Why do you keep speaking of the American racial underclass? There is the African-American community, and there is the underclass, and there is a significant Boolean intersection between them, but not a union; many are members of either set but not the other.
Argument from ignorance, or just a stupid cunt?
So, just anecdote then.
Oh, dear.
I thought I was perfectly clear in my reply when I said
which you quoted in your post (#39), but let me try again: I do not think your statement bears any relation to reality. Cite, please?
The Communist parties and governments don’t help that confusion any, as they generally call their political-economic systems “socialist.” “Communism” being the ideal classless, propertyless, stateless society towards which they are in theory working in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion. At least, that was the Soviet ideology.
What you have to understand about Socialism vs Capitalism, or about economics in general, is that incentives matter. A society’s behaviour is largely dictated by the incentives to action that people are given. Subsidize a behavior, and you’ll get more of it. Punish a behavior, and you’ll get less of it.
When you look at free countries that nonetheless have large underclass populations, the usual reason is that the people in the underclass have been given incentives or punishments which have dictated their behaviour.
The big problem with socialism is that it brings with it a moral hazard. A direct side-effect of a highly progressive tax system is that it acts as an incentive to remain poor and a disincentive to become wealthy. For example, under Obama’s system of refundable tax credits, people will be rewarded for having low incomes by receiving direct payments from the government. For some who would have found poverty intolerable without those payments, and therefore would have worked hard to become more productive, those payments will cause them to instead choose to remain where they are, and society will suffer.
As a concrete example, Obama’s system of refundable tax credits actually creates a very high marginal tax rate on money at a very low wage. Most countries, including the U.S. and Canada, have low tax rates at low income levels, and have very slow growth in the marginal rate at those levels. This means there is no disincentive to earn more money, and upward mobility increases at the low end, whch is just what you want. If I can get a $1000 raise at work, and keep all of it, I might work a little harder to get it. But if that $1000 comes with an effective marginal rate of 40%, I’m only going to take home $600. All those people who’s decision line for working harder for a raise fell between $600 and $1000 will have their decision changed, and will choose to stay where they are.
Refundable tax credits that are lost at relatively modest income gains will have the effect of increasing poverty - that is, increasing the percentage of people who have incomes below the poverty level without the tax credit. The tax credit will allow them to live a little better, which is exactly why more of them will choose to stay where they are.
On the rich side, steeply progressive tax rates have a double whammy. First, you have the disincentive to earn wealth in the first place I already mentioned. Second, these people tend to be investors and businesspeople, and put a lot of their income into the market or their businesses. This grows the economy. Tax it away from them, and less of that growth will happen.
You can compile a big list of the various moral hazards socialism creates, and you can look around the world and see the effect it has. Look at France: It has very strong labor laws. People get six weeks of vacation, minimum wages are high, and it’s almost impossible to fire someone after you hire them. This was done for purposes of ‘fairness’ and ‘helping the worker’. And what was the effect? Well, it worked out okay for people who already have jobs. But for the employers, not so much. And when you can’t fire an employee, you have to be really careful who you hire. Therefore, disadvantaged populations in France like Muslim immigrants and young people without job histories have horrendous rates of unemployment. This is creating a whole new underclass in French society.
This is what’s wrong with socialism. It rewards failure and sloth, and punishes hard work and productivity. Of course, it also helps the truly needy more, but at great cost to society as a whole.
I’m not clear on what this has to do with the thread. There are many types of risky behavior, but for some reason you seem to want to focus only on sexually risky behavior.
brainglutton asked me a specific question about the incidence of HIV. I brought up reckless behavior in that context.
Even if one accepts that a progressive income tax is socialism, this is just nonsense, absolute and utter nonsense. People will strive to make as much money as they can. Wealthy doesn’t even matter!
If I’m making $45,000 a year, and paying - say - $10,000 in taxes, your theory is that I won’t strive to make $70,000 a year just because I’d be paying $15,000 - or whatever - in taxes? That’s nonsense; I’m still better off. I still have an incentive to make more money.
