Fine. Now re-cast that message to appeal to non-conservative voters.
I actually didn’t mean it in that way. I meant it in a way that’s relevant to the discussion at hand - that being a hard-line conservative apologist essentially comes with, or from, an inability to consider nuance. You reduce the world to black and white, you (perhaps not deliberately) turn everyone’s views into straw men to fit within that dichotomy, and you are perhaps even oblivious to the fact that you’re doing this.
His implication that anyone is concerned about the growing systemic disparity in wealth must therefore resent the idea that people who have different jobs make different amounts - implying that we’re all arguing that eveyone should make the same amount - really is, well.. demonstrating an inability to handle nuance.
You’re welcome to say that a particular argument excludes nuance. You can’t say that a poster is unable to conceive of nuances, or that he is child-like.
I’d put this under the same heading as, for example, littering. I don’t think you’ll find any Republicans who oppose fines for littering.
I’m not sure how this matters, really.
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The only important metric is how fast technology is advancing. If, for example, you lived in a socialist nation - where there is no income gap - but technology (electronics, medicine, transportation, etc.) was still largely the same today for the poorest person as it was in 1950, is he really better off than the poorest person who lives in a capitalist, high income gap country and has internet, an iPhone, modern medicine, etc.?
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Say that as the income gap grows, the price gap grows as well. The price of a Honda Civic stays the same, but the price of Ferraris grows equally to the expanding gap; public school stays the same, but private school costs grows with the income gap; the price of cruddy real estate that no one wants stays the same, but the best land in the nation grows with the income gap; etc. Has anything really changed?
The only way to ensure a standard of education is through lots of standardized testing. Lots of standardized testing, however, tends to lead to “teaching to the test”.
Teachers need to have the freedom to teach as they want, focusing on the things they have a personal interest in, and to have the power to bring their students into line - even if that means rapping them across the knuckles, making them stand in the corner in front of everyone, or writing on the whiteboard a hundred times.
Raising the wage of teachers to attract the best is also necessary.
- Force people to sign up to a health insurance plan.
- Not allow insurance agencies to turn anyone away.
- Disallow corporations from making health insurance plans available as a perk to employment (the likely cause of rising costs).
- The amount that you pay for your health insurance plan must be optional. (It can be $0). The amount that you get back (averaged over all people paying the same amount) would be something like 80% of the average health care costs of people of the same age + a percentage of the amount paid in to-date after removing the amount to pay for all non-payers.
- Extend patents on pharmaceuticals to last 50-60 years.
Could you elaborate on why this would reduce costs? It may have other merits in incentivizing the creation of effective drugs, but I must be missing how this relates to reduced costs.
On education, specifically colleges, I would eliminate government-guaranteed loans, or at the least curtail the exposure the government has for default on these loans by making the guarantee a nominal percentage of the total loan. Education loans would still be available from banks, as always. One of the reasons college tuition is increasing at an alarming rate is because there is no risk in raising these rates: the government has guaranteed the repayment of college loans, so the colleges have no real reason to keep their tuition competitive with other schools, in order to attract students. Guaranteed loans have ensured that demand far exceeds supply. (A situation not un-similar to health care 50 years ago or so, I might add.)
As has been pointed out by others, the result of an increasing earnings gap between rich and poor is the disappearance of the middle class. The gap is growing.
For those whose answer to this is essentially “there is no problem”…
At what point does it become a problem, if ever? Is it OK if 1% of the population has 50% of the income and wealth? How about if they have 75%? 90% ? What if the 1% of the population gets 99.9% of the income and have 99.9% of the wealth? Is it a problem then?
Where is the dividing line? How much is too much? I suspect that before it ever got to this state, the wealthy would be swinging from lamp poles.
I explain it more thoroughly in my blog (including cites), but the short of it is that:
- It takes on average about 15-20 years from the point when a new avenue of research is determined to bring the first pharmaceuticals to market which were based on that research.
- Companies get a patent on something before they start to research it. A patent only lasts 20 years.
- Thus, by the time the company which spent all the R&D costs can put something on the market, they have only a short amount of time to recoup their costs before cheaper knock-offs come in to compete.
- The US doesn’t have a government agency which makes a single, wholesale purchase of pharmaceuticals every year. The US also allows the advertising of pharmaceuticals and has the aforementioned issue of raised insurance payouts due to a high insurance payout being a perk of employment. Between these items, the US gets to bear the brunt of financing pharmaceuticals. Other nations can negotiate as a full nation for a lowered price, insurance agencies won’t finance full-price medications, and in some places you can’t advertise drugs as “name brands”.
