A society is always about 3 days of hunger away from a violent revolution. Start your clocks.
Just a reminder that no one steals food in America. If you thought you saw someone shoplifting food, no you didn’t! That never happened, you imagined it, turn around and walk away, nothing to report here.
it’s AI
Everyone on a jury should argue this. “I can’t trust the bodycam footage. Could be Sora. I have reasonable doubt.”
Not American, but I totally didn’t see someone shoplifting a couple of weeks ago and I just carried on with my business, but on the way out I heard another customer grassing them out. What is the world coming to?
You know what you hardly ever see - billionaires telling on each other for their crimes for no reason. Solidarity, people!
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But it’s OK: Kristi Noem gets two $170,000,000 private jets, Trump gets a golden ballroom, a luxury airliner and billions of dollars in bribes, Argentina gets $40,000,000,000, and ICE get all the weaponry they desire plus big fat bonuses for hitting their kidnapping targets. So as you sit hungry through the holiday season, know that your tax dollars are at least giving someone a good time.
Don’t forget the $250 million that he feels he is owed by the DOJ for being prosecuted, which he intends to instruct the DOJ to settle and pay.
Let’s instead phrase it that ICE gets more budget for militarization than the entire Israeli military.
Just let that sink in for a bit. ICE and resources allocated than the Israeli military.
It’s the 16th most funded militarized force in the world.
Essentially equal to Canada’s military budget.
Shits fucked
Republicans don’t give a fuck if they kill people by withholding healthcare, obviously they don’t give a fuck if people starve.
At some point the Democrats have got to realize this and start acting accordingly, but Democrats are still bending the knee: 13 Senate Democrats just voted to install a conservative judge in Alabama.
Republicans don’t give a fuck if they kill people by withholding healthcare, obviously they don’t give a fuck if people starve.
Maybe that’s why they love Israel so much?
Not an American but if the government shutsdown and they are cancelling programs, shouldn’t you not have to pay taxes for that time period?
Most working people have their estimated taxes deducted from their pay before they receive it. They don’t have an option to not pay.
Well, that one congressional district that has their congress person being kept out should definitely not have to pay because that would be a taxation when they have no representation.
Also, several congresspeople have said that they “don’t represent the Democrats” in their districts. I think that, too, should immediately exempt those residents from taxes.
They don’t have an option to not pay.
Sort of. When you start employment, you fill out a whole bunch of paperwork related to taxes and pay. Most people opt to have standard tax withholdings, but you can opt to get the full paycheck with no withholdings. It just requires you to pay a huge bill at the end of every year out of your bank account.
If you’re smart and time it right, you can take what would be deducted and put it into a 12-month certificate. Then, when the year ends, you take that principle and pay the taxes. You just get to keep the interest.
Most people don’t because taxes and the deductions from the paycheck change so much every year. It can be hard to figure out and a pain to have to refile the paperwork to change the deductions to see what this paycheck’s deduction should be.
If your income does not have withholdings you are required to make payments quarterly. If you owe above a certain amount when filing your tax returns you have to pay a penalty.
You can write exempt on the withholding form to stop your employer from withholding, but the forms are very clear that it is only to be done if you owe no tax. Unless you earn less than $16k or whatever the standard deduction is for you, it would be unwise to not make advanced tax payments.
You can file your forms differently to avoid paying the feds, or delaying those payments, but you do so at personal risk.
i used to do that, claim exempt and just pay at the end of the year. if what you end up paying is over a certain amount, they will get you for penalties and interest.
You can fill out a form and send it to your HR/payroll department to adjust your withholdings at anytime, and they are supposed to do so no questions asked.
The employee not paying their income tax does not actually have an adverse impact on the employer, so they don’t care. Of course, the employee still has the legal obligation to pay; but breaking tax law is pretty inherent with tax protest.
Then we have to pay someone $150 to mail it to the IRS.
Lol
Lmao
It would be like withholding rent from your landlord until they repaired your heating. You’d have to still place the money in escrow to prove to a judge you had the money intended to pay.
