Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
1) Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
2) No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
3) Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
4) No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
5) No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
(TikTok screencap)
Giving the freedom to billionaires to not pay taxes because they donate to charity is so very wrong.
I don't have the power to decide where my taxes go. They shouldn't either.
"Who knew non-profit would be so profitable?!"
Aaaah she’ll shake it off.
(Which is a mandamitory remark at this point)
Get all chummy with the ol prez...uhhh...dente... oh don't worry about me boss... we can play good cop bad cop. I am gonna just be playing same ol liberal in the long run. I have long term plans just like ol milkers nancys poodle. Look at me don't I look good. I smell good. You look good too boss. But yeah we gotta look like we kinda don't like each other. That ok muy boy, you are in the big leagues now. Remember it is all about managing perception. You the good cop, I am bad cop but you know whats it is all about... you wouldn't be here if you didn't know. Yeah I get it boss too much or never enough by a thread so the next election cycle they have a carrot to go after but never fix the problem. We need the order out of chaos. They need to know that woke fascism is better than the other form which is really just the same.
The left and right paradigm... back and forth wratcheting further and further to the right with bandaids that don't even stick. Wall street owns you!!! The federal goverment works only in the service of the self interest of capital. The rest follows the same pattern. I have been alive too long to fall for this back and forth. Maybe people put too much faith into politcians as they want to just believe and not truly live. Maybe we worship idols. Crumbs in the mecca of the imperial core. These politicians are in rock and hard place... thats what they signed up for... it is tempory position in which they hope to find employment in the private sector or some other high paying position or title. The world as you know it is just not real. Your broken heart after voting is apart of the process though. Go get em tiger!!!! I vote sometimes like I rip ass. It is what it is
Mamdani made Taylor Swift pay taxes
False: there's no mention of Taylor Swift in particular. This may be an attempt to create a false conflict between the two.
Why are all the memes now text on top of pictures of randos
Im pretty sure they are screengrabs from tiktoks. Never really used it myself but thats the default font afaik
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Every billionaire is complicit, including your favorite billionaire: The pop star, the superstar athlete, the philanthropist, or the guru who cosplays as middle class. They're all motherfuckers.
This is why I can't stand to watch professional sports anymore, just some millionaire getting payed by his billionaire owner to play a game so you stay distracted by your bread and circuses.
Whatever you do, never mention this world-view at work, if you value your career.
I just hoot and holler along.
Totally honestly, I'm pretty open about all my views no matter where I am.
It's always weird cuz I donate to Charities and I also already pay taxes. How come they can't do both?
I thought he didn’t adjust taxes? I thought pension funds were used.
I’m not 100% up to date though so i may just be wrong.
He suspended pensions contributions, took just over $8bn in state aid funding and exemptions from state regulations, and delayed initiatives such as classroom size reduction. The city also over-estimated the number of employees it would have this year so that was an extra special saving of $1.3bn when expected outgoings were reconciled with the actual number. The actual tax increases he has implemented would “only” be worth $500m.
Basically it was a one-time thing, and the budget won’t be balanced next year, and the tax increases are nowhere near enough. But it got good press for a couple of days which I suspect was the point.
Something similar happened with the Federal Liberals in Australia a few years back, maybe in a more cynical manoeuvre. They structured things to get two or three good years of budget balance, had a big song and dance about budget being 'back in black', coffee mugs were made, anybody who cared to read a little understood the transitory nature of it, but that didn't stop the media screeching and squawking.
Joke was on the Liberals in the end, their main opposition, Labor, benefited more from those years than they did, since the Liberals then went ahead and lost the next election.
Lets hope Mamdani is less cynical, and has more humility than the Australian Liberals. In the process proving to Americans that some right winger churning out Friedman quotes isn't actually that good for an economy.
It's both. He convinced Kathy Hochul to pass a tax on second properties (pied-à-terre tax), but he also suspended pension contributions for 5 years.
Mamdani making T. Swizzle pay NYC taxes was the reason he balanced the budget? I thought it's because he negotiated with NY state for aid (which, fair game; NYC pays more in taxes than it gets back), delayed the city pension, and is finalizing a pied-à-terre tax.
What meaningful raise on Taylor Swift's taxes has Zohran Mamdani imposed? Did she not pay taxes before? What's the source here?
The real world is allowed to be complicated and messy, and ironically, reducing it to "hurr durr he taxed Taylor Swift" is doing a disservice to what Mamdani actually managed to work out to balance the budget – which is imperfect, but he inherited a $12 billion deficit from a grifter. It's good for what it is.
Taylor Swift owns multiple secondary properties in New York City.
She has amassed a massive real estate footprint on a single block in Tribeca, worth an estimated $50+ million. Her holdings include:
Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani finalized a deal to implement a pied-à-terre tax surcharge on luxury secondary residences in NYC.
The tax starts as a 4% surcharge on the property's value and then there is an annual charge that scales up progressively based on the assessed value.
