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Political Whores
Feb 13, 2012

rkajdi posted:

Realistically, this is the way we treat every politician ever. W without position and money would just be another ne'er-do-well drunkard with a past full of failures. Clinton without position would just be a another serial philanderer and harasser. But because these people are considered Great Men we overlook the actual person and create a saint. This is also neglecting the flawed personality it takes to want to grab for power in the first place-- the people who want power seem to be even more broken than the standard man on the street.

Yeah, conceptually speaking I don't have any problem with the idea of the benign ruler who commands for the greater good. I've just never seen it in reality. Doesn't mean that people in power are 100% terrible, or that they can't do some good, but it's always important to remember that people in politics chose to be there, they weren't just anointed by God to be a ruler.

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mr. mephistopheles
Dec 2, 2009

Mr Interweb posted:

No, no no, no, no.

Huckabee, for all his "folksiness" is just as much of a piece of poo poo as any other right wing personality. He's that guy that you see in the movies all the time. You know, the pastor who seems all friendly and cordial, but when nobody's looking he indulges in every form of depravity imaginable. He's given several nods to the birthers throughout the years, as well as making other typically racist comments about Obama.

Yeah, but he actually believes that poo poo. People like Limbaugh and Hannity just say whatever it takes to appeal to peoples' most basal fears and turn them against the other. I'm not saying he doesn't have reprehensible views, I'm saying they are predicated on naivety rather than focus group pinpointing on how to sell the most bile. I never said he was a good person, I said he wasn't intentionally malicious and I stand by that. Huckabee is as much a victim of right wing brainwashing as he is a propagator of it.


This is just hilarious old grandpa poo poo. This is more selling idiocy than selling hate. This is more preaching to the choir than telling people how to think and feel.

Again, I just want to reiterate, I don't think Huckabee is a good guy. I just thing lumping him in with guys like Hannity and Limbaugh is like saying George W. Bush is as evil as Karl Rove. I feel like it's giving him too much intellectual credit, honestly.

Zuhzuhzombie!!
Apr 17, 2008
FACTS ARE A CONSPIRACY BY THE CAPITALIST OPRESSOR
The estate tax is 5 million, right?

Meaning the estate tax only kicks in if you inherit over 5 million dollars in money or does it also apply to junk like jewelry, antiques, etc?

thefncrow
Mar 14, 2001

Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:

The estate tax is 5 million, right?

Meaning the estate tax only kicks in if you inherit over 5 million dollars in money or does it also apply to junk like jewelry, antiques, etc?

The estate tax exemption is $5m in value. If you're inheriting more than $5m in jewelry, antiques, paintings, etc, you pay the tax just as if you were given the cash value of those gifts.

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

mr. mephistopheles posted:

Yeah, but he actually believes that
This is just hilarious old grandpa poo poo. This is more selling idiocy than selling hate. This is more preaching to the choir than telling people how to think and feel.

I'm not sure about that. This is marketing a very questionable version of US history to children, which shapes their thoughts and feelings going forward. Hopefully the poo poo production values mean its impact is pretty limited.

Alkabob
May 31, 2011
I would like to speak to the manager about the socialists, please

McDowell posted:

I'm not sure about that. This is marketing a very questionable version of US history to children, which shapes their thoughts and feelings going forward. Hopefully the poo poo production values mean its impact is pretty limited.

Conservatives don't need to do a lot of recruiting, they need to only reach a few young people while the rest of the membership grimly clings to life at the average age of 80.

mr. mephistopheles
Dec 2, 2009

McDowell posted:

I'm not sure about that. This is marketing a very questionable version of US history to children, which shapes their thoughts and feelings going forward. Hopefully the poo poo production values mean its impact is pretty limited.

But these videos were made for people who were going to teach their kids this poo poo anyway. I guess you could argue that it's worse because they have more ways to do it now, but eh.

