• InternetUser2012@lemmy.today
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    2 months ago

    Back when Obama made it where you couldn’t be evicted and bailed out the auto industry, I had a friend that drove a car hauler. He wasn’t paying his house payment and lived for free for a year, and only had a job because of the bailout. He talked mad shit about the bailout and about people living and not paying their rent. This is republikkklown logic. I was blown away and said to him, he wouldn’t have a job or a place to live if it wasn’t for that. He said he’d live somewhere else and get a different job.

    Since then, he lives with his wife and child in his mom’s house with a shit job and complains about people being on welfare. They don’t get it.

    • Soup@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      If there’s any way they can punch down instead of address their own issues they’ll take it. It’s why they resort to going after made up nonsense or the most vulnerable.

      • SyntaxTerror@feddit.org
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        2 months ago

        This is happening right now in Germany. In two of our 16 federal states, the fascist party got around 30% of votes through fear mongering and propaganda. In one of the states, all of the remaining parties would be needed to create a functionable government with a majority, containing the whole spectrum from left to right. I am not sure about the future of this state.

        • Soup@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          So that one state is a minority government? If it weren’t for the fact the right is just objectively wrong about literally everything I actually prefer a setup where no one party has a majority. Majorities mean that the ruling party can just ignore everyone else and huge numbers of people just have effectively zero representation.

          • SyntaxTerror@feddit.org
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            2 months ago

            Election day was only yesterday, so the exploratory talks for possible coalitions are only just beginning. The party with the second most votes (conservative) had already announced that it does not want to form a coalition with the party “Die Linke” (our leftmost party, this is also the case nationwide) but also not with the fascists. This leaves only a minority government with a center-left party and a new party that has both radical right and radical left issues in its program (if I have understood this new party correctly). But “Die Linke” has already said that it would play along with a minority government, even if it is not part of it, as long as they agree or negotiate on the respective issues.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No.”

        Actor Craig T Nelson on how the government never helped him.

        • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          So help me there was some big deal right wing personality who talked about how the government shouldn’t subsidize education by saying that when he was a kid he wanted an education so he… went down to the public library and read books there. Not a hint of irony. Can’t remember exactly who it was, but the dissonance stuck with me.

            • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              The difficulty in locating the original is that Republicans are ALWAYS trying to destroy public education and public libraries, so it’s kind of like trying to Google John Smith.

          • the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            Hmm, while it’s widely quoted i dunno if there is audio/video to find

            give me a bit to see if i can dig that up. If anyone wants to try as well it was in Simpsonville, South Carolina, by an unidentified person to congressman Bob Inglis.

            Edit: it was reported by the Washington Post as happening on July 28 2009. While the Simpsonville town hall website keeps audio and transcriptions of its meetings, it seems to have purged all meeting records before 2015. Anyone else wanna take a crack at it?

            • SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              2 months ago

              The big one was a woman protesting holding up a sign showing that but there are many variants. Google image search “keep your government hands out of my Medicare” you’ll see a whole slate of them

    • MrVilliam@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I literally knew a girl who said this. She truly had no idea that they were the same thing, but rattled on about wanting it gone while benefiting from it.

      I also knew an older woman who hated Obama and said “he’s arrogant for naming that after himself.” She didn’t believe me that her favorite channel was the one who named it after him unofficially and that its official name was ACA.

      They truly just repeat bullshit until it sticks, and it usually works on the people who don’t bother to diversify their information sources. It’s so goddamn frustrating.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        She didn’t believe me that her favorite channel was the one who named it after him unofficially and that its official name was ACA.

        That can’t be true, because I’ve heard it called Obamacare 30 times. Everyone knows it!

        • jaybone@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          “Everyone says so”

          It’s like an introduction to fallacies in a freshman year philosophy class.

  • dudinax@programming.dev
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    2 months ago

    “Social Security’s great for the old folks, but there’s no way it’ll be around when we’re old”

    Votes for the guy trying to destroy social security.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      I mean, technically that’s correct, if they keep voting for the guy trying to destroy social security lol

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Ronald Reagan was cutting advertising telling people that Social Security was going to go bankrupt in a generation back in 1961.

        Then he took office in 1980 (after he’d predicted bankruptcy) on the position and “fixed” SS by raising taxes on low income Americans and gutting their benefits. But the subsequent multi-trillion dollar trust fund didn’t satisfy SS scalds. They still insisted it was going bankrupt, so Republicans raised taxes and gutted benefits again under Clinton and Gingrich, while introducing alternative privatized savings programs (401k, IRA, etc).

