Meme - "Inflation is bad"
"Inflation is bad or you ordered a private taxi for your burrito"
"Private taxi for my burrito"
Wall Street Apes on X - "This American works full time in the operating room at a hospital and just got off a 12 hour shift. It’s after midnight and she must now go drive DoorDash after being on her feet for 12 hours because the cost of living is so high in America.
“I work in the operating room and I just worked a 12-hour shift in the operating room and I cannot afford my rent. I can't afford my rent. I can't afford gas. I can't afford groceries. I can't afford any of my endless other bills that I am responsible for because I am an adult. After working a 12-hour shift in the operating room. So you know what I have to do? I have to DoorDash, and it's 12: 30 at night after I've been on my feet in the operating room for 12 hours all f*cking day. I'm now out DoorDash driving”
I’ll never shop sharing these stories because we must ALL advocate for a drastically lower cost of living. We cannot accept this is the way things are. We cannot accept this is the direction we’re going and things will just keep getting more expensive"
EducatëdHillbilly™ on X - "So she’s either a janitor in the operating room or she’s spending an ungodly amount of money because any RN is making over $90,000/year as an OR nurse."
MarbleRabbit on X - "Her video about having to drive doordash comes exactly 3 posts after the recap of her vacation to the French Riviera"
Proof that the working class is underpaid, that we need to "tax" billionaires and that Capitalism has Failed. Anyone who disagrees is a Bootlicker
Meme - Allie+ @allie_voss: "The younger and poorer the generation, the more they eat out and DoorDash. This is part of the problem"
"How each generation spends on food (January to September 30, 2023)
Gen Z - 22% delivery, 32% grocery, 46% restaurant
Millennials - 15% delivery, 46% grocery, 39% restaurant
Gen X - 9% delivery, 53% grocery, 38% restaurant
Baby Boomers - 4% delivery, 62% grocery, 34% restaurant
Interwar Generation - 2% delivery, 69% grocery, 29% restaurant"
Meme - Taylor Lorenz @Taylorlorenz: "This is bc they do not have the time or capacity to create home cooked meals. It's an issue countless pal have tried to raise w leftists but big leftists online continue to poor ppl for being forced to rely on these services for meals, which act as a tax on the poor"
Taylor Lorenz @TaylorLorenz: "I Seamlessed a $22 avocado toast and this is what just arrived *crummy avocado toast*"
Meme - Taylor Lorenz: "l am pretty into the disability justice world bc of my health stuff and I volunteer doing meal delivery to ppl who are struggling financially and can't make their own food. I hope you can get out of your bubble! You'll see that a single person's experience is not universal."
Bridget Phetasy @BridgetPhe...: "You can just say you work for DoorDash! There is no shame in it!"
The Fat Electrician on X - "We are unironically moments away from people legitimately declaring DoorDash is a human right."
Disinformation Expert Lizzy on X - "This is complete BS. It's cheaper and healthier to cook your own meals. Spend a few hours on the weekend batch cooking and freezing your meals for the week or the month. People have been doing this for years and there are infinite resources to teach people how to meal prep."
LB on X - "Taylor Lorenz has to be top ten social media personality who is completely out of touch with the real word"
Vanessa on X - "Thread starts with that graph showing Gen Z spends 46% of food money at restaurants. Then she inexplicably says they don’t have time to eat at a restaurant bc they’re all working two jobs (??) then ends it with “this is actually about the elderly and disabled” lol amazing"
Meme - Jack @whothehellsjack: "No I work in retail where I can quite literally see how much money I'm making the company. I'll do anywhere between $600 and $2000 in a 5hr shift while only making $71. It's more radicalizing to see the dramatic extent at which your surplus labor is being extracted"
Mago Berlino @MagoBerlino2: "Translated from Italian We're all leftists until we start working"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "The figure is sales revenue, not profit; typical net profit margins in retail are around 3%, meaning the company profits only from those sales after deducting costs of goods, rent, utilities, and overhead."
