Oh hey! Go Minnesota!
What’s the deal with Minnesota and Wisconsin? I tend to group them together or associate them with each other but one clearly does things differently. Why the contrast?
From my limited experience, Minnesota is tremendously more progressive than their neighbors who make a really big deal about (poor quality) cheese. I met some younger folks in the Twin Cities who had escaped an otherwise bleak trajectory after growing up in Wisconsin.
If you haven’t been, Minneapolis and St. Paul are beautiful cities filled with some lovely people. (They also had some terrorist cells some years back. People need something to do in the cold months, I suppose.) But there’s culture and history and decent food and people are really kind and welcoming. And although the winters are cold, getting around in the skyway is a neat idea, despite making the downtown feel like a big indoor mall.
I haven’t been to Wisconsin but I know people who have. It sounds like they’re trying in some places (Milwaukee) but sometimes trying just isn’t enough.
Madisonian here. Wisconsin is a purple state with a major gerrymandering issue. There are deep blue cities of Milwaukee and Madison, and also some smaller cities like La Crosse and Green Bay. Travel just slightly outside those cities, and shit gets MAGA fast. The result is a purple state where it’s easy to section off blue and red voting districts.
The Democratic governor has stopped the worst crap coming out of the state legislature, but doesn’t have much influence to enact his own agenda.
The state supreme court recently got a liberal majority and promptly shot down the gerrymander maps. The new maps don’t guarantee a progressive majority (and in a real democracy, they wouldn’t in a purple state), but what should happen is making districts competitive. Legislature candidates will actually need to listen to voters, not just assume they’ve won as long as they pass the party primary.
Minnesota has the advantage that it has a blue metropolitan area of around 3M people, which is over half the state. Hard to gerrymander that for team MAGA. Madison + Milwaukee metro is around 2M, or around 40% of the state.
Lastly, Minnesota public radio absolutely owns. That may or may not have anything to do with anything else, but I’m super jealous whenever I stream The Current.
Edit: forgot this part. Fuck you, our cheese is internationally award winning.
Haven’t heard of The Current, I’ll check it out.
It’s basically for people who love music from the last 70 years. Anything from Elvis to The Beatles to Prince to Alice in Chains.
I lived in a suburb of St Paul for a year over 30 years ago. It was progressive, but it was the most inbred place I’ve ever been. If your family hadn’t been there for five or six generations you were an outsider.
What about terrorist cells?
I should have looked into it before posting as I misremembered the breadth of the issue, but when I first started going out there for work this was a recent happening: https://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/07/13/somalia.americans.killed/index.html
So it wasn’t terrorist cells as such, but some guys recruiting Somali-Americans to go to Somalia and fight for some other guys.
This is great, thank you.
You know, genuinely I have no idea. Especially because due south my GOD is Iowa completely NOT progressive in any way, shape, or form. If you ever drive through Iowa and start flicking through the radio stations it’s terrifying. One radio station saying that “so and so democrat is the antichrist” is one too many but there were several.
Because my first thought would be urbanization, but really Wisconsin and Minnesota population distribution is not that different. It’s also not bleed over from Canada because we’re both about as connected as the other. Large forests and lakes between us. Prince was genuinely propping up the local music scene a TON before he died but… I don’t think a single industry could be responsible for it. (it’s a difference though) Then we even elected Jessie Ventura Governor, which… maybe scared other politicians to get in line? I genuinely don’t know. I grew up in an incredibly conservative town in Minnesota but at the same time I had enough info to go “some of this sounds like utter bullshit”. I remember listening to Joe Soucheray as a kid (even showed up on his radio broadcast at the fair once) it’s not like conservatives aren’t there, but not in the numbers.
It feels like a Springfield/Shelbyville rivalry: both areas were colonized by the same sorts of people, but Wisconsinites wanted to marry their cousins.
This is hard to look at!
Tax the rich!
The rich don’t have income, they are not represented here at all.
