#politics

Total effective tax rates (includes all taxes: federal+state income tax, sales tax, property tax, etc) for the richest Americans declined by 2018 to a level beneath that of the bottom 50% of earners,[18] contributing to wealth inequality. Analysis by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

The Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA /ˈfaɪkə/) is a United States federal payroll (or employment) tax payable by both employees and employers to fund Social Security and Medicare[1]—federal programs that provide benefits for retirees, people with disabilities, and children of deceased workers.

Since 1990, the employee's share of the Social Security portion of the FICA tax has been 6.2% of gross compensation up to a limit that adjusts with inflation.[a][9] The taxation limit in 2020 was $137,700 of gross compensation, resulting in a maximum Social Security tax for 2020 of $8,537.40.[7] This limit, known as the Social Security Wage Base, goes up each year based on average national wages and, in general, at a faster rate than the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U). The employee's share of the Medicare portion of the tax is 1.45% of wages, with no limit on the amount of wages subject to the Medicare portion of the tax.

So personal income tax in the US is ~30% for most of us (ranging from ~10%-37%), compared to Social Security's ~6.2% Medicare is 1.45% (or 12.4% + 2.9% if you count the employer portion). AND only the first ~$137K is taxable so our maximum tax amount to Social Security and Medicare is capped, while normal income tax that politicians can direct to anything from foreign wars to immigration enforcement to redistribution to different states or interest on debt driven by tax breaks to the rich that caused deficits.

An average of 9,000 refugees were admitted monthly between January 2024 to January 2025. From February to December 2025, there were 1,226 total admissions, 1,059 of whom were from South Africa.

It's quite disappointing that these policies - especially the H1B tax, which brings the best and brightest in the world to the US - all target legal immigrants.

I love this report!

This data-driven, impartial report contains historic metrics — how you use them to advocate for the changes you want to see in the country is up to you.

Most spending was on Social Security, national defense, grants to state and local governments, Medicare, and interest on the debt. Spending and revenue were both higher than their pre-pandemic levels, and the federal government ran another deficit as spending outpaced revenue.

Why do we always lump Social Security in with other national spending? Social Security is collected separately from all other tax revenue and goes directly to the Social Security trust fund. That money cannot be put anywhere else. Politicians can't direct Social Security goes into a trust fund and politicians can't change how it's spent, unlike defense spending and other spending. In my view, Social Security should be separate. It's not the government's money to spend, it's money that is given back to the people directly. So comparing national defense, which the government can choose to change the spending levels, reallocate it to other spending priorities, Social Security cannot be because it's a trust fund.

Public schools took in and spent more funds than ever before. It also had mixed impacts on teachers and students. The number of public-school teachers has increased each year since 2020 while the number of students has decreased or stayed the same. Meanwhile, test scores have fallen.

Well we have to do something about that and be drastic about it. However, I don't see how cutting funding alone - the current Republican priority - will help.

Carlson said that according to the Bible, the descendants of Abraham would receive land that today would include essentially the entire Middle East, and asked Huckabee if Israel had a right to that land.

Huckabee responded: “It would be fine if they took it all.” Huckabee added, however, that Israel was not looking to expand its territory and has a right to security in the land it legitimately holds.

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has not had fully recognized borders. Its frontiers with Arab neighbors have shifted as a result of wars, annexations, ceasefires and peace agreements.

During the six-day 1967 Mideast war, Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula as part of a peace deal with Egypt following the 1973 Mideast war. It also unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

Israel has attempted to deepen control of the occupied West Bank in recent months. It has greatly expanded construction in Jewish settlements, legalized outposts and made significant bureaucratic changes to its policies in the territory. U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank and has offered strong assurances that he’d block any move to do so.

Palestinians have for decades called for an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza with east Jerusalem its capital, a claim backed by much of the international community.

Huckabee, an evangelical Christian and strong supporter of Israel and the West Bank settlement movement, has long opposed the idea of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian people. In an interview last year, he said he does not believe in referring to the Arab descendants of people who had lived in British-controlled Palestine as “Palestinians.”

Israel has encroached on more land since the start of its war with Hamas in Gaza, which was sparked by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Under the current ceasefire, Israel withdrew its troops to a buffer zone but still controls more than half the territory. Israeli forces are supposed to withdraw further, though the ceasefire deal doesn’t give a timeline.

After Syrian President Bashar Assad was ousted at the end of 2024, Israel’s military seized control of a demilitarized buffer zone in Syria created as part of a 1974 ceasefire between the countries. Israel said the move was temporary and meant to secure its border.

And Israel still occupies five hilltop posts on Lebanese territory following its brief war with Hezbollah in 2024.

