Those are bumper stickers. Can the poor aspire more with Republicans? Have more freedom? I don’t think so.
Not that it’s relevant, but I’ve never been above lower middle class. I was damn grateful that unemployment benefits were around when my wife’s employer went out of business last year.
OK, Horatio Alger, maybe that was possible in rural Canada. Take it to the south side of Chicago. Let’s say you’re lucky enough to have a job that pays $10 per hour, say $20,000 per year. How much of that do you think you’re going to save? Realistically, nothing. Let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say they can save an amazing 25% of their income. That’s $5,000 per year. In 5 years that’s only $25,000. Think there are enough decrepit farms that these inner city folks can go buy? Or businesses they could start with that kind of money? It just isn’t realistic. If you’re working for minimum wage, there’s a good chance you just don’t have the skills or the knowledge to start and run a business. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur.
Unfortunately, people do lose hope. They can bust their asses for minimum wage (or less) for years and not be any better than they are now. Or they can give up. Many do. That’s sad, but hardly the fault that the safety net exists.
Objection, calls for speculation by the witness. The welfare money one would get by having three or more children is hardly enough to survive on. Welfare motherhood is not a career choice many would take. Again, the Republican alternative is to cut the safety net away.
I think this is a bit in the past. Much of the paperwork has been eliminated. You fill out the forms electronically and get issued a card that gets replenished at intervals. No denying that the police treat the poor like shit, particularly minorities. Getting shot or choked by police is part of the hazard of being poor and black in the US. Again, what does the GOP offer?
The free market isn’t as free as your libertarian pipe dreams would suggest. It’s rigged. If you’re lucky enough to get a job, you work for whatever the employer feels like paying you. You watch helplessly as Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy and raise them on things that disproportionately hit the poor, like sales tax, cigarette tax, and liquor tax. Again, what do Republicans offer? No extension of unemployment benefits. Something that not only makes it hard for those that can’t get a job, it is antistimulative. When you give unemployment benefits, it gets spent. Every nickel. That goes back in the economy. What else do Republicans offer? Drug testing welfare beneficiaries. Not only is that fiscally moronic (you spend more in testing than what you save), it is inhumane. Yes, go tell Johnny he can’t eat today because his mom smoked a joint. What else do they offer? Not infrastructure investment that creates good paying jobs, that might cost Mr. Gotrocks his next tax cut. They offer tax cuts for the wealthy that have been proven time and time again not to create jobs. They offer tax cuts for the wealthy in the hopes that some of it trickles down to the poor. Actually, they don’t hope this. They know it won’t. They just don’t give a shit. What do Republicans do for the poor? Push for voter ID, knowing full well it solves a problem that does not exist, they just want to take the vote away from as many of the poor as possible, particularly minorities. Do they want to fix the inner city schools? No, they want to siphon money away from them via vouchers. Free public education offends Republicans. What else do they offer the poor? Maybe cuts in Social Security and dismantling Medicaid. What else do Republicans offer the poor? Damned if I can see anything. Moronic bumper stickers like freedom and aspiration.
More bumper stickers. Is Bill Gates’ income taxed away? Are the Koch brothers’ incomes taxed away?
File this under “Will Democrats ever figure out why they lost the working class vote”? Decades of increasing taxes on the working class, making it harder for people to start their own businesses, displacing American labor with imported foreign labor…
Decades of increasing taxes on the working class? Who does that? In Michigan, it’s Rick Snyder, who virtually eliminated the property tax credit and introduced taxes on pensions. Nationally, it was Barack Obama who wanted to did shield all those making under $250K from tax increases. What taxes increased for the working class due to Democrats? Why would it be harder for people to start businesses? I suspect you’ll say “regulations”, but specifically which? Foreign labor? Who is it that hires foreign workers? Call me crazy, but I think most business owners are Republicans.
The Democrats have come around on the tax issue, although I’m sure it’s political expediency rather than a principle. Taxes on the middle class are the 21st century third rail. Democrats will never be able to go to that well again, and actually can expect reduced revenues over time since middle class tax cuts continue to happen and that’s still where most of the government’s revenue comes from.
As for foreign labor, sure, 0.1% of Republicans benefit from it, so there’s a constituency within the GOP to bring in more of it. This is not the position of the GOP base. It is, however, also the position of the Democratic Party and most of the Democratic base: more immigration.