Did somebody say Bell riots? I thought I heard Bell riots.
Star Trek future here we come, huzzah!
Don’t forget we have to do the Eugenics Wars first as well…
As well as World War III killing a double digit percentage of the world population.
Yay the end is near!
I’m sure Mark Twain will rescue me from those
Don’t forget the post-atomic horrors that follow.
But maybe I can live just long enough to meet porthos
That was after they created the Sanctuary Districts in major cities, like San Francisco. We’re still a bit away from that. They’re leaving the homeless to roam.
That was last year. Check your calendar.
The eugenics wars happened in the 90’s. Something shifted the timeline around.
Temporal Cold War
So we’re in the Kelvin timeline? Ugh, well, okay, I guess.
No, that is not the same thing. The Kelvin Timeline exist due to Spock trying to prevent the destruction of Romulus from the nearby sun going supernova. The Temporal Cold War is different factions of the galaxy at war, messing with history.
The Temporal Cold War is from ENT.
Thing is, it’s gonna hit the rural MAGA folks the hardest.
There’s a part of me that wants to go “I told you so…” which is expected…
But the more cunning part of me wants to leverage their hunger, dismay and rage and work to aim it squarely against Trump and the entire MAGA movement.
MAGA will blame the Ds and “libtards”, because that’s what they’ve been told to do.
Most of them will, but we don’t need most of them to tip the scales.
Who isn’t? It’s the “Schumer shutdown” and what did they say on Fox News? Something like “open the government and then discuss”. They eat that shit up.
Who do you imagine is going to blame the republicans? Trump is untouchable because they’ll just invent some story to justify their blind faith.
Hell, I had a family member tell me “you got to read between the lines. Don’t take anything he says literally”
Yup. Chomsky talked about the Angry White Man syndrome and how they were right to be angry, but they were angry at the wrong people.
Faux and other wingnut welfare outfits didn’t run in the red for years on end (maybe some indefinitely) for no reason. All that infrastructure - Faux, Washington Times, hate radio, Regnery publishing, etc…is all there to properly indoctrinate a certain percentage of the population into believing all their problems are a result of anything else BUT Republican and conservative ideology.
use that to build class solidarity.
mocking them will achieve nothing except make you feel better
It doesn’t even do that. People want and hope it’ll do that, but it doesn’t. Not really.
I’d like to have empathy, and publicly I won’t call out these hypocrites, but I honestly can’t care less if these fuckers starve. I feel bad for the children and helpless that are affected, but the others that voted for this are reaping what they sow.
Yeah, but “he’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting”.
I try to have compassion for people that have made bad choices in their lives, but fucking hell, it is really hard to sustain that for people that voted to hurt other people. Actively wanting that to happen. Not to really improve their own lot in life, but to hurt others.
Exactly. I don’t enjoy or actively seek the hurting of these individuals, but I can’t keep caring about people that repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot. I can empathize with people that make a mistake. I will go so far as to say that people that voted for Trump in 2016 fucked up, but that they made a forgivable mistake. I can’t do that for anyone that voted for him in 2024. There are no excuses. He was a known commodity that detailed exactly how he was going to rule if elected again. Nothing that he had done since January is a surprise at all. There are plenty of rural residents that are grouped with the majority that voted for Trump that unfortunately are being punished for the actions of their neighbors. I have the most sympathy for those families as they aren’t just most heavily affected, but they are grouped up with those other terrorist supporters. The rest, other than the innocent children, can sleep in the bed they made with empty stomach and crippling debt.
Yep they can have the day they voted for.
It’s hitting visible minorities the hardest. That’s clear. God forbid you speak Spanish and look “Mexican”… MAGA will come in at second-worst, perhaps, and some of them will be happy about that.
I’m a moderately intimidating-looking white guy and the fear in the eyes of all the little latina moms in the supermarket when they look at me… It’s so tragic. I’m just trying to be as polite and accommodating as possible whenever I can to quell their fears. Feels like the social fabric is just melting around us.