Overall, drugs are only about 1/10th of the average cost towards healthcare each year, so it wouldn’t be a major savings (though still larger than most things commonly proposed), but it is something that should be done.
Eh? Does step 4 make no sense to anyone else? Why is anyone going to pay a dime if premiums are optional? And what do you mean by “get back”? If you’re hit by a truck while crossing the street and get sent to the ICU, have multiple surgeries, and extensive rehab, all costing a million dollars, who pays and how much?
Health care costs are a huge topic but I wonder if people get wrapped up in insurance too much. Insurance is a risk management tool. Having it doesn’t directly make health care cost less overall. Ultimately if we want health care for everyone, we have to accept health care that people actually want is fairly expensive and the wealthy will subsidize the poor. That’s a tough sell for most conservatives.
I disagree with your premise. It’s not business, but humanity in general that has such a poor record of environmental custodianship. I think limiting your blame and concern on this to “business”. It wasn’t business that nuked the delicate ecosystem of the paradise o the bikini atoll, the pacific, the desert, nor was it business that used slash and burn agriculture in ancient Latin America, depleting the soil. This is not to say that business has any kind of laudable record either.
It’s a human problem. We seem to be getting better, and it is the clear responsibility of the government to oversee and protect our our resources and environment.
I think that income inequality is a real problem. That being said, as a conservative, I subscribe to the LUC. The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Seeing something that we don’t like in the economy and deciding to do something about it without knowing why it is happening and what the cause or the causes are, is a pretty dangerous and foolhardy thing. So, for the time being we do nothing, but attempt to study and discern the reasons this inequality exists and is growing.
Again, I think this is the legitimate concern of government. Frankly, I think the conservative/liberal debate has improperly become about regulation or deregulation. Personally, I have no problem with regulation. I want to make good regulation, and do away with bad. In education, I think most of it is bad.
For example, schools can’t track. I think education is a privilege, not a right. I think we should seperate the kids and track according to ability, and I tho k schools should be allowed to suspend and expel permanently children who are recurring discipline problems. School should be about teaching. If the student is not ready and willing, there is no point in teaching them.
So we track, and below the lowest track that is actually providing education we have one more track that is strictly behavioral. If children fail out of that, the fail out. Hthey can try again the following year, if they want to.
Basic,ly we just teach to the teachable. We ensure thir is top quality education available everywhere, but we mke it a privilege that needs to be earned to get it. We lose some, but we save more. In ghettos now, we are losing practically all.
Here, I think the problem is regulatory in nature. We have a bloated bureaucracy surrounding the actual health care. He have huge legal liabilities, huge malpractice insurance, huge bureacracies for health insurance. I think what we need to do is basically dismantle all this tangential stuff.
Is it possible? Sure, I think a good paradigm is our veterinary system. We can provide a very and in many cases, I think, better level of healthcare to our pets than we do to ourselves simply because the veterinary system is not so heavily encumbered.
The world isn’t fair. Get over it. What other outcomes should we attempt to legislate?
As long as opportunities are equal, income disparities are not a problem rising to a level where a government should legislate remedies, particularly while technology is progressing at the rates observed in the developed world in the last 200 years and assuming the society in question follows the rule of law.
If one does not like his station, buckle down and avail oneself to the equal opportunity ready for the taking. We’re talking UK and US here, not Burundi and Bangladesh. If the individual in question does not have the ambition, creativity, interpersonal skills, IQ (or good luck) which affords fully leveraging said silver platter, so be it.
Slightly drunk here, so take the below with a grain of salt (this is the one day a year I allow myself to drink these days…cheers).
It’s a balancing act between to much regulation (leading to less jobs and more of that dreaded ‘outsourcing’ stuff) and to little, leading to companies doing stuff that would impact the environment and local citizens health. My inclination would be to gather a panel of experts from the effected business sectors (say, for example, the mining industry), environmentalists with expertise in those sectors, economists and scientists (again, with specific expertise in the effected environment) and try and balance out environmental impact verse economic growth and impact on jobs…then, since I’m God Emperor or whatever I’d decide what regulations make sense for a given sector and set extreme penalties for companies who break those regulations. And I’d have a troop of furry minions to oversee and act as, um, watch dogs for the industries involved.