Which is why we need to tax wealth, not just income. All the wealth is going to the one percent, and things will just get worse as automation continues to make inroads in labor markets and deliver income ONLY to people with capital.
Taxing wealth is very bad policy. It penalizes saving and such taxes always get old ladies who scrimp and save in the dragnet.
A better idea is one Democrats have recently been embracing to tax transactions made by banks at 0.1%. That actually raises pretty significant revenue and could have positive effects by reducing bank risk-taking, if only slightly. Raise the tax to 0.5% and you probably do it even better.
But wealth taxes, no. We already have a wealth tax. It’s called the property tax. We also tax estates when people die.
Raising the gas tax is also good policy, but that hits the middle class so is unlikely to happen unless middle class income taxes are reduced to compensate. That one might actually happen, because some Republicans are on board with raising the gas tax if it’s offset by other tax cuts.
Your comment indicates a lack of awareness of what computers, robotics and software are and are capable of doing. Most of the work human beings do now is eminently suited to being done by software and robots, or some combination thereof. Already they are predicting that many of the tasks legal firms do will be automated soon. There go paralegals. Driverless cars, there go bus drivers, truck drivers and taxi drivers.
Sooner or later, they’ll develop robot hands and computer algorithms that are able to interpret what a camera sees well enough to perform all manual labor, and probably sooner rather than later.
I know you feel safe using the word “Luddite” to ward off uncomfortable thoughts about almost all human beings rendered permanently unemployable by machines, but … these are not difficult problems that need to be solved for it to happen. No AI needed.
Since when did this concept become so alien? It used to be called the American dream, but it exists in all countries. The people who came to America before the 1960’s didn’t come for a handout - they came because they wanted opportunity and freedom.
This may be alien to you, but it’s worth trying to understand and not just sneer at and dismiss as delusion or stupidity: There are MANY poor people who truly believe in freedom, and who want the ability to rise to the level of their own ability. I was raised to believe that taking charity was about the lowest thing a person could do - it was a sign of failure - failure to provide, failure to save, failure to live up to one’s responsibility as a free person. It was the absolute last resort.
On the flip side, I was raised to not care so much about material things and to focus more on building character and mind. Those grandparents I mentioned that built their farm into a half-million dollar property? When they retired they still drove a 15 year old car and lived in a modest little house in a small town. When they were away from home on a trip, they would stay in a motel 6 or whatever cheap motel they could find. Until the day they died they continued to act as if they were poor. Because who you were mattered more than what you had.
I took student loans to go to college, and felt bad enough about the 0% interest rate when I was in school that I refused to sign the paperwork that would have wiped 40% of the debt off the books at graduation - a program the government came up with to encourage students to finish. To me, it was horrifying that people were being taxed in order to give a big gift to new college grads - the people who were expected to do much better than average anyway. So it took me over 10 years to pay off my student loan.
Later, when I started a small business, I wrote a fairly successful software package. I got a call from the government wanting to give me an R&D grant for building it, even though it was finished. I guess it was less risk to fund only ‘R&D’ that was already a success. It was a large five figure sum of money, and I turned it down flat to the astonishment of the government agent. I was just raised that way. That money came from someone else - it didn’t grow out of thin air. I had no right to it, and I didn’t need it. It would have been grossly against my values to take it.
This is not an uncommon attitude. Ever notice that some of the poorest states have a lot of right-wing types, while San Franscisco, full of liberals, is one of the most expensive places to live? And the most wealthy area of the country right now is the D.C. region - full of liberals. It’s not about wealth. It’s about being left alone to live your own life and to see how far your own skills can take you.
As for the right offering more freedom - it’s absolutely true. The best path to wealth a poor person has is entrepreneurship - the dream of starting a small business and growing it into something. Every regulation, zoning law and license requirement makes that harder. The legal requirements may seem ‘reasonable’ to an ivy-league grad, but to someone with nothing but a college diploma and no money to hire a lawyer, it’s daunting. it was the biggest hurdle for me to get past all that, and I live in the most economically free region in North America. I can’t imagine what it would be like to try to open a small store in Berkeley or in Chicago.
Unemployment benefits are a one thing - you pay into that system in case you need it, so it’s more like insurance. I don’t have a problem with it, unless it is extended to the point where it enables marginal cases to stay out of the work force for so long they become unemployable.
