I honestly can’t tell if folk who want to be taxed less actually understand where the money for social services comes from.
“Why should I have to subsidize someone else’s kid with my taxes? They already go to school for free!” “I don’t want to pay for your healthcare! Go to the emergency room if you’re sick!”
The quality and breadth of accessible education is sorely lacking, and many people want to strangle it even further. Once we get to the point where only families who already have money can afford a reasonable education, we’ve just reverted to a caste system.
I’ll admit it; I don’t understand compound interest. Oh, I understand how it works, but I don’t understand why financial advisors et al. treat this as a magical blessing from the heavens. If you put $10 in the bank and end up with $11, it won’t be any different than if I put $11 in the bank at the end. A dollar from interest is no different than a dollar from labor or a dollar from sales or a dollar plucked from the street gutter. So why do people get the look of awe and reverence on their face when they say “Oh, but it’s compound interest!”
First, I think you’ve made some assumptions about my (and others’) politics. Personally, I’m a hand-up-not-a-hand-out kinda guy. You’ll never see me talking about cutting funds for the SBA or DOE.
But anyway, I honestly can’t tell if people who want everyone to go to college actually understand why college is expensive and a degree is devalued.
“Everyone should go to college so we’ll all have valuable degrees! And it’ll be cheaper that way!”
I don’t know where you got the idea that this thread was about what we think the system should look like. It’s about what the guy in the OP should do to improve his lot in life and if he has the right to bitch at all.
First of all, hopefully you understand that by “skill”, I mean “job skill”, not something like shooting milk out of your eye socket. Second, you need to add two more conditionals- “If a person is not paid well, then he does not have skills or is not utilizing them.” So this guy in the OP is not paid well, therefore he either has no skills or is not utilizing them. Since he’s been trying to move jobs for two years, he must not have any underutilized skills that people wish to pay him for.
Ergo, he has failed to acquire any skills. And because no one who puts forth sufficient effort to acquire employable skills can possibly fail to do so (barring rare situations like disabilities and incredible misfortune), he must not have tried sufficiently to acquire skills.
Honest question, not an attempted gotcha just more me trying to understand how the conservative brain works:
Is it only in AMERICA that people are to blame for their poverty, or can any poor person in any country pull up the ol’ bootstrap and “gain skills” and get whatever raise the haves decide to sprinkle the workers with? Just first world countries?
IMO, it seems when you make statements like just earn skills and you will get a raise, that you doubt that social mobility is a thing. If it is lower in some countries and higher in others, in the lower countries all you have to do is pull that boot up higher and tighter, do I have the idea right?
I did assume so, since you have demonstrated you believe that success and skill are the same. This does lead us to the strange point that shooting milk out of your eye could suddenly be in huge demand and what wasn’t a skill suddenly becomes a skill, but if I rejected everything others thought that was weird I’d never talk to anyone. Let it be said that I think this is a highly nonstandard use of the word and you may get your ideas across more clearly in the future if you just avoid using such a word, if you have your own idiosyncratic definition.
Yes. “If and only if a person is paid well does he have a skill [which is being utilized].”
I see why you think so, but I don’t think anyone here would agree with you. Probably some people would agree with this phrase, but if they realized how you were defining the word “skill” they’d reconsider.
Oh, now we have three axes: success, unemployable skills, and employable skills. I’m not sure I care to run around this tree again.
I’d say it’s false on any understanding of “skill” that has anything to do with the standard English definition of the term. For someone could easily have many skills but lack the crucial skill of selling his skills.
I know at least one person in this position, for example. On further thought, make that at least two. Actually three. Hm…
I’m unfamiliar with labor laws in other countries, but I assume if there’s money to be made, it might as well be yours. So yes, anyone can bootstrap themselves. In some countries, there is no money to be made and no access to the skills required to take what little there is. But that’s not America, nor is it Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia, or a bunch of other countries I could name.
Note that I haven’t said all poor people are to blame for their poverty- the disabled or infirm aren’t, for instance- but we’re talking about sound-minded, able-bodied factory workers here. And we’re not talking about Tiger Woods-level of success, either.
So yes, (almost) anybody can be successful in first-world countries. Most people don’t try because it’s considered too hard, but the point is it’s possible.
When talking about skilled and unskilled workers, I don’t think it’s idiosyncratic to define “skills” as something people are willing to pay for. You don’t think when economists talk about skilled workers, they’re talking about people that are fun at parties, do you?
What do you mean “now”? Look at post #201 and what it’s responding to. They’ve been there for a whole page now.
You’re ignoring a system designed to divert risk away from money lenders to tax payers.
The lenders could take all kinds of irresponsible risks, knowing that the tax payers would have to pick up the tab. This meant they could make scads of money making what they knew to be bad loans, and they used all kinds of tricks to get people to sign papers they didn’t understand, or didn’t actually say what the buyer thought they said. Many of the signers had no idea what they were getting into, and the sellers deliberately kept them in the dark.
It’s a simple idea. When you deceive someone to gain something of value from them, you have stolen. What part of that do you not understand?
May I point out that many upper class people game the system to get unearned and undeserved wealth, or does that make me a commie? (That notion would amuse quite a few people around here.) Your basic claim seems to be that practically all wealthy people deserve their wealth, having done nothing morally or legally wrong, that almost all of the parasites are in the lower classes with virtually none in the upper classes, and that any body who doubts the wisdom and goodness of this insight must be a commie welfare queen.
