
Charity shit is a band aid on a cancerous growth. We have serious systemic issues here that are never going to work themselves out for the better without an actual social revolution, which may never come. The specter of AI looming over the world will either be the savior of democracy or its rapist. It will all depend on just how thoroughly and greedily we as a society allow our political system to leverage the benefits of the new AI technologies for the exclusive benefit of the wealthy…
Oh my god some of yall are such miserable shits! 26 million dollars is a LOT of money. Probably more than most of you brokies will EVER see. I don't even like her or him but how can you complain about this? Who gives a fuck if it's for publicity or a tax write off?? 20 charities got a donation while you sat your fat ass on the couch and bitched abt the rich. Losers!
…when you so foolishly believed in any of the bullshit that has ever come out of that motherfuckers big fat lying ass mouth and thought it makes a lot of sense to trust a fucking degenerate billionaire nepo baby who was born with a diamond encrusted golden spoon in his ugly mouth and never struggled one day of his life to look out for the regular people of the world and go to bat for anybody else’s interests but his own. I saw through that line of egregious nonsense a million miles away and…
…computer geeks in charge of running all this shit through AI systems to determine which hundreds of thousands of people would be involuntarily fired (over a quarter million people confirmed shitcanned by Elon and doge in 2025)… all to supposedly save the government how much money? Nobody even really knows, but it wasn’t even close to the $2 trillion he claimed it was supposed to save. Even if doge’s own estimate of $215 billion is correct, that means that he ruined a million people’s lives…
…all of these checks, which only barely scratched the surface of how much money most regular people were losing because of the government handling of the pandemic, and then of course you have a huge lag in the time it takes for lawmakers and employers to actually bump up the pay scale to adjust for the drastic loss of buying power that the dollar suffered as a result, which is basically just a great excuse for the private sector and the public sector to stand around pointing fingers at each…
…other and scratching their heads all confused and perplexed, and then instead of really making us whole at rhe end of the day, it’s American politics, so of course rhe best we can ever expect out of these people, the pathetic compromise that we are conditioned to accept from our leaders of government and industry, is a half-assed effort to “meet us halfway,” as though any of it was ever our fault to begin with, right, but yet somehow we owe it to them to MEET THEM HALFWAY, which means SUCK IT
People, you should all find Gary Gulman’s comedy special entitled “In THIS Economy?!” And watch the whole thing which is incredibly intelligent and hilarious at the same time and this guy is wayyyy underrated and I can’t believe he isn’t more famous, but I guess he’s had some struggles with depression that derailed his career for a while. Comedians love him though, he’s a comic’s comic, you know…
…anyway, Gary Gilman, “In THIS Economy?!” And he’s got this bit in the special where he discusses how rich Bill Gates was at the time, because this is like 15 years ago when Gates was the richest man in the world, and Gulman draws this comparison between bill gates who had something like 50-75 billion dollars back then, I think, vs. the average American male net worth which was around $100,000, and Gulman points out that if that’s true he feels a little bit underpaid, as he was I believe a…
…substitute teacher at the time he was honing his comedy skills and working toward that special. He used to test out material on the students in class too. Anyway, yeah, so he tells this story about finding a $20 in an old coat, and how it totally changed his plans for the weekend. Haha. And he wonders out loud how much money it would require for bill gates to feel as lucky and thrilled as he was to find this $20 bill in an old coat. So he actually recites some figures and runs thru the math…
…and he comes to the mathematical conclusion, based on the net worth figures and a forty hour work week and how much money gates must be making to accumulate that kind of money and blah blah blah, that for bill gates to feel the same joy that he himself experienced by finding a $20 bill in an old coat pocket, “bill gates would have to reach into his pocket and pull out—I shit you not—A TWELVE MILLION DOLLAR BILL!!” Because twenty dollars as a fraction of an average American man’s $100,000 net…
……net worth, if you cross multiply and solve for x, is proportionally equal to $12,000,000 of bill gates’ roughly $60,000,000,000 net worth at the time that he filmed this special for Comedy Central. Clearly, this “joke” could take on a whole new level of ridiculousness now that we can discuss Elon musk’s new $1,000,000,000,000 net worth figure and the failure of the economy to compensate the general public for the rampant inflation that has taken place ever since 2020 due to covid stimulus…