I grew up in a city with a population of 50,000 when I wasn’t living on the farm. Not exactly rural. I moved to Edmonton in my early 20’s, and that’s where I went to college and started my business. At the time, Edmonton was about 600,000 people. Not exactly rural. I lived in a basement suite for 5 years with a roommate in order to survive, and I worked every summer, every spring break, and 16 hours per week while in University to make it through. It can be done.
I can’t speak to Chicago. But you know what? If your skills won’t allow you to survive, you can always move. That’s what I did. I moved away from home with all my belongings in the back of my old car, A couple of thousand dollars plus tuition that I earned working 3 years full-time after high school, and nothing else. My mom couldn’t spare any money. I found a cheap basement suite for $400/mo, found a roommate to share it with, and got a near-minimum wage job.
I’m not saying it’s easy, and I believe it’s harder today than it was then. But it can be done.
Aren’t you the defeatist. I started my business with almost zero money. And of course other people aren’t going to buy a farm. My mother didn’t - she worked minimum wage in a grocery store and worked her way up to manager. Then she bought half a duplex and lived there for 12 years and paid it off. Sold it to buy a small store of her own, then sold that at retirement and bought a double-wide trailer to live in. A nice one, in the city, but still a trailer. But it’s all she wanted, and it allowed her to put enough cash in the bank that she could buy things for her grand-kids and not have to worry about whether she could make her mortgage payment.
You don’t have to be. My mother worked a minimum wage job with two young boys. My father left when we were 2 and 5 years old. She went to night school to get a secretarial diploma, got a job as a receptionist in a hair salon, then found a better job at a grocery store where she had a chance to move up.
She actually made less money switching jobs, but it had the opportunity for advancement. Again - aspirations. Sacrificing now for future benefit.
I wonder if it helps them when the left constantly tells them that they are being oppressed, that their lives are miserable, and that it’s not their fault, and that someone else should ‘do something’ to solve their problems. I wonder if they were helped by the grand projects and subsidies that had the effect of congregating them into ghettos? We did the same to the native populations in Canada - paid them to stay on reservations where there was no hope and no opportunity.
When you’re a young woman with parents who are raising your kids for you and paying all their expenses, a welfare check can buy you a lot of drugs and alcohol - which seemed to be the plan she was on.
No, the Republican alternative is to make the safety net as small as it needs to be without being cruel, because the moral hazard created by an expansive safety net is a soul-deadening trap. The Republican plan is also to cut regulations and remove obstacles to upward mobility so that the poor can lift themselves up.
You don’t have to report your job search status when on unemployment? You don’t have to deal with social workers when you and your kids are living in a lousy place out of necessity?
Why did you have to bring race into it? In some areas race is definitely a large factor. In other areas it isn’t. Before we reformed our very generous welfare system we had a larger percentage of people on welfare than you did, and it was pretty much a demographic cross-section of the country. When we reformed welfare and added strict work requirements, the roles shrunk in HALF. Subsequent studies looking at where they all went concluded that the vast majority simply went back to work.
Bullshit. My employer ‘feels’ like paying me nothing. It HAS to pay me a good salary, or I won’t work there. The market works two ways, you know, and employers are as helpless before it as consumers are. If you don’t believe this, please explain why so many people make more than the legally mandated minimum wage? Perhaps you could tell me why here in Alberta our minimum wage in 2013 was $9.40, but 7-11 cashiers were getting $12.50 and up, plus $500 signing bonuses and another $1000 if they stayed a year? You don’t suppose that evil *market *had anything to do with it, do you?
To the extent that the ‘game is rigged’, government is a big part of it. Subsidies and grants going to cronies, featherbedding rules, closed-shop ordinances, regulations designed to protect established businesses from new start-ups, you name it.
If you think all regulations are put in place to protect the public from business, you’re kidding yourself. The Davis-Bacon act was a piece of racist legislation put in place to protect existing construction firms from competition from ‘upstart’ blacks willing to work for less than union wages. Beautician licensing is nothing more than protection from competition instigated by the very industry being licensed. Mattel lobbied for lead-in-toy testing because they already had lead testing in place while their competition from the second-hand market couldn’t do it.
So yes, the game is rigged. And it’s cronies and politicians on the left and right doing the rigging. That’s what I’m fighting against, while you want more of it so long as it’s the guys on your side doing the rigging for the ‘right’ reasons. I’m pro-market, not pro-business. There’s a big difference, and if you don’t understand what it is, I recommend remedial reading.
