Or, you could address the lack of confidence that third world nations are capable of benevolent self government.
Capital gains is also income.
If its unrecognized then it’s not taxable yet.
Is that from January 1 to today? Because the S&P is only up like 8% this year.
A capitated tax has never made sense. We have had a graduated tax system ever since we’ve had an income tax. The concept is based on marginal utility. $1 for you means less to you than a dollar from someone making minimum wage.
Yes it is a complex issue. So are all the other issues you seem to be able to dismiss so easily.
We no longer have welfare in this country as you may have understood it. The welfare reform act basically limited what you may think of as welfare to 60 months during a lifetime.
In bankruptcy, restructuring requires everyone’s consent. And the way they get that consent is in part with the threat of debt erasure. Why does the debtor get to hold debt relief over the heads of his lenders? He made those decisions. Why shouldn’t he carry that debt into his grave. Some places his children inherits that debt and may ride it into their grave.
We live in a society and part of the social contract is that we create safety nets so that people don’t fall into the abyss. We create regulations so that people don’t take advantage of those safety nets and in the bankruptcy context to prevent people from taking risks they shouldn’t.
I think that anyone that takes extreme or absolute positions are bound to be wrong more often than they are right. It leads to inflexible thinking.
I see this sort of thinking on both sides. Two sides of the same coin, Extremists on both sides thinking they’re the only ones that they understand the world when all they understand is a dogma and ideology.
It’s a very paternalistic attitude. It’s the same sort attitude that led to ideas like “white man’s burden” You see it these days with woke white progressives. Back then it was used to rationalize colonialism and today it is wash their hands of past sins by creating newer (hopefully smaller) ones. All they’re doing is swallowing a spider to catch the fly.
Areyouwrong.
It has nothing to do with race, and a whole lot to do with the fact that many of these governments were intentionally set up to fail by colonial powers following WW2 during decolonialization; others are the governments which were set up following a revolution that overthrew such an intentionally failed government. Neither of these paths is a recipe for success.
But that strays from the topic here once again. Though I think it certainly does help me understand your mindset.
My lack of confidence isn’t with the people, it is with the government currently in charge. And of course I have no confidence in a third world nation’s government - if the government was competent, it wouldn’t be a third world nation. There are plenty of countries that aren’t “third world” at all that are full of brown people, so again, this has nothing to do with race and everything to do with history.
Check out the Portuguese approach to combatting heroin addiction. In reality handing out needles reduced the number of addicts. The complete de-criminalization allowed addicts to seek help. It was more humane, more cost effective.
Helping addicts with free needles has been shown in virtually every instance to be beneficial. The WHO concluded way back in 2004 that it did not increase the number of addicts.
But in the conservative mind it doesn’t punish the addict so it must be wrong.
Conservatives don’t want the results: Conservatives want “other” people to be punished and justify this with arguments from the university of “it is obvious” backed by research from the “Rush told me”- institute.
They are filthy drug addicts, I am dependant on prescription pharmaceuticals, also from the “Rush told me” institute.
That they both buy their ‘high’ from the same source is irrelevant.
Are you unclear on the definition of “undermine”? “Lessen the effectiveness, power, or ability of, especially gradually or insidiously.”
Take the recent election for example. Biden won by 7 million popular votes and 64 Electoral votes. Instead of conceding like every President has done once they election results became apparent, Trump continues to spread misinformation and baseless claims about “election fraud” and “vote tampering”. The intent is to create seeds of doubt that the electoral system works.
Trumps MO is to delegitimize any organization or individual who he doesn’t agree with or sees as a threat. That’s not my “opinion”. That’s public record of things Trump says and does.
In Conservative’s minds, the WHO is a corrupt Chinese puppet.
That…kind of sounds like a nicer way to say “screw you jack, I got mine”.
The truths you may have experienced are not universal and don’t necessarily scale to national policy.
Look, I went to business school and spent almost 20 years working in Manhattan at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. I’m not some hippy-dippy socialist and I fully understand the concepts of unintended consequences and moral hazard. As a general rule, sure, I believe that hard work and free markets are the way to go. But I also recognize that there are a lot of people who work very hard (or want to) and are simply unable to find work, meaningful or otherwise due to circumstances they can’t control.
I also believe that when conservatives experience these things it causes them to lose their mind. Unemployment is for drug addicts and lazy welfare cases. Not hard-working people with Christian values. So in their mind, there must be some external cause, undermining the system.
I mean…aside from the obvious one of Wall Street bankers and CEOs.
In Argentina almost all the people are lily white and they are falling behind thanks to corruption and tin pot dictators like in several other nations in South America. Argentina was considered to be well developed in the past, but nowadays it has fallen a lot. One big reason? Lack of more economical fairness and thinking that autocracy is the beesnees.
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To be fair, they are still among the highest development among South American nations (but they could be better if it wasn’t for the unfairness the leaders in the 20th century decided to reach for), but the point is that no, a worldview that points out at dictatorships and unfairness as not being conductive to good development has little to do with that view being a racist one.
The thing I noticed is that when addressing the apparent lack of confidence you give to liberals about third world nations not capable of benevolent self government, the reality is that history has shown that the conservatives do not like it when liberals explain the reasons. So many times it happens that those explanations are just ignored or forgotten.
This is the problem I have with conservatives. I studied Economics. I understand the free market. I understand when it works and when it doesn’t. But you have to understand a few things that conservatives just don’t.