Rockopolis
Dec 21, 2012

I MAKE FUN OF QUEER STORYGAMES BECAUSE I HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO WITH MY LIFE THAN MAKE OTHER PEOPLE CRY

I can't understand these kinds of games, and not getting it bugs me almost as much as me being weird

rkajdi posted:

...This is also neglecting the flawed personality it takes to want to grab for power in the first place-- the people who want power seem to be even more broken than the standard man on the street.
You know, a thought just struck me; I hear this a lot, and I probably believe it, mostly. But I have to wonder, what do you say to the sort of person, possibly yourself, who says "If I want to have any hope of doing 'good' in and for this world, I need power (and lots of it)." Possibly, if nothing else, "I need power to mitigate the damage of the aforementioned flawed power seekers."
Or were you meaning the kind of ruthless personality that it takes, not to grab for power, but to grasp it? The selection process ensures you get only the most ruthless, whatever the intentions of the pool of candidates?

Of course, the paranoia inducing thing about all this is that I imagine something similar is going through the heads of...okay, well, at least one of the people over on the right wing side.

Zuhzuhzombie!!
Apr 17, 2008
FACTS ARE A CONSPIRACY BY THE CAPITALIST OPRESSOR

thefncrow posted:

The estate tax exemption is $5m in value. If you're inheriting more than $5m in jewelry, antiques, paintings, etc, you pay the tax just as if you were given the cash value of those gifts.

Gotcha. That's what I thought. Reaffirms that I have no sympathy for folks hit with the death tax. And it's not taxing twice, your taxing a transaction between two people from the looks of it.

Spacedad
Sep 11, 2001

We go play orbital catch around the curvature of the earth, son.

mr. mephistopheles posted:


This is just hilarious old grandpa poo poo. This is more selling idiocy than selling hate. This is more preaching to the choir than telling people how to think and feel.

Again, I just want to reiterate, I don't think Huckabee is a good guy. I just thing lumping him in with guys like Hannity and Limbaugh is like saying George W. Bush is as evil as Karl Rove. I feel like it's giving him too much intellectual credit, honestly.

It's easy for us to laugh at it, but this poo poo is meant to be shown to children for conservative parents to brainwash their children with revisionist history bullshit.

I was brainwashed with crap exactly as bad and worse this at the christian school I attended as a child. For me it wound up backfiring in later life though (as I stopped attending that brainwashing school and was able to contrast their bullshit with facts) but for a lot of children it brainwashes them to be obedient fact-hating right wing lapdogs for life. Some of the other christian school kids in later life I knew kept their narrow minded fundamentalism and now inflict it on their own kids in vicious cycle of ignorance and prejudice. (In my view, it is a cycle with diminishing returns though, because of the free availability of information in general these days.)

Anyway, yeah - don't underestimate the insidious nature of schlock like this. When you have a captive audience of impressionable children who have limited strictly controlled internet access (i.e. can only browse sites like 'conservapedia') hokey-rear end made-up bullshit like Huckabees videos is taken seriously. Because there's no counterpoint to show that it's a load of nationalist revisionist history anti-science white supremacist right wing religious bigot extremist horse poo poo.

Children raised to be tolerant and open-minded towards others different from themselves make it very difficult for conservatives to capture the youth vote. This is also why conservatives way way wayyyy over-react to attempts at teaching kids to be tolerant, pro-science, anti-bullying, etc. - accusing those doing so of pushing a 'liberal agenda.' This is because doing so frustrates the efforts of conservatives to brainwash children with their view narrow ideas. They can't compete on a level playing field of ideas, so they have to 'cheat'; you get them demanding intelligent design be taught alongside evolution, in spite of intelligent design not having gone through the scientific rigors that evolution has. There's no reason outside a very narrow interpretation of the bible to treat gay kids as second-class citizens, so they put school policy in place to stop teachers from even talking about homosexuality - resulting in a predictable increase in gay teen suicides due to bullying. The destructive anti-human side of right-wing conservatism can only survive if they prey on the young with impunity, so it's our job to stop them at every turn. To shut down and frustrate their efforts to train children to only accept conservative ideas, and to reject fact out of hand.