As others have said, I don’t accept your premise here, so I don’t think it’s something that needs fixing. I don’t see a race to the bottom, to be honest…what I see is US labor pricing itself out of competition either via offshoring/outsourcing or, as mentioned above, automation. It’s not businesses job to ensure that every American who wants one should have a well paid and fulfilling and rewarding career. Obviously right now the economy is faltering, and there are things that should be addressed, but I don’t think you are going to get many ‘conservatives’ who think that the ‘expanding income gap’ is a problem, in and of itself, nor that this is something that government should fix for us.
How would I address the faltering economy? If I had all the answers I’d be running as the first Hispanic Agnostic President. 
That said, I think that the obvious answer is to remove some of the uncertainty that is impacting business and keeping a lot of companies in a recession, bunker mentality. Some of that uncertainty has to do with uncertainty over what their costs will be in the next few years both due to taxes and due to other costs (like health care), so I’d try and remove some of that uncertainty by junking the health care reform stuff (for now) and set up taxes such that they would be long term and companies could evaluate what their cost models will be for years into the future (I AM God Emperor after all). As for debt, I’d increase taxes across the board, on every sector…BUT…those new taxes would have fixed time limits and they would go toward the debt, not towards expanding new programs or funding new programs. I’d put in a separate (permanent) new tax structure solely for infrastructure maintenance.
So, how would increasing taxes help the economy? For one thing I believe that paying down the debt would be well received around the world, and would stimulate investment in US treasury instruments. I also believe that setting hard and fast time limits on the new taxes would both allow business to adjust and measure their burden and project their future costs. I also think that if we all were paying more that it would get rid of this us verse them mentality that goes back and forth between The Rich™, The Middle Class™ and The Poor(aar). It would also bring in boatloads of money to the government and if it was put to paying down the debt I think that would be beneficial in stimulating long term economic stability. In the short term it probably wouldn’t help all that much, but then nothing that is being done has helped much either, so c’est la vie. People would have to suck it up.
Disband the Department of Education, obviously, and leave it up to the states to set their own standards and programs. It’s obviously not working and it’s costing us a mint. I’d probably go with more of a charter school model, and make the charters accountable to their local communities. If the charters aren’t meeting the standards of the local community then the local community would have the power to boot them out and bring in someone else who will meet their standards.
I wouldn’t do anything about secondary school costs except to deregulate and get rid of the current student loan system. I think what we have here is classic distortion of the market due to quasi-government involvement and unintended consequences. College shouldn’t be for everyone, but for those who really want to go and get an education. What I’d probably do is some sort of incentive for trade type schools that do training and certifications in various fields (IT, say, or nursing) and try and make those available in online type learning environments at low costs to people…and then let people figure out for themselves what they want to do. If banks, on their own, want to loan you money for college, and if you are agreeable to the terms, well…there you go. If not, you can look for another bank, or save your money, or go into the service…or use the certification and training classes available online or perhaps through your local community, assuming they want to set up such a program.
De-couple healthcare from your job and then basically the same thing as with education…deregulation. It would change the entire model of health care insurance. The thing is, the exploding costs are due in large part to the regulation and insurance system we have. Also, they are due to the fact that all this high tech medicine is pretty expensive. If companies don’t have to pay part of the cost for insurance then that should mean (in fact, I’d ensure that it DOES mean) those costs can be part of an employees salary. Said employee would get back not only what the company was paying towards employee insurance, but what they were paying as well. With that money they could then evaluate their own insurance options…or choose not to get any insurance at all if that’s what they want (I would have the government take out essentially a basic insurance policy on every citizen for, say, emergency care).
What I THINK would happen is that insurance companies would no longer be getting bankrolled by the government and by business to have these large, semi-exclusive group policies, and instead they would have to compete in a similar manner to car insurance companies. So, maybe you’d go with the insurance company with the funny talking aardvark commercial, or with an online healthcare insurance company, or whatever…but they would have to compete directly for your business, and if you didn’t like them it would be like switching car insurance. I expect that if the insurance isn’t automatic that people will be forced to take some time and really think about what they want or don’t want. And, of course, if local communities still wanted to do some sort of group policy and put that out for competition, they could.
Would any of this work? Damned if I know…probably not. I’m a crazy 'doper conservative after all! I was trying to think outside of the box and trying to think like a damned money grubbing, selfish and prudish conservative 'doper. Mainly I think that the direction we are going is the wrong one, and that the answer isn’t more regulation, more government and that all answers don’t involve soaking the rich to the maximum extent possible. I believe (there is that word again) that the answer lies in acknowledging that we have a lot of problems, and that they are ALL of our problems, and that the solutions are going to involve all of us…rich and poor and all the majority in-between.