I’m currently getting funding from my mother who is also about to get furloughed for working for the military. So she is losing double what she sowed in the election. You fuck around and your family loses, and your family’s friends lose. I’m currently in the trickle down era!
just don’t give in to the “i told you so’s”.
then they’ll only resent you….then they’ll only resent you
Yeah, then. They already do resent us because some propagandists told them to. We are their enemy because we try to improve the lives of all, even those they hate. I hope that hate can satiate their hunger next month, because that’s all they’ll be left with.
*more.
yeah i resent them too, point is showing his base how he betrayed them, not about being right.
They’ll whisper “owned the libs” with their keto breath and die of starvation before they admit their orange god is a fraud.
Can any Americans explain to me, a Canadian, how it makes sense for essential services like food benefits to be suspended just because your government can’t get their shit together?
Like, genuine question here; how is this is a good system? How does your country benefit from things being designed this way? I’m not saying we don’t ever have political deadlock in Canada, we most certainly do, but even as someone who gets half my household income from the military, I’ve never had to worry about a missed paycheck just because politicians are being stupid. We have failsafes for that. Why don’t you?
So, many many years ago, there was a system where when a bill was passed, that meant it got funded. Simple and sweet. Actually it wasn’t that sweet, because Nixon was refusing to spend money that the law required the U.S. government to spend, similar to what Trump is doing today.
The current system is generally based on the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. There have been many small and large changes since, but the structure basically goes back to that.
Now that’s useful context that I didn’t know. Thank you.
In a sensible country, the government would continue to spend at the levels of the previous budget in the event of a delay in negotiating the renewed budget. It makes no sense. There are no benefits. Please do what you did in 1814 again we need it.
We don’t even need to go burn the white house down again, he tore it down himself.
Bbbuuuuttttttttt, what if he was inside it still? Please???
It wasn’t just the white house. Also congress is the one that makes the budget, and the laws that causes a delay in budget negotiations to atop payments.
So fun fact, the shutdowns came from a legal opinion of the AG in the 80s, and they didn’t even adhere to that decision until a decade later, except for the first time. Reagan wanted the government shutdown to force Congress hands to cut more then they wanted to.
Then for the rest of the 80s and some 90s everybody ignored that AG decision until 1995 when Newt Gingrich (man that fuck was bad for the country) got into a fight with Clinton over spending and then all of the sudden the AG opinion mattered again.
Okay Mr. Canadian, I’ll try my best to explain it. The first thing you have to remember is that food stamps are a recent invention compared to the history of the country. Not that recent, but they came around just about when the boomers (for some of us, our parents. For others, grandparents) were about to be born.
So, when the framers got together to design the Constitution, food stamps did not exist (they weren’t even an idea of the time) and they were deathly afraid of a powerful government (a mix between the circumstances leading up to the Boston tea party and the slavery question/compromise between the North and South). So, under that framing, the founders were dead set on having the power of the purse being under as many people’s representation as possible. That is why the power of the purse and the allocation, of which the allocation of food stamps would fall under, is in Article 1 (Congressional powers) of our Constitution.
Yeah it can’t get its shit together but, at the same time, with the jackass we have now, putting the food stamps (or any allocation of the budgetary allotments) under the control of someone so petty is actually a godsend.
I don’t know what fail safes Canada has, so I can’t speak to that. However, does our Constitution need some amendments? YES As to what those are/would be, I cannot say because the list is too long. I think one of the reasons we are having such issue now is because our political system has been so captured since Regan that half the country feels like its living with a crazy lady in the attic, and they don’t want to feed the insanity any more than necessary. Is that a bad way to keep a country going? Probably
Shutdowns have terribly little to do with the Constitution or Founding Fratboys. They’re mostly the result of the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (and then repealing the “Gephardt rule” in 1995).
Having a debt ceiling is idiotic. Congress passes a budget to decide what to spend, so why would they need to pass another bill to fund the spending they already passed? Literally, the answer to that is “So they can shut down the government.”
This isn’t an issue of “the power of the purse” or checks and balances. It’s political grandstanding. Republicans are determined to break the country.
