Let Me Explain

If there's anything that all Americans can pretty much agree on, it's that the country is at war with itself. (It's literally the stop hitting yourself  meme). We all collectively groan at it, and compromise between the political left and right is almost impossible when we turn our heads and start yelling at each other. I'm not going to claim I'm an expert on political human psychology, and I'm not going to preach that everybody should just calm down and take a chill pill , because we all know that saying that doesn't actually do anything. The good news is that there is actual stuff we can do. Hope really isn't lost yet. I will talk about why people who want to entertain both sides of issues don't get represented in politics, though. Say you're an aspiring politician. You have views from both the left and right, and you're going to start a campaign for mayor, for example. You need money for your campaign, and having the support of more major ...

 Basically any political campaign nowadays runs on one thing, and only one thing: money. This has always been true, but now it's to so large an extent that corporations are basically running politics. Your voice gets diminished while the corporations throw a lobbying party. So how did we get here? In 2010 the Supreme Court had a case on its hands: Citizens United vs. the FEC (Federal Election Commission). Before the case, it had been a century where the FEC had rules prohibiting corporations from "independent political spending". Citizens United, a nonprofit group, sued the FEC for having these rules, saying that prohibiting corporations from spending violated the corporations' First Amendment right to free speech. The Supreme Court sided with Citizens United (an ironic name, given that they definitely weren't united for the citizens , if you catch my drift). Let me walk you through what this decision means. As an individual, you can't donate beyond a few thou...

So, tariffs. They're obviously a hot topic right now, because the US is on the brink of embracing them lovingly and making them central to our foreign and economic policy. And the internet is in a war over it. That's why I wanted to break down what tariffs actually are and what they do to prices. So what are tariffs? Tariffs are taxes paid by importers. If X in America buys something from Y in another country, a tariff would mean that X has to pay a tax if they want to keep importing stuff from Y. There's two major reasons someone would want tariffs. Making more domestic jobs: A tariff obviously doesn't apply to stuff made in America, so if buying from Y is more expensive than buying from domestic industries, companies will start buying from domestic producers instead of foreign ones. This means that domestic producers make more money and get to expand and create jobs for American workers. Relying less on other countries: We obviously don't want to be dependent on...

 The politically polarized internet keeps screaming about one of two things: either it's "inequality" or it's "the economy is being ruined". A lot of the debate seems to center around tax brackets, and what level of taxes lower and middle-class people pay as opposed to the upper classes. So there's two types of tax structures, and people either support one or the other: "progressive" tax structures, with the rich paying a higher percent than the poor, and "regressive" tax structures, with the rich paying less. Before we get into tax brackets by the way, I want to clear up a huge mistake people make when talking about this: say you're making $79999 a year, and the next tax bracket starts at $80000. Your taxes will not  suddenly jump if you make $80001 a year. You first have to pay the previous tax rate for everything you earned below $80000, and pay a higher rate for the $1 extra dollar (which will of course be almost literally not...

Let me start by saying that this is pretty controversial (please don't start mentally screaming at me). The big, ominous question: whether the government should operate stuff, or whether businesses and individuals should. The answer is not that black and white. So, what is privatization? Privatization is when the government takes the programs it's operating and sells a bunch of them off to businesses in the private sector (the sector not operated by the government). If the government is the one operating infrastructure services, or education, or the energy industry, we say this stuff is in the public sector . When the government takes it and sells it off to businesses or individuals not connected to the government, it moves stuff from the public to private sectors, and we call that privatization . So why would anybody want privatization? Well the reality is that the government is usually really terrible  at operating stuff. If it operates energy, for instance, it might constrai...

You've seen news about the debt ceiling. You've seen news of a shutdown. You've seen those big counters in cities like Las Vegas that tally the national debt and broadcast it for you to see how huge it really is more than $36 trillion , in fact. That's around $106,000 per citizen. But the question that doesn't get answered often is: why is having a large national debt bad in the first place? If the government can just keep borrowing and spending this money, then what danger is it in? The answer lies in interest (the money kind. You'll soon see that politicians literally aren't interested in you at all). When the government borrows money from a bank, it has to promise  to give it back, plus some extra interest. Because no bank would ever tolerate the government taking money and never giving it back, the government does a Ponzi scheme to "finance its debt". The government takes out a loan, uses the money on its spending, and needs to pay it back. The...