The rich don’t have income
They certainly have revenue.
And it’s taxed differently and not present on these graphs.
And it’s taxed differently
More “taxed not at all”.
Well, that’s a different problem.
Tax their wealth then 🤷🏻♂️
or you know, their charities would be quite sufficient
i’d be ok if we move income tax onto the corpo side of things.
Would mean that it’s the companies responsibility to pay that tax, and no longer forces the IRS to go after joe shmoe, who fudged his finger on a 0 while it was still wet.
Or we could also just remove individual taxes, and tax corpos, that’s where all money is anyway.
You can’t tax companies.
says who? I said we can tax companies, so let’s fucking tax companies, fuck companies.
Where do you think business and property taxes come from?
From your pocket. Are you really that naive?
yeah which is exactly why i dont want to fucking pay tax myself. Just let the fucking corpo that pays me do it instead.
But it still comes out of your pocket.
yeah, that’s fine. I don’t care, i even advocated from removing individual taxes altogether but i dont think you read that part.
As long as i’m not filing them, and the IRS cant sue my ass, i’m fine and i don’t care.
The optimal clearing price for a good or service doesn’t map to the tax rate. That’s why schemes like a gas tax cut and cuts to real estate rates don’t reduce the price of energy or rent. Also why voucher programs and other tax rebates tend to pair with inflationary prices.
Businesses just pocket the gains in the same way they’re forced to eat the losses when taxes rise.
Well, I don’t know how it works in US, but tax cuts do result in lower prices here in UK. For example, we have 0% VAT on groceries and they tend to be cheaper than elsewhere in Europe.
And no sane business will eat losses, that’s how you run out of business. So every tax penny always comes from your pocket. Always.
For example, we have 0% VAT on groceries and they tend to be cheaper than elsewhere in Europe.
The rest of Europe has some strict protectionist policies on food imports to prop up their own agricultural economies. UK is a net importer, so it gets to buy out of both the US and EU agriculture surplus.
Fly over to the US (which doesn’t have a sales tax on groceries) and compare prices to Mexico (which also doesn’t have a sales tax on groceries). You’ll consistently find US prices to be higher because (a) vendors know Americans have more money so they can be charged higher prices and (b) the US is a net-agg exporter and regularly dumps its surplus into Mexican agg markets. This has destroyed the Mexican agg sector and produced a bunch of north-bound migration as a result. But it also makes food rates in Mexico cheaper, as you can bid between local output (produced at lower-than-US wage rates) and surplus foreign imports (sold at dumping rates, because there’s too much of it).
And no sane business will eat losses
Businesses routinely eat losses. Some businesses have literally never turned a profit - Lyft, AirBnB, and Reddit have never shown a profit. Amazon famously took 20 years to show a profit, with Tesla and Spotify coming in close behind.
But even after becoming profitable, firms will periodically gain or lose profit margin relative to the prevailing market. A company with a 10% profit margin in Year 1 that sees the marginal rate fall to 8% in Year 2 can’t necessarily raise prices to increase profits, because increasing prices will cut into sales volume.
Companies that rely on large pools of customers and lengthy supply chains can and will periodically operate at a loss on the fringes of their business, if they see those fringes as loss-leaders with the potential for growth in future years. Walmart pioneered this strategy back in the 1980s, building unprofitable storefronts in growing neighborhoods under the theory that stacking a claim early on was easier than acquiring property after a development had been completed and filled in.
So every tax penny always comes from your pocket.
Just the opposite. All tax revenue must ultimately come from business revenues, as businesses fund the salaries of the state’s labor force. In a state like Alaska or a country like Saudi Arabia, residents get a negative tax based on the gross exports of the local business interests in a given year.
In states like California and New York, the tax base is entirely predicated on the high incomes of locals. And those high incomes are predicated on tech and finance companies paying out enormous salaries. These are functionally taxes paid by the business to employ high-demand staffers, who predominantly live in these states.
