Okay, so - let’s say tomorrow, the top 10% of America decide to give away half of their money to whatever. Where do you put that money?
Money does not solve these problems. There are deeply embedded social problems in poor areas that clearly perpetuate the cycle. More school funding doesn’t work. More job programs/welfare/after-school programs/etc., don’t seem to work.
How can we use Richie Rich’s money to get a real return? Make a real difference?
I see no answers to this.
Bravo! Well said! About as succinct a summary of what it means to have an economically just society as I have seen. I’d add that a fair share would also afford the opportunity to start new enterprises because you have the time, the energy and the resources to start one. We would be a much wealthier society BECAUSE everyone had a fair share, instead of this stupid beat-down into poverty that conservatives wrongly believe is somehow good for society. Plus there would be a lot less economic crime.
I would direct your attention to an article in Inc. Magazine about the remarkable success of entrepreneurs in heavily taxed, socialist-oriented Norway, where the average wage is $45,000 and everyone has access to education, health care and food. Somehow, the country has thrived, missing out on all the pain the US and most of the rest of the world has suffered in its Great Recession. We need to be more like Norway and less like the Third World hellholes our conservatives colleagues are working so tirelessly to turn the US into.
Exactly so. The children of the rich and the upper middle class (use to be the middle middle class as well, not so much as the middle class is slowly being ground out of existence by the conservatives) have so many advantages over the children of the poor that it is hard to believe our conservative colleagues would be willing to take a stand on such shaky ground.
Do you think the CEOs of the investment banks invested their own money? How about the traders with their million dollar bonuses? How about people who get VC funding?
I’ll give you work hard - but the guy who works two jobs if he can find them to keep his family from getting tossed out on the street work hard also. I get a lot of money for what I do, and I work hard, but not nearly as hard as the house builder who is making a lot less than I do.
You know, if we were calling for a 95% tax rate that would be one thing, but asking for a 3 - 6% increase is not exactly class warfare. I’d have no trouble paying a bit more. My relative wealth is a result of hard work and good decisions, but also genetics and growing up in an area and in a family with a lot of advantages. Not a rich one by any means. Asking the rich to give a bit more as their fair share to make society work better and to not fire policemen is not the same as telling them “up against the wall.”
Okay fine - where are you spending the money?
I know that just giving poor people money will alleviate many immediate problems, but what evidence is there that redistribution will lead to better outcomes over generations?
And don’t say “education” without some kind of legitimate backup - school funding is a catch-all for these kinds of debates, but the evidence of actual social and economic impact is hard to find.
GAH. Norway is so unlike the U.S. it is not even funny. They have a populationthat is roughly 1/2 of Los Angeles. They have huge amounts of mineral wealth. They are the 116th country in terms of populationand the second largest exporter of natural gas and the sixth largest exporter of oil. They also export electricity.
In other words, they have a small population with large amounts of resources. And cash.
At least try and use an apples to apples comparison.
Slee
Its not that he thats the poor and seeks to oppress them. He is simply feels their suffering is an acceptable price to pay for more economic efficiency. Or to put it inversely, he is not willing to sacrifice a significant amount of economic efficieny to alleviate crushing poverty.
If this results in a dystopian level of wealth disparity, well, I’m sure the market will figure out how to self regulate itself out of that problem as well (if indeed it is even a problem).
Well, right at this moment we are getting our entire house redone, which is keeping one contractor, and sometimes an assistant, busy for quite a while, and is also helping the bottom line of both Home Depot and a locally owned hardware store. But for the most part I’m part of the problem. if someone dumped $10K on me right now, it would go straight to my investments, with little or none going for increased consumption.
During the ‘50s with its high (too high) tax rates the income gap decreased. Let’s put the money into infrastructure. Let’s put the money into not cutting home heating support for the poor. Let’s put the money into schools so teachers don’t have to buy their own supplies and so schools don’t have to scramble to let poor kids go on trips. Let’s put the money into research. And let’s put the money into cutting the freakin’ deficit.
As for school funding, when we moved from NJ with relatively high property taxes to CA with relatively low taxes, we found that our daughter in 8th grade was about a year ahead of her class - not from acceleration, but just because she went an extra period a day in school in NJ, and could take both languages and science at the same time. Don’t tell me that didn’t have an impact on California’s test scores relative to NJ.
I’m not advocating income equality, but I doubt that there is any person in the world who will work a lot harder for $50 million a year versus $40 million.
