First, my responses will be getting faster, I'm only 20 pages behind! lol
Second, my point was more that people complain about the system not being fair & the rich (undefined) should pay more, when in fact, many of the "poor" don't even pay anything at all. That is NOT a fair (equal) system. And it may be playing with statistics, but the fact that a small fraction of the population pays ~3/4 of the bill, how fair is that?
Also... HOLY CRAP!?!?! 70%!!! I had to go look that up. 1981, 70%, over $108k ($375k today) single filer. That.... shocks/amazes me. That's really interesting. I'll have to think about that for a while and research more.
As for the disparity, that has always been with us (humans.) What was the disparity between a pharaoh and a slave? Monarchs and their serfs? I would argue that the benefit of our current system (capitalism) has lifted more people out of poverty than ever before in history. And for most countries, even those in poverty are far better off than in previous centuries.
I have volunteered years of service in working for missions/shelters for homeless. I personally feel we need to take care of them and help them. I do not believe the government is the best solution for solving this issue and I would prefer for the government to be as small as possible and take as little of my money as possible.
You gave me something to think about with those previous tax brackets. Off to catch up on that last bit. I can do it!
Also
@Monokuma
Disparities between class and inequalities are actually far higher under capitalism. The ratio between what a CEO gain and what the person doing the cleaning gain is more important than the ratio between a peasant and a noble in Middle Age. Supposed reduction of poverty can be argued on: first, if we afford this level of comfort in developed countries, it's because some people in others countries are working in really hard conditions for very low pay; second, poverty is still quite high in many capitalist countries and not only outside of the Western World.
Giving public duties to private sector is just ineffective (contrary to the capitalist belief, never demonstrated, that private is always more effective than public). Example: in my country, France, we have a public health assurance system that is complete by a private one. Management fee for the private one is around 25%, for the public one it's around 5%. So the public one use a far higher part of what people pay to actually covert people health risks, it's a lot more effective. Plus, it's a bad idea to make money on health: the epidemic may start in poor ghetto but the germs don't know class frontiers. When it's private, poor people got a shitty service (see the third word level of poor people education and health in USA). Rich people can pay a lot and then they have a really good service. So, it also creates massive inequalities.
During and for a while after WW2, higher bracket for tax for the rich people was somewhere around 90% in America, thank Roosevelt. How strange that's also the period were growth was the higher and the economy function the best. From then, tax for the rich and big companies have constantly been lowered and not only by right wing parties, even if no economist ever proved that it has a real life economic benefit. Most of the bill is paid by middle class when rich people above a certain threshold often pay almost nothing (it's not compensate by them giving money to charity, it's been a while we are out of the ethical protestant capitalism as describe in Max Weber's works). An error in your reasoning is also you only look at direct taxation: poor people actually pay a lot more tax than rich people in proportion of their earnings, even if they are exempt of income tax, because of indirect tax, like consumption tax and the like.
Rich waste and speculate with their money, same big companies spend a lot to massively paid lazy shareholders and managers at doing nothing useful, not for improving salaries and work conditions, or investment and research, most of it isn't send to actual economy. In France again, report show that the last plan of tax cut for big companies (which reduce by billions euros the money available to finance useful state services or reduce the massive public debt) result in most of the money gain from it being given to shareholders with no effect on investment and actual economy: so those politics cost a lost for almost no benefit, it's even less effective than just launching money by the windows. Poor on the contrary spend almost all of their money on actual necessities and with that give local people some work. State can also be a lot better at using this money in a way that benefit the common good and not only a little minority of ultra wealthy. If poverty was lowered in many western capitalist countries, it's mainly because of social security and the state, not because of capitalism itself. What prove that is in many countries with capitalism but without a functional social security system people stay poor and inequalities are massive.
So, today capitalism is financial, speculative, mostly disconnected from real life economy, irrational and ineffective relatively to the needs of the large majority of the population. In this conditions, giving even more power to the "invisible hand of the market" is suicide. The small state that libertarians advocate is the law of the jungle, a class dictatorship and a de facto totalitarian dystopia.
there ya go being all teachy for us again - thank you
But this is spoken like someone who has never suffered from athlete's cock fungus.
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That's still far better than getting a STD.
As one who have both a cock and boobs, i can also testify that sweat on boobs is even more itchy and annoying than sweat on balls.
Also, it's an occasion to complete my yesterday message. I talked before about how in 19th century flagellation was really popular in England. 19th century is also a period of massive epidemic of syphilis: in London, 1/5 people had it at the time and if we count the other STD, half the population had at least one. So there is a high probability that there is a link between the two. BDSM can also be use as a safe alternative, like feet, when genital sexual contact is dangerous.
By the way, we have a more recent illustration of this with covid. People were forced to confine and reduce physical contact. They explore various way to still have pleasure. Sell of sex toys explode, porn consumption too, there were an increasing in practice of BDSM, roleplay, phone sex... Confinement posed many problems (except for some autistic people like me, in fact we loved it) but on this aspect of sexuality, it does some good, helping people to better understand what make them horny.