On that note, this stuff I'm talking about is also why there's zero effort on the part of the GOP to change their policy ideas. They are doing what creationists try to do in the classroom all the time - never change their core bullshit; just give it a re-marketed name like 'intelligent design' and slap a new coat of paint on the same old reprehensible trash. They are stuck right now in a holding pattern of believing that what has always worked in the past - that remarketing and rebranding bad ideas - will work again in the future. I sincerely doubt this, as people quite simply are much more savvy these days to being manipulated or marketed to. The shrinking electorate of ignorant whites can no longer 'cover the difference' for being able to fool a majority of active voters. This is also why they're trying to gerrymander like hell and play games with changing the electoral college - they aren't going to change at all; just remarket the same old bullshit under new 'cleverly-disguised' slogans, and cheat at the electoral process to get undeserving candidates elected.

Quite naturally it's up to us, the savvy voters, to not let our guard down, fight hard on the offensive against them, and get the word out at every opportunity about their despicable tactics. The 2012 election hasn't ended for me in a lot of ways - the GOP needs to be utterly crushed in its current form before they'll reform and become a viable party with actual good ideas.

Spacedad fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Jan 29, 2013

Horseshoe theory
Mar 7, 2005

thefncrow posted:

The estate tax exemption is $5m in value. If you're inheriting more than $5m in jewelry, antiques, paintings, etc, you pay the tax just as if you were given the cash value of those gifts.

The unified credit is actually for both lifetime gifts and the estate tax (both sides of the same coin) with a $13,000 (may have increased to ~$14,000 due to inflationary measures) gift exemption ($26,000 per married couple) per year that doesn't go against the unified credit. So, basically, if you are single and give someone a $20,000 gift in a year, $7,000 of it reduces the $5 million unified credit and/or is taxable if you've already used up the credit; any unused portion of the credit at the time of death is used to shield the estate assets that aren't protected by other factors (such as the spousal deduction as spouses can inherit an unlimited amount of assets and not pull against the unified credit).

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.

thefncrow posted:

The estate tax exemption is $5m in value. If you're inheriting more than $5m in jewelry, antiques, paintings, etc, you pay the tax just as if you were given the cash value of those gifts.

Mike Huckabee being the most tolerable, pleasant and somewhat sane person amongst the most intolerable, largely insane and unpleasant people I hear every day doesn't make him any of those first things I listed. It just means the bar for acceptability is set too low.

As others have pointed out, he's just saying the same horrible poo poo all the others are and chasing the same buck. He's just more handsome and articulate about it. It's like saying Colin Powell or Barrack Obama "speak so well" or that John McCain occasionally bucks his own party line.

What I mean is gently caress Mike Huckabee.

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.

Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:

Gotcha. That's what I thought. Reaffirms that I have no sympathy for folks hit with the death tax. And it's not taxing twice, your taxing a transaction between two people from the looks of it.

And we're talking about and INSANE amount of money here. 5 million is where it STARTS to kick in. Huckabee's making it sound in that speech that ever time anyone dies, the government is taxing the gently caress out of hard working folks on Stockton and 103rd. The only people the estate tax effects are people playing fast and loose with lawmaking, who gets sent off to war to die and who gets to pollute land.

People like Mike Huckabee. None of the bosses I've had would even be affected by an estate tax.

richardfun
Aug 10, 2008

Twenty years? It's no wonder I'm so hungry. Do you have anything to eat?

OMG JC a Bomb! posted:

Oh, but lest we forget, there's Laura Ingram's "Obama Diaries". Where she literally wrote a book from Obama's perspective using "I sho' be lovin' that chicken!" style racist caricatures, so Colbert pretended that he actually believed Obama actually wrote it and feigned amazement at how horribly written and offensive the book was.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/343110/august-03-2010/laura-ingraham

I was in the audience during that show, and it was amazing :allears:

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Rockopolis posted:

You know, a thought just struck me; I hear this a lot, and I probably believe it, mostly. But I have to wonder, what do you say to the sort of person, possibly yourself, who says "If I want to have any hope of doing 'good' in and for this world, I need power (and lots of it)." Possibly, if nothing else, "I need power to mitigate the damage of the aforementioned flawed power seekers."
Or were you meaning the kind of ruthless personality that it takes, not to grab for power, but to grasp it? The selection process ensures you get only the most ruthless, whatever the intentions of the pool of candidates?

