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At a Republican town hall in Nebraska (slrpnk.net)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 257 points 2 years ago (26 children)

I'm fairly convinced that what makes a lot of the US population right wing is a lack of understanding of what that means.

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  • [–] 109 points 2 years ago (14 children)

    My dad (long time conservative but can't get on the trump train which is good at least) thinks that "tax the rich" means people like high end doctors and surgeons. People who are absolutely in the top 1% but like "has a nice weekend car and maybe a lake house" not people making millions of dollars per month or week (or more)

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  • [–] 112 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    "The difference in wealth between a surgeon and a billionaire is about one billion dollars, it's the billionaires that need to pay more taxes, they pay a smaller % than you."

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  • [–] 61 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    How the the story of the nurses who pay more tax than Bezos didn't result in a landslide for progressives, I'll never understand.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    More as a percentage* than nurses.

    That's one of the arguments my dad makes too, depending on the source he pays like 1-2% in taxes on a given year which was over a billion dollars last year.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Which is hilarious. That percentage should be around 40-50% if not more.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    And at one point it was pretty close to that in many parts of the West. For as much as American conservatives want to go back to the 50s socially, they don’t seem keen on bringing back the fiscal policies of the time…

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    And the people who want to go back to the 50s don't realise that the fiscal policies were what made that time great, not the social norms.

    For example, the great thing wasn't that women had to do the housework, the great thing was that you only needed one worker per household to live a good life.

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  • [–] 39 points 2 years ago

    Your dad thinks that people earn money by working for it. In other words, he's what would be a normal person in a socialist society.

    All you have to do now is teach him what capitalism is.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    The top 1% make roughly $600k per year, or probably more significantly (as not all rich people get "income"), a net worth of $11million according to this article

    So yeah, maybe some doctors are in that category, but it's probably just the real big earners.

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  • [–] 42 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

    Natural result of the massive and constant effort to make the Republican party seem less insane than it is that's undertaken by both political parties for some reason

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    The medias are normalizing the pathological behaviours from the GOP. That false requirement to be unbiased in the face of the most serious breach to the constitution is what got us here.

    Not all ideas are worth consideration and mainstream medias are failing to understand that.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    "failing to understand that" oh they're aware, it's just they're all large companies with motivations to keep the far right in power.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    True, but it’s not the secretive conspiratorial type of motivations, it’s the “make money; make numbers go up” motivations. Corporate news are owned by billionaires for a reason- naked power. Your rag might lose money but the spin they make can help everything else.

    Honest, truthful reporting is, by nature, kind of boring to the average person. Hence all reporting has to be pumped up, juiced with outrage or horror or astounding details somehow. Making it inherently dishonest.

    And there is no such thing as an objective point of view.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    I don't think that helps, but public opinion of the media is pretty low and fewer people are reading the news all the time, so I don't think that explains it.

    The real problem is that the average person who doesn't think about politics much and assumes the truth is somewhere to the left of what Republicans are saying and to the right of the Dems constantly hears Dems like Schumer Jeffries Pelosi Hoyer etc. talk about how we need to strengthen the border and fund the police and other stupid shit like that, and it ends up making things like the suspension of asylum rights and giving billions of dollars of taxpayer money to for profit organizations seem like a reasonable middle ground.

    e; ... buuut, I also feel compelled to point out that the one place I was able to find a recording of this town hall was through a "news" channel that was actually founded by this lawmaker, so the media environment is not not a problem I suppose

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Public opinion of the media going down is also driven by the right wing. Hell, I don't think the media minds it, given that most of those companies also have stakes in other shit that'll, at least in their minds, benefit from a corporatist government.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    also propagandizing that there is an actual left or communist party in america too. usa is the most right wing WESTERN country out there. being puritanical around nudity is pretty telling too.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Right, for the most part the Democrats tend to fit the definition of conservative better than the Republicans. The Republicans themselves more or less covering the spectrum of right wing. Although you do occasionally get a character like Nixon who policy wise in a lot of ways meets the definition of liberal better than most of today's Democrats.

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