Rhode Island passed a similar luxury second-home tax targeting non-resident estates over $1 million, a piece of legislation that the press nicknamed the "Taylor Swift Tax" due to its impact on her $17 million Watch Hill mansion.
To say that this alone is balancing the budget is an oversimplification (what are hot takes if not reductive) but the tax will have a meaningful impact because she owns a lot of property in NYC.
The tax in its entirety is supposed to bring around 500 million. The NYC budget was 12 billion in the red.
It's a great start, but suggesting that they managed to balance out the budget thanks to something that handled 1/24th of that deficit is just silly.
Enough partial solutions will sum up to a whole. If we treat them all as insignificant, then none will be enacted and no progress will be made.
Did I say anything remotely like that?
Or, maybe, did I say "it's a great start, but let's not overreact"?
Sure, it is reductive but I also get what the image is referring to and don't think we have to be too literal about it. It's saying the spirit of that tax (ie. taxing the ultra wealthy) is how Mamdani is going about balancing the budget - while invoking a very recognizable billionaire to drive the point home. I read it more as using Taylor Swift as an example rather than insinuating her taxes, or the secondary estate tax in general, would be enough to balance the budget on their own.
Many hot takes are like this. They're meant to capture your attention, and while they may not be literally true on their own, the good ones have a reasonable conceptual foundation.
I think that it creates a false image in people's eyes.
For context: I'm all for taxing the rich. At the very least the should have all their methods of "avoiding" tax removed, but I honestly hope they get taxed something like 90% for their insane wealth.
At the same time I know a bit about how the world works and I have friends who work in AML, so I know that "taxing the rich" will never bring as much money as people think it would.
Back when Musk pretended to be the "cool leftist millionaire" he would sometimes boast about the taxes he paid, trying to be "the shining example" for other top 1%. He was still paying a tax rate of between 0.4% and 0.1% - thanks to his accountants being creative.
On top of that, people completely do not understand what progressive taxes mean. They think that if you have a tax level of 10% for $0-1000 and 20% for $1001-10000, then it means that if you're earning $2000, you would pay $400 in taxes. Which is not true, you would pay (100010%)+(100020%) = $300.
But this fundamental misunderstanding makes them think that a billionaire should be paying some massive amounts of money from ALL their total net worth (which is also confusing "wealth" with "worth", btw). Even if we somehow someday got a fair and honourable billionaire, their tax payments would feel like they're avoiding taxes because of those misconceptions.
This meme reinforces a false reality where these taxes are significant enough to change things - they're not and they most probably won't be.
It’s not how he’s doing it though. The biggest items in his balancing act are the billions of dollars in state aid and regulatory exemptions he’s called in, the deferral of pensions contributions for 5 years, punting key policies down the road to 202X and an accounting quirk that saw NYC over-estimate the number of employees it would have this FY to the tune of $1.3bn in non-existent salaries. So he did bring $500m in extra taxes, and he negotiated state aid, but mostly it seems to be abot not doing things, and taking the credit for coincidences.
Did he figure out a way to tax the billionaires that primarily own assets?
Fuck yeah he did.
And, shockingly, they're not leaving NYC en masse.
We desperately need a tax on securities. I don't particularly care about taxing luxury products, because those products are produced by workers, who pay taxes and buy things. But securities are the "means of production".
Don't tax the dollar value of the security. Don't force them to liquidate their shares before they can pay a tax. Just go ahead and transfer a percentage of their shares of each security to the IRS, who can liquidate it on the open market, slowly over time.
Tbh Just taxing securities backed loans as income would close a big hole
I don't think that would actually do anything at all. Banks would just loosen their lending requirements, and all those securities-backed loans would just become personal loans to high-net-worth individuals. The investment portfolios of the ultra-rich need to be directly targeted.
I'd take 1% per year. This tax is only on the obscenely-wealthy. Every natural person can exempt $1 million of their total portfolio. No exemptions for artificial persons. The IRS is limited to liquidating no more than 1% of total traded volume of any issue on any given day: >99% of trades will be market trades, so the IRS shares will have minimal effect on value.
Part of the reason we call some securities liquid, vs not, is that some can't easily be divided.
The govt can't easily take hold of 1.3% of someone's family mansion. Or a rare painting that they got hold of.
I don't think I've heard a definition of "security" that would refer to either of those examples. Perhaps "registered securities" is closer to my intended meaning?
I would not intend for this tax to apply to personal assets or the owner's primary residence, but it is not particularly difficult to divide ownership of real property among multiple entities. Applied to investment properties, the government would basically be a lienholder.
Yea i looked it up earlier. It looks like a tax on second homes valued over a certain amount
That and a fucked up minimum wage
I am not sure if you are familiar with NY's minimum wage. NY is one of the states that set the state minimum higher than the federal minimum and continued to do so. It still isn't enough, but we are trying here.
The good thing is that she still can donate to food pantries too!
taylor parties with magats i woulndt be so sure, and shes conservative herself.