I really put the personal drive it takes to just think about gaining power of your fellow man as the flaw. I've also never seen a person like you suppose above who is both willing to do good and also destroy the system on the way out to ensure that nobody gets to undo his work. This is doubly true now that we put people through such a meritocratic pressure cooker that the scum left at the end is utterly convinced of their ubermench-ness. I'd almost prefer the WASP aristocracy of the past (not that I'd be an elite there either), because at least they eventually dismantled themselves out of some level of guilt. I don't see anyone being able to push the meritocratic elite off their pile of corpses.

Rockopolis
Dec 21, 2012

I MAKE FUN OF QUEER STORYGAMES BECAUSE I HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO WITH MY LIFE THAN MAKE OTHER PEOPLE CRY

I can't understand these kinds of games, and not getting it bugs me almost as much as me being weird

rkajdi posted:

I really put the personal drive it takes to just think about gaining power of your fellow man as the flaw. I've also never seen a person like you suppose above who is both willing to do good and also destroy the system on the way out to ensure that nobody gets to undo his work. This is doubly true now that we put people through such a meritocratic pressure cooker that the scum left at the end is utterly convinced of their ubermench-ness. I'd almost prefer the WASP aristocracy of the past (not that I'd be an elite there either), because at least they eventually dismantled themselves out of some level of guilt. I don't see anyone being able to push the meritocratic elite off their pile of corpses.
Hmm...
I was trying to talk about it in terms of the system we are currently stuck with (not something that is going to be destroyed), as opposed to something...more extraordinary than unlimited political contributions and lobbying :(, but I suppose what you say holds true there as well. I was also speaking about it in personal terms; side effects on the voting public aside, uh, you are correct to trust yourself to be a ruthless bastard with good intent, but you are also at least as correct to distrust anyone else similarly ruthless, just as someone else ruthless with good intent can trust themselves and not you.
I guess in terms of this thread, the ends are not justified by some means; if you ride the :foxnews: train to power, you cannot get off (and still retain any influence) and it will corrupt whatever good intentions you may have had when you started, because if you try to do good, you're out on your rear end. And your successor will be worse than you.
As has been mentioned before, to energize their voters, they whipped them into a frenzy, but now they have no choice but to follow them.
It's kind of like the One Ring, I guess, but since there's no convenient volcano, it seems we are stuck with it for now.

...thus, this would seem to indicate that we require a series of loosely or unconnected people who are ruthless enough to fake their way onto the easy :foxnews: train to power, do the good they were intending to do, and take the natural backlash of getting kicked out of office...and hopefully get replaced by other similarly motivated agents. The problem is, if you coordinate, you end up having to trust someone else who could be ruthless with bad intent, plus I think that technically makes your group a cabal, and those are rarely good things. Additionally, most positions, like representatives, mostly have their power in blocs, right? President, on the other hand.
This is rather reminiscent of a variety of Mitt Romney conspiracy theories; you know, the shift to the crazy right, the poorly managed campaign, the dropping off the planet after the election, the sane Republican=Democrat joke.

I think I need to sleep. And to stop watching Hong Kong undercover cop movies. This has just been a thing bothering me for a while. Perhaps what was bothering me earlier in this thread.

Alec Bald Snatch
Sep 12, 2012

by exmarx

mr. mephistopheles posted:

Yeah, but he actually believes that poo poo.

Actually he doesn't. That's what the theology derail on the last page was about. He's a self-promoter first and foremost; he just uses incorrect bible quotes to that end.

boom boom boom
Jun 28, 2012

by Shine

mr. mephistopheles posted:

Everyone should watch that documentary that guy did that basically shows her as a bitter high school "mean girl" who managed to get into politics by having a high profile in her state and being pretty. Some of the petty, borderline illegal poo poo she did while in office and got away with is terrifying.

