With the billionaires backing him, it’s going to be on us as individual Americans to make sure Trump doesn’t end up in the White House again. That means not just voting but talking with people around you, volunteering and donating

  • @MagicShel@programming.dev
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    156 months ago

    Some day we’re going to find out the entire Republican Party was co-opted by a geopolitical rival, and once they got enough traction, they just need to hit the gas every once in a while and we do the rest to ourselves.

    The only way we can truly have a democracy is by containing the income gap, which we have utterly failed to do since the 80’s. The wealthy aren’t part of our world. The truths which dominate our lives simply aren’t true for them. The idiom is “death and taxes” but the truth is it’s just death.

    • @djsoren19@yiffit.net
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      136 months ago

      We know they were, it’s Russia, they’ve been co-opted by Russia. We’ve been screaming it from the mountaintops since 2015, Donald Trump is a stooge for Putin and has infected the rest of the party. Nobody cares.

    • @oxjox@lemmy.ml
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      86 months ago

      The wealth gap is certainly an issue. Typically, Americans are more prosperous under Democratic presidents and while that may be true on paper in select areas, it’s apparent that most people are still hurting. On paper, Biden has been a remarkable president and has saved Americans billions if not trillions. Saving money is different than putting money in their pockets though. To say, yeah - but it could have been so much worse, means nothing to most people.

      I’m not sure how this played out but there was a plan…

      A study by the liberal Institute of Taxation and Public Policy predicts Mr. Biden’s plan would increase by more than $100,000 a year what someone in the top 1% of earners pays Uncle Sam. President Obama in 2013 raised taxes on that same group by $83,000. President Trump in 2017 cut their taxes by about $50,000 a year.
      The top 1% of Americans earn about 20% of all income in the U.S., but they pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes. The Biden plan will put even more of the tax burden on the wealthy. “It’s time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1% of Americans to just begin to pay their fair share,” he said Wednesday in his speech to Congress.

      And wages are up compared to inflation for the past year. But eventhough inflation is still at a comfortable-ish sub 4%, the future looks questionable.
      https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/

      But to the greater point, when people are struggling to put food on the table and upgrade appliances or save for the future, they’re going to get stressed. They’re going to become afraid and they’re going to search for answers - even if those answers are wrong, it’s what they want to hear. Keeping this wage gap wide, keeping the middle class down, gives politicians power.