Last time I checked, I was still a him.
I’m not on welfare, and I’m the wrong gender to be a queen. I come from a poor background, and I’ve done everything you’ve said to do. I got an education, I’ve worked hard, sought out opportunities, I’ve been a good boy. Still I’ve been working poor most of my life. That’s why I seethe with contempt when some asshole liberal tells me I have “white privilege,” or some asshole conservative tells me that I lack moral character and/or intelligence.
While we’re on the topic, a friend of mine is buying a house and says she has a packet of 85 fine-print pages full of technical terminology and legalese to go through. Is this typical? I did a little googling and couldn’t find copies of mortgage documents, but it may be there’s a specific name for these things which I don’t know and which may help me find such documents to look at. Any idea what terms I should be using?
Yes, it’s typical. It’s why it’s recommended you add $500 to the costs of closing and bring in a real estate attorney. Compared to how much you’ll spend on a house, it’s peanuts.
I didn’t, but although I’m not an attorney, I do have a degree in accounting and read and negotiate contacts in my job. I did look over each page for the two closings we went though eighteen months ago.
Okay that makes sense, and I’ll remember it when I buy a home–get an attorney.
I assume the role of the attorney will be largely interpretational–he’ll go through the contract and explain it to me, correct? And if he gets something wrong and I am thereby misled, he’s on the hook? (And his explanations, I assume, are in writing, for the record?)
Or is that not what a real estate attorney would be doing for me?
Reading over that it sure sounds like I’m trying to ask leading questions but I’m actually not. I’m actually very concerned about what’s going to happen come house buying time.
That’s basically what I’m saying, yes. The wealthy, like most people, are generally law-abiding and honest people. Their wealthy is both earned and deserved. Most (maybe not “almost all”) of the parasites are in the lower classes, yes.
First of all, I didn’t call you a welfare queen. I said that just like “welfare queens” don’t really exist, neither do sound-minded, able-bodied unskilled workers that tried to get ahead and were just kept down by the man.
I never said you lacked moral character, either. It’s not reprehensible to be poor. It’s just objectionable to be poor and complain that it was the system’s fault. If you’re poor and happy, hey, more power to ya.
Sorry. I wasn’t aware that men had “cat” in their usernames.
I’d say “fine print” and “full of” are probably exaggerations, but 85 pages sounds about right. It’s a lot to look over, sure, but it’s certainly decode-able by the layperson, especially the math parts.
I know the reading abilitities of a lot of “laypeople” fairly intimately, due to the nature of my work. I’m going to have to take what you’ve said with a grain of salt til I’ve seen the docs for myself.
Today I tought a classroom of laypeople who couldn’t understand how to figure out what the conclusion of the following passage is:
Of the five “thoughts” in the passage, the correct answer was not one that even a single person in the room believed (at first) was the conclusion of the passage.
If there are a lot of laypeople like this, then there are a lot of laypeople who can’t read 85 dense pages of legal or technical text and hope to understand it.
I’ve read that quoted passage a few times and I’m not sure what you are asking your students to say…what was the exact question you asked your students because all the information is listed, if you asked me “What is the conclusion of this passage” I would be confused as well because there is nothing to be inferred by the passage, just stated.
The question I asked them was, “What’s the conclusion of this pasage?”
And of course it has a conclusion. It’s a very clear example (albeit not the simplest one in the world.) Follow the indicator phrases like “so” “since” etc.
ETA: The example is admittedly pretty artificial–you don’t typically see “so” and “so then” one after the other. But that shouldn’t confuse anyone who has a grasp of the concepts involved. The artificiality is due to what I was illustrating with the example, and to the fact that I don’t limit the examples to just academically perfect prose (“so” and “so then” occuring close together definitely happens in spoken contexts, frequently) and also to the fact that it was written up on the fly during class. But anyway… a but OT I guess. I was just trying to illustrate how little-prepared at least some lay people are for reading even simple texts and understanding their point, much less thick legal documents.
I wanted to edit that last post but it was too late. Here’s a new version:
The question I asked them was, “What’s the conclusion of this pasage?”
And it does have a conclusion. It’s a very clear example, actuall, albeit not the simplest one in the world. Follow the indicator phrases like “so” “since” etc. (Given the presence of such words, what is it that led you to say that everything in the passage is “just stated”?)
I am not 100% clear what you mean by the phrase “inferred by the passage.” Can you explain that? My confusion stems from my belief that passages never infer anything–people are the things that do the inferring. So when you say “inferred by the passage” what exactly do you have in mind?
ETA: The example is admittedly pretty artificial–you don’t typically see “so” and “so then” one after the other. But that shouldn’t confuse anyone who has a grasp of the concepts involved. The artificiality is due to what I was illustrating with the example, and to the fact that I don’t limit the examples to just academically perfect prose (“so” and “so then” occuring close together definitely happens in spoken contexts, frequently) and also to the fact that it was written up on the fly during class. But anyway… a bit OT I guess. I was just trying to illustrate with a concrete example how little-prepared at least some lay people are for reading even simple texts and understanding their point, much less thick legal documents.