Okay, cool - now please provide cites that that spending results in a better economic and social outcome.
What do you mean by spending? Clearly, spending of any sort is not guaranteed to improve things. However, I’m sure you will agree that cutting spending in some ways will make things worse - for instance by having badly out of date books.
Do you think there is no connection between education and social outcomes?
Actually, more important perhaps than putting money into schools is putting money into families, to provide at least a minimum standard of living. I’m sure you agree that on average a kid living in the car or in a homeless shelter is not going to do as well in school as a kid in a home. A malnourished kid is not going to do as well as a well-nourished one. All of this is a lot more important than class size, I think.
How is it wrong? I did not make the claim that all the poor work. The claim is that those that do, work harder and for less than those at the top. Forgive me if I don’t find 12 hour days of sitting in various board meetings, traveling to conferences, attending fund-raising dinners, talking calls from their broker and spending an hour with their assistant to dictate a memo is comparable to 6-8 hours flipping burgers then taking the bus to a second part-time job stocking shelves.
And the fund-raising dinners they attend are the spaghetti feeds to help the family down the block who has spent most of their income making sure their kid or the mom can continue cancer treatments.
As for why the percentage of the working poor is lower than other groups, I’ll refer to the next part of your cite:
I can’t help notice the implication in many cases that the poor who don’t work do so because they are lazy and aren’t willing to find work. But that would not be the case in this instance, would it? I also hope that stat you cited was not the only piece of information you digest from that report.
And I am sure their situation has only improved since 1999 when the above data was collected.
[QUOTE=Sateryn76]
And don’t say “education” without some kind of legitimate backup - school funding is a catch-all for these kinds of debates, but the evidence of actual social and economic impact is hard to find.
[/QUOTE]
You simply are not looking hard enough. Countless studies and reports, such as the one Shodan referred to above, have shown the correlation between levels of educational attainment and lifetime earnings, and the correlation between levels of education funding and per capita income. So many that to deny causation is nothing more than willful blindness.
I think furt was being sarcastic. Since you took him seriously, perhaps you can tell me exactly what in my post would increase the suffering of the poor? On the contrary, the things I described are actually barriers that the well-off have put in front of the poor to prevent them from competing. Salon owners don’t want African immigrants undercutting them. Union workers making $80,000/yr don’t want competition from poor people who don’t have jobs. Taxi drivers sitting on half-million dollar medallions don’t want their wealth reduced by expanding the supply of cabs, diminishing the value of their medallions.
I see a big disconnect between old-style liberalism and modern liberalism. Old-style liberals used to be champions of the poorest in society. Modern liberals tend to be champions of big liberal institutions and vested interests, even if that comes at the expense of people living in real poverty.
For example, liberals are fighting tooth and nail to protect the perks of the public unions. But these union jobs take money out of the same pool that is also used to fund programs for the poor. In an era of rising debt and decreasing revenue where there’s clearly not enough money do do everything you want, you’d think that a liberal would choose to reduce the salaries of the highest-paid employees before cutting benefits to the poor and destitute. But that’s not what’s happening.
I would recommend the following video (and short article) to the OP, for more examples of how government intervention strangles the very kind of bottom-up economics he desires.
A splendid example of reactionary bullshit. People like Walker cut taxes for businesses and then give this sort of explanation of why worker wages must be cut, as if revenue was an act of God. Or revenue decreases as the result of a recession started on the Republican’s watch, and it is treated like a spending problem. Our tax rates are historically low, but raising them is considered a worse sin than page diddling. And then people like you present it as if there were only two choices.
I was just taking a jab at you but to respond to what seems like an earnest reaction to that jab, I’d say that a lot depends on the prism through which you see things and the vantage point from which you see them.
You entirely ignore the possibility of increasing tax revenue as an alternative to cutting benefits for the poor without gutting unions.
You point out a few cases of overregulation and cry “see regulations are evil”
The plural of anecdote is bad policy.
If your point is that there are SOME regulations that need to be reduced, then of course I agree. I’m not going to defend EVERY regulation out there but there is also such a thing as too little regulation.
Sorry, he lost all credibility when he claimed progressives were behind such ideas as eugenics and segregation. Eugenics was based on faulty science and had support from all sides of the spectrum until that theory was discredited. Its current proponents are definitely not progressive. And to claim that progressives supported segregation is bullshit. It was progressives that ended it. Did labor unions refuse minorities membership, yep. Did Woodrow Wilson re-segregate the civil service, yep. And that is because racism was rampant and considered the norm long before progressives ever became a political force in this country.
