Low Information Voters
One of our favorite lessons from English is when we get to talk about different forms of figurative language. One of those forms is the euphemism. A lay person might define a euphemism as a more gentle way to say something unpleasant. For instance, when someone has died we say “she passed away.”
Let’s peel back the layers of stupidity here. For one, a capital gains tax is always issued upon the sale of the stock or property. Jackbooted thugs are not busting down grandma’s door and evicting her for not paying taxes on a home she has not sold. She has not reaped any capital gains until she actually sells the home. Therefore, she would not owe any money under any circumstances.
I know the punch line to this argument, but let’s focus on the stupidity a little longer. A capital gains tax is levied on the profit from the transaction. So, their math doesn’t even math. The tax would be levied on 25 percent of the profit and not 25 percent of the total sale value of the home. So, it is 25 percent of 450,000 dollars. Sorry, to geek out on everyone there for a second.
The punchline? Only people worth 100 million or more will pay the tax. The general response to these memes have been to congratulate grandma for being worth 100 million dollars. Suddenly, the threat of bankruptcy over that 125,000 grand doesn’t seem so real.
The story of Donald Trump’s lunacy over transgender reassignment in schools has been well documented. Jeff Tiedrich did this earlier and it was a lot more hilarious when he did it. My concern isn’t with one candidate that’s a lunatic. My concern is with all of the folks that seem to think this is actually happening because he said it.
To hear Trump tell it, schools are actually taking it upon themselves to give individual students gender reassignment surgery. Granted, Trump has never been a details guy. He has other men and women to work that stuff out. I haven’t seen any equipment in the nurse’s office that would get that done, but maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough.
Maybe, a bus whisks them away during the school day. It’s a field trip to the OR. Maybe parents are extremely self-absorbed these days, but I think at least one would notice that their son had become a daughter during their time at school and alert the mainstream media.
Some idiot is going to come up their neighborhood school and “demand answers.” What we are really talking about is the abandoning of common sense. That’s what low information voting is all about. You could be talking about people that are otherwise intelligent people, but they don’t pay attention to the news or they get their news from dubious sources. Instead of fixing these misconceptions, these dubious media sources are profiting from it. Why wouldn’t they?
Maybe euphemisms aren’t getting it done. Maybe it is time to call it what it really is and shame the devil. If you believe any of this crap you are a dumbass. If you know it’s a bunch of crap and forward it anyway to rile up the dumbasses then you are evil. Period.
Honest to goddess: it’s like all those lumps of protoplasm standing behind the Toxic Orange for his “speeches” are unable to think at all. But the major press is just as nuts. Their headlines are misleading lies and favor the idiot. And Kennedy: he thinks Toxic O can think and communicate and parse out and converse! The worm must have eaten his entire brain, not just a little. Sometimes I feel like we are all living at Coney Island and never leaving the merry-go-round. How can we even have a vision of this country beyond November, when the people featured every day on our teevees are completely addled??
1Dubious media sources need all the resoures they can fool out of their gullible listeners to pay off defamation claims brought by upright companies.
2It’s not low-information voters that worry me. We vote mostly on a combination of character/affinity. It does not take a great deal of information to decide that.
It’s the anti-information voter that causes the trouble. I think that’s what you are talking about: people who know things that just aren’t so. (Leftists are just as likely to join this club as rightists.)
As for the tax, the question is not about capital gains but capital levies.
We have to go back pretty far to see those in action. The most recent that I recall were the ‘loans’ extorted by the Venetian republic to pay for war against the Turk.
Payers got bonds in return. Three generations later, the gummint redeemed the bonds, for 8 ducats for every 100 ducats mulcted for descendants of original creditors, 2 ducats for speculators.
This is an idea that is never going to fly. Better to campaign for eliminating the capital gains preference. If there was ever any justification for taxing capital gains lightly, it has disappeared in the era of crypto, where there is so much unemployed capital that many billions are sunk in shell games.
I can think of other, non-tax methods of releasing stuck capital for socially useful objectives, but they are complex. Just indexing capital gains to inflation and taxing them as ordinary income will do what the thumbsuckers want. (In the grandparents example, indexing will eliminate all or almost all of the gain.)
