No. My response was to point out that the people who actually tabulated the numbers and assigned the categories explicitly said that the categories did not have the meanings that a totally different organization assigned to them.
I know that anecdote is not data, but simply look at the posts from someone here who agrees with you about taxation; RandRover. This poster:
- has bragged about their wealth and earning power
- feels that taxing the wealthy at higher rates is just wrong
- has said that charities should do the job of looking after the poor, not government
- has admitted that he/she gives not a nickel nor a moment of time to charities.
This person (and many more like him/her) are the reason that our society has decided to not rely on the charitable instincts that you yourself no doubt possess. If everyone was like you, perhaps your vision might work. They are not. You assume that everyone is like you and would give. They will not.
Charities do help, of course. They are not being ignored. As you’ve been told (if you’ve read the thread responses), they do not do a good job of implementing Pan-societal fixes and policies that help alleviate poverty on a large country wide scale (education, literacy for example).
When societies rely exclusively on charities to alleviate suffering, people die on the streets. Disease and crime are increased. In general, Western societies have decided that we don’t really like to see that. We’'ve decided that it’s in our OWN best interests that most people are educated, have food and shelter, and are not living in sub-human conditions that encourage disease and crime.
You never cited the actual definition and tried to argue that definition is unsatisfactory for the issue at hand. It would seem that if you start all the counties in the United States and (1) eliminate any counties with cities or towns with population greater than 50,000; (2) eliminate any counties with cities or towns with population greater than 10,000; and (3) eliminate any counties with a high percentage of persons who commute to such cities or towns, then you are left with counties which are considered “rural” for purposes of the classification.
(This comes from the document you link to.)
To me, this seems like a perfectly adequate definition of “rural” to test your hypothesis.
I had no idea about the patent statistics, but at least your unemployment claim seems unwarranted. Here are some statistics from the Swedish employment agency (http://www.ams.se/admin/Documents/ams/arbdata/tidigare.htm#4) (Swedish):
Year Unemployed %
1980 94571 2,3
1981 123042 2,9
1982 161294 3,8
1983 178248 4,2
1984 159258 3,7
1985 139376 3,2
1986 133532 3,1
1987 117434 2,7
1988 88689 2,0
1989 65709 1,5
1990 71007 1,6
1991 137672 3,0
1992 309757 7,0
1993 447370 10,4
1994 438363 10,3
1995 436180 10,1
1996 407553 9,5
1997 366989 8,6
1998 285546 6,7
1999 276681 6,4
2000 231244 5,3
2001 193009 4,4
2002 185838 4,2
2003 223023 5,0
2004 239201 5,4
2005 241434 5,3*
2006 210891 4,6
We had some problems in the early 90’s but those have since been overcome, and it doesn’t seem to have a steady upwards trend at all. Unemployment is probably going up now due to the crisis thing, but you can’t blame that on our “socialist” programs.
Conservatives hear ‘socialism’ and they think Che Guevara, Liberals hear ‘socialism’ and they think Sweden.
Well, I am not going to accept as “rural” cities of 10,000 to 49,999 people that have all the typical infrastructure of a city as well as the typical problems we associate with cities. I suspect that the vast majority of the crimes committed by various ethnic groups in “rural” situations are actually occurring in cities that have been arbitrarily assigned a “rural” classification.
Your points 2 and 3 are, in the “Micropolitan” definition, required to be linked as compound conditions,
so a city of 15,000 that has no significant commuter traffic with the surrounding countryside falls into the category that the Bureau of Statistics has (directly ignoring the note of the Office of Management and Budget that the terms cannot be used interchangeably) labeled “rural,” even though the 15,000 person city most likely is subject to all the good and bad features of any other “urban” city.
I think you are a bit confused about the definition of “micropolitan,” but I will make things really easy for you: Please provide 3 examples of cities or towns which (1) had population greater than 10,000 at the time they were classified; (2) were not classified into “micropolitan” or “metropolitan” areas; and (3) contain the “city slums” of which you spoke earlier.
Actually, I can’t do that. I was mistaken about the way some cities had been categorized based on an article I read last year about Sunnyside, WA, in which Sunnyside was called a “rural” location. It turns out that for the OMB and DOJ, since Sunnyside is in the same county as Yakima (even though it is separated by forty miles of desert), it has, indeed, been categorized as part of metropolitan Yakima and probably gets an “urban” label.