For those who are not familiar with USA revolutionary history, the Boston Tea Party was a riot against an increase in tax on imported tea imposed by the king of England without any consultation with the British North American colonies. The actual complete phrase was “No taxation without representation.” The irony is, many Trump supporters are not saying anything about Trump’s unilateral decision to impose tariffs, bypassing the representation Congress is supposed to provide.
Alt text: A two panel comic. Top panel has a title of 1776, and a white man is yelling angrily. The word bubble says “Pay a 3% tax on tea and paper. Screw that! Revolution!” The bottom panel has the title Now and a white man looking despondent. The word bubble says “Pay 40% of your income. Sure that’s totally fine.”
Holy AI slop, Batman!
Yeah, it’s pretty bad. My alt text cleaned it up for them, lol
Its funny cuz the part the character would be saying is the part that’s not in their speech bubble
Yeah, its AI slop for sure
The right with its “artistic and aesthetic superiority” have yet again had to use generative AI…
Context - the Tea Party was in response to tariff-free tea arriving in Boston. The rioters were tea smugglers who didn’t pay any tax, but feared for their price gouging practices due to the arrival of cheaper legitimate tea. There was a strong element of personal score-settling, as the violence culminated in the total destruction of a competing smuggler’s ship by arson. The whole thing was so shady, the leaders of the revolutionary movement immediately disowned the actions.
Also, at the time, the average citizen of the 13 colonies paid 10% of the tax that British citizens did. Taxation was a pretext rather than a causation of the revolution.
The whole thing was so shady, the leaders of the revolutionary movement immediately disowned the actions.
Kinda sounds like the Tea Party Movement did chose a great analogy.
Not to mention it’s extremely rare for someone to have an effective combined tax burden of 40%.
I got nerdsniped by this. If you’re in the US in the highest-tax state (California) filing singly with the standard deduction and all of your income was earned, you’d need to make $1,308,404 in 2025 to see an aggregate income tax rate of 40%. This would put you somewhere in the 99.9th percentile of earners.
If you instead make your money through already being rich (long term capital gains and qualified dividends), it’s impossible to ever hit 40%.
I feel it’s important to further clarify that California is only a high tax state for the very high bracket earners.
Oh, for sure, it’s just the highest one for this particular math problem.
I’m not that familiar with tax law in the USA, why is it impossible? Is it because making money by having money is not taxed, so if it makes up a large enough percentage of your income, the percentage of your total income you pai in taxes can never reach 40%? If so, at which point does it become impossible? (Unless there is a 100% tax bracket, which would be Un-American™)
Capital gains and qualified dividends cap at 20% federally and 12.3% in the state with the highest tax rate, so the tax burden on them can never exceed 32.3% at infinite earnings.
Regular income caps at 37% federally and 12.3% in California, so can get up to 49.3% at infinite earnings.
It’s really not. We pay a shit-ton of tax.
If you’re single in CA, earn $150,000 and own a home (although the property tax only contributes a few percent), your tax burden is 40%.
- Federal Income Tax: $29,400
- Medicare Tax: $2,175
- Social Security Tax: $9,300
- State Income Tax: $10,956.67
- State Disability Insurance (SDI) Tax: $1,650
- State Sales Tax: $1,750
- Property Tax: $3,800
- Fuel Tax: $522
Total=59,553.67
59.5/150=39.7%
But hey, at least this isn’t one of those European countries where they provide great social services but tax you like crazy! /s
I take some issue with some of those numbers. My calculations look at the tax table at 150k with standard deduction, shows 52333/150000 =0.349. And even 35% takes some working at not minimizing your liability; no mortgage deduction, no tax advantaged savings etc.
Good call. I forgot to take the standard deduction. Doing that brings my calculation down to 37%.
@Sarcasmo220 is this made by AI? Like, the speech bubble is not where it should be no?
It does seem like AI slop to me
First thing I noticed. What a garbage comic.
The right always forgets that the reason why that happened was due to “taxation without representation”.
In Hungary, we pay a separate “healthcare tax” (state insurance, to “get people and the state ready to get rid of communist healthcare”), and I’m willing to pay that. My problem is that we have Europe’s worst healthcare system, part because our government doesn’t invest in education thus no doctors, part because of massive corruption and as such things become way more expensive, part because that money gets reappropriated towards “sickness prevention” (building stadiums, giving money to football teams, etc.). That’s what I’m angry about, not that I cannot express my “individualism” by pledging brand loyalty to “Evil and Rich Kiddy Fuckers from the US” Health and Humane Inc.
True. I often hear a criticism of universal healthcare is long waits to see a doctor, and so the right claim socialism fails. But the reality is, as you mentioned, it is the lack of investing in free higher education that causes having too few doctors. Everything is connected.
what, i thought hungary had a universal single-payer system such as nhs and sus.
The right thinks about how much they pay; the left, what they get in return.
They happily gloss over the cost of running a successful society. First responders, public schools, roads, utilities, public works, etc all cost money. They can spend $$ on all of those with profiteering on top of them by privatizing everything. We already see how this has worked out for healthcare and elder care.
Just passed to get in debt for another trill while slashing your social safety nets. Might see a return to a 2:1 USD:GBP at this rate
The revolution was spurred on by the Stamp Act which required a tax on everything from tea to playing cards. Not only was it a lack of representation but the whole situation that the colonies were expected to be part of England but weren’t treated like it. Now in the Crown’s defense England was spending a lot on defending the colonies but they still should’ve given them a seat in parliament. If they had done that we might still be part of the UK or ended up like Canada (taking longer to leave).
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