It’s a slippery, accelerative slope. Companies never would have price gouged the way they did during and after COVID 30 years ago; they didn’t have the technology, data and also lack of fear of antitrust. Each new cohort gets worse in company practices and voila!

Everyone always also sees themselves on the lifeboat, not being the one who pays the piper. Just like the 70% of lottery players who think they will win.

It’s a tried and true model. It also has tried and true historic results, for the populace…and eventually the powerful.

You will see relative pittance for lower tax brackets, millions and billions for the wealthy. What’s worse, critical services that will be cut to find these tax cuts, and then what will come next. They will cut Medicare, raise the social security age which is a benefit cut all to give just that much more to the ultra wealthy.

The land of opportunity for those who steal it.

No. You pay a lower percentage in lower brackets. Most people don’t make it to the higher ones. A 1% difference in a normal tax bracket might mean a difference of a few thousand dollars in taxes. At high levels of wealth, 1% of millions is a shitload of savings, which is why it’s always pointed out that the wealthy disproportionately receive most of the benefits of tax cuts. There is no reason it has to be like this, their benefit could be capped at a hard dollar amount.

Tax brackets are also not connected. A common misconception is that when you go over a bracket limit into the next one suddenly all your income is taxed at that rate. This is incorrect. Your tax rate changed for each amount in that bracket and nothing above or below it, referred to as “marginal”. If the first tax bracket has a 0% tax rate and 2nd tax bracket has a rate of 5% starts at $10,000 and your income is $12,000, you don’t pay taxes of 5% of $12,000, you pay 0% for $10k and 5% of $2k.

One of the other major problems is that in the last 40 years the fusion of corporate power and political party purchase by lobby and corruption has us currently with some of the lowest maximum tax rates in history. Just 5 or 6 decades ago, normal tax rates were 50+% on the ultra wealthy. They’re now 37 and will be cut further. The super wealthy don’t even have regular “income” but earn from investments and may only pay 15% tax rate as they’ve lobbied for this exception. Their rate of 15% is of course before all the loopholes and lack of IRS staffing to enforce tax law, which disproportionately benefits the very wealthy.

That’s your US tax primer 101.

I was indeed auto-ed. Which is why, when anyone says trust our future to AI, I point out LLMs can’t even get simple things like that correct but they want to fly nuke plane missions unmanned.

Yeah.

Malign is an adjective and is appropriate. It’s past participle, though very common, is hardly the only form of the word.

Careful, will get you promoted to head of an agency you’re not qualified to run with these fascists.