What documentary is that?

Pope Guilty
Nov 6, 2006

The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.
My favorite part was when she tried to fire the local librarian for being unwilling to let her just remove books from the shelves at her own discretion. Or maybe when she fired the state trooper for dumping one of her relatives and somehow didn't get indicted for corruption.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Rockopolis posted:

Hmm...
I was trying to talk about it in terms of the system we are currently stuck with (not something that is going to be destroyed), as opposed to something...more extraordinary than unlimited political contributions and lobbying :(, but I suppose what you say holds true there as well. I was also speaking about it in personal terms; side effects on the voting public aside, uh, you are correct to trust yourself to be a ruthless bastard with good intent, but you are also at least as correct to distrust anyone else similarly ruthless, just as someone else ruthless with good intent can trust themselves and not you.
I guess in terms of this thread, the ends are not justified by some means; if you ride the :foxnews: train to power, you cannot get off (and still retain any influence) and it will corrupt whatever good intentions you may have had when you started, because if you try to do good, you're out on your rear end. And your successor will be worse than you.
As has been mentioned before, to energize their voters, they whipped them into a frenzy, but now they have no choice but to follow them.
It's kind of like the One Ring, I guess, but since there's no convenient volcano, it seems we are stuck with it for now.

I'm not even talking radical overthrow stuff here when I mean destroying stuff on the way out. Just something to help tie the hands of say executive orders and signing statements would be awesome. Obama came into office talking some good stuff about human dignity and all that, and look where we are now-- a giant pile of drone strikes and still no Gitmo solution. If the "good guy" (I personally hate that term) who gets put into office can't keep from using this stuff, we're boned. It's then just a steady accumulation of power into a single office's hands, since there's no ability to undo the mistakes and accumulation made in the past.

SnakePlissken
Dec 31, 2009

by zen death robot

boom boom boom posted:

What documentary is that?

I did a quick search and found two major documentaries on her, "The Undefeated" and "Sarah Palin: You Betcha" and I bet Mephisto is referring to the latter. And they are both available streaming from Netflix, BTW. A little incentive for me to not cancel my subscription just yet.

ED: Oh, and also "Sarah Palin's Alaska" also streams. Ho boy! I'm gonna have to like stay on with Netflix a little bit longer because they have the videos of the lady that has come to stand for so much, I mean represent a whole lot, quite a number of things, that say so much about the political structure of our discourse in this here great land of ours.

SnakePlissken fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Jan 29, 2013

Beamed
Nov 26, 2010

Then you have a responsibility that no man has ever faced. You have your fear which could become reality, and you have Godzilla, which is reality.


Crasscrab posted:

The thing I love about Colbert is that there are people that take his character seriously. Like they'll watch his show and just not get that it's a shtick at all.

They're a big minority, though. Like maybe 20% that poll showed? Not representative of a majority at all.

empty whippet box
Jun 9, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Beamed posted:

They're a big minority, though. Like maybe 20% that poll showed? Not representative of a majority at all.

The idea of 20 percent of people not understanding that Colbert is parody makes me :psyduck: so loving hard.

Ograbme
Jul 26, 2003

D--n it, how he nicks 'em

Phone posted:

I can't find it off hand (yay cell phone posting), but there was a poll showing that conservative leaning people expressed the thought that Colbert deep down is sincere about what he's saying.

The phrasing was basically "Colbert is joking, but we know he believes what he's saying."
Conservatives are empirically more likely to believe that a writer truly believes what they say, even when told otherwise.

Duck_King
Sep 5, 2003

leader.bmp

Warchicken posted:

The idea of 20 percent of people not understanding that Colbert is parody makes me :psyduck: so loving hard.

20-25% seems to the baseline for completely crazy/stupid, which is pretty terrifying when you realize how large that number is. Even after the complete cluster gently caress that was the Bush administration, towards the end, 24% still approved of Dubya, and 19% approved of loving Cheney of all people.