        But that still didn’t satisfy scalds. They tried to privatize the program in 2005 under Bush Jr. That failed, but we still got an earful about how SS was going to fail in the next 20 years if we didn’t do something. So then Obama tried to pass another round of cuts and tax hikes in 2013, but Republicans killed that too. So then Trump claimed we were headed to a Fiscal Cliff in 2017, and tried to privatize SS, but Republicans refused to pass that either.

        At this point, we’ve passed repeated deadlines under which SS was supposedly going to fail. The 1970s, the 1980s, the 2000s, the 2020s… We’re still waiting on the Big Cliff in 2037, but since COVID killed several million people far sooner than expected, that’s thrown the math of significantly.

        I anticipate we will continue to hear people predicting the end of SS until Congress finally finds the majority they need to kill it.

  • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    This is why the GOP has fought to destroy the public education system for decades: It’s way easier to manipulate poorly educated people to vote against their own interests compared to well educated people who are more likely to have learned critical thinking.

    • jaybone@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      See here’s what I’m wondering, if they are so easy to manipulate, why can’t the left just manipulate them into voting democrat?

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
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        2 months ago

        They’re easy to manipulate if you play off their basic tribal fears and religious bigotry. The Democrats are far from a perfect party but they at the very least aren’t openly bigots.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Because honesty and integrity matter for society. We’re trying to create a better world, not replace the Republicans with Democrats who behave just as badly but have a different name.

  • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The amount of people I see being payed minimum wage but dont want a living wage is insane. I don’t get it

    • Fillicia@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Same vibe as:

      “I won’t work overtime because I end up losing money on taxes”

      That’s not how tax brackets work!

      • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        That’s not how tax brackets should work. But sadly for last year’s state tax I came across it. [Example numbers] Previously I had 24,200 annual salary but zero tax as it was below 25,000. Even though personal deductions are 10,000, below 25 was considered too low to tax. This year, due to a mistake from employers I was paid for two weeks retroactively, now I have 25,300. Instead of taxing 300 above 25,000 the tax was for 15,300 after deduction. So I had to pay taxes which decreased the money below 25,000 which should not happen if income below 25,000 pays no tax.

        And considering there might be things like not qualifying for financial assistance and other things when you cross 25,000 (again example numbers), the actual benefit of making slightly below that, is higher than making slightly above that…

        So the system is putting a resistance to overcome poverty. Either you start making double of what you are making, or stay on your lane. Because trying to improve your situation by only a little is harmful.

          • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I know it’s an edge case. But the edge case of having to pay more on taxes on increasing income existing for incomes close to poverty line seems counterproductive, doesn’t it?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Lots of people working the service sector are trained to hate one another. The assumption is always that the other guy isn’t pulling their weight, never that the establishment is understaffed or the staff undertrained and overworked.

  • Kalkaline @leminal.space
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    2 months ago

    What they (Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, centrists) really want is emergency departments over run with patients who can’t get care for chronic conditions and then they have an excuse to repeal EMTALA. At that point they’ll be able to sink people deep into medical debt and when social security and Medicare/Medicaid fails to cover the costs then we can force medically disabled people into low wage jobs and take their assets to sell at pennies on the dollar to mega corps and further consolidate wealth in this country.

    We should instead create a pipeline for that wealth to flow through the lower and middle class on it’s way up to the top bringing the floor up and making sure basic infrastructure like medical care has the funding it needs.

    • SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      If you make the wealthy ultra wealthy then their urine is full of healthy nutrients when they piss on you.

      That’s the basis to tinkle down economics.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    I’m not American, but this happens a lot more than you’d think.

    I live in Canada.

    A relative of a friend actually voted for a party called “the People’s party of Canada”, and one of their goals as a party was to eliminate subsidized housing. That relative of my friend… lived in subsidized housing and was not able to afford to have a home if not subsidized.

    They literally voted for a party that, if they had won, would have made them homeless.

    I don’t think that the PPC won a single district (giving them no seats in government); much to their benefit and their disappointment.

    Schools really need to teach critical thinking.

  • Michal@programming.dev
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    2 months ago

    To be fair it’s not hypocritical to use service you’re entitled to and still be against it. After all, you paid for it with your taxes.

    • Tyler@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      But voting against it to remove its benefit to others is the hypocrisy. For instance, a cousin of mine was on her parents’ insurance until the cutoff of 26 because of Obamacare and was all about getting rid of it. I would point out how she was only insured because of it (this was before her being 26 and booted off) and asked her what her next plan for being insured would be. Of course she didn’t think that far ahead and just said she would be 26 by the time anything changed so it wouldn’t matter.

      The party of grifters is aptly put.

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      That’s a straw man here. The ACA didn’t require individuals to buy insurance. They’re getting it because they value it, not because their money was already taken.