Taxes in 2122

This is the last AP for our Humanities class, Equality. In this unit, Hxstory, we further dived into the topics of Race, Gender, and Class, except this time, we focused more on the present-day relations of each category and acknowledged how history got us to each of these points. In this unit, we discussed the value of learning accurate history, systemic racism, critical race theory, feminism (how it started and how it's defined now), social class and poverty, income inequality, and the current race, gender, and class relations in the U.S. We watched a couple of Trevor Noah videos on history and CRT, we listened to Talking while Black, talking about a recent racist incident at a high school, we read Bad Feminist, talking about how Feminism is now defined and misunderstood, we watched Roger and Me, which centered around GM factories closing in Flint, and we ended with a couple of crash course videos on Social Class. My favorite part about this unit was learning about the current class status and inequalities in the country because I feel like it says a lot about our society and it also draws race and gender into it. After going in-depth about all of these topics, and learning about how history gets us to where we are and carries us into the future, we were challenged with our project. For this project, we chose a specific event or occurrence that we thought would happen in the next 100 years (by 2122). It could be any prediction of a policy change or status of a certain movement from today (2022) and were to create a 'news' segment on it. For my topic, I chose to imagine the status of the Tax the Rich movement and if there had been any progress. I report on a new piece of legislation that was passed, called the Equitable Tax Act, which focuses on the upper, middle, and lower class each paying their share in taxes. Below, you will see my video and script. Enjoy!

 

Script

March 3rd 2122 

Intro 

Good morning, daily viewers … Today is a very significant day. The date is March 3rd, 2122 … Taxes are due in April. It couldn't be a more perfect time for the Equitably Taxed Act to be passed. After a lengthy 100 years of the Tax the Rich movement, and the near destruction of the lower and middle class, long-awaited action has finally been produced and Axolotl Musk, who you may know, was the first to experience it. 

Body 

Before I quote Axe, let me first give a little context on the legislation, and what we had to go through to get it. Tax the Rich has been a movement for over 100 years. It started, as it says on taxmarch.org, as, “a movement, a rallying cry, and a way of thinking. It's about fixing a fundamentally broken and rigged economy so that it works for all of us…” And then goes on to further explain the history and status of the current economy (a hundred years ago), and so on. Anyways, so throughout this last century or so, there were marches, riots, proposed bills, and countless efforts made by leaders or public figures that were a part of the movement, to introduce and pass actual legislation. And after years and years of trying and trying again and again, an Act finally went through. The Equitably Taxed Act federally ensures that people are taxed based on their income, instead of a fixed percentage, and there is to be more education about taxes, and therefore, fewer loopholes that the upper class primarily is able to take advantage of. The problem that this is going to solve is that in the past, technically the low income and higher-income people were being taxed ‘equally’, however, when you look at the bigger picture … you can see the vast differences in how much each class was paying and how it affected them, separately. To put it into perspective, imagine an upper-class individual, who makes $200,000 a year, and a lower-class individual, who makes $25,000 a year, both have to pay $700 in taxes. While that amount is equal, the effects on either one are heavily unequal. The $700 in the upper-class person’s wallet is barely a dent, but for the lower class individual, that could be almost a full month’s salary. With this new Act, each class will be taxed a percentage based on their income, so no one person pays more than the other - they just pay what they can based on how much they make. A lot of other fundamentals of the Act were also inspired by Axe’s contributions to her grandfather’s business … which I’ll mention shortly. 

The granddaughter of Elon Musk, a renowned billionaire who has found his new home on Mars, was the first to see this act go through. She filed her taxes on March 1st, and she noted that she happily paid significantly more than she had the year before. She then said, “I think my grandfather would be proud if he were still down here - I am thrilled to be a part of such progress and hopefully this will do enough to restructure the lower and middle class. I think it is time that we widely hold the upper class accountable and start to rebuild our nation and economy, hand-in-hand.” 

As you know, Axolotl Musk is a member of the upper class herself, being an heiress to her grandfather’s empire and all, but from a very young age, she has familiarized herself with the suffering of the lower classes in the country. She has been an influential leader in the Tax the Rich movement, and an active participant in her grandfather’s empire - especially dealing with funds. She has always pushed for the money made in the business to be primarily redistributed externally. She created new jobs and opportunities, supported environmental organizations, and donated whatever she could. After all of her hard work and success with the business, congress decided to make these key elements part of the Act as well - there is now the promise of new jobs, environmental stability, and better usage of gov. funds. I think it is safe to say that she is a very crucial figure to the movement and to the passing of this Act. Those who are in favor of it are very happy for her to be one of the leading faces and I am extremely enthusiastic to move on into our future, following this event. I can’t wait to report further on what is yet to come and see our country’s economy be rebuilt and for the American people to feel united and supported. 

End

Well, we’ll see you tomorrow … bright and early at 9am! Start your day Chicago…. Peace out. 

Conclusion 

I hope you enjoyed the small news segment! Overall, I really enjoyed doing this project. I thought it was fun imagining what might happen in the future because it could really be anything I made it to be. It was a little hard to write out the script at first and for me to figure out how to structure the video, but all in all, I am pretty happy about how it all turned out. If I were to do something different, I would have probably added more visuals and pop-up graphics to make it slightly more engaging. However, I am proud of my work and would love to do something like this again. 

Works Cited

“It's Time to Tax the Rich.” Join Us in Asking for a Real Debate on Taxes., 1 Mar. 2022, https://taxmarch.org/.

Can you have a conversation with a computer?

This is our last project for our Coding workshop. In this unit, we really focused on if, elif, and else statements. Through this, we learned how to further give the computer more in-depth instructions. We also learned about Booleans, which are a part of if/elif/else statements and they can be true/false, less/greater than or equal to, etc. They are essential to setting up the result of the rest of the statement. The last thing we learned was (#)comments, and they are basically just notes that you can leave yourself in the code, that the computer won't read. For this project, we were challenged with making code that allowed us to have some sort of 'conversation' with the computer - like a chatbot. Below, you will be able to interact and answer questions, using my code. Enjoy!

I hope you enjoyed that mini conversation! Overall, I really enjoyed making this project. Usually, it takes me a while to construct these but once I had an idea it was just smooth sailing from there. I feel like I've really come to understand and have fun with code and I would love to do something like this again. If I had more time, I might've made the conversation a little longer, but I am happy with how it turned out. Thank you for interacting with my project!