Well, the idea is that people will only work more so longer as the benefits of the increased money earned outweigh the cost of the increased work demanded. Shifting the tax rate can shift that trade-off (by altering the effective monetary value of a given wage increase). Sure, all else being equal, who wouldn’t want more money? No one turns down a free lunch. But all else isn’t equal.
This is an economically ignorant statement. Incentives matter. They have real consequences.
Look at it this way: Let’s say that I’m your employer, and I ask you to work some evenings and skip some lunches and maybe the odd weekend. Would you do that for free? Of course not. Would you do it for a million bucks? Of course. This means that your ‘price’ for doing this added activity is somewhere between those two extremes.
You may not explicitly work it out in your head, and may have just internalized it by your emotional reaction to the request, but you definitely have a price for extra work. Would you do it if the boss told you that you might get a raise if you showed that level of dedication? Well, that depends on how much the raise is, doesn’t it? If you put in 10 extra hours a week, and the raise is $50/mo, you’re probably not going to do it. If it’s $500/mo, sure.
There is always someone on the ‘margin’. Someone who’s behavior can be changed by a slight change in incentives. Tax that raise, and you will push some people out of the decision to work harder.
It should be trivially easy to see that this is true. If it didn’t, why don’t we all have two jobs? How come we only work 8 hours a day? If you’re a contractor who’s paid by the hour, why don’t you just work 16 hours a day? Some people do, but many choose not to. Their price hasn’t been met.
Every time a tax pushes take-home income of additional work below the employee’s price line, that employee will not do the additional work.
Yes, of course, it’s only because of taxes that people don’t work 16 hours a day.
It’s only because they aren’t being offered an income increase which they feel justifies work X that people aren’t doing work X; this is largely tautological. Tax rates can alter the manner in which wages map to effective (i.e., post-tax) income, altering the comparison between increase in income and increase in work, and thus affecting people’s decisions in this regard.
True to an extent Sam, but only at very high marginal tax rates. It’s not an all or none proposition, there is more of a sliding scale. And the scale is different for different people, and will also change with the same person over their lifetime. I believe that most people see the logic in a system where those who have more contribute more to the common good of society. There is a tipping point, to be sure, where someone will say “I am not going to work more/harder just to pay most of it in tax” I don’t think Canada or the US is anywhere near that point for the vast majority of people.
Canada is “more socialist” than the US in many respects - other countries are “more socialist” than Canada. The things that slide a country down along the “socialist” scale include a variety of things - top marginal tax rate, or “redistributing the wealth” is merely one thing.
This is why I cringe whenever I hear about “socialist” Obama, and how an increase in the top tax rates in the US (back to where they were not so long ago for God’s sake) is going to cripple the economy, and lead to the extinction of the American Dream as we know it. Hyperbole much?
What you’re missing is that Obama’s refundable tax credits make the effective marginal rate increases at the low income levels very high - as high as 40% (i.e. if you earn a salary that entitles you to a tax credit, and then you get a bump in pay that eliminates or reduces the tax credit, the effect is that your bump in pay will only result in a take-home of 60% of the pay increase). Once you get above that threshold, the marginal rate increases are reduced to normal. But for people in that very low income range, there will be large marginal rate increases, which will act as a significant disincentive.
Of course, it can be hard to find the line between a social democrat and a left-liberal. To me, the difference is this - a liberal seeks to take money from the rich and give it to very disadvantaged people or to use it for social works programs or government programs like education. A socialist, on the other hand, believes that as you move up the ladder of wealth, a certain percentage of that wealth should be taken from you and pushed down the ladder to everyone else - not just the needy. As Obama said, “Society works best when you spread the wealth around.” Socialists see large differences in wealth as inherently bad and seek to minimize them through the redistribution of wealth along egalitarian lines. Or as the saying goes, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
In a liberal’s ideal world, the rich will be taxed enough that there will be no more hunger and poverty, and everyone has access to a good education and good health care. In a socialist’s ideal world, there are no differences in wealth. Everyone gives what they have to the big government kitty, which then re-allocates it more ‘fairly’.
You need to understand that the world is a very different place than it was 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, The U.S. had some of the lowest tax rates in the world, because everyone else’s were so much higher. There were also a lot more trade barriers, and the Asian Tigers and China were just beginning to wake up.