…checks radically expanding the money supply, as they weren’t written out against actual funds that existed anywhere in real life and were actually just creating new dollars out of thin air, injecting them into the money supply, and jacking up the cost of everything, which would be all well and good if we could always count on a proportional increase in minimum wages and personal incomes across the board, but that’s not how it works in real life, where you can have Trump and Biden pumping out…
…their big windfall checks and showing off the artistic renderings of the new yachts they’re purchasing with all the extra capital gains they’re making off the losses of the general public, so you can’t try to recoup expenses from those assholes without getting all this explosive pushback from them, whining and moaning about socialism and communism and lamenting every dollar they’ve ever had to spend on a tax in their lives. But they’re the ones making the biggest contributions to the campaigns
…quite frankly anyone who did not was just out of their minds a thousand percent, to vote for someone like that. Or racist. I don’t know what else the had to offer anybody. Tax breaks for the billionaires. Got it. And if you’re just so fucking filthy racist that you’re willing to suffer economically just to make sure that the black community and the Latin American community and women’s rights are suffering even more than you are, because your main problem is paranoia that somehow a minority…
…than HALF THE WORLD’s POPULATION COMBINED, which is over 4.1 BILLION PEOPLE of the total 8.2 BILLION WORLD POPULATION. That means ELEVEN INDIVIDUAL multibillionaires plus Elon Musk and his fuckin TRILLION are getting richer and richer and richer every day while HALF THE WORLD, OVER BILLION PEOPLE, get poorer and poorer in order to bankroll that upward accumulation of wealth to such a disgusting degree. It is a fucking evil empire and a Ponzi scheme, and it needs to change. NOW. Fucking YESTERDAY
…fucking LAST YEAR, or you know what, it’s too bad we can’t somebody to travel back in time and stuff a sock down Reagan’s throat and shove him in a dark closet somewhere for a while to keep him from signing off on a lot of the shit he and his dickhead backers were doing to undermine democracy and rig the economy to rape the working class and make the bankers even richer. I don’t know how so many people today seem to forget history, or what any you people who ever voted for Trump were thinking..
…that all these legislators have to run to get into office and stay there, thanks to representatives spending like 75% of their time during any given 2-year term doing various fundraising activities in order to have a chance at staying in office again next time. It’s all these things that work together to radically enrich the already grotesquely wealthy while everybody else toils around for nothing. Look, Elon musk and the next 11 richest motherfuckers in the world have more money to their names
…at the expense of everybody else. The only way to save the world from the brutally repressive technocracy that we are currently barreling toward head-on with no brakes would have to involve a full-tilt, full-wrap, full-force revolution from all sides. The revolution must be at once economic, social, political, ideological, cultural, educational, philosophical, and of course technological, and might already be too late. It certainly doesn’t help that we now have to face the challenge of…
…undoing so many of the regressive setbacks that are now being forced into place by the purveyors of fascism behind and in front of the heritage foundation’s project 2025 plan and their agenda 47 mission. Everything maga and everything the current administration stands for is completely odds with not only the interests of the vast majority of the public, whether most of those people even comprehend that fact or not, but also the interests of the human race itself, as the policies enabling and…
…encouraging the rampant and unrestricted, unregulated, indiscriminate, and out of control development and proliferation of artificial intelligence, without any kind of cohesive or comprehensive plan in place for how to protect ourselves from the plethora of both known and unknown risks and dangers that are already being predicted to present themselves in the very near or immediate future, appear to be most likely poised to sell us all out to the big tech billionaires rather than empower anybody
I don’t like Taylor, but this is a good thing. Idk why you’re upset for a 26,000,000 dollar donation. This will save thousands of human and animals lives. Like she’s not a good person but this is a shit ton of money that’s not easy for an individual to donate. Regardless of how much she makes annually, it’s still insane. Now please donate $50 million next time you want to complain about DONATING TO CHARITY. This anger you have also reduces the likelihood of other famous people donating.
It just really frustrates me when people online are so negative that they find something to complain about even for super good news. Like 26 million to charity! Can we be fucking happy for once instead of picking it apart to find anything to complain about! Jesus Christ!
