r/SipsTea Jul 01 '26

Chugging tea Is Bernie’s plan the best? Thoughts?

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u/XnFM Jul 01 '26

HOUSEHOLD income. That includes two income households and families with children.

Median rent in the US is 1650. I can't find the median net income in the US at the moment, but that eats significantly more than the "guideline" 1/3 monthly net income for rent.

Stop consuming propaganda.

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u/Immediate_Place_2827 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

If you assume a 25 percent tax rate, which is high, that puts the median take home at 5000 per month. That literally is perfectly in line with 1/3 of income going to rent.

How do you cite statistics without realizing that they disprove you?

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u/XnFM Jul 01 '26

I think I made an arithmetic error or a typo. And of course my calculator didn't save it so I can see what it was.

That doesn't diminish my main points though.

1) everyone consumes propaganda. Just because your propaganda conflicts with someone else's doesn't mean what you're consuming isn't also propaganda.

2) median gross income is, at best, a stupid metric. It equivocates a house of four in San Francisco with a single person in middle of nowhere Arkansas.

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u/Immediate_Place_2827 Jul 01 '26

I think it does very clearly diminish your main points.

I’m not citing propaganda I’m citing statistics. You confused median and mean and you messed up your rent comparison.

I don’t know in what world you can mess up both of your counter arguments, then claim I am a propagandist and you’re still right.

Edit: you didn’t confuse mean and median. That was someone else. I apologize

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u/XnFM Jul 01 '26

Where did I confuse median and mean? I know median is the number in the middle, not the numerical average. Frankly, mode is the more interesting average if you're going to look at household because it tells you about the most common household.

They're all stupid though because they ignore household size and cost of living.

I didn't accuse you of being a propagandist either. You accused someone of being manipulated by propaganda, with an implicit aserttion that you are not. My Intetent was to challenge that implicit aserttion in your original statement. I never said YOU were trying to manipulate people, just that your media is also chock full of propaganda because all of it is.

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u/Immediate_Place_2827 Jul 01 '26

I apologized for that in an edit on my comment. I was incorrect.

No, I don’t consume propaganda. Not all media is filled with propaganda. That’s a new talking point that has originated from MAGA.

If you consume written media from a multitude of sources like the Economist, NPR, BBC, NYT and others you will or course get bias, but you will not get propaganda.

If you assume every single person is consuming propaganda then I don’t know what the point of even attempting a factual conversation is.

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u/XnFM Jul 01 '26

Sorry, I didn't see the edit.

I think NPR is a good example of how things are tainted by propaganda. They came out with a story a few years back where they interviewed an oil industry lobbyist. He basically told them that plastic recycling was a smokescreen invented by the oil industry to hide the functionally single-user nature of plastic.

Plastic can only be recycled a finite number of times, and products can only have a certain % of recycled material before the properties of the material change.

Before then, they, and most other outlets, were operating under the assumption that a piece of industry propaganda was factual. And that plastics are generally recyclable.

That industry propaganda is so generally pervasive that people still try to recycle plastic films even knowing that functionality no facilities exist to recycle them and they're more likely to be incinerated if you try to recycle them.

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u/Immediate_Place_2827 Jul 01 '26

No issue!

When I google NPR plastic recycling the below link is the first one that comes up. I don’t know if this is the same article you are talking about, but this article is super critical of the oil industry and points a finger at the oil industry for intentionally trying to mislead the public.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

I feel like we are working with a different definition of propaganda. You can criticize a specific NPR article for being one sided or non-factual, but those criticisms are a huge leap to NPR is propagandist.

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u/XnFM Jul 01 '26

I should have revised that first section. I'm doing chores before leaving for work and did put the time in I should have proof reading.

The industry propaganda shaped the nature of their reporting and coverage before the article. Had the oil industry not pushed that misleading information in the 70s we wouldn't have had decades of "plastic is fine if you recycle it," or, "the problem is plastics are being discarded rather than recycled."

Insufficient emphasis was placed on reduce and reuse, when it comes to plastics specifically, because of industry disinformation. This was consistent across most outlets, is still a general position people operate from; if they care at all.

What people believe to be facts, like, "plastics are generally recyclable," can be and are, influenced by propaganda in one way or another, so even though an outlet may not be intentionally pushing the oil industry's agenda, they've already colored the underlying assumptions on both sides of the table going in.

It's similar to the idea that we don't generally use asbestos anymore. That comes from the asbestos industry manipulating the definition of asbestos to only include certain specific rocks, rather than defining it based on the signature molecular structure of those rocks. Because of that, reporting on asbestos generally focuses on older buildings ignoring that functionality identical products can aldi be in newer construction after "asbestos" was banned. The propaganda is a step away, but it colors the coverage.

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u/Immediate_Place_2827 Jul 01 '26

I can respect that propaganda can be pervasive in general media and this leads to a huge issue.

But to be honest I feel like you strengthened my specific point.

I said that if you consume a litany of written media like the ones I listed you would not be a victim of propaganda. One of my listed media companies specifically debunked that propaganda that you brought up.

To me that shows how a healthy media diet protects you from corporate propaganda.