I don’t believe in ‘sin’ taxes. And I do believe that the rich should pay more than the poor. But I also know that what makes capitalism work is capital, and nothing else works as well for both the rich and poor. You guys on the left like to make fun of ‘trickle down’, but the fact remains that the poverty line in America is almost 3 times the world’s average income. How do you think that happened, exactly?
Whereas the money that was given to them came from the money fairy.
I’m against drug testing as a condition of government benefits, but the first question I’d ask is, what kind of mother would be spending her money on drugs when she has children and is living on welfare? Perhaps the focus of this story is a little misplaced? Is this the same mother who couldn’t possibly save money while making minimum wage?
We’re going to have to disagree on this, but a healthy economy is not created by convincing people to spend beyond their means. This takes Keynesianism and twists it into something it was never meant to be. As a reminder - if Keynes were alive now he would be telling the government to stop spending so much and start paying off the debt. Remember? To the extent that ‘fiscal stimulus’ works (and that’s debatable), even Keynes would say that’s only true when there is an output gap, and modern Keynesians would say it’s only true if there’s an output gap and the preferred solution of loosening the money supply doesn’t work because interest rates hit the zero bound.
No one serious other than today’s political partisans ever suggested that you could simply borrow and spend your way to higher growth regardless of the underlying conditions of the economy.
Sez you. Ask France how their 90% tax rate on the wealthy worked out. Ask Japan how that massive infrastructure stimulus is working for them.
On the other hand… Canada has lowered federal corporate taxes to 12.5%, lowered the top marginal tax rates, cut dividend and capital gains taxes, and we came out of the recession with very little debt, our federal budget is now in surplus, and our pension system is fully funded. How can that possibly be, if austerity and low taxes don’t work?
On the other hand, we used to have a government that consumed 53% of GDP, a debt equal to 70% of GDP, much higher taxes, more generous social programs, and our economy was in the dumps, our dollar was 30% lower than yours, and our unemployment rate was chronically 2-3 percentage points higher than the U.S.'s. Please explain that using your economic philosophy.
While you’re at it, you can explain how the Keynesians could be so wrong after WWII, when the U.S. cut its government budget by 60%, laid off 15,000 regulators and about a million soldiers. The Keynesians including Paul Samuelson said that this would plunge the U.S. into a deep recession, and advocated massive spending on public works programs. So that’s what Britain did, taking a sharp turn to the left. The result was exactly the opposite - the U.S. economy exploded, and Britain was plunged into a deep recession. So what went wrong?
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Do they want to fix the inner city schools? No, they want to siphon money away from them via vouchers.
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Actually vouchers are a last resort. The right tried to fix the public schools by instituting reforms such as merit pay and giving principles the right to fire teachers who were not doing a good job. That was opposed by the teacher’s unions. Republicans advocated allowing children to choose their own public school. That too was shot down. So finally, charter schools and vouchers were used to do an end-run around a system that is failing the kids and which refuses to carry out fundamental reforms necessary to correct the problem. Oh well. You can try to stop them, but if you do eventually you’re going to lose to some other alternative, because your left-wing unionized model of public education sucks.
One of the fundamental hypocrises of the left is that they always decry materialism, but when it comes right down to it that’s all they care about. You are obsessed with what the rich have, what you don’t have, and you demand that someone take power and ‘spread it around’. The right tends to believe that freedom is an end unto itself, and that family and community is more important than federal bureaucracies and ‘help’ from nameless bureaucrats. The right tends to believe that productive work is a key part of a person’s self-worth, and that charity, while sometimes necessary, is also a trap that leads to a life of misery.
The old phrase “Give me Liberty or give me death” comes to mind. It wasn’t “Give me liberty, but really I’ll trade it for a nicer TV.”
No, because your side lost the debate. It would be if you got your way.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think Silicon Valley was built on? How about Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Amazon, Federal Express? Do you know why the Allen Large Telescope Array has that name? Hint: it might have something to do with the capital you want to tax away.
You’re absolutely right, Sam. Your employer feels like paying you nothing. And in a decade or two, your employer is gong to have the option of doing so. Because a machine will replace you. And almost everyone else who works for your employer. Say, five percent of the old workforce will still be around. So of course you’ll get another job. But everyone else’s employers will have replaced their employees with machines. There will be damned few … well, honestly … NO other jobs to get. So of course you go the self-employment being the self-sufficient type that you are. But where’s your market, Sam? Everyone’s unemployed, what do they use for money to buy the goods and/or services you produce?