Dude, come on. A good thing. Ffs, billionaires do this all the time, charities do more for public support of billionaires (who benefit from them monetarily) than do the people the charity is supposed to help. 26 mil is a drop in the bucket. Literally. To think that will save thousands of lives is fucking CRAZY!
Yes because giving money to non-profit food banks and children’s hospitals totally helps all billionaires and not the kids with cancer… dude you sound insane. Yes this can benefit these two people with tax write offs, but literally no one else other than Travis, Taylor, and the kids who will be treatment and the families getting fed
Girl how are you this delusional? Of course 26 MILLION dollars saves thousands of lives. For example, one of the charities they donated to, “Feeding America”, reports that $1 can provide 10 meals. And 98% of their donations go directly to their services. It’s actually wild that you would RATHER the federal government have this money instead of charities that are directly feeding people 💀
She could do so much more and change the world, and it wouldn’t change her life one bit. No such thing as an ethical billionaire, there’s no way around it, that level of money hoarding only exists for greed, Taylor isn’t an exception and if anything with her lack of response to this admin using her songs, shes a billionaire she isn’t gonna say a damn thing to the man who gave her massive tax cuts. 26 million is a lot of money, but it’s not to her and this meant nothing to her. Keep her rich tho.
Charities are not effective in the way you think they are. Yes, it’s great they just got some money—where’s the rest of her money going to? Why are we ok with her and her team deciding what to do with all this wealth? It’s anti-democratic and the effects of the donation are inflated.
Wow, you are wrong. She donated 26 million dollars, meaning she spent that full 26 million. It’s true that she gets a tax deduction for that donation, but shes in the 37% tax bracket meaning it’ll save her from paying about 9.6 million in her federal income taxes. So yes she gets to save a bit, but donation deductions are not dollar for dollar, and she still paid 26 million out of pocket.
Many of them are highly effective. I’m not saying every single dollar will go DIRECTLY to helping someone in need, but you are underestimating how far that much money can go. And I’m not okay with it, I’m a socialist. But I don’t think this is an example of a bad thing happening
You don’t realize how much a lot of “charity” money just pays the salary demands of their directors and doesn’t actually wind up in the bellies of starving children. A lot of “charities” are just conservative rackets designed to benefit the donors through tax incentives more so than the abused animals on the commercials or the starving children in the third world or whatever you think you’re donating to. The whole concept of the “foundation” is pretty twisted if you look into it. But look:
I’ve been paying taxes for over a decade. I know what a write off is. Regardless of if it’s written off, that money still goes to those charities to help people. Who cares what happens with Taylor and Travis and their finances. They did a good deed. That should be the end of this discourse.
My thing is that we have a situation where the wealthiest corporate interests have structured the whole economic system to siphon more and more money, capital, resources, wealth, etc. upward into their pockets at the expense of millions and millions of regular people. And it’s reaching the point of absurdity here when we have a jackass like Elon musk becoming a trillionaire and expecting us to congratulate him or suck his dick or whatever the fuck he wants. I don’t think the emergence of the…
Because youre giving her what she wants. You know she didnt do this out of the goodness of her own heart right? Its for optics and looking good. If she actually cared about shit then maybe she should use her platform for good, not give the equivalent of 2 cents to charity (compared to her net worth).
