1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Human nature isn't it?
I chuckled when I realized I'd seen an academic study cited as gospel truth about supporting the world with only a third of current resources just after a post where everyone ignored the academic studies saying a proposed wealth tax would lower revenues etc.
This quote makes me feel good. I'll believe it!
The beauty about actual science, as opposed to the fanfic and bragging that scientists need to publish to get paid, is that we can resolve contradictory theorems through experimentation
Massachusetts and NY raised taxes on the rich, and yet their revenues did not plummet.
Is there any contrary instance we can find where taxes were raised on the rich specifically and revenues dropped?
(And if so, get the academics back to refine their theories, make more predictions, and let's see who's more accurate!)
The way that theory is framed is the most ridiculous thing in the world. The rich are the least sensitive people to price increases.
What's that number that's being thrown around, top 10% of incomes account for 50% of consumer spending?
...yeah, from February of this year:
https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-rich-spending-2c34a571
The top 10% of earners—households making about $250,000 a year or more—are splurging on everything from vacations to designer handbags, buoyed by big gains in stocks, real estate and other assets.
Those consumers now account for 49.7% of all spending, a record in data going back to 1989, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. Three decades ago, they accounted for about 36%.
Yes, inequality is increasing in the US.
But I don't really get how that relates. Anyway, may point is that if you bracket the tax at high enough incomes, maybe not even a 99% marginal tax rate will suffice for making rich people move away. Those people are rich, they don't care about spending some money to live where they want.
The same is not true about the poor, by the way. It's easy to tax them so much that they leave.
And Laffer focusing his work on the rich was the cheapest and most plain sell-out on the academic history.
My point is that inflation will drive down consumer spending for most people, but the highest incomes barely notice anything has changed.
Oh, I see.
Good point. I didn't notice the huge empirical test for it running right now.
Life is a Grand Experiment, no?
Making more than $250,000 a year doesn't make you wealthy, it just means you have disposable income.
Being wealthy means you don't have any income, you just get loans against your static wealth at incredibly favorable interest rates.
Well, ≥$250,000 covers everything from $250,001 to $1,000,000 or 100,000,000 and beyond. The low end of that category includes people who are payed well for highly specialized and/or accredited labor, while the high end is mostly people who own things for a living.
Sure, it's not exactly precise to lump the highest end of labor in with everything from your local car-dealership capitalist all the way the tippy top of hedge-fund owners. But it still indicates a very, very unhealthy consumer economy.
you just get loans against your static wealth at incredibly favorable interest rates.
It's more than that, because the wealth of those who utilize loans this way typically isn't static. It's not about just getting a good rate, it's that the assets they use as collateral appreciate in value at a rate higher than inflation and the interest rate combined, so in practice, the interest rate is literally negative. The price of having access to these loans is that their net worth just grows a bit more slowly as a result.
Of course, this only works as long as said assets continue to appreciate at that rate.
Science is not a search for truth. It's a search for provable falsehoods and useful theories.
They increased, actually. There were more millionaires in these places after the increased taxes on wealth than there were before.
Me when I find a belief I still have
Ahaha, A+ comment.
Me after cumming. 😬 Sorry y'all
Gross. I love it
Only if you thought the science that agreed with you was gospel in the first place
Yes, but also not all studies are created equal (or done with honest intent on the first place)
I have a theory, that ROGD was carefully crafted, so boomers will think their (grand)daughters having a pixie cut during their teen years only to have long hair again afterwards was "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria", thus think that most cases of trans people are just a "bit confused temporarily", and would eventually grow it out.
It's always good to maintain a healthy skepticism. Science studies are only as correct as present knowledge allows and results therefore changes as our knowledge expands. There are plenty of examples where once scientific facts have been proven wrong.
Also, as you mention, some studies are fabricated only to serve specific agendas.
Funny meme, and natural part of human nature. But, while disregarding information that doesn't agree with your worldview can be bad, the reason it's a intrinsic bias is because most people are right about most things in their everyday life. If a stranger tells you that you owe them 20$, you're probably going to trust your gut that you don't, rather than start looking for evidence. Obviously, that breaks down when it's about anything abstract or complex, and there when we get science involved.
But if you're somewhat experienced and well read in a scientific area, you develop the same confidence in your understanding that leads you to dismiss some findings as unlikely. This can be bad, and one of things slowing scientific progress (see Planck's principle), but it's also a useful heuristic. If you've read enough economics papers, you develop a reasonable bullshit detector. Not that the research on the wealth tax you referred to is necessarily bad, but it's going to be using a model or drawing conclusions from some related data, in ways that (I suspect) would not convince me if I read it. Once you've read 30 articles showing that raising minimal wage cuts real spending power vs 30 that show it doesn't, you see how 'good economic research practice' can lead people to very different conclusions.
May as well reveal your interpretation of the 30 studies at this point. Not that you're wrong so far, more curious.
My conclusion was that raising minimum wage gave people more money to spend (obvs), and although it could be linked to some increase in inflation, that that cost was borne over the wider economy, so those on MW still saw an meaningful increase in real terms spending power. The evidence for MW rises causing unemployment were mixed, but meta-regression analysis showed that there was significant publication bias in MW studies (preferring those that showed MW raised unemployment) and once that was accounted for, MW was neutral on unemployment. Apart, perhaps for a small effect on teenagers.
But it was a few years back that I had to look in to that, and the studies themselves are often focussed on data from decades earlier. And that's the problem with a lot of economic research claims, while it is helpful to examine historical patterns and learn from them, it isn't easy to isolate the confounding factors and get to some general law. I feel it's closer to history than physics (despite the aspirations of some economists), you can learn from the past, but current society will be different in significant ways that might make things play out quite differently.
This would be funnier if it wasn't so aggravatingly accurate, lol.
nearly every single criticism against "science" is rooted not in a claim made by a scientist, but by the media and politicians completely fucking misrepresenting what the scientists said.
MAGAts
People with the health and enviromental benefits of a whole foods plant-based diet.
This is expertly crafted to piss off people either way they think lol