Gorsuch, the first Supreme Court justice Trump appointed when he first took office, joined the principal opinion in full but, in a separate concurring opinion, urged Americans to put their faith back into the legislative system.  It was a message that seemed directed toward one person in particular: Trump.  The conservative justice acknowledged that the court’s decision would be “disappointing” for some. He said major decisions affecting Americans are “funneled through the legislative process for a reason.”  “Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises,” Gorsuch wrote. “But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design.”   “Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man,” he continued.  Since returning to the White House, Trump has sought to circumvent the legislative process and consolidate the executive branch’s power across the board.   “In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future,” Gorsuch said. “For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious.   “But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is,” he added.

It’s results like these that are exactly why we need ranked choice voting. A glass half full verdict of the results are that the candidates deemed not pro-Israel enough got almost 60% of the vote.

“To me this isn’t just about a presidential election,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, “personally, I think that the United States has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws.

“I think that, personally, the idea of completely unconditional aid, no matter what one does, does not make sense,” she added. “I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza, and I think that we have thousands of women and children dead … that was completely avoidable.

“So I believe that enforcement of our own laws, through the Leahy laws, which requires conditioning aid in any circumstance when you see gross human rights violations is appropriate,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded.

The Leahy laws are two statutory provisions, named for the former senator Patrick Leahy who introduced them in the 1990s, which prohibit the US defense department and state department from providing funds to “units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”.

But, according to Charles Blaha, the former director of the state department office that leads Leahy vetting of foreign security units, while state “department officials insist that Israeli units are subject to the same vetting standards as units from any other country. Maybe in theory. But in practice, that’s simply not true.”

Matt Whitaker, the US ambassador to Nato, declined to directly answer the question, saying Israel is “one of our closest allies”.

Shaming the public as rubes for succumbing to conspiracy theories misses what people are trying to tell us: They no longer feel included in the work of choosing their future. On matters small and big, from the price of eggs to whether the sexual abuse of children matters, what they sense is a sneering indifference. And a knack for looking away. Now the people who capitalized on the revolt against an indifferent American elite are in power, and, shock of all shocks, they are even more indifferent than anyone who came before them. The clubby deal-making and moral racketeering of the Epstein class is now the United States’ governing philosophy. In spite of that, the unfathomably brave survivors who have come forward to testify to their abuse have landed the first real punch against Mr. Trump. In their solidarity, their devotion to the truth and their insistence on a country that listens when people on the wrong end of power cry for help, they shame the great indifference from above. They point us to other ways of relating.

Trump has recently said he wants to nationalize federal elections and revived election conspiracies, launching an FBI investigation into the election results in Fulton County, Ga., a state the president has repeatedly and without evidence said he won in 2020.

States are granted control of most aspects of U.S. elections under the Constitution.

In his second post on Friday, Trump cast the midterms in existential terms.

″(T)hese Corrupt and Deranged Democrats, if they ever gain power, will not only be adding two States to our roster of 50, with all of the baggage thereto, but will also PACK THE COURT with a total of 21 Supreme Court Justices, THEIR DREAM, which they will submit easily and rapidly when they immediately move to terminate the Filibuster, probably in their first week, or sooner,” Trump wrote.

“Our Country will never be the same if they allow these demented and evil people to knowingly, and happily, destroy it. Thank you for your attention to this matter — SAVE AMERICA!,” he continued.

Video from bystanders showed that Pretti had not attacked officers, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said immediately after the shooting. Critics raised further complaints after Noem and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller both called Pretti a domestic terrorist before an investigation had concluded.

Gallup’s final presidential approval survey was released in December. It put President Donald Trump’s approval rating at 36% — the second consecutive month at that level and the lowest of his second term, according to Gallup. The same survey found just 17% of respondents approved of the job Congress was doing. Approval stood at 24% among Democrats and 29% among Republicans.

Gallup’s exit does not leave a vacuum in presidential polling. Morning Consult, Harvard-Harris, The Wall Street Journal, Economist/YouGov and others continue to track approval and favorability. RealClearPolitics aggregates many of those surveys for comparison.

Although this is just an anecdote, I think it happens very widely. Maybe not always as sinister, but certainly far from innocent. Basically we see that these online companies are now paid by engagements (i.e. views, clicks, comments, shares). So they create algorithms that show content to people who are estimated to have higher engagement with content. Why not? People engage with content they like right? And we didn't tell the algorithm to prioritize anything bad - in fact we may even bias the algorithm away from obviously bad content.

Even simple statistical algorithms are very good at predicting what someone is likely to engage with given a modest set of examples from their past online engagements. The more advanced machine learning and AI-based algorithms we have today are unbelievably good at it. The reality is that us humans cannot actually understand how or why these algorithms are prioritizing content, we just know that it generates more engagement. We also don't know what content it will see and how it will react to new types of content.

The companies also tell "creators" that create posts/videos that generate engagement they can make money. People have realized what types of posts and videos get more engagement and they've found that things that make people angry or envious generates more engagement and more money. They figure, it it was against the rules, content moderation or the algorithm won't show it (exactly what the person in this article said). Yet, none of that happens and hate spreads.

