On October 03 2012 05:19 Velr wrote: So... We got people with jobs in a country that need goverment support. This means, despite working, they don't earn enough --> Goverment jumps in to pay the diffrence.
So... Whats the problem here.. let me think.. Oh, it's: "People with jobs not making enough money to live from it".
Sooo.. Either you have to pay them decently for their work or you have to support them via goverment (taxes)... Or let them starve or just somehow get rid of them. You want less goverment support/involvement, so assure that they get paid enough to live from their work (so they pay taxes that then can go into education so future generations get higher paid work... .... ).
You are really reinforcing my point about people being unable to see beyond their own biased perspective. Especially when you throw out absurd either/or fallacies, such as, "either we increase public support, or we let people starve to death." Those are not the options, I could offer plenty of other possibilities.
Also you are assuming everyone who needs support are people who have jobs and just aren't making enough to "survive." Let me at least offer a little anecdotal evidence here to the contrary. I have a relative right now who doesn't work. She doesn't work, because she CHOOSES not to work. She is not on the verge of starvation, in fact she is overweight. The government gives her subsidized housing, food stamps, unemployment, WIC, and who knows what other benefits. She actually lives in a better home and drives a nicer car than my wife and I who work. She's been in this state for years, and will continue to be, because she has no incentive to change. If the government suddenly pulled her support, sure, she would have a hard time. But that's because the system has created dependence that wouldn't exist in the absence of the support.
Now somewhere between your extreme and the extreme I offered, there is a point that comes pretty close to "common sense" good governing.
yeah you have a biases as well my friend, you have this slant for the conservative view and think that his liberal slant is much worse then it is. We all have a bias because we all like to hear ideas that we agree with, calling someone out on theirs while not admitting you have your own really undermines your argument.
while i really doubt your story is true at all (even if it was, this women is breaking the law, you can not get rich off government support legally)
i do agree with you that somewhere in the center is the right way to govern the country. We need a way to support those in need while preventing fraud. We need a way to give people choices while not infringing on others. We need to have a real talk in this nation about where we are going
(i hope its to the left :p)
Just because I'm offering the right perspective does not mean I am advocating it. I'm trying to offer opposing points since people tend to ignore their existence with so many of their arguments. If the majority on TL was right wing, my arguments would become very liberal, I assure you that. I rarely state my own views, people simply extrapolate them based on who and how I argue against others.
As far your other point, I think everyone agrees on that. Everyone agrees that we need to support those in need. The problem is that everyone has a different definition of need. Let me again offer a right perspective of need since you come from a liberal perspective. If a person has shelter, food, clothing, and access to an education and emergency medical care, then their needs are effectively met. Whatever goes beyond that is using the violence of government to increase comforts at the expense of other people. Programs such as Social Security, which do not take into account a person's economic need at all, are programs which progressives should oppose in their current incarnation, since they are effectively regressive by transferring wealth from those who are in a lower class to a higher. Typically a person's class and financial well-being rises as they get older, causing the young and less well off to subsidize those who are older and more likely to have reached financial security. This is an example of a government program supported by liberals which ignores need and simply serves to benefit one group at the expense of another.
Social Security is a bad example. Before it was introduced half of all senior citizens rotted in poverty. As much as Social Security may need reform, that is just a bad example with flawed reasoning.
Edit: 2000 posts. Let me take this moment to just say I love you all regardless of ideology and regardless of how you make me want to grab your genitals and push them straight up past your gut and out of your nostril at times!
I don't quite see how it is a bad example. We are living in the present, not the past. In either case, how about another example.
Subsidies for higher education. Milton Friedman can say it better than I can.
What farvacola said. It's funny how you say we're living in the present, not the past, then link to a speech of Milton Friedman's that took place decades ago. Granted our higher education system is still not perfect, but it's far better than what it was during those days.
And I still do believe Social Security is a bad example even today. The whole 'old people are likely to have reached financial security' is a pipe dream at best in our current economic climate.
