I’m not in any sense a right winger. Corporations can and do cut or add to their dividend payments all the time. After the corporation declares a dividend stockholders as of the dividend date are entitled to it, but corporations are not legally obligated to pay dividends or to keep paying them.
As old Bell System stock owners found out.
And Congress adjusts SocSec payments. But whatever the payment is deemed to be, the SocSec recipient or shareholder is legally entitled to it.
The point is that SocSec payments, once the rate is set, and dividends, once announced, are both contractual obligations – neither is a charitable donation (nor a bribe given to non-traditional Americans).
[QUOTE=septimus]
I’m slightly flabbergasted by the fact that our right-wingers cannot understand this analogy (even for their lives). Let me take it slowly.
[/QUOTE]
Well, that’s militantly surprising, since it’s obviously you wouldn’t know a right winger if it was sticking a large pole up your ass…sideways. 
Not all companies pay dividends. Some do, some don’t. It’s not an entitlement. Your analogy is a major fail…but then, you think that John Mace and I are right wingers, so what can one expect?
Only in your own mind where dividends are apparently always demanded and received. Even if it were the case, your analogy would be weak. You don’t have to pay anything into Social Security to get benefits from it, given the right circumstances…you simply need to be an American. You don’t even have to pay any taxes in some cases. To get a dividend you need to, you know, go out and buy stock in a company (one that gives dividends) and then hold and maintain that stock. In your world, perhaps stocks always go up and always give dividends, but sadly in the real world this isn’t always the case…otherwise people would simply buy stock and hold onto it forever as little magical money making machines of goodness…possibly burning the peasantry to generate their perpetual flow of money and thus giving even more joy to those who own it.
Why yes, it does seem to be. You actually got one thing correct in your post. But thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts for you. Here is the SDMB Board Game, Great Debates edition…and here is some lovely straw for you, for future needs. And this lovely ceramic dog…please step carefully on your way out…
septimus: Dividends are paid or not paid at the pleasure of the company’s BOD. A dividend can be declared or cancelled at an time. It would be wise for you to adopt a less condescending tone when you are discussing something which you don’t seem to understand very well.
Not at all. I’m happy to see you tilt at windmills as much as you’d like.
OK. I’ll accept that.
What false meaning? It’s the dictionary definition that you cited yourself. I have no amends to make, and I think others have already explained why your analogy is what is called, in debate parlance, a bad one. Sometimes referred to as “apples and oranges”. You are conflated a legally required payment by the government with a voluntary payment by a private entity.
Two questions for you, please.
Had I used “interest payment on a commercial bond” for the analogy instead of “dividend”, would you have accepted that as an “entitlement”?
Do you think I understood how dividends worked before you kindly explained them to me? No condescending snark, please; I’m sincerely curious how you assess my knowledge level.
I don’t know much about commercial bonds, so I won’t pretend that I do.
Pffft. You don’t get to reserve snark for yourself and then plead for no snark from other posters.
But perhaps I was wrong. It may be that it only seemed you didn’t know much about what a dividend was. It’s possible that you made a mistake thinking you were being clever, and then tried to hang on like someone without a life vest holding on to a sinking ship. Frankly, I’m not too interested in figuring out which it is. In either case it adds nothing to this debate.
[QUOTE=septimus]
2. Do you think I understood how dividends worked before you kindly explained them to me? No condescending snark, please; I’m sincerely curious how you assess my knowledge level.
Today 04:32 AM
[/QUOTE]
Possibly had you not tried to play the (very old, very tired) ‘sheesh, these right wingers are clueless and don’t know dick’ card when it was clear that you were wrong it would have gone over better for you.
Like John, I don’t know that much about commercial bonds, so I’m unable to assess how good that analogy would be. Assuming they are like regular, Federal Bonds I’d say it’s still a bad analogy. To get those interest payments you would presumably need to go out and buy the bond…at a guess, not everyone gets one simply because they are a US citizen. Even if we say that Social Security is only there for people who have worked and paid in enough quarters I don’t see how your analogy works, unless you automatically get commercial bonds and automatically derive those payments, or, IOW, are entitled to both the bond and the payments.
You tell me since hopefully you know more about them than you seemed to know about dividends…how does your analogy work better this way? And what’s the freaking POINT of this whole digression? What are you trying to prove with this…that rich folks get entitlements too? That there is a dual standard in politics? That, oh I don’t know, water is wet and the sky blue?
As to what consititutes Entitlement Spending I would turn to the good ol’ gobmint.
The Recovery Act has its own webpage to track spending and has a section on spending for Entitlement Programs:
That spending is divided up into various categories, some of which we have discussed in this thread and some that make me wonder why that particular spending is Entitlement Spending.
Under Medicaid/Medicare there are line items for:
[ul][li]HHS-Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services-Grants to States for Medicaid[/li][li]Medicare HITECH Incentive Payments[/li][li]Medicare - Program Management[/li][li]Medicaid - General Department Management[/ul][/li]All well and good. No real surprises. We all seem to understand Medicare and Medicaid spending are Entitlement Programs.