OMG JC a Bomb!
Jul 13, 2004

We are the Invisible Spatula. We are the Grilluminati. We eat before and after dinner. We eat forever. And eventually... eventually we will lead them into the dining room.

Beamed posted:

They're a big minority, though. Like maybe 20% that poll showed? Not representative of a majority at all.

I had a professor that was basically a living breathing strawman liberal. Vegan, dangerously underweight, dressed like Lady Gaga, ect. She absolutely refused to believe that Colbert wasn't playing a character, and went on tirades about how his conservative punditry was heartless and cruel.

Oh, and she was teaching a course on the psychological and social effects of mass media. So that's probably why I'm terminally underemployed.

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Duck_King posted:

20-25% seems to the baseline for completely crazy/stupid, which is pretty terrifying when you realize how large that number is. Even after the complete cluster gently caress that was the Bush administration, towards the end, 24% still approved of Dubya, and 19% approved of loving Cheney of all people.

I always look at it like this. Consider 50% as perfectly average. Anything below 50% is dumber than average. Anything below 25% is dumber than the average dumb person.

empty whippet box
Jun 9, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
So I guess it's payday for a lot of people, and I'm seeing a lot of people claim their checks are way smaller now because of obama. Even have one guy claiming he pays 600 more per month in taxes now due to the medicare and social security taxes.

I looked it up, and those combined would be 2.9 percent increase in taxes, which would mean he was paying 240,000 in taxes PER YEAR if a 2.9 tax increase meant 600 more per month. Am I going crazy here, or is he just completely lying?

Radbot
Aug 12, 2009
Probation
Can't post for 3 years!
Considering the majority of Americans don't even understand progressive marginal taxation or what FICA funds, you can safely ignore almost any American speaking about taxation that isn't posting in D&D. Oh, and the GOP blocked the payroll cut extension.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound

Warchicken posted:

So I guess it's payday for a lot of people, and I'm seeing a lot of people claim their checks are way smaller now because of obama. Even have one guy claiming he pays 600 more per month in taxes now due to the medicare and social security taxes.

I looked it up, and those combined would be 2.9 percent increase in taxes, which would mean he was paying 240,000 in taxes PER YEAR if a 2.9 tax increase meant 600 more per month. Am I going crazy here, or is he just completely lying?

I can't speak to his numbers, but what he's wrong about is blaming Obama instead of the Republicans in Congress who mandated that change.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Warchicken posted:

So I guess it's payday for a lot of people, and I'm seeing a lot of people claim their checks are way smaller now because of obama. Even have one guy claiming he pays 600 more per month in taxes now due to the medicare and social security taxes.

I looked it up, and those combined would be 2.9 percent increase in taxes, which would mean he was paying 240,000 in taxes PER YEAR if a 2.9 tax increase meant 600 more per month. Am I going crazy here, or is he just completely lying?

He's pretty much lying. BTW, the actual salary would be much higher since SS taxes cut off at ~113K, so all dollars after that only would have an increase of 0.9%. That puts the number at more like 550K. If you're pulling in that kind of dough and are worried about $600 a fortnight (btw, your pretax salary would be over $21K every two weeks) you really need to stop living so close to the edge.

EDIT: I've caught guys lying on this, though not to the same degree ($400/month) and called them out on the carpet. I'd suggest tell people who say poo poo like that they're bald faced liars or morons. As a reference, an 85K salary sees an increase of about $120 a month in payroll taxes.

rkajdi fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jan 29, 2013

thefncrow
Mar 14, 2001

Warchicken posted:

So I guess it's payday for a lot of people, and I'm seeing a lot of people claim their checks are way smaller now because of obama. Even have one guy claiming he pays 600 more per month in taxes now due to the medicare and social security taxes.

I looked it up, and those combined would be 2.9 percent increase in taxes, which would mean he was paying 240,000 in taxes PER YEAR if a 2.9 tax increase meant 600 more per month. Am I going crazy here, or is he just completely lying?

