For me, that the Cold War began with the US wanting to stop Stalin's plans of imposing communism on the world. Did anybody else's curriculum portray Trotsky in a positive light? lmao it's funny to imagine the weirdos who write those textbooks were trots.
"We had to nuke Japan to end the war quickly" was a big one. No mention of our fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, much less the horrors endured by civilians throughout occupied Europe and Asia. Certainly, no effort to draw a line between our conquest of Japan and subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Another whopper was my 6th grade math teacher claiming she received less take-home pay after her income went up and blaming this on progressive income taxes. She proceeds to work it out on the board, saying "Look, sure, I make an extra $1000 but then my tax rate goes from 25% to 28%, so now I'm actually poorer". Like, yeah, this is lib shit. But she was a math teacher ffs. I don't know if she was just fucking with us or if she genuinely believed it. But she refused to acknowledge effective tax rates.
The “We had to nuke Japan otherwise it would have extended the war” was definitely a big one.
A lot of people have no idea what they’re talking about with taxes. My wife one time said what your teacher said but she promptly realized how dumb it sounded and never mentioned it again.
I still have to tell people at work that getting a pay raise is always good, you will never lose more money on taxes then you are taking home. Its such a simple concept but so many people seem to have no idea how it works.
The most valid form of this argument is if you happen to go over a cut-off for a benefit. I'm not really sure what they are in America.
The Welfare Cliff is a big problem, but it largely comes in the form of reduced benefits (losing SNAP, losing Medicaid, losing HUD subsidies, etc). You're not going to be in a situation where your marginal tax rate on the next dollar is 100+%.
Yes, I agree.
I'm a big WW2 idiot- what's the counterargument to nuking Hiroshima/Nagasaki?
The Japanese were already in a hopeless situation strategically and would’ve likely surrendered at around the same time. A ground invasion of Japan probably wouldn’t have happened.
Also it seems that Japanese high command didn’t give that much importance to civilian deaths resulting from the nukes and may not have been as relevant to their surrender as they’re made out to be.
Overall it’s the certainty with which we are told that “we had to nuke them or else a million soldiers would’ve died” which was just post-war apologia and not a contemporaneous justification.
I'd heard the Japanese were in pretty awful strategic state, but i guess the common belief is that the military elite were so radicalised that they were willing to continue being imperialists to the very end, regardless how doomed their cause was. Would that be considered true?
I've had to argue with grown ass adults about this, even fairly recently. so troubling.
Yo that "jumping up a tax bracket" shit was so pernicious