Left wingers don't understand the difference between revenue and profit. That's why they're poor
Yogi on X - "Bezos went on CNBC yesterday and said "You could double the taxes I pay and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens." And all the bureaucrats and socialists lost their minds. Promise the teacher a raise. Tax everyone. Launder the money through Washington. Then blame the billionaire. We aren't morons Ro, we've seen this before. Bezos said the bottom half of earners should pay zero federal income tax. A nurse in Queens making $75K hands the IRS $12K a year. He said cut it to zero. She keeps her full paycheck. No bs refund, paperwork or shady government program. Simple. They won't do it. And you should ask yourself why. They don't ACTUALLY want to help anyone. They just want to pretend they tried and get your votes while making you hate the ppl they scammed. They want the money to flow through Washington, the city, every ponzi department and consultant and charity so each one can wet their beak. By the time it reaches the teacher it's maybe $100, if that... And then they'll blame the billionaire who hasn't paid their "fair share." Right Warren??? Lets take a gander at Mamdani's education budget. NYC spends $42K per student per year, 3x the national average ($15K). Highest in America. Florida pays $9K. NYC spends more per pupil than most people pay for private school or college. Its frickn insane. The budget has gone up every year, enrollment has gone down. With all that money only 3 out of 10 kids can read in the 8th grade. Cuba can read better english and they speak spanish lol. So where is the money going? Def not to teachers. but shh, ro doesn't want you to know that. A starting teacher in NYC makes $65K. Mamdani's city spends $42K per kid, runs a $40B budget. You could pay every teacher six figures with that money and have 12 kids per a classroom. But thats too logical. It goes to administrators. Consultants. Overtime. Unions. Friends and family businesses. Pensions for people who left a decade ago. Studies about studies. Buildings that take ten years to renovate. Everyone else but the kids, teachers and actual schools THERE IS ENOUGH MONEY. Politicians decide where the money goes. Teachers are underpaid because of how government spends money. Not because Bezos doesn't pay enough. Then they stand outside a billionaire's apartment with a camera and tell you he's the problem. That's the SCAM. Ro Khanna says tax billionaires to fund $60K teacher salaries. NYC already spends enough to fund $100K teacher salaries. The money's there, Ro. Your people are the ones who won't give it to her. Federal level is the same story. DOE spending up 649% since 2000 and kids aren't any smarter. GAO found $186 billion in improper payments last year. $3 trillion in errors since 2003. It’s criminal. Stop taxing the nurse. No bureaucracy. Just let the woman keep her full paycheck. Outrage is deflection. They'd rather she pay. Because her keeping her own money doesn't fund the machine and they lose the one thing that keeps the whole racket going: a billionaire to blame."
John Rain on X - ""Why do anxious people lean left?" According to this study, anxious individuals are more likely to support welfare programs and wealth redistribution, but not other left-wing policies. The researchers interpreted this as evidence that anxious people are mainly motivated by concern for their own material security, rather than any abstract sense of "injustice.""
Beki on X - "So... insecurity driven by illegal immigration, crime, and debt will lead to more leftist voters, who then elect more people who increase illegal immigration, crime, and debt. Feedback loop."
Meme - Robert Reich @RBReich: "There are basically 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars:
1) Profiting from a monopoly
2) Insider-trading
3) Political payoffs
4) Fraud
5) Inheritance
Don't believe the self-made myth."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Research shows most billionaires accumulated wealth by founding and building successful companies. A University of Chicago study found 69% of the 2011 Forbes 400 started their own businesses."
Meme - Magatte Wade: "If you look at the Doing Business Index, it's easier to do business in any Scandinavian country than ANYWHERE in sub-Saharan Africa. That's why they're rich and we're poor. We have mineral wealth and land wealth - we should be mind-blowingly rich if we were unchained like Denmark."
Magatte Wade: "Why is Africa still poor today? Because it's the hardest place in the world to do business."
How ignorant. Don't they know it's all colonialism? That's why Vietnam and Singapore are so poor today
Lauren Chen on X - "Biden's FTC literally went after bulk pricing as "discriminatory". It sounds ridiculous, but it's real. They argued it was unfair smaller retailers were charged more than big brands. But they didn't get that the big brands paid less per unit because they bought bigger quantities. Antitrust is supposed to protect consumers, but bulk pricing is a standard business practice, and the entire concept behind companies like Costco. This is what happens when bureaucrats dont live in the real world 🤡"
Opinion | Labor Department redesign makes tracing union spending easier - The Washington Post (aka "The federal government’s most efficient use of $600 ever?") - "Turns out it’s possible to improve a government website without wasting gobs of money on contractors and consultants. A tiny office in the Labor Department has made big strides to improve transparency for union members at negligible cost to taxpayers. Federal labor law says that once a union is certified or recognized in a workplace, it is the exclusive bargaining agent for all workers there. That means every certified or recognized union is a government-backed monopoly. With government-granted power comes government-mandated transparency. A 1959 law, passed after a series of corruption scandals, requires unions to file public disclosure reports detailing their activities each year with the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS). OLMS has posted those reports on its website for years. But they’re difficult to read, they could only be viewed one at a time, and they’re sometimes hundreds of pages long. As part of the Trump administration’s effort to modernize government websites, OLMS has added a new “Visualization” column. All the reports are available the same as before, but now some also have a more user-friendly version. The data are searchable and sortable, and users can view multiyear comparisons, with charts, at a glance. This fix has made it much easier to see, for example, that the Amalgamated Transit Union has 18 vice presidents, and they all make more than $215,000 a year. Or that the Laborers’ International Union of North America spends just $30.53 per member on representational activities while its president and secretary-treasurer each make over $740,000 a year. Or that a single lobbyist for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees made more money than any of the union’s officers in 2025. Or that the United Steelworkers’ largest single expense last year was $2.9 million to Caesars Entertainment Corporation, for its Las Vegas convention. This significant improvement didn’t require a protracted bidding process. OLMS Director Elisabeth Messenger said the visualization feature was made in-house in 78 business days and the software was less than $600. She added that the visualization feature will be expanded to cover other reports the agency receives, including from employers. Will this upgrade lead to a massive improvement in the lives of most Americans? Not really. But a small government office significantly improving the way it fulfills its mission for less than $600 offers a model for others. And it’s a win for union members who want to know how their dues are being spent."