Yeah, he's lying.

Unless he's making over $200,000 a year, the only change he saw was a 2% increase on SS tax (the 0.9% increase you also factored in does exist, but it only applies to income above $200,000). Since SS tax caps out at $113,700 a year, that tax increase caps out at $189.50 a month. For him to actually have a $600 increase from the SS and Medicare taxes, he would have to make $747,333.33 a year.

Now, he could see a $600 a month increase at a lower figure than that, because income taxes went up 4.6% on income above $400,000. Factoring that in, he would have to make $457,888.89 a year to see a $600 increase.

But, yeah, unless he's making half a million dollars a year, he's lying.

Good Citizen
Aug 12, 2008

trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump

Warchicken posted:

So I guess it's payday for a lot of people, and I'm seeing a lot of people claim their checks are way smaller now because of obama. Even have one guy claiming he pays 600 more per month in taxes now due to the medicare and social security taxes.

I looked it up, and those combined would be 2.9 percent increase in taxes, which would mean he was paying 240,000 in taxes PER YEAR if a 2.9 tax increase meant 600 more per month. Am I going crazy here, or is he just completely lying?

Depends. Remember there's a cap on the social security taxes so its not a straight 2.9 increase all the way up. So in that way it's unlikely. The one exception is if he's self employed and paying on both the worker and employer side for FICA

thefncrow
Mar 14, 2001

Good Citizen posted:

Depends. Remember there's a cap on the social security taxes so its not a straight 2.9 increase all the way up. So in that way it's unlikely. The one exception is if he's self employed and paying on both the worker and employer side for FICA

Not really. The 2% cut was employee-side only, so even on the Self-Employment tax it is still just a 2% increase, plus the employer side of the SS portion of the Self-Employment tax stops at the ~113K cutoff just like the employee side.

thefncrow fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jan 29, 2013

Good Citizen
Aug 12, 2008

trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump trump

thefncrow posted:

Not really. The 2% cut was employee-side only, so even on the Self-Employment tax it is still just a 2% increase, plus the employer side of the SS portion of the Self-Employment tax stops at the ~113K cutoff just like the employee side.

I wasn't aware of that. So yeah, that guy is either full of poo poo or is making such a ludicrous amount of money that you should laugh in his face about crying over $600

Rockopolis
Dec 21, 2012

I MAKE FUN OF QUEER STORYGAMES BECAUSE I HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO WITH MY LIFE THAN MAKE OTHER PEOPLE CRY

I can't understand these kinds of games, and not getting it bugs me almost as much as me being weird

rkajdi posted:

I'm not even talking radical overthrow stuff here when I mean destroying stuff on the way out. Just something to help tie the hands of say executive orders and signing statements would be awesome. Obama came into office talking some good stuff about human dignity and all that, and look where we are now-- a giant pile of drone strikes and still no Gitmo solution. If the "good guy" (I personally hate that term) who gets put into office can't keep from using this stuff, we're boned. It's then just a steady accumulation of power into a single office's hands, since there's no ability to undo the mistakes and accumulation made in the past.
But we both seem to be taking power creep and an unsavory path to power as a given, and unlikely to change.
Given those constraints, does it not follow that you should grab that path to power, both for the chance to do good, and to occupy the position instead a presumably more malevolent alternate?
Of course, the :fox news: approach has unpleasant side effects on the public, and using reinforces the necessity of using it in subsequent rounds, possibly counterbalanced by demographic changes.

Also, does the One Ring analogy make Huckabee a Ringwraith?

empty whippet box
Jun 9, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

thefncrow posted:

Yeah, he's lying.

Unless he's making over $200,000 a year, the only change he saw was a 2% increase on SS tax (the 0.9% increase you also factored in does exist, but it only applies to income above $200,000). Since SS tax caps out at $113,700 a year, that tax increase caps out at $189.50 a month. For him to actually have a $600 increase from the SS and Medicare taxes, he would have to make $747,333.33 a year.

