If that was Sowell’s point, it would have been worthless. Unfortunately I’ll have to repeat it for you:
“Most working Americans who were initially in the bottom 20 percent of income-earners, rise out of that bottom 20 percent. More of them end up in the top 20 percent than remain in the bottom 20 percent”
Your summary of this point as saying lower income people are more likely to increase incomes is a bizarre spin.
Let’s call the bottom quintile poor and the top quintile high income.
If you were to tell your average Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump supporter that people who start out poor are more likely to become high income than remain poor, they’d call you a liar. This is an unbelievable fact that is unmatched in the history of he world. We aren’t even talking about inter generational movement. We are talking about individuals rising up from poverty within their own lifetimes.
Most of those pollution deaths are in places where the government has carved out “acceptable” levels of pollution, below which no suit can be brought against the polluters. The government fails to protect property rights and liberty is to blame? Nice try, bud.
Trump U? Lol try asset forfeiture and eminent domain if calling taxes theft is too scary for you. Or have liberals taken to defending asset forfeiture under Trump’s fascist regime?
They need not be if the goal is to witness more economic mobility in the backwater states of Europe. Privatization would be an end goal of liberalization.
Since we have the track record with you ignoring data and bizarre distortions via your ideology, I have the better things to waste time on, like perhaps a pedicure.
Of course anyone writing “’ backwater states of europe” is not worth any time of serious information.
you can try providing any data for your variuous assertions like on wealth transmission. Data, not ideologue assertions.
Then it’s not really “$10 a day”. It’s a meaningless average as it has to be paid in one lump sum.
Is it a separate fee or is it part of a housing plan?
I did okay - but that doesn’t invalidate your point that productivity increases haven’t been shared in general. I’m all for higher income taxes on those who have, including me, in order to distribute money when businesses won’t.
But my point was that if you start with money you don’t have to be very smart to keep it and grow it.
When I was in college I more or less illegally cooked in my dorm rather than taking the food plan - and my costs went down a lot. (And time spent on it went up.)
Maybe you can enlighten us on how college debt is behavioral, since Farnaby obviously cannot.
I see no data backing up his claims. Now, certainly someone right out of school may be low and may raise in position due to regular raises and promotions.
But, more to the point, he never says anything about people falling out of the top 1%, which is your claim. Why don’t you try to find evidence for that absurd statement.
That was not my claim. I know what college and meal plans cost - I paid for my kids college. Saying that paying for food plans in college is not “behavioral” in no way says that tuition doesn’t cost more.
Thieves don’t usually pay their victims, so eminent domain doesn’t count as theft, whether or not specific instances are justified. I haven’t heard of a lot of liberal support for asset forfeiture - I think that was more of a law and order thing.
Now, do you agree that Trump was ripping off his “students” or not. Note he paid them back when sued. Sum up all the ripoffs, and I suspect you get a lot more than asset forfeiture applied to the innocent. Taking back ill-gotten gains should not count as theft.
Technically, not everyone who goes to college gets the best deal they can. The ‘best deal’ as it were is to only go to an expensive college if you determine the benefit exceeds the cost. For example, if you go do premed at Harvard, the immense tuition costs are offset by the fact that your odds of getting into medical school were (though I heard recently they put a quota on how many As) much higher.
But if you go major in women’s studies and a teaching certificate, at Harvard…you can see how your immense debt:income ratio is a little bit your fault.
But there’s been mostly out of control inflation of education costs. The chief reason being that the Federal government will give you loans, no matter what the number is, so people go into as much debt as it takes.
The other reason is that State governments have stopped subsidizing schools in their states, spending the money on extra prisons instead. (yes. Most state governments are on a tight budget and they’ve had to build more and more prisons over the last few decades)
So the government actually is responsible for out of control inflation of education and medical costs (the medical costs are for a different reason).
But the solution to these problems is not “government abdicates”. The solution requires the government’s policies to be changed.
I suspect that Libertarians and Objectivists don’t really care about finding a “solution to poverty”. Their belief is based on a concept that the system is most fair when people keep the fruits of their labor and can trade with each other, unencumbered by interference from Big Government or Special Interests distorting value based on political agendas. Enterprising poor people will find ways to get ahead. The ones that won’t or can’t, well, they will just have to stay poor.
It’s a nonsensical belief for many of the reasons stated in previous posts, and one that has been disproven through history:
Privatizing certain public services, such as police, fire, military, prisons, even health care have demonstrated conflicts of interest that are not in the best interest of society.
While regulation does incur a cost to business, often those are costs that have been externalized to the rest of society, such as disposing of waste and toxic byproducts, maintaining safety standards, disproportionate wear and tear on public infrastructure, even fraud or criminal activities.
-There is little to no empirical evidence that reducing taxes on the wealthy or corporations “trickles down” to everyone else. It’s not clear why anyone would think that is a good system to begin with.
-Society has to incur the costs of extreme poverty anyway - in the form of more security, more police, more prisons, more insurance against crime and vandalism.
-A system based on laissez faire free markets without any checks or regulation is inherently amoral. That is to say, it doesn’t care how a dollar is made, so long as it is made. Libertarians might argue that people will ultimately decide the morality of an enterprise through voting with their dollars instead of through their legislators. But historically, people don’t seem to give a shit where their T-shirts, iPods and food come from or how it’s made, so long as it’s cheap.
Of course, the counter argument by Libertarians is always to equate any regulation with Stalinist Communism.