Deliberately miseducated because the Hungry Ghosts needed factory workers and soldiers, not people who could ask questions. The tax code in particular is kept Byzantine on purpose.

I sometimes wonder how much we can blame people; we’re here because the programming didn’t work on us, but probably for a bunch of different reasons, many of which are also outside of our control.

The American people are not intellectual, to put it mildly.

Sometimes I feel stupid and then I remember that most Americans are functionally illiterate and barely know how to add two numbers much less do even basic calculus. Then I feel a little better.

Then I feel really bad again because what the fuck how is it 2024 and people can barely read.

Stream of thought time…

Season 1 of ST:TNG has a line from a child character maybe 10 or younger along the lines of “ahh dad do I gotta do my calculus homework it’s so boring” and his dad is all “we gotta all learn the basics son so yes you must do your calculus. But don’t worry you also get to do music.” I think about this line. Education should be improving. We should be learning more and more things as we learn to educate people. We should be able to take advanced math classes as basics because we know how to impart knowledge. This would of course ultimately apply to everything. We could play so much music. Learn to write such great books. And yet it’s just getting worse.

Anyway ya you’re right it’s crazy about marginal tax rates.

reminds me about how when I tell someone “I’m not voting for the democrats, we live in one of most solidly blue states in the country” and they rail on me about the lesser of two evils bullshit argument, half the time they don’t even remember that the electoral college even exists

it’s drilled in to us repeatedly as children and young adults, a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. it doesn’t help that tax payment is unnecessarily complicated to create an industry of tax preparers who lobby to keep the process unnecessarily complicated. so you end up with working people in their 40s who literally have no idea how any of it works, but just repeat anecdotes from others as though they are facts.

I sat in a college level basic law course where the in house counsel for a public agency just straight up lied about estate taxes, with complete conviction.

if you keep everybody ignorant and confused about policy you can advocate for reforms that don’t fix anything.

It’s disturbing how many Burgerlanders don’t really comprehend the difference between a million and a billion, either.

It really must be so fucking nice to know there is literally not a lie too stupid or far fetched for their base to believe.

Like imagine being able to live life just inventing your own reality.

Like your boss walks in and you’re leaned back in the chair hammered smoking a joint but when you get called into hr you say you didn’t do that (you’re still visibly drunk and still smoking the joint) and your boss is just a liar who has it out for you.

So hr fires your boss and gives you $10,000 for a screenshot of your signature.

It’s probably at least partly because at least some high schools literally teach students that income tax brackets mean all income gets taxed at that rate as part of their “civics” curriculum. Education, especially related to economics, is fully captured by far right cranks pushing propaganda through control over textbooks and program funding.

I even remember some dumbshit “educational” video from high school “civics and economics” that had some poor farmer having to not grow his herd because progressive taxation meant he’d be making less money if he made more. That class and the American History class I took the next year both stand out as just constantly getting basic material facts wrong. Like the English classes did a better job of covering history than the actual history classes did.

It’s funny, I can only remember the names of two teachers I’ve ever had and I can barely remember anything of highschool, but I can remember these clear flashes of how completely dogshit most of the classes were, even two decades later.

I know someone who was pulling in easily $500K/year and still didn’t understand marginal tax rates…boggles the mind

i come from a long line of accountants going back to guys who counted silver coins for some shitty Welsh lord and that’s the only reason i ever knew anything about the U.S. tax system

It really is amazing how that stupid grift still works. It’s worth commenting on because it shouldn’t be a thing anymore and yet here we are 24 years after Will Smith dropped Willennium and people still don’t get it.

If taxes are marginal, why do so many people care about them!?!?

The simplest way to pare down the tax code would be to take your percentile of income, and you pay half that % of your income in taxes. Poorest 10%? Income tax is 5%. Richest 1%? Income tax is 49.5%.

This is like historical anti-materialism. Not just idealism, but people having their entire conception of their material relations to one another wrong.

I fully understand that aptitude tests as a requirement for voting are wildly undemocratic, but if we had one that was exactly one question long and that question was to demonstrate you understand how tax brackets work, I would be for it.