As for his opening statement - that government is stifling entrepreneurship through over-taxation and over-regulation, how does that differ from my OP?
I do agree with those sentiments. But we do need some level of taxation and regulation. It is one thing to advocate for temporary targeted relief, and removal of policies that have been demonstrated not to work. It is another to call for their wholesale cuts leaving only the bare minimum. We had that regulatory system. And it led to the Gilded Age and sowed the seeds for the Great Depression.
And so we created a new regulatory scheme which worked very well throughout the 50’s and 60’s until shocks like the oil crisis and the Vietnam War decimated the macroeconomic conditions that scheme created.
And rather than address those issues, the administrations since, starting with Reagan and including Clinton, gutted those regulations and refused to effectively enforce what was left, especially under Bush Jr.
And am I happy to report that the neoclassical general equilibrium model based on ‘homo economicus’ is dying.
Evolutionary institutional economic theory is showing that markets are not independent entities following ‘basic economic principles’ and only need to be left alone to work, but are susceptible to a variety of influences - behavioral, institutional, and ecological among others. And many of which can be quantified and targeted interventions do work that encourage true economic growth, not just a run from one bubble to the next.
Unfortunately this paradigm shift is only starting to reach mainstream policy makers who still focus on top down solutions. And while the Obama administration appears to support the new paradigm, they have to fight serious and well-funded vested interests in the old paradigm, and that battle is repeated in several other lower jurisdictions.
But bottom up policies from microcredit to Head Start to Hernando Soto’s work on informal economies have shown far more progress at raising living standards than trickle down policies have over the last three decades. Though the current financial crisis, caused by deregulation, is wiping out many of the gains those programs had shown. Going back to top-down incentives or further wholesale deregulation will not bring them back.
And I have little sympathy for the gypsy cab driver who decided to flagrantly disregard the law instead of campaigning to change those laws or use his income to try and become legitimate. He is lucky he only spent a week in jail.
Yet again we come to the basis of your philosophy ‘Do it my way or else…’ even when it hurts the poor.
Serious question. Do you think that the fact a cab medallion goes for $600,000 is a reasonable price to run a cab? If so, how do you reconcile that with ‘we need to give them to people at the bottom to allow them to earn non-wage income and not rely on the labor market.’?
Second, how do you know that the cab driver was not working towards changing the law?
Slee
I didn’t say a word about Walker. We’re talking about regulations that Democrats support but which act to protect the powerful against the poor and weak.
If you want more examples of how modern Democrats are the party of big special interests and not the poor and disadvantaged, let’s go down the list from just the past two years:
The Stimulus Package - The Democrats claim to be following the Keynesian prescription for fixing the economy. Well, Keynes would tell you that money and jobs that go to the unemployed will be a hell of a lot more stimulative than money which goes to the middle and upper classes.
To that end, Republicans tried to get a temporary waiver of the Davis-Bacon act, so that the poor and unemployed could be paid to help with infrastructure projects. Hiring two unemployed workers at $15/hr is a hell of a lot more stimulative than hiring a union worker at $30/hr. Not only that, but the extra supply of labor might have sped up some of the projects.
The Democrats put the kibosh on that, because God forbid they should anger their union bosses and have their funding cut off. This was one instance where the Republicans actually bought the Keynesian argument and made a suggestion that the Democrats themselves should have been suggesting. They had an opportunity to co-opt the issue and force Republicans to either go along or show them to be obstructionist. Instead, they chose to protect union wages.
In addition, a lot of the stimulus money that was supposed to be for new infrastructure wound up being siphoned off by the public employees unions in the form of pay and benefit increases. Again, not very stimulative. Imagine how much better off the Democrats would be right now if the stimulus had been more effective. And it could have been. But that would have meant not caving in to union demands.
Education - Obama seemed to be a genuine education reformer. He was in favor of charter schools, and gave speeches where he actually blamed teacher’s unions for opposing merit pay. Good for him. That is, until he got to Washington and got properly schooled on who a Democrat may not piss off. Then suddenly education reform kind of dropped by the wayside, didn’t it? Instead, the budgets for education were increased. Guess where a lot of that money goes?
Inner-City education is a disaster, and black parents in the inner city generally support charter schools. There is lots of good evidence that charter schools work well. But the charter school program is going nowhere. Education reform has been very slow or almost stagnant for two decades - primarily because of Democrats being opposed to real reform efforts.
