I'm old enough to remember a war on sugar in the 70s. My mom took us off of Lucky Charms/Fruit Loops for breakfast and starting making her own granola circa 1974. She was reading/hearing lots of stuff about the dangers of sugar in the diet.
Global economy. You cannot shift the consumption blame onto the country producing the good for another. The pollution in China created to make phones for Americans is part of the same transaction.
It's like when the US used to ship our plastic waste to China, and China stopped accepting it. China only had a plastics pollution problem because it was a cheap buck to sweep an American problem under a Chinese rug.
That's technically still true according to the tax laws here, but Trump raised the standard deduction during his first term in office so where I previously took an itemized deduction and claimed my mortgage interest from my taxable income, it's now more beneficial for my (basic) tax situation to claim the standard deduction. I appreciate the simplicity, but I'm no longer getting a tax benefit for home ownership.
I own a modest house that I bought close to 20 years ago before the standard deduction changes. The first year the calculated tax savings from itemizing was a whopping $800. This went down every year and at year 7-8 it no longer made sense to itemize. Interest rates are higher now but the standard deduction is way higher now as well. This strikes me as something that was a big deal in the very high interest rate 80s and has then been parroted as a huge benefit for decades after is largely ceased being true.
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