States invest in infrastructure to attract workers (most commonly public utilities, police/fire/EMS, and schools). Skilled workers become a magnet for businesses. And businesses pay taxes - both directly to the state and indirectly through taxation on salaries.
Get rid of the infrastructure and public services (as Kansas tried to do a few years back) and you lose the workers. You lose the workers and you lose the businesses. You lose the business and you lose the tax base.
Because, in the end, all tax revenue comes from business activity. If you have a bunch of consumers who do nothing but eat, your state has no real revenue stream.
The rest of Europe has some strict protectionist policies on food imports to prop up their own agricultural economies. UK is a net importer, so it gets to buy out of both the US and EU agriculture surplus.
Britain was part of EU just recently and still has the same policies for the most part. And being a net importer it means that prices should be higher. And they actually did increase after Brexit.
Fly over to the US and compare prices to Mexico
There’s no point comparing two countries so far apart in economical development. The prices in Mexico are lower because Mexican labour is much cheaper. You should compare US to similar countries like Canada or European counterparts.
Some businesses have literally never turned a profit - Lyft, AirBnB, and Reddit
You misunderstand their business model. You are not a consumer of their product, you ARE the product. And their business model is not to turn profit on intercations with you, but to milk venture capital. The side effect is that their actual profit is not treated as profit from tax perspective, so they have free money essentially.
A company with a 10% profit margin in Year 1 that sees the marginal rate fall to 8% in Year 2 can’t necessarily raise prices to increase profits, because increasing prices will cut into sales volume.
A successful management will think in decades, not years. Just like a good investor. There are good years and there are bad years, but the balance sheet must workout in the end. Also businesses has plenty of other ways to increase profits: redundancies, wage stagnation, debt, etc.
All tax revenue must ultimately come from business revenues
A business is a virtual entity. No matter how you twist it, taxes are paid by people. A business can’t pay shit, it’s just a record in the Company House.
based new mexico
Minnesota fistbump
I love it here
I’m confused, WA has no income tax, OR has high income tax… As someone who moved from WA to OR, got a raise, and ended up with smaller paychecks I can attest that this doesn’t represent everyone accurately
This chart is not displaying income taxes. It is displaying the share of all taxes contributed by income brackets.
For anyone not reading between the lines, taxes like sales taxes and property taxes are designed to disproportionately target those with lower income (i.e., regressive), while income tax is mostly supposed to target higher incomes (i.e. progressive).
this is the problem with illinois which has a fixed flat income tax in its constitution.
So the red states actually have a less wealthy 1%, and therefore less inequality.
This is a wildly misleading chart at first glance.
Uh, the thing about percentages, as in “the top 1%”, is that they are proportional. It doesn’t matter if one state has fewer billionaires than another state, that’s not what the chart is displaying.
If the average income tax of the top 1% isn’t 20 times higher than the average tax of any of the 20% groups, then they’ll be paying less overall tax. Because there’s 20 times more people in the bigger group.
Or it could be showing that those states have unfair tax rules, which is undoubtedly the case for some of them.
This chart is honestly completely meaningless, because there’s no way to know which of those two conditions exist.
It’s lies, damn lies, and statistics, poured into a rage-bait map.
Edit: However, I would be intrigued to know how the middle 20% managed to pay the least tax in Oregon.
This chart is honestly completely meaningless, because there’s no way to know which of those two conditions exist.
You could read the accompanying article.
Or even just the text on the chart.
WA has no income tax, but it does have a state level sales tax. Low income people spend a larger portion of their income on purchases which results in a much higher tax rate.
How the heck does Oregon manage to have the lowest earners paying more than the median earners without a sales tax?
Gas and income taxes
Ya know. Seems like a good time for another constitutional convention. Governing our country federally with a document written by rich slave owners pre train let alone pre internet doesn’t seem max optimization for hamburgerland
I expected better from New England.
Who’s gonna pay? New Mexico
Most new York residents are renters and don’t pay taxes directly. The cost gets passed onto them by landlords.