On October 03 2012 03:07 JonnyBNoHo wrote: The US used to have a big crime problem. Watch movies from the 80's / early 90's
Much of this has to do with sweeping neoliberal reforms and the gutting of social programs. cf David Harvey _A Brief History of Neoliberalism_. In particular, the bankruptcy of new york city and imposition of austerity by IMF, after which a huge crime wave swept the city (and was cracked down upon by Giuliani, whose consultancy firm went on to do a similar thing after similar reforms in Pinochet's Chile)
Could you give some examples? I really don't see the period between 1960 and 1990 that way.
Suoma is saying higher education is better these days. Farvacola is saying it is worse. I had a response coming but now I realize it's hopeless to try.
On October 03 2012 05:19 Velr wrote: So... We got people with jobs in a country that need goverment support. This means, despite working, they don't earn enough --> Goverment jumps in to pay the diffrence.
So... Whats the problem here.. let me think.. Oh, it's: "People with jobs not making enough money to live from it".
Sooo.. Either you have to pay them decently for their work or you have to support them via goverment (taxes)... Or let them starve or just somehow get rid of them. You want less goverment support/involvement, so assure that they get paid enough to live from their work (so they pay taxes that then can go into education so future generations get higher paid work... .... ).
You are really reinforcing my point about people being unable to see beyond their own biased perspective. Especially when you throw out absurd either/or fallacies, such as, "either we increase public support, or we let people starve to death." Those are not the options, I could offer plenty of other possibilities.
Also you are assuming everyone who needs support are people who have jobs and just aren't making enough to "survive." Let me at least offer a little anecdotal evidence here to the contrary. I have a relative right now who doesn't work. She doesn't work, because she CHOOSES not to work. She is not on the verge of starvation, in fact she is overweight. The government gives her subsidized housing, food stamps, unemployment, WIC, and who knows what other benefits. She actually lives in a better home and drives a nicer car than my wife and I who work. She's been in this state for years, and will continue to be, because she has no incentive to change. If the government suddenly pulled her support, sure, she would have a hard time. But that's because the system has created dependence that wouldn't exist in the absence of the support.
Now somewhere between your extreme and the extreme I offered, there is a point that comes pretty close to "common sense" good governing.
yeah you have a biases as well my friend, you have this slant for the conservative view and think that his liberal slant is much worse then it is. We all have a bias because we all like to hear ideas that we agree with, calling someone out on theirs while not admitting you have your own really undermines your argument.
while i really doubt your story is true at all (even if it was, this women is breaking the law, you can not get rich off government support legally)
i do agree with you that somewhere in the center is the right way to govern the country. We need a way to support those in need while preventing fraud. We need a way to give people choices while not infringing on others. We need to have a real talk in this nation about where we are going
(i hope its to the left :p)
Just because I'm offering the right perspective does not mean I am advocating it. I'm trying to offer opposing points since people tend to ignore their existence with so many of their arguments. If the majority on TL was right wing, my arguments would become very liberal, I assure you that. I rarely state my own views, people simply extrapolate them based on who and how I argue against others.
As far your other point, I think everyone agrees on that. Everyone agrees that we need to support those in need. The problem is that everyone has a different definition of need. Let me again offer a right perspective of need since you come from a liberal perspective. If a person has shelter, food, clothing, and access to an education and emergency medical care, then their needs are effectively met. Whatever goes beyond that is using the violence of government to increase comforts at the expense of other people. Programs such as Social Security, which do not take into account a person's economic need at all, are programs which progressives should oppose in their current incarnation, since they are effectively regressive by transferring wealth from those who are in a lower class to a higher. Typically a person's class and financial well-being rises as they get older, causing the young and less well off to subsidize those who are older and more likely to have reached financial security. This is an example of a government program supported by liberals which ignores need and simply serves to benefit one group at the expense of another.