Richard Hanania on X - "Absolutely shocked that unions don’t actually represent the interests of workers but union bosses instead."
This is why left wingers promote union membership. Of course, their "solution" is to just expand the graft so everyone can eat instead of reducing it
Vijay on X - "This is an absolutely incredible interview with the former Democrat Governor of Washington state. Her criticism of the current legislature is sharp and well made. The current leaders of Washington are way out of their depth and leading the state off a fiscal cliff:
-----------------------
Questioner: Do you think majority leaders understand—do you [think] our legislature understands the impact of [the] policy environment as it relates to [the] economy?
Christine Gregoire: No. I really don’t. As evidenced by… You mentioned estate tax. I argued with some folks about [the] estate tax. We were the highest in the country, tied with Hawaii at twenty percent. We went to thirty-five. We’re not just the highest — we are beyond the highest. And I said, “You understand the consequences of this? Can I see your fiscal note because I’d like to help [craft] it? Because here’s what you can expect: Those people are not homeless. They will not [be] paying [taxes] when they leave. They stop paying cap gains. When they leave, they stopped giving significantly to philanthropy which would otherwise be necessary by government. So do you understand that you see consequences of what you’re doing?” And the answer is no. I left office with a budget of 33 billion and the budget today is 80 billion. Uh, I think that’s a little bit too much of growth. Yet how we find ourselves [is that] every legislative session now is in whole projected to be in the hole. We don’t really have an income problem. We have a spending problem. And we’re answering it by stacking one more tax, one more rule, one more regulation. The one thing that the business community doesn’t need is that lack of predictability. How many people in either of [the] Democratic caucuses have come from a business past? So if you haven’t come from it, you don’t know it, you don’t understand it. And therefore, to me, we all collectively — and Chris and I have talked a lot about this — have to educate from the outside in. We have to explain things like sales tax on services. [You] thought [it] was a nice attack on big business. And here are the small businesses that have been tremendously adversely impacted as well as customers."
Rethinking Economics, the movement changing how the subject is taught
Tellingly, the article barely talks about what they think is wrong with mainstream economics, but it looks like it's just pushing neo-Marxism instead of claiming that mainstream economics is factually wrong, which is not surprising
Opinion | Europe Is in Decline. Good. - The New York Times - "Among contemporary European writers, the novelist Michel Houellebecq is not known for his optimism. In his oeuvre spanning three decades, a leitmotif has been the inexorability of human decline, from the quality of internet pornography to European civilization itself. “France has given up on progress,” he wrote in 2014. “We are all not only tourists in our own country, but also willing participants in tourism.” Today, Mr. Houellebecq’s comments sound darkly prophetic. Economic growth across the continent, long anemic, has dwindled toward nought, with even Germany’s industrial behemoth slumping. Dynamism has disappeared, replaced by painful dependencies: Europe’s technology comes from America, its critical minerals from China. The continent’s transformation into an arid playpen for tourists, with its economies geared to serve the visitors, is no longer the stuff of dyspeptic speculation... it is undeniable that Europe has been “provincialized,” as the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once termed it. The negotiations to end the war in Ukraine show that the bloc has been steadily reduced to a second-rate participant in world affairs. In President Trump’s eyes, it is “decaying” and at risk of “civilizational erasure.” All of this sounds menacing enough to Europeans. Yet perhaps demotion need not be traumatic. Rather, a reckoning with European decline — cultural, political and, above all, economic — could give rise to a healthily