Shutdowns have terribly little to do with the Constitution . . … They’re mostly the result of the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (and then repealing the “Gephardt rule” in 1995).
What ever restrictions that Congress puts on its budgets and developing budgets are well within its power of the purse under Article 1 Section 8, which expressly states:
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
If Congress chooses to express that limitation within a statute, that is well within its rights. So, whether or not it is actually about political grandstanding is moot under the constitution because it is expressly within Congress’s power of the purse.
My point is that nothing in the Constitution requires government shutdowns. Your comment about “the power of the purse” was fairly off base/misleading because it’s all political grandstanding.
This country existed for ~225 years with no government shutdowns. Yes, it has always been within Congress’s rights to be dumbasses, I didn’t suggest otherwise. I just want to be clear that nobody is forcing them.
Shutdowns are not caused by the Constitution or any quirk of American procedure. Newt Gingrich passed a law so he could hold the government hostage, and Republicans have gotten worse ever since.
I mean, the main failsafes we have in Canada are pretty simple.
First, there is no debt calling. Once a budget is passed it remains in effect until a new budget is passed. Government departments are funded until specific actions are taken to make them not be funded.
Second, and this is the main one; budgets are considered confidence votes. That means if you ever fail to pass one, you’re done. Hand over the keys to country, you don’t get to drive it anymore. Either the opposition forms a government if they’re united enough to do so, or we go to the polls and elect a new one.
The first part means that during this process the basic mechanisms of state all continue to function. No one misses a paycheck. It can be annoying having to go to the polls again, maybe a few times in a row even if political deadlock is particularly bad, but ultimately its the voters who get to decide the outcome, not the politicians.
Anyway, thanks for the detailed answer.
Is that a bad way to keep a country going? Probably
You know I said something like this to my therapist once. I ended up with a lot therapy in a short amount of time
Well, in the context of sovereign states, the equivalent of a therapist would probably be another nation invading the US and rooting out the Nazis. But, would that happen today? No. So, the crazy lady in the attic, while heavily a US problem, is also a global problem.
We don’t need to be invaded, we are actually capable of rooting out the Nazis ourselves. But around a third of white people are white supremacists and another third get more mad at the suggestion their friends are white supremacists than their friends being white supremacists, so…
I don’t know the official reason, if such a thing even exists. My heads screwed on just wrong enough to hazard a guess:
The empathy of inconveniencing and materially harming their constituents (or the fear of their electoral retribution) would be such a driving force that the government would seek to end any shutdown before it came to that.
Of course, any well-meaning intent withers in the face of monsters willing to kill, and let others die, for the facade of politics they don’t even truly subscribe to.
any well-meaning intent withers in the face of monsters willing to kill, and let others die,
for the facade of politicsbecause their donors told them toFTFY
No. It doesn’t make sense and it is not a good system.
It benefits the oligarchs who control our government, certainly not the people. This is working as intended. Republicans have been trying to dismantle the government for 60 years and they’ve just about got it.
It’s not a good system. It benefits none of the citizens. It’s being done to intentionally divide us further.
hahhaha, wait, Canada, gov worker, missed cheques not a thing??? Have you heard of the phoenix payroll system??
I mean, the US is currently missing pay periods due to a conflict between their political leaders – but for us, our gov workers missed paycheques due to sheer incompetence. The people responsible for that shitshow weren’t even fired / held accountable for screwing it up. I don’t disagree that the US system has some issues, but I also don’t think we’re in that great a position to comment haha
But that’s not a built in feature of the political system, is it? Like, you do see the difference, right?
Fuck ups happen everywhere. Canada has plenty of them. But what’s happening in the US is apparently just how the system is designed. Hence the question; why design it that way?
Like, genuine question here; how is this is a good system?
Good question. I think to answer that you have to take into account competing ideals in hyper-capitalist American noggins about how the poor are thought of, how americans measure themselves, how we see social services as charity, and where charity “belongs” in our system of governance. Many Americans even on the left think charity should be the role on non government organizations, usually churches. We’re an overly religious country and we arent realistic about what churches do and how and why they do it. Since we hate the poor, we hate their support systems, and so we intend for them to be failure prone.