Now, he could see a $600 a month increase at a lower figure than that, because income taxes went up 4.6% on income above $400,000. Factoring that in, he would have to make $457,888.89 a year to see a $600 increase.

But, yeah, unless he's making half a million dollars a year, he's lying.

I did call him out on it and he suddenly admitted that it was only 200 per month but it "felt" like 600. Feels good to get someone in a boldfaced lie.

thefncrow
Mar 14, 2001

Warchicken posted:

I did call him out on it and he suddenly admitted that it was only 200 per month but it "felt" like 600. Feels good to get someone in a boldfaced lie.

The funny thing is, if it is actually $200, that means he's pulling somewhere north of $200k. Like I said, the 2% SS increase caps out at $189.50 for yearly salaries at or above $113,700, which means to actually genuinely hit $200, he has to have a salary high enough to trigger the 0.9% Medicare increase for incomes over $200k.

If he's not making right around six figures, it's much closer to $150. (For the actual number, $150/month correlates to $90,000 income)

Zwabu
Aug 7, 2006

Rockopolis posted:

This is rather reminiscent of a variety of Mitt Romney conspiracy theories; you know, the shift to the crazy right, the poorly managed campaign, the dropping off the planet after the election, the sane Republican=Democrat joke.

For whatever reason I fixated on one item in your post. Mitt disappearing after losing the election is the most understandable and expected outcome. Him trying to stay on the public stage to any degree afterward would be both obnoxious and unexpected.

Mitt is a megarich corporate mucky-muck who managed to win one term as governor of a very Democratic state, then spent the rest of his time preparing for and running for President. His political resume is that he wasn't popular enough to be reelected had he run, he failed trying for the Senate, and had two failed presidential runs, one in which he gained the GOP nomination.

He pretty much represents the actual POWER base (not the voter base) of the GOP perfectly, but doesn't embody any strong ideology beyond no taxes and no regulation. He had one signature achievement as governor, the health care system that became the template for the national law, that the crazy-rear end politics of the current GOP have forced him to disown.

He is not a figure who is beloved to a large power base within the party like even Sarah Palin is. The crazy far righties that have sway know instinctively he is not one of them. He isn't a major party figure like Dole or McCain that had long Senate careers and in the case of McCain, has continued on after defeat for the Presidency.

He's as much of a nobody as it is possible to be as someone who achieved the GOP nomination. He got that by way of a weak field, having more money and organization than his opponents, and by physically LOOKING like the guy that usually gets cast as POTUS in movies and has the profile that people imagine engraved on a coin. But that's it. Not beloved, not a particularly good public speaker, not a notable standard bearer for a particular cause (he could have been for better health care coverage, but.. you know), and rich as gently caress so he doesn't need to do ANYTHING. He doesn't need to run for office, do speeches, make commercials for Viagra, whatever. He can chill out in his giant homes and drive his insane power boats around.

In fact, I'd argue that even for a big ego guy like Mitt, lecture circuit is bad because it will only reinforce his national identity as the guy who lost the election to Obama. I can't get into Romney's mind, but I'm guessing comfortable obscurity would be preferable.

Hell even those weird conference calls publicized right after the election seemed odd. "We lost because moochers!" What was the point of any of that, was that going to improve his standing or how his candidacy was going to be regarded going forward? Is that even normal for losing camps to let that kind of info leak out?

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Ghost of Reagan Past
Oct 7, 2003

rock and roll fun

thefncrow posted:

The funny thing is, if it is actually $200, that means he's pulling somewhere north of $200k. Like I said, the 2% SS increase caps out at $189.50 for yearly salaries at or above $113,700, which means to actually genuinely hit $200, he has to have a salary high enough to trigger the 0.9% Medicare increase for incomes over $200k.

If he's not making right around six figures, it's much closer to $150. (For the actual number, $150/month correlates to $90,000 income)
My father called me to crow about how I feel now that my taxes have gone up. I hadn't noticed, it's such a small increase. And I don't even make that much!

He was displeased with my answer.

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