This was a perfect opportunity for President Obama to show his bipartisan bona fides - and Republicans were eager to work with him. That could have bought him political capital he could have used in the health care debate to make a better health care plan. But no, mustn’t anger the teacher’s unions. Sorry, kids.
The only proposed merit pay legislation was ‘Reach For The Top’, and that took the form of additional bonuses for teachers - 4 billion worth. Who’s going to oppose 4 billion in bonus money?
Health Care - There were two big opportunities to improve the health care bill and steal some Republican talking points - tort reform, and taxing the ‘gold-plated’ health care plans. No, tort reform wouldn’t have fixed health care by itself like some Republicans claimed, but there was savings to be had there, and pretty much everyone agrees with that. Everyone except the trial lawyers, of course. And we can’t anger them, can we? Bye-bye tort reform.
Then there was the tax on ‘gold-plated’ health care plans. Not only would that have made the health care bill more affordable and avoided the need for odious parts of the bill like the 1099 requirement, but imagine how well that would have played today in these public union battles. They’d be able to claim that they’re already taking it on the chin by having their benefits taxed. Hell, that was even part of the bill at first. But once again, the unions raised the heat, and the Democrats caved and quietly pulled the tax. What a shock.
High Speed Rail - 53 billion dollars for high-speed rail. Guess who doesn’t ride high-speed rail? The poor. Guess who likes high speed rail? The unions. Billions of dollars of government contracts, all of which must (thanks again to the Davis-Bacon Act) be done with union labor. And of course, all the jobs maintaining and running the system will be good union jobs. Expensive union jobs, in a time when there’s not enough money for all the programs you might like to implement for the poor.
How about Van Jones’ ‘green jobs’ initiative? Initially, it was supposed to hire inner city people at minimum wages or close to it to help insulate houses and such. But after a little consultation with lobbyists and criticism from other Democrats, those jobs became “good paying” jobs at prevailing union wages - and it all became so expensive that the whole scheme just kind of faded away.
The fact is, the Democrats are heavily funded by big special interests - the trial lawyers, teachers, the Teamsters and the UAW, the big public unions like SEIU and AFCSME, and Hollywood. Everything they do these days seems to be done for the benefit of those groups. The Democrats are firmly on the side of the big motion picture houses and the record companies in disputes regarding file sharing and copy protection.
I’m not saying Democrats don’t care about the poor, or even that they don’t advocate some programs that help the poor. Just that when the needs of the poor come into conflict with the needs of the Democrats’ big funding sources, the poor lose.
It was succinct, not simplistic. You can only spend so much on your basics, however grandiose those basics are. You don’t buy 10 autos if you only have three or four drivers in your household, what’s the point? (There are exceptions like Jay Leno, but as a practical matter, the rule holds.) You don’t buy a second, third or fourth house unless you are using houses as investment properties. Mostly what you do is, you put any money over and above your living expenses, into investments, because that’s how you STAY rich. Plus it’s painless. You are not denying yourself food, cloth8ing, housing, vacations, or any little toys you want, that’s covered in your living expenses. And the wealth of the wealthy elite is such that their living expenses are a FRACTION of their income. (Note, salaries are typically a small part of a really wealthy person’s income, being so taxable and all.)
Happier now?
Umm, if wealth concentration occurs without government intervention, then government policies that encourage it tends to create very small oligarchies of the wealthy with the vast majority of people relatively poor? In other words, the natural propensity of wealth concentration is to move societies toward third world hellhole conditions, and it takes constant vigilance to keep it from happening and maintain a healthy middle class, which is what you need for a really healthy society and economy?
Of course you don’t GIVE the money away. You set up a social safety net for the poor so they can survive, basic food housing and health care taken care of. Hell if you set up single payer health care for EVERYONE you could save money like all the SENSIBLE countries do.
Plus of course if health care is not tied to employment, businesses are relieved of that expense.
To spur employment, since workers have become SO much more productive of late, instead of letting corporation work one person for 60 hours a week, set the work week to 30 hours a week by law, with harsh penalties for overtime, forcing businesses to greatly increase the number of people they employ. This would eliminate the unemployment problem and also make wages increase, since workers will once again be at a premium. Plus the people who only work 30 hours a week will be have the leisure, and thanks to the higher wages, the money to start side businesses and new businesses, giving them a path for their aspirations cause you know, not everybody likes flipping burgers and changing bedpans.