Ask yourself this: What’s it going to do to U.S. business investment when U.S. corporate taxes are at 45 or 50%, and Canada’s are at 15%? With completely free trade, what will it mean when U.S. companies are forced to pay what is essentially a carbon tax through cap and trade, and Canadian companies don’t? What will it mean when the wealthy in the U.S. pay 28% on their capital gains, but if they move to Canada they’ll only pay 15%?
The U.S. currently has the second-highest corporate taxes in the world. The Democrats complain loudly and bitterly about manufacturing jobs leaving the country - do you think the high tax rates just might have something to do with that?
And when U.S. manufacturers face increased competition from lower-cost labor from other countries that are rapidly gaining in productivity, what do you think is going to happen to manufacturing when the Democrats pass card-check laws and the number of union workers in the U.S. doubles?
You don’t live in a vacuum. Wishing the world was the way it was in 1990 isn’t going to help save the economy. Why do you think Canada and other countries have moved towards flattening the tax system with consumption taxes and lowering corporate and income taxes? Because just like a company has to cut the fat to compete in the market, governments in a competitive world need to make sure they are not taxing their own productivity. The U.S. under Obama would be moving in the opposite direction of most other countries. This will not be good for America.
The Democrat’s response will be protectionism. They’ll demand ‘fair trade’, and hold trade agreements hostage to worker protection requirements that will have the effect of killing the deals and protecting the jobs at home. They’ll pass laws to try to stop businesses from moving capital to other countries to avoid tax. They’ll try to fix the problem by offering ‘job creation’ subsidies, which will require even higher individual taxes. This will end in a very bad economic outcome.
It seems that to have any chance of even standing for high office in the U.S. you need an incredible amount of money that can only be supplied by the wealthy.
So to get their funding you must get your policies ok’d by them.
The rich dont need social health care or welfare so that isn’t going to be high on their agenda, especially if they think that their wealth will be taxed to pay for it.
So if you wish to stand then your policies must please them.
All this before you even think about courting the electorate.
So when the major hopefulls of whichever party finally put their platform before the voters you just know that there isn’t going a Socialism option,the people who wouldn’t compromise on that failed the audition and are never even heard of.
I should really pay to join this place. I may not agree with everything, but I do learn a lot…
More tomorrow.
Ya know what? I think we’ll try it and see (at least, the polls seem to indicate we will).
We know that the tax/economic policies of the last 8 years are an epic fail. We don’t know that what Obama’s proposing (and whatever is eventually worked out) will fail.
You can tell us what you think, but you don’t know that they will fail.
Something that may or may not be relevant:
Many people have already mentioned that nowadays “Socialism” sounds like “Mild Communism”. I suspect Obama is more of a Social Democratic persuasion, which is not invasive of personal rights.
Many of the “social network” mechanisms of Spain weren’t created or improved by anybody who’d be called a “leftie” by anyone. Our two XXth century dictators did a lot of work on Social Security, many initiatives in Social Housing were started and managed by parish priests (not “the Church” as an institution) or by groups of industrialists who figured out, like Scotsman Robert Owen, that healthier workers do better work, Public Housing also came from a Dictator. And, in spite of what Judge Garzón may or may not want to believe, el Generalísimo is still dead and still no kind of Commie(1).
(1) He’s just started an investigation into the36-39 war as “a crime agaisnt humanity” and one of the documents he’s requested is Franco’s death certificate. Jokes about Franco living in Vegas singing Love me Tender at weddings have taken about five minutes to spring up.
The racial issue seems to amplify and intensify things. Again, looking at gun control – which is an issue I know pretty well – one can look at a place like Vermont which is 99% white. There is practically no gun regulation in Vermont. Probably there are white members of the underclass there, and probably many of those people engage in the sort of criminal activities which the underclass are more prone to engage in. Nevertheless, there is not a huge problem in Vermont with people shooting eachother.
I have my own rules of debate.
Per Rule 4, you must represent to me that you are seriously skeptical that members of the underclass are more likely to engage in risky, promiscuous sexual behavior than others.
Then I will try to find you a cite.