Social Security is a bad example. Before it was introduced half of all senior citizens rotted in poverty. As much as Social Security may need reform, that is just a bad example with flawed reasoning.
Edit: 2000 posts. Let me take this moment to just say I love you all regardless of ideology and regardless of how you make me want to grab your genitals and push them straight up past your gut and out of your nostril at times!
I don't quite see how it is a bad example. We are living in the present, not the past. In either case, how about another example.
Subsidies for higher education. Milton Friedman can say it better than I can.
I agree so much with you. Really, very true. We live in the present so let's celebrate, quote, and remember the thinkers whose ideas are responsible for how fucked up it is. Thanks for the deregulations, for your awful morally corrupted anti-poor ultra-individualistic moral, for the destruction of welfare state and for the crisis we are going through. Well done Milton. You rock. And say hello to miss Tatcher and the bad western actor who applied your dreadful policies.
It's all good, there are three very good reasons to like my friend Friedman, and they are not even mutually exclusive: either you are a millionaire, either you are really uneducated, either you need to fix something inside your brain.
On October 03 2012 06:50 jdseemoreglass wrote: Suoma is saying higher education is better these days. Farvacola is saying it is worse. I had a response coming but now I realize it's hopeless to try.
Nah, I wasn't suggesting that it is worse, I was merely suggesting that it is different.
On October 03 2012 05:19 Velr wrote: So... We got people with jobs in a country that need goverment support. This means, despite working, they don't earn enough --> Goverment jumps in to pay the diffrence.
So... Whats the problem here.. let me think.. Oh, it's: "People with jobs not making enough money to live from it".
Sooo.. Either you have to pay them decently for their work or you have to support them via goverment (taxes)... Or let them starve or just somehow get rid of them. You want less goverment support/involvement, so assure that they get paid enough to live from their work (so they pay taxes that then can go into education so future generations get higher paid work... .... ).
Ideally people develop the skills / abilities they need to earn a good living. That way low paying jobs and the need for government assistance become irrelevant.
I think about anyone no matter which standpoint he is on agrees with that. The question is what you do with people that don't, which there allways will be.
I see "Bosses" earning millions employing people which can't live of the pay they are given albeit being 100% on the job. I can't for the live of myself come up with a good argument as to why the upper echeolons should swim in money and others need goverment help while working for the same company. I'm not arguing for equal pay, far from it, but the way it is now (not just in the US) is just ridiculous. Then hearing/seeing these same guys, which damn well know how much they pay their lowest employees, bitch about "poor people taking away their money (via goverment)" makes me just angry.
You need to solve that problem with government - not by making businesses pay workers more. First, low wage jobs by themselves aren't a problem. A student working a low wage job on the weekend or during summer for a little spending money isn't a problem for society. The problem arises when someone tries to raise a family on that low wage job. But that's not the fault of the job, and trying to make them pay more will result in a lot of those jobs going away.
CEO pay is really a separate issue. If you pay them less that money won't go to workers, so I'm not sure what the problem is other than that it appears 'unfair' in some businesses.
On October 03 2012 06:50 jdseemoreglass wrote: Suoma is saying higher education is better these days. Farvacola is saying it is worse. I had a response coming but now I realize it's hopeless to try.
It is if we're talking in the same context as the one laid out in Milton Friedman's speech (poor people not utilizing government-subsidized higher education). The biggest crux of Friedman's argument in that speech is him saying university propels those with low-income into the ranks of the higher middle-class. Definitely not true these days.
On October 03 2012 06:50 jdseemoreglass wrote: Suoma is saying higher education is better these days. Farvacola is saying it is worse. I had a response coming but now I realize it's hopeless to try.
It is if we're talking in the same context as the one laid out in Milton Friedman's speech (poor people not utilizing government-subsidized higher education). The biggest crux of Friedman's argument in that speech is him saying university propels those with low-income into the ranks of the higher middle-class. Definitely not true these days.
