Ok, so assuming for the sake of an argument that the study is flawed (and I would argue that “tentative,” “preliminary,” and “far from perfect” do not automatically make it “a joke”), does that then make the following claim true:
?
First let me say that my comment here isn’t specifically directed at you, but your quote provides a useful anchor around which to direct my observation.
There are many aspects of the US economy and society that literally quite boggles the minds of civilized nations. That the richest country in the world still argues about universal health care, for example, when every other industrialized country in the world has embraced it for many decades as a core pillar of their social contract, is incomprehensible on any rational level. The extent to which the health insurance industry – just to take that one isolated example – controls the hearts and minds of everyday Americans is such that even the minimal reforms of the PPACA are denounced as “socialism”, which seems to be just appalling evidence of an oligarchy promulgating self-serving disinformation. The widening gap between the super-rich and everybody else, as expressed in the Gini index and many other measures – provides many other examples.
So when I see an expression like “The idea that the rich have or could hijack the political process is a myth designed to make people feel better about their envy” – when in fact there are good grounds for questioning whether there is even a meaningful democracy in America any more – the health care and taxation systems being prime examples – I see someone who has not only drank the Kool-Aid, but is either manufacturing and selling it or has drowned in it.
Well, you could always move to Sweden or any other country that taxes its people heavily and redistributes its wealth. Nobody’s stopping you, you’re free to go, any of you that feels that this country’s wealth is not distributed adequately.
Or, better still, we could stay in our own native country and work to make it more egalitarian.
Well, of course: “America – love it or leave it”. This philosophy has been heard quite extensively, though I personally haven’t seen its formal publication much outside the realm of bumper stickers on redneck pickups with gun racks on the rear windows.
No.
Why do you get to decide who is civilized, and what the indicia of civilization are?
Perhaps we’re the richest country because we embraced a self-sufficient attitude for so much of our history, and did not allow ourselves to be shamed into paying for things which should be the responsibility of each person?
When has this ever been true?
In other words, Americans are taught from childhood to be easily exploitable victims. Self destructively selfish, short sighted and disloyal to our own; more concerned with hatred than with anything else. A society full of people who would prefer to suffer or die themselves than take the terrible risk that somehow in some way something they’ve done might actually help someone else.
And, what does it matter that America if the richest country in the world if most of the population doesn’t share in it? Why should we care about abstract numbers?
Nah, just throwing all in together. Being quick on the response/post.
More to come.
Those fucking kids born with Down’s Syndrome and AIDS should lift themselves up by their bootstraps!
You just seem to take for granted that ‘producers’ are labor, and then decree that the rich are not producers. Powerful stuff.
You are playing with definitions, and trying to say that one of the factors of production are the sole means of production. Note the word ‘production’, which is related to produce/producers.
The rich create quite more than the poor, via entrepreneurship, and you know that. That’s basic economics.
The rich do not ‘make profits off of the producers’, the rich make profits off of their resources, some of which are wages that they pay to labor.
Also, show me a person who sits on a huge sum of money. That is just nonsense. Their money is working for them, as they have apportioned it. They drive the consumer economy with their spending. With their investments. Creating whole industries all around the world. Creating jobs.
Their huge sums of money are not towers from which they abuse the poor, as you would have it. Their HSM are tools, which drive production.
“It depends on where his money went.” Fabulous. :rolleyes:
No, that’s right wing propaganda.
Nonsense. It’s the common people who drive most of the economy. Nor do they create jobs, the common people do.
In general, it’s been true for much of our national history.
That’s just left-wing propaganda.
Yes, because this is the conservative approach—using a low income cutoff will tend to underestimate the effect of wealth on policy (and it’s not like they only study a 146,000 a year household, or even just that group of such households—this is just their income cutoff for the ‘affluent’ bracket). And of course, the conclusions of a single pilot study will always be ‘tentative and preliminary’ (which, I note, is the authors’ own wording)—any scientific result needs independent corroberation and replication before it can be considered robust. But this does not invalidate the study as a data point, and it’s a far cry from making it a ‘joke’.
How’s the air in China? I hear it’s nasty stuff. And all those workers who committed suicide at Foxcomm … makers of fine Apple products … I wonder why they did that?
Maybe China isn’t the paradise you think it is …
I got a better idea. I will stay here and make America a better country. YOU can get the hell out if you want, and don’t let the doorknob hit you on the butt on the way out.
Or maybe we got rich because we had a continent full of resources and a shortage of labor that led us to embrace automation, and we didn’t get fucked over in two successive world wars (granted, the Europeans kinda brought that on themselves, especially World War I which I see as the last gasp of the old European aristocracy, destroyed by its own incompetence).
Wrong. Der Trihs may have overstated the case, but the health-care debate confirms something very sad about American right-wingers.
Studies show that a single-payer model could provide care to all Americans for the same total cost as is now spent for some Americans. (There is a huge expensive bureaucracy, as well as individual doctor’s costly paperwork, dedicated to denying care.) When this is brought up right here at SDMB, there are many whose response shows that they are resentful that “undeserving” might get free health-care. They don’t react to the arithmetic fact that their own costs wouldn’t rise. Even when the arithmetic is explained, they continue to voice resentment and fear that someone will get something “undeserved.”
Now if psychoactive drug were administered to the right-winger, temporarily suppressing their overly large fear centers and activating the rational decision-making cortical area shown to be larger in “liberals,” they might respond more rationally in the health-care debate. They aren’t, and they don’t.