Sure, but you can see that he’s given it some effort. I haven’t seen one example of 9bad bracketing0 in the whole OP. 
My experience shows you need to at least double that. There’s another 10-20% who are homeless by choice, they prefer the lifestyle. Not to living in mansions of course, but as opposed to doing the grind for minimum wage, etc.
I don’t think they are the same thing in the sense that I doubt that the ones who make a rational choice to be homeless require as much investment in health care or police as the ones who are seriously mentally ill or serious substance abusers.
I have considered living in a car before, and if I did I wouldn’t need a whole lot of law enforcement and health care investments made for me. Definately not $73,000 a year.
True. But few have health insurance, other than than the taxpayer funded County ER.
And thus they deserve the rack. That’ll steer 'em straight.
Even if I failed to accurately reinstate the original language of the OP, the background behind that sub-literate word salad (as distinct from the poster himself, whom I would never even consider criticizing here in GD) represents, in my “pinion”, the single most revealing insight into the very quintessence of the modern conservative collective substitute for a mind. In that sense, it’s priceless.
My sub-literate older brother, he of the “Obama’s a socialist!” Fox News-parroting fish-school of autonomic brainstem belching (and who has never been able to define the term “socialism” correctly, of course), continues to shout that “The Democrats deliberately invented welfare in order to enslave blacks and the poor!”
In reply, I calmly related the fact that it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who pulled the rug out from under the hopelessly unemployable with children (as DrDeth correctly pointed out above), and that one reason Republicans despised him so much was because he swiped their hate-fueled mission to do just that. He stole their thunder, and that is something they will never forgive.
I also informed him of the facts surrounding the fruitless search for Reagan’s cruelly apocryphal “welfare queen”, launching yet another vicious and fact-starved hate meme into the fetid air of what passes for conservative thinking, and which the right-wingers still live to vomit forth in their typically coprolalic way of “debating” liberals. I pointed out the fact that even before Clinton’s rapacious gutting of the social safety net, less than 5% of all welfare funds weren’t legitimately received and spent, and that number included errors on the part of the agencies involved. A 95% accuracy rate would be the envy of pretty much any major human-centered effort!
In 2005, that figure had climbed to 98%, even though the dollar amounts distributed constituted a tiny fragment of the GDP (and a tiny fragment of what the hopelessly unemployable need to even try to elevate their children out of poverty, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle).
I added the fact that the form of welfare that was previously referred to as “food stamps” (now known as SNAPS) are, by far, the best public investment in human capital, going overwhelmingly to what social scientists call “work support”, in that they are going to people who are actively looking for work or are working at jobs that pay so poorly that their incomes fall considerably below the poverty level. The fact is, this program is amazingly successful at keeping people from having to resort to the cruelly dismantled remnants of the what had been the Christ-inspired, or at least Christ-concordant, welfare program, a program that one would think that all the chest-beating right-wing ostensible “Christians” would laud if they had any moral and intellectual integrity at all. And then there’s the fact that every dollar spent on SNAPS returns $1.73 in economic activity to the GNP/GDP! Can you imagine how much the GDP would soar if we spent even more “tapaters” money that way?
Let’s not forget that Wall Street sharks create effectively nothing tangible at all. They move money from one slot to another, which contributes nothing of real value.
And don’t forget to include the fact that “tapater”-funded corporate welfare utterly dwarfs the tiny amount spent on human welfare, which is orders of magnitude greater than the amount you apparently consider “wasted” on mere flesh-and-blood non-corporations!
So, how does that effect your (ahem) “calculations”, ralph124c? After you force your corrupt, despicable, billion-dollar welfare-cheating conservative masters to stop stealing such incredibly vast sums from the GNP/GDP (who then often hide it in secret, tax-free off-shore bank accounts), only then can you preach to us about the pennies going to your much-hated poor people.
***. . .
Why did I bold all those occurrences of the word “fact”? Because of what my addlepated elder brother actually, truthfully remarked in utter frustration after I’d related all that, a reply which perfectly reflects the current conservative worldview of Idiot America…
[INDENT]"Why do you keep bringing up facts!?"[/INDENT]
The Banking Class recently reduced the GNP by a lot.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/sr12.cfm
The paper reports that the average household headed by a high school dropout receives $32,183 per year of direct benefits spending and population-based spending and an additional $10,901 as their share of public goods and interest spending. The conclusion is that a person earning $10/hour is not only paying less in taxes than their share of government spending, they actually earn less money than their share of government spending. And that’s a salary which is significantly higher than the current minimum wage of $6.55/hour or the new minimum wage of $7.25/hour which will go into effect on July 24, 2009. Furthermore, people in these wage brackets are likely to spend substantial periods of their post-high school life not working at all.
