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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   21928 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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It is already the case that half of all people are not net tax payers. Where is the culling?

It hasn't happened yet because there isn't enough control yet. I'm not sure that you appreciate just how big of a change your ideal AI future will be. In your ideal AI future, the levers of power would necessarily be concentrated with the AI or the people responsible for its decisions. I'll pose a question to you. Suppose you can tomorrow, with a snap of your fingers, make your ideal AI future become reality in the US. But in the process, you'd have to liquidate the bottom 10% of the US population. Would you do it? What about 20%? 30%? How much of the population are you willing to liquidate to realize your ideal AI future?

Organizing against local datacenters, or worse American data centers in general, will do less than nothing against xrisk

Ok so what do you actually suggest I do? Say I'm a private citizen who one, doesn't not support the AI future and two, would like to stop AI development world wide. How do you suggest I act to achieve these goals?

It is already the case that half of all people are not net tax payers. Where is the culling?

This underlying claim isn't actually true. Overall average income is something like 50k per year, but that includes college students, stay-at-home mothers and stuff. If you narrow your parameters to an age-range like 30-50, the average income is more in the area of 80k or so per year, which is high enough for most people to be net tax payers. Super-high income earners don't distort it enough to make it not so.

A more accurate appraisal is that of people who work at all, most eventually graduate to become net tax payers and are the backbone of overall society, and of people who work minimally or not at all, these are often college students and mothers who are playing an important role in society of their own. They are a necessary cost the system must bear to sustain itself.

The idea that most people are freeloaders or minimum wage Walmart staff is popular around here, but does not measure up to actual statistics.

This is just copium/wishcasting and doesn't pass the sniff test given most developed countries have a progressive tax system and run yearly deficits. Plus, you are still a lifetime net fiscal negative even if you're a net-taxpayer in your prime years but it's outweighed by the degree to which you were a net-tax consumer in your early and senior years.

Take the US, for example. It spent $7.04 trillion in fiscal 2025 with a population of 342 million, or about $20,460 per person. Playing around on SmartAsset shows one would need to make about $98,000 as a single person taking the standard deduction to cover the $20,460 through both federal income and FICA taxes. Suppose we consider a net-tax payer one who is able to cover this amount. It's a simplifying step since it allocates overall government expenditures pro rata per person, but it allows us to do some interesting Noticing.

Taking a peek at dqydj: in 2025, median individual income peaked at ages 52-53 at $70K (with a blip of $70K at age 65 and another blip of $72K at age 72, likely related to SS fully vesting and RMDs for retirement accounts), well short of $98,000. Furthermore, this only includes those "who worked (or wanted to work)." So not only does the median worker (or aspiring worker) not make enough to be a lifetime net-tax payer, he or she never makes enough to be a net-tax payer in any given year (assuming all years over his or her lifetime are similar to 2025). Only at the 67th/68th percentile of age-53 workers does income hit $98,000, much less workers as a whole.

Poors and mids are hard-carried by higher-earners fiscally. This would be consistent with other findings such as, in the US, the bottom 50% of tax-payers contribute only 2.3% of federal income taxes paid and the bottom 75% contribute only 11.5%.

It would be nice to give an actual source.

  • Average consumer unit: Income 104 k$/a, size 2.4 people including 1.3 earners

  • Median consumer unit: Income 74 k$/a, size 2.4 people including 1.8 earners

  • Average consumer unit led by a person of age 25–54: Income 125 k$/a, size 3.0 people including 1.7 earners

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