On paper, the free market provides optimal outcomes. But it makes a host of assumptions that aren’t true in the real world - not even close. For example:
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Perfect information and rationality by both consumers and producers (IE, I look at a candy bar and know exactly how much it will improve my life, measured in Utils- an arbitrary unit we made up to talk about decision making in a quantitative way). Branding and advertising doesn’t work because I can tell at a glance exactly how much happier a coca cola would make me over a supermarket brand coke.
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No barriers to entry. So if I think Ford isn’t serving their customers well, I can start up a new car company tomorrow, and if making cars is no longer profitable I can shut off production at an instant.
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Perfect competition. All products are equally available to all customers at all times.
And a bunch more.
Now, we can change up our models to account for these things, but once we do, something very interesting happens: THE FREE MARKET NO LONGER ARRIVES AT OPTIMAL OUTCOMES THAT MAXIMIZE UTILS FOR ALL CONSUMERS AND PRODUCERS.
The second we break any of those assumptions, equilibrium is NO LONGER OPTIMAL. Instead, the market settles somewhere else - under most alternate models, with some form of monopoly or oligopaly maximizing their own “utils” to the detriment of everyone else.
The way around this is to institute policies. For example, in real life perfect information is a laughable idea. Economically, if you could cut costs by making your burgers out of rat meat while maintaining the same profit by keeping it a secret, you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD! So we create an agency like the FDA, whose job it is to ensure that when you buy a “100% Beef Burger”, you can trust that this is true. Not perfect information, but the economic model behaves more like one that assumes perfect information would.
Ignoring this is how you end up with ideas like “supply side economics” and “deregulation” being automatically good for the economy. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a breaking point where increased taxation WOULD hurt the economy, or where regulation really would stiffle growth. But claiming that ALL regulations stiffle growth ignores the fact that without regulations the economy would completely break down, because NONE of the assumptions these free market models make would be REMOTELY true.
And that’s why Somalia is a libertarian Utopia.
If anyone’s tired of hearing me beat this drum, I apologize, but I think the difference can really be distilled to conservative thought being a vicious circle of bad intellectual habits and the authoritarian mindset.
By “authoritarian mindset” I don’t automatically mean people goose-stepping around agitating for a totalitarian dictatorship. In fact they think they’re very much against that. But they do want a friendly familiar face on top of the hierarchy, telling them and everyone else what’s the best thing to do and think. They want the big daddy to tell them they’re good, punish the bad people, and take away the troubling complexities of modern life.
I freely admit I would find that more easier and comforting than trying to work it all out myself. But I’m not wired like that (except when it comes to Amazon reviews).
They’re so intensely wedded to that authoritarian mindset… indeed, completely oblivious that there might be other ways to think and learn… that they develop some really bad habits of thought to defend and justify it. Mostly it’s just routine logical fallacies… whataboutism, black-and-white thinking, slippery slope… but the big daddy of corrupt thinking is conspiracy theorism. Here again I don’t mean the popular conception of seeing spies behind every bush. I mean that when they encounter something that contradicts their worldview, it’s not evidence of new information, it’s evidence that the coverup goes deeper than they thought.
Of course these intellectual faults feed other character faults… racism, xenophobia, greed, paranoia, anti-intellectualism. But it’s not 100% clear to me whether these are the cause or the effect of the bad intellectual habits. The whole thing might be an endless self-perpetuating ball of string.
Anyhoo. OP asks for our 2 cents, so there’s mine.
Right? The problem with the governments of developing nations in, say, Central America have nothing to do with the fact that those governments rule over brown people, and everything to do with the way that having your democratically elected government overthrown by the CIA to ensure that the Dole Company would stay profitable would tend to shake the national faith in democratic institutions.
One short TED-Ed video that looks at that usually forgotten history:
In December 1910, the exiled former leader Manuel Bonilla boarded a borrowed yacht and set sail for Honduras in hopes of reclaiming power by whatever means necessary. Bonilla had a powerful backer: the notorious organization known throughout Latin America as “El Pulpo.” It was a U.S. corporation trafficking in, of all things, bananas. John Soluri investigates the United Fruit Company.
I wonder how someone could interpret “Governments in developing countries aren’t currently capable of supporting their citizens to the same extent as the United States” (in response to the question, “why don’t you hold the developing world to the same standard as the US”) to mean “because them brown people can’t run a functional government!” as opposed to the much more logical and historically accurate “because of the history of those governments, much of which is the legacy of colonial history”.
I think it says a lot more about that person’s view of said “brown people” then anything else.
I think that’s mostly consistent with my experience with conservatives. Or maybe a better way of putting it is that conservatives believe there is a “way” things should be done. An “order” if you will. Which is not necessarily a bad thing in moderation. On some level, I think most people want to have at least some level of certainty that studying hard, following the rules, working hard at your job, being a good husband/wife/parent, will generally produce positive results. And I think the world now is changing so rapidly that it can be extremely unsettling for many people. You have kids dropping out of college to become millionaires/billionaires. Entire industries changing or disappearing almost overnight (even before COVID). The career my kids eventually pick probably hasn’t been invented yet (unless my 3yr old daughter sticks with “mermaid princess” and my 6 yr old son sticks with “NY Waterway ferryboat captain”) Going to your favorite restaurant or store and half the staff looks “different” and doesn’t speak English (assuming it hasn’t been replaced with some nuevo pan-Asian fusion place). Dudes marrying other dudes. The girl from Juno is now suddenly a dude.
it can be very confusing.
Do you think wealthy people are able to buy themselves out of consequences in a way that less wealthy people are not?
Do you think that children born to wealthy families have to “work hard?”
Would you support a wealth tax so that people like the Kardashians can’t be born into wealth and not have to contribute to society?