No, the crux is that the majority of people who go to higher education are not lower class to begin with. And so there are people who aren't going to college who are subsidizing those who are currently wealthier or likely will be wealthier, which makes it regressive taxation. I also think your statement is wrong, education is still quite clearly capable of propelling people to higher classes. Denying this fact is taking the American victimization narrative much too far.
On October 03 2012 03:07 JonnyBNoHo wrote: The US used to have a big crime problem. Watch movies from the 80's / early 90's
Much of this has to do with sweeping neoliberal reforms and the gutting of social programs. cf David Harvey _A Brief History of Neoliberalism_. In particular, the bankruptcy of new york city and imposition of austerity by IMF, after which a huge crime wave swept the city (and was cracked down upon by Giuliani, whose consultancy firm went on to do a similar thing after similar reforms in Pinochet's Chile)
Could you give some examples? I really don't see the period between 1960 and 1990 that way.
(First of, I was wrong - it was Mexico, not Chile that hired Giuliani's firm. Either way. Here's from the Harvey text mentioned above)
"The New York City fiscal crisis was an iconic case. Capitalist restructuring and deindustrialization had for several years been eroding the economic base of the city, and rapid suburbanization had left much of the central city impoverished. The result was explosive social unrest on the part of the marginalized populations during the 1960s, defining what came to be known as 'the urban crisis' (similar problems emerged in many US cities). The expansion of public employment and public provision - facilitated in part by generous federal funding - was seen as the solution. But, faced with fiscal difficulties, President Nixon simply declared the urban crisis over the in early 1970s. While this was news to many city dwellers, it signalled diminished federal aid. As the recession gathered pace, the gap between revenues and outlays in the New York City budget (already large because of profligate borrowing over many years) increased. At first financial institutions were prepared to bridge the gap, but in 1975 a powerful cabal of investment bankers (led by Walter Wriston of Citibank) refused to roll over the debt and pushed the city into technical bankruptcy. The bail-out that followed entailed the construction of new institutions that took over the management of the city budget. They had first claim on city tax revenues in order to first pay off bondholders: whatever was left went for essential services. The effect was to curb the aspirations of the city's powerful municipal unions, to implement wage freezes and cutbacks in public employment and social provision (education, public health, transport services), and to impose user fees (tuition was introduced into the CUNY university system for the first time). The final indignity was the requirement that municipal unions should invest their pension funds in city bonds. Unions then either moderated their demands or faced the prospect of losing their pension funds through city bankruptcy.
This amounted to a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York City... wealth was redistributed to the upper classes in the midst of a fiscal crisis. The New York crisis was, Zevin argues, symptomatic of 'an emerging strategy of disinflation coupled with a regressive redistribution of income, wealth and power'... Watching the progress of events in Chile with approval, [Walter Wriston] strongly advised President Ford to refuse aid to the city... the terms of any bail-out, he said, should be 'so punitive, the overall experience so painful, that no city, no political subdivision would ever be tempted to go down the same road.'
[Discussion of reforming of New York under control of financial institutions]
Working-class and ethnic-immigrant New York was thrust back into the shadows, to be ravaged by racism and a crack cocaine epidemic of epic proportions in the 1980s that left many young people either dead, incarcerated, or homeless, only to be bludgeoned again by the AIDS epidemic that carried over into the 1990s. Redistribution through criminal violence became on the few serious options for the poor, and the authorities responded by criminalizing whole communities of impoverished and marginalized populations. The victims were blamed, and Giuliani was to claim fame by taking revenge on behalf of an increasingly affluent Manhattan bourgeoisie tired of having to confront the effects of such devastation on their own doorsteps.
The management of the New York fiscal crisis pioneered the way for neoliberal practices both domestically under Reagan and internationally through the IMF in the 1980s. It established the principle that in the event of a conflict between the integrity of financial institutions and bondholders' returns, on the one hand, and the well-being of citizens on the other, the former was to be privileged. It emphasized that the role of government was to create a good business climate rather than look to the needs and well-being of the population at large.