Ah, yes, the Heritage Foundation, font of the most intellectually honest, fair-minded, and factually rigorous analysis on earth (after Fox News, of course).
Have anything to say, ambushed?
That same article says the average cost among all households is $32,706 a year (this was in 2007, the federal budget is far more than $2.3 trillion now). So the total of $43,084 invested annually in a household headed by a high school dropout is only about $10,000 a year more than is invested in other households on average. The annual spending is not much higher for low income households.
This attempt by the corporate class to use class warfare (by making middle class people hate poor people, making white people hate blacks and latinos, making straights hate gays, making christians hate atheists, etc) doesn’t move me. Heritage is a think tank funded by wealthy individuals and wealthy corporate interests with the goal of coercing voters into supporting policies that benefit the superwealthy by playing on our base emotions and drives for group cohesion and reciprocation to distract us from economics. This article is just an extension of that, an attempt to get middle class people to hate poor people so they will vote for politicans which benefit wealthy people (the ones who fund organizations like Heritage). The republicans who people who read Heritage vote for do not pass laws to benefit the middle class (if anything taxes go up on middle class families under GOP leadership), they pass laws to benefit the wealthy individuals and corporations that fund Heritage.
I’m about as moved as I would be if I worked at a factory where the workers were striking and owner tried to tell me that as a white person I was morally superior to black people, and because of that I should turn on all the black strikers. By sheer coincidence, the super wealthy who fund groups like Heritage get exactly what they want by playing on people’s base emotions.
A lot of us do not fall for that.
I’ll add that the Heritage Foundation is a soulless cash whore that sells its “research” to the highest bidder and is undeserving of trust.
I wonder about the topic of the OP in a slightly differnt, and hopefully more palatable way:
Is the per capita contribution to GDP competitive with other countries, either currently, or over time?
If not, then how does that bode for us, given our population trends? Could we be caught in the middle as Michael Porter called it in his books on Strategy?
We will never be as big as China or India, so we have to either compete more effectively on other than scale, or else risk not being the best, and its consequences.
With that in mind, every person counts, so are we getting the best from everybody? Are we really OK with the status quo? Does it match our needs or goals? That is how I see it.
A small number of Americans contribute most of the productivity from what I can tell. It is a small number who are successful entrepreneurs, scientists, etc. who pave the way for a better future and who contribute to GDP.
So as it stands we are a pretty productive country, but evenso only a small % are engaged in ‘bettering’ our state of economy in any meaningful way with new business or new science.
The vast majority of us (myself included) just work jobs that someone else created using science and technology that someone else discovered and invented.
I believe I already have replied suitably, but I will happily attempt to make my message more clear. I strongly suggest that those who share your views learn or further improve their skills in clear and critical thinking, unless they fear losing their devotion to contrived conservative pseudo-economics.
I suggest you and your peers begin your study with Hofstadter’s groundbreaking 1963 classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, then Jacoby’s modern update: The Age of American Unreason. But you can’t stop there, of course! My strongest recommendation for improving one’s critical thinking skills is Gilovitch’s masterwork: How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life.
One key issue Gilovitch emphasizes that your peers need to come to grips with is “confirmation bias”, the tremendously powerful predilection to uncritically accept claims which are aligned with our pre-existing biases and beliefs. Naturally, this deep flaw in human reason is hardly limited to conservatives! The Heritage Foundation per se is no better or worse than the Cato Institute is no better or worse than the Huffington Post is no better or worse than the so-called 9/11 “truthers”.
So liberals need to seek out and credit more reliable and less biased sources of information than HuffPo and the “truthers”, and conservatives need to seek out and credit more reliable and less biased sources of information than Heritage and Cato.
But conservatives face an even greater and far deeper roadblock preventing all but the very few wisest and most self-aware of them from achieving the goal of clear, critical thinking, and that is the pervasive dominance of authoritarianism and authoritarian ideology in their worldviews. Such deep-rooted authoritarianism makes subduing confirmation bias and the many other barricades against clear, critical thinking enormously difficult for conservatives to overcome.
The scientific facts assembled from many peer-reviewed studies of the domination of authoritarianism among conservative Americans, as documented in the 2009 work Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, presents a bleak outlook for the ability of conservatives to surmount the barriers to clear, critical thinking when it comes to the topics that are central to their political and socio-economic worldview and biases. To the best of my knowledge, I have personally never encountered an American conservative who has achieved that goal, but that is probably a function of the relatively limited number of thoughtful conservatives I have come across in my real-world or virtual experiences.