But then move on down to the Energy section and line items for:
[ul][li]Grants for Specified Energy Property in Lieu of Tax Credits[/li][li]Bonneville Power Administration Fund[/li][li]Western Area Power Administration, Borrowing Authority[/ul][/li]
Say what!? Why is running a power distribution program for the western states an entitlement program? Government could vote to support such a program but it seems to me it should be discretionary spending, not an entitlement. My electric company gets its money from its customers. Maybe these government run electric companies should do the same?
As John Mace noted, traditional entitlement spending programs are consuming a greater percentage of the budget. That is not sustainable in the long term. And now in addition to the ballooning costs of human services types of entitlements we now have a sort of mission creep where new programs are supported as entitlements. Gives a new meaning to the term Entitlements.
Sometimes, it’s the simplest statements that make the most sense. You hit the nail on the head there.
Rich people and even Republicans get Social Security and Medicare, so I’m puzzled how that makes sense to you (I understand why Der thinks it makes sense)…obviously a lot of both groups think that both are entitlements yet they get them anyway (you can’t opt out after all…if you work you pay, and if you pay you get it once you meet the age or disability requirements).
Well, I hear Democrats and Republicans both (not the politicians, per se, but voters) complaining about entitlements, but when it comes right down to it, they complain about the entitlements that they don’t directly benefit from.
I don’t hear old people complaining about Social Security and Medicare, but I hear plenty of younger people complaining about it. But don’t touch those Earned Income Credit, Childcare benefits, or Pell Grants. Anyone with income enough that they don’t qualify for food stamps is happy to complain about people who do. Obviously, I’m generalizing here, but I see enough of it in my day to day life that I feel pretty comfortable making that generalization.
I don’t understand why everyone thinks of the bailout controversy as a YES/NO issue. While I totally understood that something drastic needed to be done to save the banks it would have been completely possible to add some areas of accountability to the process.
Every bad debt was paid off 100% and the Fed never took seriously to the idea of having the banks that bought the bogus investment insurance policies from AIG and other banks settling for anything less than 100 cents to the dollar. Basically they told the TARP inspectors that they couldn’t ask anyone to take a “haircut” unless every creditor agreed and since the French government had some law forbidding this it would be a no go. When the TARP inspectors looked into this they were told the French government could’ve and probably would’ve made an exception to that law but no one had, you know, asked. Even a 98 cents to the dollar settlement would have saved the taxpayers millions.
And it is sort of meaningless to say the money was paid back as the Fed as continued to give money to the banks in the form of almost interest free loans and “quantitive easing” which is another name for “giving the banks billions in exchange for the worthless RMBS securities that took them down”. So, yes the banks paid back the initial loan…with other money borrowed from the taxpayers".
And what the freak was with the whole “allowing Goldman Sachs to become a bank holding company so they could get bailout money”. That was totally bogus and probably the result of everyone that runs the Fed being Goldman Sachs alum’s.
And there has been enough analysis of the financial crisis that it is fairly easy to find out which banks probably would’ve failed ( Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, for two).
I highly recommend the book “Bailout” by Neil Barofsky. Barofsky was the guy tapped to head up SIGTARP, the investigative agency formed to monitor the FED’s bailout distributions for fraud…something the FED highly objected to. Barofsky was an apolitical democrat appointed by the Bush administration whose qualifications were in high level law enforcement, he had kicked a lot of Columbian drug cartel ass.
He fell afoul of the Obama adminsitration because he objected to the whole “bailout money being paid back to the taxpayer” meme on the grounds that it had been “paid back” with other taxpayer money, among other things.
Here’s why I find the word “entitlement” so confusing.
In the example just given, I would say if I bought the bond, I would be entitled to the interest, and so the interest payments would be an entitlement to me. Just as in the real world I have a job, so I am entitled to my paycheck: my paychecks are entitlements to me. If I didn’t have a job, I would not be entitled to any paychecks. It all depends on my specific circumstances.
You aren’t entitled to the job (or to a bond, or to a dividend). You aren’t entitled to your pay, since it’s a free exchange between yourself and your employer…you gave your labor and thus are given compensation for it based on the agreement you have with your employer. You can use ‘entitled’ if you like, but it’s a different definition of the word in this case, because you are entitled to your pay because you’ve earned it through your labor, but your job isn’t an ENTITLEMENT. Same goes with the bond (assuming it works like the bonds I mentioned) or a dividend…it’s a free exchange. You buy a bond with your money, you get a return either in the form of interest payments, dividends, or when you sell it or cash it in, assuming that it’s matured in the case of a bond or that it still has value in the case of stocks in a publicly traded company.
Social Security, however, is an entitlement because while most people who receive it do in fact work all the requisite number of quarters to qualify, not everyone who gets it does…it’s not a hard and fast requirement that to get it you HAVE to work all of the quarters necessary…or any quarters at all in some cases. The only prerequisite is you need to be born an American to receive it. Same with medicare and medicaid. Oh sure, you can’t just get it for the hell of it…you’d need to demonstrate a reason why you should receive it even though you haven’t worked (some sort of disability or other valid reason).
Basically, the analogy just doesn’t work and I’m unsure why it seemingly has too. Social Security is what it is. It’s an entitlement. So what? Why is that a bad thing or a problem? I mean, if you think Social Security is a good thing then what difference does it make what it’s labeled? Call it Charley Brown and it doesn’t change what it is.