modest approach to the present. After a century in which Europe was in charge, with highly ambiguous results, it might even free Europeans of the burdening neurosis of mastery. At least Brussels no longer suffers from denial; across the spectrum, there’s an awareness that the continent is falling behind. A paradigmatic acknowledgment came last year from the former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi. In a quietly blistering report, Mr. Draghi — widely credited for saving the euro after the financial crisis — enumerated the woes of the European economy, from lack of so-called competitiveness to lagging productivity. Yet many of the remedies in circulation today are likely to aggravate the disease they purport to cure. The far right offers a familiar prescription: a racial cordon around the continent. Europe’s center, in turn, vaguely gestures at a strategy of renewal through remilitarization and technological advances. The left, for its part, either rails against European overreach or welcomes the continent’s retreat. What is needed is a new “politics of decline,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Eric Hobsbawm, one that looks both inward and outward. Internally, it requires a break with the austerity fetish that has gripped European policymakers since the 1990s. It is with good reason that the economic historian Adam Tooze has castigated E.U. technocrats as “the Taliban of neoliberalism” for their intransigent attachment to market principles in an age that has declared them obsolete. Jettisoning this dogma is crucial; loosening the fiscal rules for member states would facilitate economic catch-up, on the back of a serious strategy of public investment. On the political front, that would mean conscious centralization and pooling of sovereignty... If Europe is to reinvent itself, it must think in more heterodox ways. Mostly, it will have to contemplate something considered beyond the pale in Brussels: critical integration with China... No longer in the driver’s seat of history, it can shed its damaging delusions of grandeur. On geopolitics and climate mitigation, it can meet its targets even if it no longer gets to be the star player. That will require downsizing some expectations: The aim should be what British soccer fans call midtable stability, rather than league leadership."
When you can't deny decline anymore, the next cope is to embrace and celebrate it instead of striving for excellence and double down on disastrous left wing policies
Meme - Hannah Cox: "Anti-capitalists think they're virtuous but at the end of the day they actually just want a slave class working for them for free."
Kostas Moros @MorosKostas: "Then go make art and be in your garden. Nobody is stopping you. If you say "but then how will I pay rent and eat!", then your actual complaint is you want stuff to be handed to you for free. Which means *others* have to work to provide for you, and not make art or be in gardens."
BIG ttIMI @OrevaZSN: "I just really, really hate the concept of capitalism. I don't want to work my job every day. I want to make art. I want to be in my garden. I want to feel something."
Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "Yeah sorry, coming more and more to believe that abundance as a left- wing project isn't going to work. At best it'll make things better on the margins in a few policy areas like housing. But unless you're willing to go to war with organized labor, this will keep happening."
Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi: "Both the democratic frontrunners for governor want to kill more people by reversing the autonomous vehicle rules that the CA DMV already approved"
Xavier Becerra @XavierBecerra: "Let's be clear: When it comes to automation, jobs and safety come first. Trucks still need drivers. Driverless trucks - the heaviest vehicles on our roads and highways - must take a backseat to jobs and safety."
POLITICO: "California politics could cause a reversal on autonomous trucks"
Left wingers are luddites after all
Clay Travis on X - "Here’s Mayor Pete announcing the Biden administration’s decision to fight the Jet Blue and Spirit merger so they could protect consumers and ensure low fares. Now the airline doesn’t exist and passengers are stranded across the country."