Just to highlight how silly it is to use party preference right after a huge mid-term sweep (when party loyalty to the victorious party is highest) to predict a presidential 2 years later, this number has already switched back to Dem +4.
As to the OP, it’s pretty clear that Democrats have a baked-in EV edge right now, probably worth about 1-2% popular vote (that is, their candidate could probably lose the PV by that amount and still win the EV). That said, it’s pretty rare for the PV to be that tight, and candidate quality and overall conditions will certainly matter. As to who I would prefer as the candidate, as a centrist Dem (and they do still exist - McCaskill and Nixon in MO would be examples), I’d prefer someone in that mold but would certainly vote for Clinton over the current GOP platform.
That’s an important issue to discuss should it come about, but it’s similar to immortality pills putting people on Medicare and SS for 200 years. Obviously, that can’t happen but we’ll have to figure that out when it gets close enough to be a real possibility. Right now, automation is increasing incomes, at least of those with education. And it probably would increase the incomes of those without if we didn’t keep on importing foreign unskilled workers to displace them.
Lovely! Because, as we all know from personal experience, it’s really ALL about your own skills. If only you have skills enough, you can make your way anywhere you want to go. If not, just move. If you can’t move, well…you always can move! Just strap everything you own on your back and walk to Topeka. Or where ever it is you can let your skills speak for themselves!
Precisely. The freedom that the right gives your mom is the freedom to subsist at “all she wanted” (she was very good, too, to accept that that trailer really was all she wanted; probably all her skills allowed her to obtain, too?), which nicely coincides with what those who really succeed in life see as all she should have. Well done!
Again, precisely. Because that’s EXACTLY what the left tells “them” (cite? ah, don’t bother).
True story: a welfare check can buy you a lot of diapers and food, saving you time which you can use to better yourself. Also true story: a welfare check can buy a lot of food for kids whose parents otherwise might not be able to afford that food, because they are not getting employed, because none of the job creators has gotten around to creating a job for them.
Libertarian Freedom: The Freedom to Die from Hunger Before You Run Into Any Moral Hazards That Could Corrupt Your Poor, Poor Soul. I like it. Can’t have your soul deadened when you could just as easily be wholly deadened, eh? Obstacles of upward mobility! So that the poor can lift themselves up, preferably by their own bootstraps! Because what REALLY keeps the poor down is those obnoxious regulations of CO2, because if not for regulations, **nobody **would be poor. Well, the lazy fuckers excluded, of course.
Yes! Right! Just like that poor person, who just good hired for minimum wage at a job that doesn’t afterall pay his expenses for his family, should just say: I’ll just not work here, and see where you find a replacement for me, Mr. Employer! That’s how things were in 1880, weren’t they! We’ve come a long way from when people just dictated their salaries to their employers by refusing work! Again, good job on clearsightedly appreciating that the only thing that keeps the poor down is their sheer laziness. Such a humane viewpoint! It’s not even racist, it’s merely against everybody who’s poor!
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What do I think Silicon Valley was built on? The sweat of Chinese laborers who get paid scarcely subsistence wages for manufacturing your computers; the taxes paid by citizens funding the state that guarantees the educational programs, the infrastructure, the personal and financial safety systems, that allow companies to function; the services provided by citizens working in companies large and small around the huge oligopols of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, that make life in central California worth living; the state and federal governments that guarantee the common safety of companies, employees, and purchasers of goods alike; oh, and, of course, the insididous idea of shareholder value that disenfranchises everybody in this list who doesn’t own a piece of paper with the name of the companies on it.
I suppose you meant me to say: “It was Steve Jobs’s ingenuity alone! Huzzah for the American Dream!”
Do you know why the Hubble telescope has that name? Hubble built it with his very own money, before the eeevil state could take away his money. A rich story of true American derring-do, in which lots of self-uplifting took place.
I’ll reserve saying what I really think for the Pit, I suppose. But the sheer naivity of this is breathtaking. Get one thing straight, Sam: that system you’re cheerleading for is a system which literally requires tha some people be poor and others rich. It’s comforting (though appaling) to be able to think that those who are poor *must deserve to be * poor. But it’s about as intellectually untenable a position as exists–only slightly above, in fact, the idea that Blacks deserve to be slaves.
Yeah, whatever. Sarcasm and sneering do not make an argument. And yes, building skills, working, and doing what you have to do is part of citizenship, and ultimately they are what improve your income and your lot in life. Are there people who need help? Absolutely. Can everyone get equally far on their skills? No. The right believes in equality of opportunity. The left believes in equality of outcome - something that is impossible, and which will destroy the economy if attempted.