3A luxury trumpf has is the complete buy in of anything he says to his maga cult including the mothers of liberty. That cult includes Qanon which has strong ties to the moms of liberty. Trumpf certainly knows how to play the room, most of the time.
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-transgender-2669128779/
Hopefully his bizarre statements will come out in the debate. Would love to see him squirm trying to explain himself.
4When Trump made his outrageous comment about kids going to school and then coming home a different gender, I thought sure the mainstream media would jump all over that. But they didn’t, of course, because his outrageousness has become so normalized we, and the media, have both gotten used to it and have also numbed our skepticism. When he threatens to be a dictator, the common response is, “Well, there he goes again.” So, it’s not as if he isn’t warning us. Yet the media focus on Harris’ laugh or Walz’ military record, as if either matters. Now we get to see whether the media will accurately report on Trump’s debate performance, something we’ll all see and must decide what it means, regardless of what the media say.
5There are a number of other capital expenses that can be used to lower your capital gains taxes too. Such as any capital improvements that grandma might have made to the property (adding a garage, upgrading the HVAC, etc etc; a number of ‘repairs’ can also be worked into being a capital improvement too…).
So Grandma’s capital gains tax hit can be greatly reduced with a little creative accounting..
As far as Comrade Donnie, he continues to lose his ass on his DJT NASDAQ stock price, it’s continued the rapid fall today, was just about to dip into the $16 per share price range, a massive decline in the last month or two.
Trump Media & Technology Group, DJT:
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/djt
Bwahahaha, he’s lost billion$ of paper dollars recently.
6If he was smart, he’d fork over a bunch of shares (he’s the majority holder of them) to some of his many creditors, to ‘pay off’ some of his many debts, before the shares become worthless.
Of course Comrade Donnei’s creditors probably wouldn’t want to accept his DJT NASDAQ stock shares as payment.
It’s not regarded very well in the financial world.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/nosedive-might-not-be-over-says-investor-about-trump-media-stock
7Unless grandma’s income is in the multi-million dollar range, capital gains at the aforementioned taxes on the sale of her house would not apply to her. There are also provisions for not overtaxing the sale of one’s primary home if the proceeds of the sale are used toward a new primary residence. Also, there’s a lot of confusion between ordinary capital gains rates and unrealized capital gains rates. Also note that Harris’s rate suggestion (not at all set in stone) is 13% lower than Biden’s was. She’s strongly concerned with not overburdening the middle class. Don’t panic and research further.
8Concerning the media not calling out or even reporting on the crazy stuff/obvious lies Trumpf spews and his cult buys into, maybe it’s time to do more. Our talking about his craziness and just a few media sources (like msnbc) isn’t doing jack shit to get the media off their asses. Maybe it’s time to do a concerted effort with the likes of the NYT and WaPO to write letters to the editors and ask them directly why they’re not reporting on the batshit stuff like trumpf’s schools doing gender reassignment procedures. Maybe even include emails to the likes of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN.
9Maybe Nick can give us a script we can use. Nick? Wishful thinking probably, right. Never mind.
This is the kind of stuff everyone that can do it should do it. Same with the NYT.
10https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/3/2267588/-Washington-Post-erases-Trump-s-coup-attempt-when-pondering-policy-differences-between-candidates?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Gender reassignment surgery equipment in our schools?
Maybe democrats could simply say, “we’re against that!”
Abortion after birth? “We’re against that!”
Extra taxes on grandma’s home when she sells it? “We’re against that! Unless grandma has $100 million.”
When Trump starts arguing these nonsense points don’t argue details, just agree with him. He’ll stop bringing it up if it gets him nothing.
11Nick, when it comes to this shit, sense hasn’t been common with so many folks for years.
12It ain’t low information voting that’s the biggest problem IMHO.
It’s hyper-misinfomation voting done by people too tired of the avalanche of bullshit, or unable to check themselves, for the size of the avalanche.
Steve @ 8
What you say makes sense — if you think campaigns make sense. I find that a dubious proposition.
If the idea is to smash trump, then it might work better to promote the idea that he smells. Lo! Kinzinger does that.
13