Ian Miller on X - "It really is remarkable how awful the Biden administration was. A mixture of spectacular incompetence, malicious disregard for common sense, and political extremism It flies under the radar because Biden was mentally gone, but the whole thing was a massive trainwreck"
Robert Sterling on X - "Joe Biden killed Spirit Airlines. And anti-business, anti-market politicians like Elizabeth Warren celebrated as he did so. Spirit has been in financial distress for years. Its ultra low-cost operating model simply no longer works. Back in 2022, though, JetBlue offered Spirit a lifeline. JetBlue bid to acquire the struggling airline for $3.8B, and Spirit’s shareholders accepted the deal. The Spirit brand would have been retired, and the interior of the jets would have been somewhat reconfigured (more premium seats, more legroom, no more inserting a quarter to use the lavatory, etc.). The core of what made Spirit “Spirit”—good, bad, and ugly alike—would have changed. But the majority of flight routes would have been preserved, and most Spirit employees would have kept their jobs. Given the sizable challenges to Spirit’s business model—as well as the company’s weak balance sheet—it was the best outcome any of its stakeholders could have hoped for. But that wasn’t good enough for the Biden administration, nor for politicians like Senator Warren (who has never seen a dollar of shareholder value she didn’t wish to tax, regulate, or otherwise strangle out of existence). In 2023, the Biden DOJ sued to block the deal. In January 2024, a judge ruled in the DOJ’s favor, and the deal was dead by March. By November 2024, Spirit was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy; after emerging with a restructured balance sheet in early 2025, it would file for Chapter 11 again—a rare “double dip” bankruptcy process—less than a year later, in August 2025. And now, possibly as early as this weekend, Spirit will enter liquidation. Its planes will be parceled out to the highest bidders, where they will likely fly completely different routes across the US. Its pilots will land safely on their feet (though they, too, may have to relocate their families to new home bases), as will some flight attendants. Most mechanics and other ground crew are probably out of luck—and jobs. The Biden administration’s lawsuit against JetBlue all but guaranteed this. And the worst part is, anyone could have predicted it (in fact, countless people across the aviation and finance worlds did just that). When the DOJ or FTC sues to block an M&A deal, it typically does so by arguing the post-transaction market will be too concentrated (you’ll hear something called the Herfindahl-Hirschman index referenced to argue this; and don’t worry, the rest of us can’t pronounce it either). But this was not the argument the Biden DOJ made. The DOJ instead argued that Spirit, as an independent company, charged so little that it created a disproportionate downward pricing effect that affected the rest of the airline industry. In other words, Spirit was so cheap that it couldn’t be allowed to be acquired by a competitor, lest the entire airline industry be able to raise prices. It’s analogous to saying the dirty Arby’s in my town can’t shut down, or else the steak house across the city might be able to charge more. But here’s the thing: Those disproportionately downward prices meant Spirit wasn’t viable as a business. Unlike legacy carriers such as United—which now generate a large share of profit from premium seats—Spirit does not offer premium seats with which it can subsidize its lower-cost fares. ALL of Spirit’s fares are ultra low-cost tickets, with ultra low margins for the company. And now, the company is about to die. So way to go, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Lina Khan and all the rest of you who—despite barely having held private-sector jobs, let alone built companies or been responsible for payroll—know what a business should do better than its shareholders, board of directors, executives, employees, investment bankers, and lawyers. Job well done. I hope you’re proud."
Jeremy Carl on X - "Best short explanation I've seen of how the Biden admin (and Elizabeth Warren) killed Spirit Airlines. I think the most notable thing is the incredibly unusual justification they used to kill the JetBlue merger. They essentially said not that it would have created unaccountable monopoly power (which it clearly would not have) that it would have created upward pricing pressure to let the merger go through-- which is true after a fashion, because Spirit's low fare business model was selling dollar bills for ten cents-- It didn't work anymore as a business. So prices were going to be going up in any event. But if, like Elizabeth Warren and the Dems, you've never run a buisness, this sort of fact eluded you. Now strict honesty compells me to say that you would have had *some* of today's outcome even with the merger-- some routes would have gone away, prices would have gone up to what was needed to make the routes profitable, etc.-- but it would have been done in a much more controlled way that would have been FAR better for both flyers and Spirit's 14,000 employees, many fewer of whom would have lost their jobs."
Don Keith on X - "🚨Stacey Abrams has some explaining to do. Her NGO snagged $2 billion in taxpayer cash for eco-friendly refrigerators in Georgia. Only 67 people actually received one! She bragged about it on TV anyway. Massive fraud in plain sight and still zero arrests."
Jason Robertson on X - "Sadly, this program is a prime example of exactly how all of these programs are designed to work. The $2 Billion was never intended to buy refrigerators. It was intended to fund an NGO and pay a bunch of leftists salaries. It was also intended to spend advertising money on media outlets and other leftist platforms promoting the platform. All of those people then are expected to vote for and donate to the leftist politicians. Honestly the part that that should surprise us is that they accidentally figured out how to buy 67 Fridges, that part had to be an accident"
Polymarket on X - "NEW: The EU is pushing for “tech sovereignty” to reduce its reliance on the U.S."
Melissa Chen on X - "Wake up, Europe. You have exactly two choices: America’s tech stack or China’s. You cannot build your own. You cannot complete anything at scale. All you do is pass legislation, issue fines, write stern letters of concern, and hold press conferences about “digital sovereignty” while your cloud infrastructure, AI models, semiconductors, and platforms remain overwhelmingly dependent on foreign technology. Pretending you’ll magically “build European champions” by taxing, fining, and hamstringing the only people who actually ship product at global scale is delusional. Decades of evidence prove it. Brain drain continues. Investment gaps widen. We know what the data says: Europe lags behind in AI, cloud, semiconductors, and consumer platforms because of the regulatory moat you build and maintain around mediocrity. So you can push for sovereignty but it will not materialize because you’re unwilling to do what it takes to get there."
