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Showing posts from March 21, 2021

Charity: “A Tax Dodge for the Rich”

Example: the U.S. “As a deduction, the value of the tax benefit increases with income. The higher the marginal rate of the donor, the larger the tax benefit, meaning that the wealthier the taxpayer, the less they must pay for each dollar of their charitable gifts. Thus, for a gift of $1,000, a taxpayer in the 37 percent bracket gets $370 in tax savings while a taxpayer in the 15 percent bracket gets just $150 — a $220 difference in the size of the tax benefit for the same gift. In addition, as an itemized deduction, only a small fraction of taxpayers actually have a tax incentive to give, further increasing unfairness. Thus, millionaires can get a return of 37 percent on their charitable contributions, while a middle-income taxpayer who claims the standard deduction gets no tax benefit at all for a contribution of the same amount. Such middle-income taxpayers thus have no incentive to give, and when they do, their gift is not acknowledged by the tax system even though their sacrifice i...

“The Most Vicious Honest”

 

Britain: Wealth, Inequality, Meritocracy

The author has ignored exploitation of labour as a source of wealth. In fact, he ignored that even inherited wealth comes from past labour. Note that the word capitalism is not mention even once. As regarding why “ the belief that Britain is a meritocracy is ingrained in our collective psyche,” one has to include the role of ideology . Where does wealth comes from? Related The meritocrats shall inherit the earth What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules?

Italy

The turbulence within the main protagonists of Italian politics, and the paradoxical emergence of yet another government following a bourgeois bloc strategy, can each be connected to a unitary framework. The bourgeois bloc is not simply a social alliance that brings together the middle and upper classes, from both Left and Right, around a neoliberal reform of capitalism that draws its legitimacy from the European integration process. It is also an ideological project, which entails a complete restructuring of political cleavages. The electoral disasters faced by both the Renzi-era Democrats and Berlusconi's Forza Italia — the parties which carried this project — have not erased the effects that this experience has had on the structuring of social and political conflict. The Paradoxical Return of the Bourgeois Bloc

Migrant Workers in Britain

Some call it exploitation. Others call it meeting target and productivity. “We have borrowed a lot of money to come here, we passed long distance, left our relatives, not to get this. We came to work but we can’t work, earn money, we can’t save money and help our families. Sometimes there is a feeling that we can’t prove anything, that no one will help us.”   Low-paid migrant workers ‘trapped’ on Britain’s farms

Nawaal El-Saadawi (1931-2021)

The BBC , unsurprisingly, ignored that El-Saadawi was anti-capitalist and belonged to  the “historical socialist-feminists,” (her own words). Wikipedia admin deleted my edit when I added with a source that El-Saadawi was anti-capitalist and  socialist. I guess they want her to fit in the neoliberal feminism. But, “ after the military take-over, El Saadawi began to defend the regime of the former military chief and current president Abdul Fatah al-Sisi and his human rights violations, many of her former comrades-in-arms felt compelled to break with her. El Saadawi accused the Western media of running a smear campaign against Sisi.” Women, Egypt and Religion Life and times via her writings Meet Egypt’s most radical woman The many lives of Nawaal El-Saadaawi