Whatever, dude. Would she have been happier in a fancy place? Not if it came as a handout forcibly extracted from other people. My mother accepted the reality of her situation, worked hard to make the best of it, and had a pretty good life.
Of course, you’re welcome to sit around and whine about the injustice of it all and demand more and more from the government out of ‘fairness’. You can demonize the people who have the money you want so that you can feel better about putting a gun to their heads. But in the end, reality will get you too. You can’t invent wealth by wishing it so - all you can do is wreck the economy to take what you want - once. Then you’ll be back in poverty. Ask the people like you living in Venezuela how well their grand socialist experiment is working for them.
You honestly need a cite for people on the left telling the poor that they are being oppressed, that the rich people are taking all the money, and that the government’s job is to do something about it? Seriously?
True enough. Also true: Welfare can be a trap that keeps you from making hard choices, and can keep you out of the workforce long enough that you become unemployable. Also true: Welfare lowers the necessity for fathers to stick around and raise their kids, leading to more deadbeat dads. Also true: Welfare can have perverse incentives that keep people from marrying, that keeps people locked in poor neighborhoods, etc.
The trick is to keep enough of a safety net to help those who truly need it, while minimizing the moral hazards and bad incentives that cause more problems.
If you’re sitting around waiting for someone to create a job just for you, prepare for disappointment. A better idea is to turn yourself into someone that employers want to hire. A good way to start might be to not try to demonize those employers, but instead figure out how you can be valuable.
No one’s talking about letting people starve. No one’s talking about eliminating the social safety net completely. But if you want to go there, then is it okay if I say that all the people on the left want to create Gulags, string up all the businessmen, and expropriate the means of production in a new terror? Since we’re getting all extreme and idiotic, that is.
Wow, you’re like a pyromaniac in a field of straw men, aren’t you? I never said we could eliminate poverty, or that we had to end CO2 regulations. This is the way people like you tend to argue - if someone suggests the regulatory burden might be lifted a little, suddenly we’re calling for the death of the Earth rather than say, maybe not being quite so anal about requiring approval to put up a ‘for-sale’ sign in the window of your store or needing 2,000 hours of ‘training’ and a license to braid hair.
For God’s sake. That’s not the way the market works, which I’m sure you know. Prevailing wages are set by the interaction between all workers and employers. But in fact, you CAN negotiate for higher wages if you are worth it. That’s what my mother did. She didn’t get rich, but she got far more than minimum wage after a few years, because she made sure she was an asset to her employer. Again, this used to be common sense. But sense isn’t all that common any more, apparently.
I never said anything of the sort. Looks like you’ve graduated to a flame thrower in that straw man field.
I see. So your contention is that if the government had simply taxed all the money away from those venture capitalists, We’d still have all the benefits of the computer age? After all, there would still be poor chinese laborers, there would be even more money for the government to spend (for a while), and it could be used for even more infrastructure. All the things remain except the capitalists. Do you still get an Apple and an Amazon and an ebay and a Tesla motors and a SpaceX? Why not, if that’s all you need?
Who needs Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Fred Smith, Gordon Moore, or Paul Allen? According to Saint Hillary businesses don’t create jobs anyway. I’m sure the government could have built all that with the stroke of a pen.
The Hubble telescope is a tremendous achievement. I never said NASA never achieved anything. But you do know NASA had to have hundreds of private contractors build the thing, right?
Oh, I quake in fear of your rapier wit. Gonna try some more lame sarcasm and fake outrage? Need some more straw? How about a spittoon? The spittle can really get out of hand when you’re blustering.
The system I’m cheerleading for is responsible for improving more lives around the globe than any economic system we’ve ever had. On the other hand, the class warriors and social justice radicals have only ever managed to wreck economies and kill tens of millions.
Capitalism does not require people to be poor - it allows people to rise to the high of their talent, skills, and work ethic. The result is certainly a mix of rich and poor - the 80/20 rule applies. Some people are smarter, luckier, work harder, are in the right place at the right time, etc. It isn’t always fair, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternatives - especially when mixed with a reasonable safety net which ensures that the poorest people do not starve and are not stripped of all opportunity to improve their lot.