The research demonstrates that authoritarian leaders consciously or unconsciously manufacture factitious but “authoritative-sounding” assertions and social memes (as with Reagan’s “welfare queen” hate meme) for blatantly self-serving reasons, such as to artificially divide and polarize the electorate by deliberately framing issues in an excessively vitriolic and inflammatory fashion. Nothing brings out the voters to the polls like hate!
Research also demonstrates that authoritarian followers simply have very few and/or very weak critical thinking skills or otherwise powerfully resist utilizing them when it comes to the political and economic biases and counterfactual belief systems that comprise their worldviews.
Evolution brought about a human brain and human nature that, by dint of natural selection, primed us to hold and propagate all kinds of blatantly false beliefs. Those who were excessively fearful of unusual factors in the environment, and thus often crafted bogus pseudo-explanations like witchcraft and gods or other mysterious agencies like the “evil eye” of the poor, the unusual, and the dispossessed, were more likely to avoid those situations and, though based in utter falsehoods, their undue fear increased their genetic fitness and multiplied the genes, alleles, or gene combinations in the gene pool.
The collection of scientific results that Hetherington and Weiler report in their book establishes that conservatives/authoritarians are innately more fearful than others, especially of views, actions, or behaviors that appear to them to upset the ostensible “natural” or “God-willed order” of things, just as their fearful genetic forbears did.
While liberals and other non-conservatives are hardly immune to these irrational fears, their worldviews are much less authoritarian in nature and so those fears do not play anything remotely like the fundamental role they play in conservatives.
So good luck to you and your authoritarian peers.
Almost right by my view.
what you refer to as “the vast majority” is the middle of some distribution. You are the ones providing most of the productivity.
The one end of the distribution you mention provides the means for change in production, and causes it to be distributed to the middle at some regular interval in time.
The other end, that is the question. They are not contributing at all, or only in relatively tiny amounts. How big is that end? because in this model, if you could just dispense with that end, you would have the same overall productivity, and a much higher per-capita rate.
Or, if instead of dispensing with it, you could integrate it into the middle, then you could increase the overall productivity while “carrying” a smaller number of non-contributors (the carry rate brings down the per capita productivity).
So at a high level in considering policies, it seems to me you need to have a plan to decrease that carry rate while realizing you can’t simply jettison people form the distribution by fiat. You either carry them or get them working, there is no other way around it.
And from that, you can then measure and predict international competitiveness without getting caught in zero-sum policy discussions that bear no fruit.
If we have autos that get 60mpg and factories that can produce $50 laptops in 10 years it will be because a small number (maybe a few thousand) scientists, professors, entrepreneurs and engineers discovered ways to achieve that. Those technologies when distributed among society will result in billions in productivity gains from the work of these few thousand people.
The reason most people work jobs that pay living wages and decent healthcare vs. working jobs that paid starvation wages and lived with non-existant transportation, healthcare and infrastructure 300 years ago is because a small % of the human race devoted themselves to science, engineering and social politics in earnest. The rest of us just go along for the ride. A small % on the right of the distribution curve create a livable society and those of us in the middle just enjoy the fruits of their labors.
Having said that, you have to define what consitutes the poor end of the distribution curve. A gang member who joined a gang at 11 and is arrested at age 20 and given a death sentence for a capital crime, then executed in his 40s will require roughly $2 million for the trial, appeals and housing on death row before he is executed. That neglects the amount invested in law enforcement for his crimes before his death sentence, the property loss and business lost due to his driving up crimes (small numbers of criminals commit most of the crimes), the cost in healthcare for the acts of violence. All in all, public investments and private losses (due to declining property values, increased health care costs and businesses leaving the area) of $3 million+ for a gang member who is given a death sentence at age 20 is not really an excessive number, all for an individual who contributed nothing to society at large but sapped large amounts out both financially and psychologically.
And like the study I posted earlier said, the chronically homeless require $73,000 a year in public services. So I’d include them (career criminals and the chronically homeless) in the poor end. However those 2 groups only make up about 0.3% of the US population.
How do you integrate them? It will probably be people on the far right end who do it. As examples, professors in political science may find ways to combat crime. People who work in IT may find better ways to use everpresent video and audio devices to catch crimes in action which can be used in trials. Physicians and biologists doing medical research will research ways to treat substance abuse problems and severe mental illnesses more effectively, which will help the chronically homeless integrate themselves into society. Research psychologists may find better interventions for at risk youth to integrate them before they descend into a life of crime.
But what is the cutoff for far end? Do high school dropouts who work jobs but only make $11,000 a year get included? I wouldn’t consider them the same as I would consider a career criminal or chronically homeless person with a mental illness or substance abuse problem. I might consider them the declining side, but not the far end.