The TLDR (in my opinion) is that (on average) American policy makers hate their poor and think being impoverished is inevitably the result of a character flaw, criminal intent, or racial inadequacy and wealth is the result of higher character and virtue. Most Americans are startled to meet a rich black man, and doubly so to meet a rich black woman.
We also dislike the intelligencia, since at least the 70s. Unless they are in finance.
I wonder how many people on SNAP voted for the pedo-in-chief.
Like half of my friends are overt leftists who rely partially or fully on SNAP benefits, and they all voted against Trump. And I’m really worried about them.
What the fuck. I know Republicans despise poor people and think they can just magically pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, but… People still need to eat! We obviously have to! Hoping no one I know is hurt in the upcoming riots and crime.
In the meantime, please consider donating to food banks and nonprofit organizations, since apparently none of our tax dollars will go to helping those less fortunate…
People still need to eat! We obviously have to!
Eat the rich?
Mostly plastic, huffed farts, and inbred bitterness. Not healthy eatin’.
Fertilizer, however… There’s a plan.
I hear pigs can go through bone like butter.
IIRC, ya gotta prep by shavin’ the hair off and pullin’ the teeth out (for the sake of the piggies’ digestion). 16 pigs’ll go through 200lbs in ~8 minutes. That means that a single pig can consume 2lbs of uncooked flesh every 60secs.
Hence the expression, “as greedy as a pig”.
A revolution welcomed by an administration to enact the final coup d’etat.
Maybe, but that really relies on him having the support of his generals. Given that they aren’t even being paid, his generals not supporting the administration, and the overall oath being to the Constitution rather than a person, I don’t think the military would support a coup attempt.
He’s spent $70 million on ICE to stockpile weapons of all sorts.. He doesn’t need the Generals, and if stereotypes of what we have in the military are correct, they’re right wingers or interested in preserving their paychecks and positions, so they’ll be active supporters or just let it happen. I think getting any of them to engage in organized military action to preserve the constitution against trump is less than a 20% chance.
Maybe he has a lot of guns, but how does 1 guided missile stand up to an Air Force of F-35s?
they’re right wingers or interested in preserving their paychecks and positions
They don’t even have that right now.
There won’t be a pitched battle. It will be generals stepping up with the threat of it and forcing congress to remove trump, or physically rejecting his leadership with declarative statements and refusing his command. If that doesn’t happen, nothing will happen.
They already have all the power (house, presidency, Congress, supreme court) he already controls the military and has his own private gestapo. The coup is complete.
Take that, Canonical!
I’m a Free Thinker Who Does Her Own Research Republican using SNAP and if the DEMONRATS let this happen I’ll be FURIOUS and VIOLENT towards THEM and THEM only (because Fox News TOLD me to!)!
“Why did Biden do this to us? Taco tried to do something about this horrible economy that Biden handed him, but I guess nothing could be done, oh well I guess I’ll have to starve. Also, the DEMOCRAT PARTY did this because of the blue haired people.”
And with only one week for people to prepare. Smooth.
Very Christ-like.
Best case scenario, this gives communities the push they need to step up mutual aid efforts.
Some will as much as they can. This will then be used as evidence that government public support programs aren’t needed.
But they are, local and community support programs dont have the resources to do it on their own. So many people will go hungry.
It will actually break many of them. When a lot of GoFundMe are now for buying groceries, as well as credit cards being used for the same, this can’t last.
Communities building up and connecting is exactly how this sort of propaganda dissolves.
I thought that solution was molotovs.
Fuck. Now, what am I gonna do with all these —um, community activations?
Regardless of what means you advocate for to assist in changing society, communities need to build up for change to rest on a solid foundation.
That old nut, “from the ashes” hits a bit different these days.
I’d reckon our society is already in ashes, at least here in the US. We’ve let our country be destroyed while also allowing ourselves to be collectively trained to believe we are helpless to effect any and all change.
Precisely.