Politicians are using the same tactics. They've realized that content that makes people angry or envious will generate engagement with them - and that leads to them being "popular" and ultimately winning elections.

So what can we do? Most of all we should make sure that we're aware that the content online and spoken by politicians is at least in part if not mostly to "engage" us. Remember that what we read and what they say is often meant to provoke us into some response. The wise old saying from my grandmother of Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see, seems more appropriate than ever.

Why not boycott social media? I think it's harder than it seems. Public companies that we are all invested in share key information on twitter. News sites that are the foundation of an "informed electorate", link to twitter in most articles. Governmental leaders around the world share policy updates on twitter - and twitter requires you to sign-in and share information about yourself in order to see it - so even remaining anonymous isn't an option. Are you going to stop going to YouTube - is there any other video site left? What about Linkedin - who also has a content algorithm that the most popular people work hard to understand and get noticed. So while it sounds nice to just obstain, I think it's less realistic than it seems.

Last summer, the man says, he found himself sitting in his car, analysing trends on TikTok. His day job was conducting viewings for an estate agency but he was trying to come up with an idea for a viral video account that could be run as a money-making side-hustle.

“I was thinking of unique videos I can do for people,” he says on the tape.

That’s when he had a brainwave: “Hate brings views.”

At that time protests outside asylum hotels were spreading across the country. The man says he noticed “far-right people” were among the most engaged on TikTok. They were easy to rile up: “They hate such videos of illegal migrants. I was like, why not?”

He added an AI-generated voiceover about asylum seekers, rapists, and illegal immigrants then pressed upload. The audience response was instant and enormous, and TikTok’s algorithm responded by pushing it into the feeds of hundreds of thousands of people. Irate Londoners drove up engagement by complaining they couldn’t afford such properties while illegal immigrants were supposedly getting them for free.

“It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content. Instead, he was rewarded with millions of views. He was just an entrepreneur following a simple content strategy: “Every single video I would basically copy paste the same thing. I wrote down ‘illegal migrants’.”

Despite fostering online hatred, the man recorded by Wasserstrum insists he doesn’t personally share the views expressed on his TikTok account. Instead, he suggests his fake anti-migrant house tour videos were just a way to game the algorithm, build an audience, and hopefully make money.

”I didn’t do anything because of hate,” he says on the tape. “I didn’t care. It’s just I wanted the clicks.”

A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., declined a request by prosecutors to indict two Democratic U.S. senators, Mark Kelly of Arizona and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, on charges of seditious conspiracy

The attempted indictment of Kelly, a former U.S. Navy captain and the former CIA analyst Slotkin related to a video in November that they made with four other Democrats in Congress, on which they reminded members of the U.S. military that they have the right to refuse to follow illegal orders by superiors.

It is extremely unusual for a grand jury to refuse to issue an indictment when a prosecutor seeks one. An indictment is a charging document that a grand jury will issue if jurors agree there is probable cause to believe a crime was committed.

Trump at the time accused them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

“Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” Trump wrote on Truth Social then.

The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

When it proposed to repeal the finding last year, the EPA also proposed to repeal all climate regulations for cars and trucks along with it. The final repeal is expected to do the same — a massive regulatory rollback in and of itself, as transportation is the largest source of U.S. emissions. Reached for comment, an EPA spokesperson noted that without the endangerment finding, the “EPA would lack statutory authority under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (CAA) to prescribe standards for certain motor vehicle emissions.”

The Clean Air Act requires the EPA administrator to regulate emissions from vehicles of any pollutant that “in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that planet-warming emissions fall under the law’s definition of air pollutants and should be regulated if they’re found to be a threat to public health.

U.S. vaccination rates have dropped and the share of children with exemptions has reached an all-time high, according to federal data. At the same time, rates of diseases that can be protected against with vaccines, such as measles and whooping cough, are rising across the country.

During his Senate confirmation testimony last year, Kennedy told lawmakers that a closely scrutinized 2019 trip he took to Samoa, which came before a devastating measles outbreak, had “nothing to do with vaccines.”

But documents obtained by The Guardian and The Associated Press undermine that testimony.

Public health experts also criticized the president for making unfounded claims about highly politicized health issues. During a September Oval Office event, Trump asserted without evidence that Tylenol and vaccines are linked to a rise in the incidence of autism in the United States.

Most of the deals, however, don’t affect what people with private insurance or Medicare pay for the drugs. People with Medicaid — who typically have minimal or no copays for prescriptions — already pay very little.

“Generally speaking, most people with insurance coverage will continue to be better off using their insurance to obtain medications rather than purchasing through the TrumpRx direct-to-consumer portal,” said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare Policy at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.

The website asks customers to confirm that they are not enrolled in “any government, state, or federally funded medical or prescription benefit programs.” Those with both commercial and government-funded plans are considered to be on government insurance and are not permitted to participate in TrumpRx.