Funny… I just finished telling several stories about poor people - and the message was not that they got rich. My mother ended up in a double-wide trailer, remember? So it has nothing to do with ‘deserve’, and I never claimed that anyone who wants to can become wealthy. But apparently you were too busy spluttering and inventing straw men to get my point.
You also seem to have missed my repeated assertion that we need a social safety net to help the truly needy. Better to cast me as another Faux-News loving, Koch-sucking neanderthal who wants to put kids in chimneys and rape the poor. Because that way you don’t have to really exercise that brain of yours, or think about hard problems that may not have a solution so easy as, “tax the rich and regulate the rest”.
And the plural of anecdote, of course, isn’t data. Have you got data? What is equality of opportunity in the first place? Everybody gets the same level playing field–and the same chips to play with? Or just the playing field? What happens when you play *Monopoly *with one guy having all the money and seven people with just a fifty each? Do you go and say: hey, sorry, it’s a level playing field! I’ll leave you to make your own deductions for real life.
Like a good capitalist!–don’t rock the boat, be happy with what you are, you did the best you could. She fell for the ideology, you’re falling for the ideology. Accept the reality!
Yes, please. Give me a cite. Because it’s so silly a paraphrase of what “the left” (sheesh)…
Well, I can not really see that all of us are getting idiotic, to be frank. Of course people shouldn’t starve–it’s very unhelpful for the economy. You have to keep the stock of workers up so you can keep paying low, low wages over the threat of hiring someone else, no? And you’re clearly not getting what “the left” wants. The mainstream contemporary left wants none of this–social democrats and the like. I want some of this (the expropriation of the means of production), but not all of it (Gulags? No. Killing anybody? No.)
Sam, I’ll cut this short with this and the other quote, for two reasons: a) I’m highjacking this thread, and b) you clearly have no understanding how capitalism works, and my shot at it won’t convince you, I’m sure. I’m not demonizing people with money: I’m demonizing the system that lets them play with that money, to the suffering of people the world over.
How do I know that you don’t know squat about the capitalist economic system? Here: you cannot invent wealth by wishing it? Of course you can! It’s what Wall Street does all the time. What do you think the various financial devices do? What do you think stock is? Its wished for wealth. Where does the wealth represented by the money come from when your stock reaches astronomical hights (before crashing again, as it always will)? It’s imaginary (at the very least, it can be, and very often is–which is why it needs outlets, for example in overpriced housing mortgages, which are not actually representing the worth of any actual house, and then…but you saw 2008). Wrecking the economy? That’s what capitalism does, over, and over, and over again, because it must, because there’s no other way it can function. Capitalism cannot work unless it extracts surplus value somewhere, and then realizes that value on the market, but it’s a con game, its logically impossible: in the market, not everybody can possible realize a profit, because then you end up with more money than there was in the market in the first place–so the system must exploit.
So I’ll conclude with this: some people, to your view, are “worth” more than others, a “worth” measured in the money that their employers are willing to give them, yes? You’re “worth” something when you’re an “asset” to an employer–when is the employer “worth” something?–so your employer determines your “worth”, no? How is that an equitable relationship?
Capitalism does not requires people to be poor, you say (only to add, then, that it does, by 80%; or 20%?). Yes, it absolutely does, and it does so logically, not by accident, simply because it is logically impossible for everybody in a free market trade to come off with a profit all the time. It does empirically, for we have global capitalism, and there are way more poor people than even 80%–incidentally, why can we cite Stalin to claim socialism can’t work but can’t cite the world today to claim capitalism doesn’t work, for it sure as hell doesn’t work for anybody but the very richest–you, me, your mum. It starts in the factory and the office where labor is extracted and paid below the actual value of that labor; it ends in the necessary economic crashes from overproduction and money speculation that are not aberrations, but logical necessities of a system that produces much more money than it produces values to buy.
Capitalism has done a whole lot of good: it’s the most innovative economic system we’ve ever had, responsible for one of the greatest upticks in overall wealth and knowledge, just as Marx said. And it’s still a broken, no-good system, because it has also been responsible for the greatest amount of human misery of any economic system we’ve ever had, from Black slavery to imperialism to World Wars to globalization, has horribly injured the particular ecosystem that we depend on to live, and continues to do so everyday, everywhere.
I’ve enjoyed reading you and Sam’s back and forth, but you have strayed far from the topic of the Democrats having a lock on the 2016 election. Plus, I think if you argued in a thread which announced what you were debating about, more people who are interested in the topic will be able to read it.