[Later, in a discussion of Mexico after receiving a loan from the World Bank on condition of neoliberal reforms]
In Mexico City in 1985 this meant that resources were 'so scarce that expenditures on critical urban services in the capital plummeted 12 per cent on transport, 25 per cent on potable water, 18 per cent on health services, 26 per cent on trash collection.' The crime wave that followed turned Mexico City from one of the more tranquil into one of the most dangerous of all Latin American cities within a decade. This was a rerun, though in many respects more devastating, of what had happened to New York City ten years before. Much later, in a symbolic event, Mexico City awarded a multi-million dollar contract to Giuliani's consultancy organization to teach them how to deal with crime."
So on and so forth. Of course this is in the context of a much longer argument. I highly recommend the book.
On October 03 2012 07:07 jdseemoreglass wrote: subsidizing those who are currently wealthier or likely will be wealthier
Can't conflate them, that's putting the cart before the horse. The argument is circular.
Anyway, the idea that supporting higher education is necessarily regressive is totally facile. Sure, you could structure it so it was, but you could also structure it so it wasn't. I paid full price for my education, but other people at my school didn't, in part due to federal aid. That's how it should be (well, in fact it should be free for everyone, but that's another story)
On October 03 2012 06:50 jdseemoreglass wrote: Suoma is saying higher education is better these days. Farvacola is saying it is worse. I had a response coming but now I realize it's hopeless to try.
It is if we're talking in the same context as the one laid out in Milton Friedman's speech (poor people not utilizing government-subsidized higher education). The biggest crux of Friedman's argument in that speech is him saying university propels those with low-income into the ranks of the higher middle-class. Definitely not true these days.
No, the crux is that the majority of people who go to higher education are not lower class to begin with. And so there are people who aren't going to college who are subsidizing those who are currently wealthier or likely will be wealthier, which makes it regressive taxation. I also think your statement is wrong, education is still quite clearly capable of propelling people to higher classes. Denying this fact is taking the American victimization narrative much too far.
'higher' classes yes, 'higher middle-class' not always unless we're talking about full four-year university + law/medical/some kinda grad school.
Those in the low-income brackets don't pay federal income taxes, so they do not contribute to the subsidies that the Department of Education pays out anyway.
Looks like a video of a prior Obama speech on race is about to released. I tend to think that it is being overhyped, but we will see what is in it soon enough.
Then again, the more details that I see pop up on drudge, the worse the speech looks. For what it is worth, I don't think that this will be anything new to people who have bothered to look closely at Obama's past. However, a lot of people don't know who this guy is.
On October 03 2012 07:33 xDaunt wrote: Looks like a video of a prior Obama speech on race is about to released. I tend to think that it is being overhyped, but we will see what is in it soon enough.
It's Jeremiah Wright. It's "just about to be released"?
No, it was released in 2007. This is the GOP''s response to Romney's private-fundraiser being taped and leaked. So the right-wing "finds" a "new" video about Obama being a reverse whitey-hating racist, even though the video was put on youtube 5 years ago.
Wow, I've never visited drudge before. I can't tell if it's an attempt at minimalism or just very low budget. I laughed when I read "THE ACCENT!" Oh god, no!
On October 03 2012 08:20 xDaunt wrote: Then again, the more details that I see pop up on drudge, the worse the speech looks. For what it is worth, I don't think that this will be anything new to people who have bothered to look closely at Obama's past. However, a lot of people don't know who this guy is.
Are you kidding? This entire election is a running example of confirmation bias and bad populism.
On October 03 2012 08:28 jdseemoreglass wrote: Wow, I've never visited drudge before. I can't tell if it's an attempt at minimalism or just very low budget. I laughed when I read "THE ACCENT!" Oh god, no!
EPT
