the US.
In some states, teachers make an average of $80k (like New York, where the cost of living is also very high). Those aren’t the
bourgeoisie; they’re fucking working class people who are likely underpaid and over-worked. And your broad contempt for anyone who you perceive to have more privilege than you is counter-productive to building a left-wing coalition that can actually transform our economy and government. Please educate yourself, or exit the movement.
I found another helpful resource that people can use to look up what the living wage would be in your area, what the current wage is, and what the cost of living is (broken down into categories) based on your living situation (number of members in your family):
17. “Politics is about negotiation. Don’t expect a
politician to make a promise and keep it, because they’ll have to negotiate
to actually pass things.”
[a] Yes, but you start off the negotiations from an EXTREME
position. You don’t start negotiations from a weak position.
Biden was ALREADY “negotiating”
from a compromised position. His promise – his “starting point”, in your framing
– was a weak, compromised position of ONE CHECK, means-tested, $2000. If he had
said recurring checks, until the American people have economically recovered from the pandemic, no means-testing, $2000 per check, along with giving us a huge check making up for the months we hadn’t been getting assistance, then
your point about negotiations would, in theory, make more sense. But he didn’t
do that. Not to mention…
[b] There is no reason the Dems needed to negotiate. They
have control of the House, Senate, and presidency. They can pass whatever they
want, as long as they have the political will to do so.
“But, but, but, what about Manchin,” you pathetically whine.
Yeah, I already explained to you how Biden could bring the scummy neoliberals
to fucking heel. You can politically browbeat people into submission. It’s not that hard. It’s just that the Democrats never try (because they don’t actually want to get shit done).
18. “We need people to get involved, not throw their hands up and do nothing. Posts like this inspire cynicism.”
My job is to tell the truth. What people do with that truth is their business. I’m not going to lie to them and tell them that Biden is totally cool. He’s not. Sometimes the truth is inconvenient. That’s life. Grow up.
If you’re soooo concerned about people feeling like nothing matters, then come up with links / suggestions that would help them get involved so we can make sure this doesn’t happen again. If you fail to do these things, you’re not REALLY concerned about people’s lack of activism; you just don’t want this particular story getting out.
Also, it’s impossible to predict how a person is going to react to a news story. For me, personally, anger is what motivates me better than anything else when it comes to politics. So actually, this is precisely the kind of story that compels me to act more, not less. Entire movements are created because of “negative” stories in the news. It’s one reason why #BLM has gotten so huge. People get inspired to act when they see bad shit happening. This hand-wringing and fearmongering about, “Oooohhhh, negative news stories will make people lazy,” is not based in reality. People and their motivations are more complex than that.
19. (Not really a point against the stimulus checks per se, but I’ll respond.) “I make $0 and I haven’t gotten stimulus checks, so I’m tired of hearing about people who do make some money not getting checks.”
That’s exactly the type of scenario I was referring to when I talk about people falling through the cracks when you means-test.
If these checks weren’t means-tested, you most likely would’ve gotten a check. Means-testing not only blocks a lot of people from getting money due to requirements, but it also means that people who DO qualify won’t get checks due to errors in the system.
For example, when you filed taxes, maybe you (accidentally) checked a box saying someone COULD claim you as a dependent. Even if no one did, the system still classifies you as a dependent (maybe it’s not supposed to, but it certainly does). Which means you wouldn’t qualify for all the stimulus checks. Little things like this can be avoided if we just issue EVERYONE a check.
Also, lmao @ the people who literally say shit like, “I don’t want to sound like a bootlicker, but [defends austerity and makes excuses for right wingers].”
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