Not true - unless you meant NYC and not all of NY. There’s a lot of NY outside of the City, and that’s mostly homeowners by a slight margin.
The majority of people in the stat live in NYC.
How does that change what I said?
I guess I need to start making a lot more money, so I can pay lower taxes.
You will pay far more taxes. These stats are just based on percentages. The rich pay more in taxes each year than most people will make in their entire lives. As someone who makes a ton of money and pays a crap ton of taxes, the people who make these graphics are clueless idiots.
the rich pay more in taxes each year than most people will make in their entire lives
Yet even when doing so they also take home more money each year than most people will make in their entire lives.
I don’t see what the issue is. The graphic shows percentage. In absolute terms you pay more but in percentage you pay less.
Sounds like you’re making money by working hard, which is a silly way to try to make a lot of money in a capitalist system. The hint is in the name, my friend: it’s not called “workism”.
If only we lived in an economy where your hard work was proportional to your income!
You pay more money total, but you have a lot more left over too. You don’t pay more in Washington State unless you own an expensive property, since they don’t have income tax. Well I guess you pay more if you buy more stuff, but that’s a given.
Even in Washington state you have federal income tax. Why should someone who makes $500k pay 10x more than someone who makes $50k? Just because you think they have more? Someone who makes $500k has worked far harder, likely has lots of student loans, and much higher expenses. This is a capitalist country, not socialist. They say eat the rich… I say eat the lazy.
The graphic is about State taxes, not federal. It’s lacking in information though and hard to draw conclusions from. It’s probably intentionally created to cause anger.
In response to your statements though, the idea is that you can comfortably part with a higher percentage of your money. I’m also in a high tax bracket and I’m not really opposed to a graduated tax rate. Someone’s gotta pay for our military, our roads, social services, police, etc. All of that stuff isn’t going to get funded by people with low income. Social programs can help people lift themselves out of poverty and give them a chance to make something of themselves. They also help protect our nation’s children.
That said, I think the big corporations should shoulder a lot larger portion of that burden than they do. I’m also not keen on the competence and lack of efficiency/effectiveness of our government in a lot of areas.
They say eat the rich, you say eat the lazy, I say don’t eat anyone. I’d love to see our country more unified.
By this logic why not just tax high income earners to the point that they make the same as low income earners? After all, they have more money they can part with as you state. Just offering to blindly pay more tax because uncle Sam needs more missiles is a really stupid argument. It leads to gross over spending and negligence. I worked for a government agency for many years and every year they would buy millions of dollars of stuff that never made if off the pallet just because they needed to spend their budget so they got it next year. Not with my money, no thanks.
There’s two facets to consider. -Is government spending well managed, and if not, what to do to improve it? You may have some fair points there
-To the extent government spending is reasonably required, how to handle paying for it? On this, you overextend their point about who can afford. Someone making $30k/year and trying to get by can’t really spare any money. Someone making $500k/year would still have crap tons of money even paying $200k/year in taxes. No one is proposing that making more should make it so you take home less than the low income person, or even close to the low income person, just that the proportion that can go to government comfortably increases.
Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming all have no state income tax. Am I missing something, or is this graph just misinformation?
- Sales tax
- Property tax
- Income tax
Pretty well every state charges a combination of those to fund their state. Some have all 3, some rely on just 1. But they all combine to be part of a person’s tax burden.
The states that rely on sales taxes for most of their income are the most likely to tax the poor the most, since the poor spend more of their income.
As a proportion of their income maybe, but X% sale tax of one rich dude’s glamour item(s) - expensive cars, boats jewelry, fashion, etc) could exceed the taxes from many many lower-income essentials.
I don’t buy this, man. Groceries aren’t taxxed, and I just don’t see how a lower income individual could physically buy the same amount of taxed goods as a multimillionaire
Penny power bitches.
I know this is going to fall on deaf but this is an incredibly misleading. I guess we really need to stoke that class war!
