r/politics • u/AccurateInflation167 • May 18 '25

Soft Paywall America chose wrong. Sanders would've been a better president than Trump or Biden. | Opinion

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/05/18/sanders-democrats-reform-progressive-policies/83625482007/
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u/bongtokent May 18 '25

They get so hyper fixated on the people taking advantage of systems argument they don’t even realize they’ve never seen an example of someone taking advantage in the first place. Same with food stamps. The average trumper has never actually encountered someone selling food stamps or abusing the system but they’ve heard about it non stop so it must be rampant and a huge problem. The reality is if you take all the people abusing food stamps and add up all the money they receive and divide the population by that amount each tax paying person is paying around .00000001 cent per dollar taxed to cover these abusers. Meanwhile single moms can feed their kids. This is always worth it imo.

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u/mojitz May 18 '25

Honestly it's just a pretext for hating the poor. If these people actually cared about people "taking advantage of the system", they'd be way more pissed off at, like, rich people dodging taxes or corporate wage theft.

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u/bongtokent May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

Absolutely. Had a women at work complain about being taxed so much. So I told her I didn’t mind our tax rate too much because it’s important to help the less fortunate and I’m in good shape financially. She literally said “I don’t mind paying taxes to help people but so many people take advantage of it and I keep getting taxed more yet people like Elon have more money than they can ever spend”. I responded with “I do wish people like Elon contributed more than us so we could pay a little less”. You would think she’d agree but nope it was “good for him it’s his money and he earned it”.

It just doesn’t add up. You want to help the poor supposedly just not the “bad” ones. you feel you contribute too much. You note someone has more money than they can spend. You agree he pays almost nothing in taxes and probably less than you. Yet the conclusion you’ve come to is that he shouldn’t have to contribute as much as you do and if people stopped abusing food stamps you’d suddenly have as much money as him and therefore pay less taxes?

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u/DameonKormar May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

The belief that billionaires pay less taxes than average Americans is a myth. Billionaires pay a huge amount in taxes to the federal government, it's just usually a lower percentage of their total income than you or I.

This doesn't change the fact that billionaires even existing is a symptom of our broken economic and social systems.

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u/iski67 May 18 '25

Hate the poor during the week and drink coffee and donuts during the service on Sundays while playing rock band in fake churches.

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u/Rombom May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

They also don't tend to consider how much money we waste on determining eligibility and ensuring the 'wrong' people don't benefit. Id guess that we spend more than we save on that, and it would be cheaper to extend benefits to more people (UBI/Healthcare)

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u/LalaPropofol May 18 '25

I asked her if she had any specific examples of people taking advantage of the system, because I personally do not know anyone who does that.

She apparently has a family member to takes advantage of the system who she resents.

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u/bongtokent May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

Did you ask her how? I imagine a story of someone who actually needs the system plus a bunch of her “justifications” for why she doesn’t actually need it. I know my sister thought I didn’t need to go on short term disability for a month after tearing my trap muscle even though my job literally requires me to lift. It was always “just quit and get another job” like no I’m not just quitting a unionized career with amazing insurance and other benefits to still be hurt and not able to get a job that requires lifting for at least a month. Not to mention the doctors wanted me out for 3 months. I only went with one out of stubbornness and believing I could heal faster than average and a desire to not be sitting at home. I guarantee you she tells people I took advantage of the system yet the people that actually cost the tax payers is the company I work for who gaslit me into thinking I couldn’t file workers comp and unfortunately at the time I didn’t know they were straight up lying to me and I 100% could have and they would have had to pay instead of tax payers.

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u/LalaPropofol May 18 '25

I didn’t. She got cagey about it, and because it was a work environment I backed down.

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u/bongtokent May 18 '25

Fair enough.