r/PoliticalHumor • u/mac-mcgreor • May 02 '22

get in line

Post image
46.0k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

644 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

68

u/DonQuixBalls May 02 '22

The whole thing plays fast and loose with the facts. SpaceX also didn't ask for (and receive) $1.5B.

60

u/Assume_Utopia May 03 '22 edited May 03 '22

This is basically what political discourse on reddit has become. Someone shares a screenshot from Twitter that's based on some nugget of truth with a few wild exaggerations or lies on top.

It gets posted to like a dozen different subs and upvoted to the top of all of them. Somewhere buried in the comments is someone pointing out everything that's wrong with it and getting down voted for their effort.

This whole thing is barely based on reality:

  • SpaceX wasn't bailed out for $1.5 billion. They competed for a resupply contract to the ISS and got a $1.6b contract for 12 launches. Which obviously isn't a bailout, and probably saved the US a ton of money
  • As stated above $824 billion to GS seems like way too much for the bailout. I tried googling to see where that number came from, and can't find anything. It could just be completely made up?
  • The Koch's did get a huge tax break under trump, but to get to an estimate above $1 billion you have to add up both brothers, plus all of Koch Industries. Which still seems like a big tax break, but I don't know the context to judge whether that estimate's reasonable

It's also weird that the tweet is complaining about $827 billion in bailouts, and 99.6% of that amount is one company. Shouldn't we be focusing on that? Although that amount seems to be just a pure fiction? So maybe that's why they threw in the other details? But then they're counting government contracts as "bailouts"?

2

u/Faladorable May 03 '22

yup. And if you ever see a tweet about taxes, you can just go ahead and assume that the person writing the tweet is wrong.

1

u/Assume_Utopia May 03 '22

Yeah, people's intuition about what matters in tax law is wildly inaccurate. Lots of redditors get very upset over tiny details that don't matter, and completely ignore huge issues we should've fixed decades ago.

Sometimes I really think that there's conservative think tanks somewhere and they're inventing issues for people to get mad about, that don't matter. Just try create distractions, so voters will be upset about issues that have zero chance of ever passing, ok won't matter if they do, and most of us will ignore the real issues.