…the worlds first trillionaire is something to celebrate or congratulate or anything like that. I think it’s actually a piece of tangible evidence that the system is fucked and we are in grave danger here. The last thing we need is a trillionaire. I don’t even like the fact that we have so many people with hundreds of billions of dollars are any multibillion dollar fortunes. I don’t think we need billionaires. I really don’t. If someone can’t get by with $999,999,999.99, I think they’re sick…
she’s a goddamn singer wtf do you mean “use her platform for good” she’s not an activist and she has ZERO obligation to be one just because she has a platform. millions of people throw money into her pockets because they enjoy her MUSIC. and she IS using her money for good to help people so what are you on about
…and gross and if I thought we could somehow cap personal wealth at ONE billion dollars, I would support that. I realize a million dollars really isn’t a big deal anymore in this day and age. I also realize something that we should be talking about more as well, which is that we need to stop talking in terms of this “one percent” / “99 percent” narrative about the haves and the have nots. It’s very misleading and it alienates a lot of innocent people from supporting the cause for change…
That’s because the top one percent is not the problem. The problem group is really the top .01 or .001%. When you criticize the entire top percent of income earners, you’re coming after a lot of people that might be your neighbors and local small business owners and people who just aren’t “balling” on a level that really compares to the real movers and shakers in the world. Making a few hundred thousand a year seems like a hell of a lot to most people, but it’s really pretty paltry compared…
nobody is arguing with you about disliking billionaires. i think most people would agree it’s absurd to hoard that much money. that said, taylor is doing her part. could she do more? OF COURSE. but it’s unrealistic for someone to donate their entire net worth to charity and the “small” donation of 26mil does make a difference at the end of the day
…to the real sharks out there. A few hundred thousand a year salary for management professionals and business owners is nothing in the bigger picture and none of those people are gonna be billionaires anytime soon just by investing a portion of that income in stocks and bonds or whatever. The scale says it all. A million means a thousand thousands. That’s a lot of money. Don’t get me wrong. But a thousand million? Imagine that. A thousand million dollars… have you ever sat there and counted…
…out loud from one to one thousand before? Try it sometime. Then just ponder the notion of doing that 999 more times in a row just to count to one million. And times that by a thousand more. It’s also important to mind the distinction between measuring wealth by annual income vs by actual net worth, which is where you see that we need to be considering wealth tax, property tax, inheritance tax, and other means of reappropriating the excess accumulation of money going upward on the social ladder
Bro I’m not even talking about Taylor swift. I give a fuck about Taylor fucking swift and her fans and her fairy tale wedding. I’m not demonizing some pop star here even if she has a billion dollars. But there’s a big difference between a billion dollars and the kind of money that the real predators are controlling. Elon musk just became a trillionaire. That’s a thousand times more money than Taylor swift is worth. And it’s ridiculous. And he needs to be checked. That shit he pulled last year…
I actually don’t care why she did it. It’s 26 million to charities, that’s something to celebrate no matter who or why. Some people say true altruism is impossible because of the praise you might get for doing good things, so I feel someone’s motives don’t matter too much as long as their actions objectively improve the world. But you guys will never take a break from bitching to celebrate so have fun being miserable
…financially sucking trump’s elderly wrinkled dick for personal access to the White House, showing up every day like a jackass in his stupid baseball caps and urban outfitters looking hipster wear, collecting all the personal info and data on the entire American population, data that was recently found to have been misappropriated and leaked to bad actors and hackers and scammers on the dark web and everything we could have easily predicted would happen to it when he put a bunch of teenage…
…with those firings to save an amount of money that’s only comparable to a modest fraction of his own personal wealth. What kind of a person does it take to go to work every day under public watch, wearing fashion jeans and baseball caps to the White House to pompously crusade against fraud and waste by indiscriminately firing a quarter of a million people when you’re one of the only individuals in the world who could essentially just make a few calls and whip out your checkbook to…
…to donate that entire sum of money to the government right on the spot, if you’re so worried about all this “waste”? What’s a bigger waste? A quarter million federal employees going to work every day to support their families (that’s where I got the “one million people” from) or one haughty, eccentric weirdo in a silly hat taking billions of dollars in corporate welfare from the government in subsidies and tax credits to line his own pockets so he can win the race to be the first trillionaire?
I don’t think u understand what a tax write off is. They are doing it so they don’t have to pay as much money in taxes and ultimately pay less money over all. I.E. they are giving less money back to the community by donating money to charity. It’s why a lot of celebrities donate to charity and start non-profits. They have sophisticated accountants that are good at making sure they keep as much money as possible
Ok first of all I don’t think this woman is as malicious as yall make her out to be. I do think the main reason she gives to charity is bc she’s a nice lady, whether the tax thing plays into the decision or not. Second, the donation is a way of contributing too the community. And, (correct me if I’m wrong) but wouldn’t the donations she makes + the lowered taxes still amount to the equivalent of not more of the taxes she would pay normally?
Taylor Swift has over 2 billion dollars. The median individual American income is closer to 50,000 So no it’d be closer to $500 if we’re being strictly pedantic, but I think it’s better to focus on the fact that Taylor swift could literally donate half her net worth’s approximate value and still be richer than 99.9997% of Americans. So yeah, don’t expect me to be impressed by her donating a pittance to a good cause lmao.