Plus, a person’s contributions to GDP is just one aspect of life. A poor person who is a great parent and good citizen is better than an upper middle class person who is a total asshole.
Well, more than a few thousand anyway. In the Bay Area alone, you have maybe on the order of a million. Plus most of the rest of the Bay Area population that is primarily engaged in support industries for that part of the population.
But my background is definitely there - improve efficiency relentlessly. By the end of dot-com era I was starting to think in these terms - Is it possible we have become or could become so efficient that we could in fact carry more, not less, non-workers?
It is a fair question - it is possible to imagine market based distributions of wealth that would allow the non workers liquid cash to have a nice life in some scenarios.
OTOH, any efficiencies we have will also be available to China, India, et al and are not really a source of competitive advantage, not for long anyway.
Those technologies when distributed among society will result in billions in productivity gains from the work of these few thousand people.
I’d go a little further than that - you are not just along for the ride, but in a real sense most of you are working to support what you call the productive ones. That is necessary and valuable - in a sense, it is grease the wheel needs to spin. I don’t discount the value in that.
Maybe we are just quibbling over the adjectives to describe the part of the distribution, and little more?
Actually, I shifted the discussion out of that realm by suggesting a different statistic - per capita GNP or per capita GDP or some such. Note that this is more or less the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours. Resulting numbers are different scales.
My statistic accounts for that, because those are part of the support services. Money changes hands, count it in GDP, then calculate the per-capita mean.
I am not concerned that they are tied to the non-working part too much - maybe in a deeper sensitivity analysis, yeah, but for a broad introduction, not so much.
If we could then get the non-workers working, they would add to the GDP, and those in the industries you mentioned supporting the non-workers in essence would shift to other jobs and contribute to GDP that way. All included in my approach already I think.
Paper losses don;t contribute to GDP, so they are abstracted out from my statistic. But the $3M (to stick with your numbers) that does count. It is real work, and real money changing hands. No problemo 
Of course, me too. I don’t think we would ever get everybody perfoming to 100% capacity at all times, but we could improve a shitload before we reached any real limit I am sure.
Well, in the long run, you plan to educate people and improve the general outlook so people don’t drop out of the workforce that way when they grow up. Those that are already there, you do what you can, but some may be irredeemable.
But ultimately your measure of competitive success is, per capita GDP. You plan for changing that to meet your goals, then you do it.
That is fantasy stuff. While laudable, at best that misses the point here - it only makes them “non-criminals”, it does nothing towards getting them or their descendents to add to the statistic at hand.
Great. All for it. Heck I sleep every night with such a psychologist :). But unless you can measure, you can’t manage. What are you proposing to measure, and how does it reflect the overall economy, especially in a way you can compare across competitive nations?
Sure, in my world. I don’t know the optimal value for the statistic, but I can tell you from my experience as a mid-upper level manager at several high flying dot coms (not ones that then crashed and disappeared btw), I really appreciate the value added by the businesses that supported us with food, hotel, transportation, cleaning, nany sitting, car washing, and who all knows what else where people were poorly paid.
Unofficially we spread the wealth as best we could to reflect the value added - paid lavish prices for food and services, tipped well, even tossed stocks and options when possible to service providers. Heck I think my chiropractor made out better than anyone picking up stocks and tips from his startup clients like me.
I think a better system could be devised for that. I really do. Not everyone can do the work we were doing, but the 11K guys and gals as you call them are often providing real value to those of us who do.
So I say, yeah count them, count everyone. We don’t need to define hard edges on these sections of the distribution, just count everyone, much easier. Take the GDP and the population and divide. That’s all you need I think.
That is the point of my statistic. You don’t have to label individuals, or even sections of the distribution, only desired results in an aggregate statistic that is easy to calculate and track. That statistic over time I think will give you a sense not only of relative competitiveness, but the carrying level of the economy.
That is your judgment. You find a way to measure the relative value of assholishness across an economy and across all natoinal economies and then lets talk.
But I would posit that if you use my statistic or something like it, along with polcies designed to raise it by shrinking the carried part and making sure there are ways to reflect and track the value the support services provide as I described earlier, I bet you will find bot less poor people and less assholishness in every group. A rising tide lifts all boats remember.
Me neither.
These days, few but the wealthy recognize class war for what it is … divide and conquer. Nice posts.
Well, that they deserve the rack is Ralph’s pinion.
What this thread needs is Godwinizing. So let me clarify for Colibri that he was correct, that the “undecalss” was indeed an acronym, for a shadowy covert branch of the Schutzstaffel which did not proudly display twin-lightning-bolt decals but rather functioned much like the Spanish Inquisition: Nobody expects the Undecal-SS! 