Angry stone age caveman in animal pelt with long beard waves his prehistoric club in the air while ranting, 3d illustration render

NPCs and Taxes

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by

Chris Johnson
in ,

One of the great things about following people on X is that you get news faster and from different points of view.

One of the worst things about X is that you get idiot NPC talking points dumped into your feed constantly.

For the last three weeks, every weekend, there is a spat of NPCs telling me that Trump has gone golfing. That he has gone golfing every weekend since he took office. That his golfing has cost some number of millions of dollars. The number is the same across every post.

This week, the talking points included that Trump was golfing while there were fires on Long Island. How can he be so cruel. And he went golfing last weekend during the fires in North and South Carolina.

Last weekend it was about how the fires in the Carolina’s were happening despite the claims of good forest management. Claims that there wasn’t water to fight the fires. While showing the same video of firefighters using water to fight the fires.

The biggest NPC talking point has been on “Tax cuts for Billionaires.” The claim is that Trump is taking money away from veterans, the sick, and the elderly to give to his “billionaire friends”.

If you open the curtain and peek behind it, you find that they are lying.

So let’s do a little numbering.

We are going to look at somebody making $12000/year, $50,000/year, $100,000/year, $500,000/year, and a million dollars per year.

We use a progressive tax rate, so as your income goes up, so does your tax rate.

Income Tax Rate Amount
Paid
$0 10% $0
$11,601 12% $1,160.12
$12,000 12% $1,208.00
$47,151 22% $5,426.22
$50,000 22% $6,053.00
$100,000 22% $17,053.00
$100,526 24% $17,168.74
$191,951 32% $39,110.98
$243,726 35% $55,679.06
$500,000 35% $145,374.64
$609,351 37% $183,647.49
$1,000,000 37% $328,197.62

Somebody with an income of $1,000,000 pays 328 thousand dollars in taxes. If everybody got a 1% tax cut, he would get to keep $3,281 of his money. The person making $50k per year would get to keep $500 of his money. Oh my goodness.

So what are these huge tax cuts that “Trump gave his billionaire friends?” The Trump tax cuts apply to everybody. The NPCs claim that everybody getting tax cuts is not fair because a millionaire gets $3k back, but regular folk only get $500 back. This is so horrible, that they proposed an amendment that would have increased the tax rate of people making more than $999,999.

This would have added another tax bracket. They are literally saying that if we don’t raise the taxes on those making more than $999,999 we are giving a tax cut.

It doesn’t make sense to anybody except NPCs.

This entire talking point also avoids the question of how billionaires make their money.

If I was working a full-time job and pulling in a billion dollars per year, I would be charging $480,769.23/hour.

It isn’t happening. A million dollars per year income is only $480/hour.

Yes, there are some professions that charge at the $500 to $1000 per hour rate, but they are generally not taking it all home. Instead, that hourly rate goes into paying for many people.

What a millionaire does is they make money by investing. Pretend you made $174,000 in 2024. After paying all your bills, you might take home $50 to $75 thousand for fun stuff.

Now, supposed you took that $50k and invested it in a stock, like $TEM in January 2025 at $32/share. If you sold it at the end of February 2025 at $89.44 you would have made a profit of $89k. Not a bad return over the course of a month.

This is a short-term capital gain which gets taxed at your as above, according to your tax bracket. On the other hand, if you hold that stock for a full 12 months and then sell it, you would only get taxed at 15%, not 24%. That is a 9% savings in taxes.

If you were to have a taxable income of over $533k/year, then your rate would be 20% on that $89k, not 37%. That translates to savings of $15,140.

Trump is not talking about cutting the capital gains taxes. He is talking about income tax changes.

Representatives make $174k/year. $TEM was one of the purchases a representative made in February.

This is the same language game that congress critters make every year. “We made cuts to the budget!” translation, “We aren’t going to spend as much as we wanted to. We are only spending $500,000 more, not the $3.3 million more we wanted”

A cut is when the amount spent this year is less than the amount spent last year.

I believe that I managed to lose some of my article. Still, it is just a rant.

        

Comments

6 responses to “NPCs and Taxes”

  1. CBMTTek Avatar
    CBMTTek

    “For the last three weeks, every weekend, there is a spat of NPCs telling me that Trump has gone golfing. “

    I have been getting “Trump golfed for 20 hours last week…” a lot.

    Sometimes I respond by telling the NPC that there are 168 hours in a week, and if you take away 70 hours for sleep and personal hygiene efforts, that leaves 98 hours for the President to work. Even if he went golfing twice as much (40 hours) he is putting in more work in a week than you are.

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    Reply
    1. curby Avatar
      curby

      we could mention the “golfer in chief” the “anoited” one who spent as much time golfing as he did fubaring up our Country. or we could ignore the adult-sized toddlers and live our best life in this great Country we have. bout time 74% of us start ignoring the 26% of liberal idiots cryin

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      1. CBMTTek Avatar
        CBMTTek

        While “whataboutism” arguments can be effective, I prefer my approach. It removes so many possible counter arguments.

        Reply
  2. CBMTTek Avatar
    CBMTTek

    And, regarding the taxes, this is something they were pulling since the Bush administration. Same argument. Just because those who earned the most got a larger dollar cut is proof enough that Republicans work for the rich only. It was BS then, and it is BS now.

    Reply
  3. Archer Avatar
    Archer

    This is the same language game that congress critters make every year. “We made cuts to the budget!” translation, “We aren’t going to spend as much as we wanted to. We are only spending $500,000 more, not the $3.3 million more we wanted”

    If the Congresscritters had said, “We made cuts to the proposed budget,” they’d be correct; they proposed a budget with a $3.3M increase, but only got a $500K increase and had to adjust the budget to match.

    However, neither of those is an actual cut to the budget, which would require a reduction in the existing budget, not just a smaller-than-desired increase. I’d even argue further that a simple reduction does not necessarily make a “cut”; a “cut” should remove at least 3-5% of the existing budget — and ideally much more, say, 10-20%. It should be significant. You don’t get to start with a $5B budget, rearrange it to save a few thousand dollars, and call it a “budget cut”.

    This whole thing reminds me of a cynical one-liner take I read years ago, which is still as relevant now as then. Paraphrasing (because I don’t remember the actual numbers), “How come a ‘slight tax increase’ costs me $500, while a ‘significant tax cut’ saves me 50 cents?”

    Reply
    1. Archer Avatar
      Archer

      As an aside, since we’re on the subject of taxes, Oregon has a state law on the books that requires — repeat, REQUIRES — the state to refund taxpayers the difference if state income tax revenues exceed the budget by a certain amount (2%, IIRC). Officially it’s called the “Oregon Surplus Refund”, but colloquially known as the “kicker”. For 2025, the surplus is expected to be $1.7 Billion, or about $400 per man, woman, child, and “other” in the state (only about half of which actually pay income tax, so it’s closer to $800 per taxpayer).

      As you might imagine, the Leftist critters in the Legislature — both Ds and Rs — HATE HATE HATE letting the citizens have their money back, and pull all kinds of shenanigans and new legislation authorizing new programs to spend the excess before the kicker deadline. It’s very much a game of “use it or lose it”, so they try to use as much as possible before having to refund it.

      The result is a constantly bloating state budget, that has to be re-adjusted each biennium (because Oregon passes biennial budgets) to remove those newly-authorized-and-paid-for programs that existed long enough to suck up the money that should have gone to kicker checks but not long enough to actually DO anything, or propose a budget increase to keep them (and they still probably won’t DO anything).

      If I could, I’d give the entire state budget the DOGE treatment. Monthly. With a proverbial machete.

      Reply

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