That is actually a very big contradiction? If she actually wanted to donate to charity because shes a good person she can drop half a billion easily and not feel it. Or 100 mil. Why doesnt she use her platform for good causes either? She only donated as a tax write off, she doesnt give a shit about being a good person, otherwise she would do something actually beneficial beyond a simple tax write off.
I don’t think some of you guys really understand just how ludicrously wealthy Taylor Swift is, so let me put it in perspective. She could give away 90% of her wealth right now, retire, and spend 10,000 dollars PER DAY, and she would likely die before she spent all of it. It would take 60 years for her to spend 10% of her current wealth at a rate of spending $10,000 a DAY.
If we take the span of her entire career (which I think is generous since she didn’t start making large amounts of money until about 15-17 years ago) she makes an average of over $300,000 dollars PER DAY. She makes the $26 million dollars she donated in less than 3 months. The whole argument about proportionality is irrelevant because Taylor Swift can comfortably lose 99% of her net worth and live absolutely comfortably, unlike the rest of us.
I say this because people are acting like it’s unreasonable to be unimpressed at her only donating $26 million, approximately a hundredth of her total net worth to charities. She has personal wealth roughly equivalent to the GDPs of Lesotho, Eritrea, or San Marino. Countries. She has wealth equal to the total wealth of entire countries. That’s the problem guys.
…SUCK IT UP and pay for half the problem ourselves with all the money most of us out there DONT EVEN HAVE IN THE FIRST PLACE in order to ease the stress on the government, which means they’re basically just kowtowing to the billionaires as usual, rather than implementing any tax that would charge the beneficiaries of this inflationary bullshit some money to cover the difference and level the field a little bit for the rest of us. But ohhhn nooooo, the jet set has already been cashing out ther…
that’s absolutely not true. the top tax bracket is $731k married n $609k single, there isn’t any way they actually *save* money by donating $26M. say their income was $26.730M (assuming they’re filing jointly this upcoming yr), donating $26M would bump em down a tax bracket, so instead of paying $9.89M in taxes, they pay $262.8k in taxes and $26M in donations, so they have $26.263M leaving their pockets instead of $9.89M. Do you see how there’s actually MORE money leaving their pockets now?
no, her NET WORTH is 2 billion dollars. That includes her music catalog and rights associated, properties/real estate, investments, and all other assets that she has. she does not have 2 billion dollars sitting in her bank accounts. Yes, she is rich, yes she is a billionaire, but it isn’t liquid and that’s a different conversation when it comes to the numbers.
And of that 2+ billion, roughly 1 billion is liquid. Of course liquidity has an impact. So does inflation, monetary interest, and necessary expenditures like taxes or necessities like gas/groceries. Yes, all of these theoretically would have an impact. That doesn’t detract from my point that this woman makes more in a day than most of us make in 3 or 4 years.
No? That’s my exact point? There is a difference between someone who can lose 99% of their entire net worth, and still be richer than well over 93% of Americans and live a comfortable life) as opposed to the rest of us normal people. I have to spend approximately 30-40% of my annual revenue per year on necessities like groceries, gas, taxes, etc. To say nothing of having to pay for school.
Taylor Swift literally owns a $54 million dollar private jet with a $3 million annual operating cost. She isn’t like us, folks, she’s so far removed from the average American that, like I said, her giving away $26 million dollars is an empty gesture. She could easily give ten times that amount, or even fifty times that amount and literally not feel it whatsoever.
I bet if it was an independent event by a random organization that raised 26 million you wouldn’t be saying this. The only reason you’re being negative is because a celebrity donated it, and that’s a pretty disgusting bias to have. 26 million to charity is 26 million to charity fuckhead and “not caring” about it is super psychotic and fucked up. I bet you ignore homeless people and don’t give them any spare change or food
there is a reason why billionaires keep that money liquid though. it's because they can get tax right offs. she can keep exploiting the labor. yk what i wanna see her do? stop investing in corporations that are destroying our planet. give her real estate to the state to develop housing for the homeless. she doesn't though. because she's selfish. like all billionaires are. her being a billionaire is a PROBLEM. BILLIONAIRES ARE THE PROBLEM