America-specific, but how well our culture-pot mixing has worked. Lots of incidents and issues make the headlines, but the crazy stuff makes the news because it’s so unordinary.
Everything.
Like, I’m talking to you now from the back bedroom of a random house in a small isolated town in the north east of England, and you could be anywhere. Travelling on a train is crazy fast. There are SO MANY leaves on that tree. Dogs are the best and there’s no way humanity deserves them. Isn’t it cool that we invented bread? My travel mug can keep hot tea at an acceptable drinking temperature for hours. Hugs are amazing. Windows are insane.
Sometimes I have to take motion sickness pills and they make me a bit loopy to the point where I start to really notice things around me, haha.
That like four people have as much wealth as 7 billion others.
Unearned income is taxed at a lower rate than earned income. I mean, pretty much everything about capitalism tbf, but that particular thing is saying the quiet part out loud and it still gets almost no attention.
A flat tax system would resolve a lot of this.
The issue with a flat tax system, though, is that the value behind each dollar is different for different classes of people.
$20 is chump change for a billionaire. $20 for a middle class person might be some nice takeout for an evening. $20 could mean whether or not a working poor person can eat that day, or if they have to save what money they have for rent or electricity.
A flat tax system isn’t actually “flat”, not in practice. It’d be more accurate to describe it as “regressive”.
I agree with you, but wouldn’t a flat percentage fix this? Something like everyone pays 20% tax on all earned and unearned income, no exceptions.
No, because you’re charging people the same effective rate regardless of their ability to pay.
Someone in the 0.1% of the 0.1% can afford to give a lot more of their income than someone in the bottom 25%. As such, a flat tax rate would negatively impact lower income taxpayers compared to high-earners.
Hence why I described it as “regressive” in my earlier comment.
Water, arguably the most important thing for sustaining life, just falls from the sky.
We had a bad algae bloom affect our water supply making it undrinkable a few years ago and it really was a wakeup call that we take it for granted. We couldn’t just turn on the tap and pour a cup of water anymore. People snatched up all the drinking water at the grocery stores and some places started price gouging by charging upwards of $50 for a 6-pack of Dasani water bottles. Thankfully it only lasted a week or two, but we keep drinking water stored in the garage now.
And we still get charged a fortune for it. Yay capitalism!
I mean you can collect rain water (or build your own bore hole), process it, treat it for storage, keep it, test it to verify that it’s still safe to drink, install and maintain a pumping system to provide pressure, provide adequate documentation and inspection opportunities, provide a traceable record of where it has come from, install a water water treatment system, provide the necessary permits to verify that you’re not draining polluted water into the ocean etc etc…
But I guess if you want someone else to do that for you, some salaries, know how and materials will need to get paid for, yes.
Reality. Anyone who has suddenly had their perception of reality completely unhinged due to a mental, psychiatric, or spiritual crisis is likely to attest their exuberant appreciation simply for “the ground beneath my feet”