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There should be some federal oversight obviously. However I do question the wisdom of some environmental regulations.
By making the economy grow again through real tax reform-especially corporate tax which is high compared to other countries. If everybody’s well off does it matter whose making money at a faster rate?
Again there should be some federal oversight. No Child Left Behind has had mixed results. But one way is via school vouchers thus giving parents more options especially those in inner cities. In addition in Europe far fewer people percentage wise attend college many going to trade schools instead. However this something liberals on this board have expressed opposition to. Oh yes and as Tristan noted break the power of the teachers’ unions.
Make sure preexisting conditions don’t prevent people from getting insurance, tort reform, and allowing people to purchase insurance across state lines would be a good start.
Can we have a cite that this phrase has ever been used as a euphemism for automation, please?
This board is littered with misunderstanding of economic terms, and this is one of the most common flavors these days, though perhaps a bit more nuanced (though no less idiotic). It typically takes the form of someone reading about how much worker productivity has increased, and interpreting that as the sweat and smarts of the noble worker, the benefit of which (after all those workers’ hard work to increase productivity!) is not shared with the very people who produced the effect! Evil corporations grow more profitable, and cheat the workers out of the productivity gains they’ve provided (that their slacker grandparents apparently were too dumb or lazy to produce). In summary: worker productivity increases, and the worker is cheated out of any share of this favorable effect, as CEOs and evil corporations slash jobs and reduce pay and offshore work, all in the interest of lining their own pockets further. So these claims are all over this board, a lot in income inequality threads and CEO pay threads, if you’re really interested.
In reality, worker productivity is the ratio of output produced relative to worker hours worked, period. Automation has been an enormous influence in this regard in the last 50 years. It has permitted companies to “slash jobs” and reduce required workers’ hours–and increase worker productivity. So, one tribe describes an action as despicable job slashing, cruel abuse of the workers, etc. The other tribe describes that same action (this example) as automation, the natural and inexorable progression toward greater efficiency (and profit).
BTW, that comment was not directed at Snowboarder Bo or at John–I knew exactly what he meant.
The cite on homeownership doesn’t take into account the recent downturn, and also specifies that homeowner’s equity in their homes has been on the decline since World War II. So while you can say there’s been an upward trend in home ownership, it really depends on what you mean. Fewer families own their homes free and clear. Families, on average, own a smaller percentage of their homes than they did.
Your other cite does indeed indicate some have moved into the upper classes. It also has this :
“So compared to 2000 levels, the low-income bracket has swelled, the middle bracket has shrunk, and the upper bracket has shrunk too, though by less. People constantly move up and down on the income scale, and everybody who left the middle bracket didn’t automatically fall into the lower bracket. But the numbers make it clear that proportionately fewer people are in the middle bracket, and more people are in the lower bracket.”
Which is my point.
Who sues you if I and my whole family succumb to your pollution? How much of your money do I get to cure my son’s cancer?
I don’t mean to pick on you, but there’s a problem with this line of thought - some consequences cannot be undone through litigation. Subjecting everything to the control of the ‘free market’ - wherein business calculate the costs of pollution and safety hazards by their expected outlays in court costs - means that the market will assign a price to human life.
And if that business determines that each fatality will costs them 50,000 dollars, and that there will be ten fatalities, but they’ll make 5 million dollars, means they’ve just economically justified actions that are tantamount to premeditated murder.
And before you say they would never do such a thing, allow me to point out that it’s actually happened. Look up asbestos litigation.
Some things should be subjected to laws with harsh penalties to shift that cost-benefit analysis enough that the company would never consider doing them in the first place.
But look at the type of home that a family would have purchased in 1945 versus 2005. Chances are there was no central heat and certainly no A/C. You had one tiny bathroom that served only it’s core function. Tiny kitchens that were merely functional. Small closets, and uninsulated walls and windows that would make the entire house drafty. No matter, because your gas furnace could blast all winter for pennies. If you were lucky you had a small detached one car garage.
Compare that to today’s McMansions that everyone simply MUST have to survive with spacious kitchens and bathrooms, three stall garages, a pool, and all of the amenities.
The first instance of home does not equal the second.
People today have the idea ingrained in them that everyone just deserves to have things things and won’t settle for less. So, credit card debt is high and home equity is non-existent because we don’t have now, nor can I envision a society in the future where the average person can live in this type of luxury.
Look at how the average American lives versus the average Somalian. That right there shows what an amazing economy that we have. But it’s not enough. We want more.