As we told you earlier this morning, Donald Trump Jr. came under fire from the liberal blue-check mob after he joked on Twitter that he was going to take half of his daughter’s candy to teach her a lesson about socialism. ICYMI, here it is again:
I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight & give it to some kid who sat at home. It’s never to early to teach her about socialism. pic.twitter.com/3ie9C0jv2G
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 31, 2017
Clearly a joke, right?
But to the Washington Post, this was a teachable moment of some sort that merited a fact check in a post titled, “Donald Trump Jr. vows to take half of his daughter’s Halloween goodies in a bad lesson on socialism”:
https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/925711942454579200
First, the Post accused the president’ son of getting this joke from Alex Jones (everyone tells this joke!):
As with the Skittles tweet, Trump appears to have cribbed this idea from someone else. Alex Jones’s conspiracy-theory website posted something Monday featuring a video of kids having to turn over their candy in the name of “socialism.” “WATCH: Kids Learn Painful Lesson on Socialism with Their Halloween Candy,” reads the headline.
And then came the fact check where the Post argued that Trump Jr.’s tweet was a “gross oversimplification”:
It’s also a gross oversimplification, to be sure. Socialism is defined by the government controlling the means of production and the distribution of goods and services — not simply by high taxes and the rich sharing their wealth with the poor. In fact, our own system, via the graduated income tax, already leads to the wealthy subsidizing the poor through higher income taxes — and taxes in general.
Someone in the highest income bracket already pays 39.6 percent of their income in federal taxes — if you are counting candy collected as “income” — and in fact, the marginal tax rate for high earners in Trump’s home state of New York is already around 50 percent. So that’s actually about the correct amount of candy for Trump to confiscate, even in our capitalist country.
Well, duh, geniuses. It was a joke in a 140-character tweet, not a college thesis on the economics of socialism and taxation.
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Related:
Guess who dressed up as Donald Trump for Halloween! Bonus outrage over socialism joke https://t.co/pyaTLhcDGO
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) November 1, 2017
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