I thought the expression was coined by Lewis Carroll? It’s definitely used by one of the characters in the Alice adventures.
It’s also a Bayesian statistics term, but we’ll leave that for now…
pan
It might be nice if we could look at the opposition as human beings for a change. Does it make you feel better to call liberals morons or to say conservatives aren’t very nice? Those kind of inflammatory statements don’t really make rational conversation all that possible.
Marc
I’m not wealthy either but I do begrudge my money being given to the ‘less fortunate’ as you term them. Whatever I have earned for myself isn’t because of I got a 7 on the first roll of the dice or I chose heads and the big coin-flip in the sky turned up heads. Any success I’ve had was because I made good decisions (stayed in school, out of trouble, didn’t have kids when I couldn’t afford them, etc). People in all economic levels that make good choices will end up successful, just as people in all economic levels that make bad choices will end up unsuccessful. Fortune (as in luck) has nothing to do with it. It may be more difficult for some who start off at a lower spot on the ladder than others, but it’s not impossible for anyone to be successful.
As for liberals being nicer than conservatives, I find that ironic seeing as they want to take money from me to give it to others. How is that nice to me? It’s easy to be nice with other peoples’ money, isn’t it?
And how was the term translated into English in the earlier editions of his work? Boot-strap does not even appear as a noun in English until the 1890s. Its first attestation in the phrase “to pull oneself up” is by Joyce in 1922.
I’m pretty sure that everyone is aware of the irony of the phrase. It is just that some people believe that it is figuratively possible.
As to the general thrust of this thread, it would seem to belong in the *Pit. Following the lead of the OP, nearly everyone has simply lined up on their points of the political compass and hurled imprecations and overbroad generalizations at their perceived opponents. There have been a few good points made, but most of this is simply generic ranting, much in the manner of the silly thread on liberals or conservatives being smarter a couple of weeks back.
Yeah, my father made a very poor choice when he broke his back on the job, spent the next 20 years in recovery, and spent all his savings, and much more, on hospital bills. He didn’t go on welfare, but he qualified for it. I don’t have a problem with my taxes being used to pay the medical bills of people like him. That would be one instance of our money filtering back to us via social spending, if the US were able to get past its irrational fear of the idea of “socialized medicine.” But that’s not your problem; you’ve got a good medical plan, I suppose.
Luck has nothing to do with success? This is hardly worth a response. You stayed in school, stayed out of trouble. So did I. What gave you the mental wherewithal to make those good decisions? What prevented you from being born into a situation in which you would have learned a very different set of values? Luck, same as me. My father has always been poor, but he did teach me, often from his hospital bed, to work hard and be responsible. If he had been a shiftless, lazy, irresponsible alcoholic, for example, he might have taught me to be shiftless, lazy, and irresponsible. I was lucky–not to grow up poor, but to have parents that taught me pretty good values.
I guess the argument could be made that it isn’t nice to encourage others to be nice. I was referring to being nice to the unfortunate in society, not to you. Oh yeah, I forgot–there aren’t any unfortunate, only bad decision-makers.
Nice attitude. But assigning blame for other people’s bad situations doesn’t improve the situation. Improving those bad situations helps the entire society–even you, if you are a part of society. Sure, there are those who make bad decisions. There always will be. Is it “nice” to say that they should simply suffer the consequences of their bad decisions? How about the offspring of bad decision makers–is it “nice” to say that they, too, should suffer the consequences of their parents’ bad decisions? And the next generation, and the next? That hurts all of us.
Some do screw up their lives through poor decision-making, obviously. Pouring money into social programs to relieve those people isn’t enough, and many of us liberals also favor giving educational programs higher priority than they now enjoy. But ignoring the other needs of the society–and that includes all members of the society, not just those in high tax brackets–also isn’t a solution.
No, it doesn’t. It’s just the way I see it.
My problem with tax cuts…
I was taught that when times were flush you paid off your debts, you squirrelled money away for a rainy day, and you undertook the infrastructure projects (like re-roofing the house) that were going to come up eventually because you could afford it now. Then, when times were harder, you would have little or no credit card bills, you’d have savings to dip into, and you would have a fairly new roof and wouldn’t have to worry about it.
I was taught this was responsible. I expect the same sort of responsible fiscal management from my government.
And, like other folks, I have to disagree with the characterization the the unemployed are lazy. Certainly, I can find examples of people who would rather collect a welfare check than work (oh, wait, I can find conservative families who think they should get a tax break because the wife wants to stay at home rather than get a job). I can also find plenty of folks who have used our safety net to catch them from a layoff during high unemployment, a spouse who runs off, an injury, or a child with a serious illness.
More humane? Yeah, right. When the Pope is a handicapped Black Jewish lesbian of Hispanic and American-Indian descent. :rolleyes:
You know, the $600 Mrs P and I will receive is chump change compared to our tax liability. I’m glad I’ll getting it though. Every dime out of the Government’s paws and in my pocket where it belongs can’t be all bad…
Is giving a teeny tiny tax refund to all Americans a wise choice at this time? It can be debated, but probably it is not. Is it better than letting the Government keep it for spending? Absolutely. Sure, I’d like see the debt paid down so I’d save more dimes in the future, but I don’t see any party loyal President would be able to push that bugbear through the House and the Senate. I simply do not trust the Government, whether it is a Democrat or Republican in the White House, to spend my earnings wisely, so I have to support the current decision to return at least an itsy-bitsy sum of the tax burden to the taxpayers.
Now some people do trust the Government to spend wisely and make the country more humane. It is too easy to call them Liberals or Democrats, which may or may not be appropriate, so I’m just going to call them Governmentalists.
The Governmentalists vocally oppose these tax cuts based on they’re own faith in the system to do things right, or at least do things better, when funded by my earnings. They bellyache about how bad it is to return the money to the people who paid it instead of the people they claim need it, but their theories of better life in under Government spending programs strictly chimerical, no more evidence exits that such would come to pass than there is for the existence of invisible pixies.
Hearing the arguments in this thread is like listening to an atheist and a devote Christian go it. Neither side can prove or justify their beliefs. Nobody is really winning. But, hey, this is the bottom line, at the end of this month I’ll have 6000 dimes returned in my bank account by the folks who took it. I’m not going to bellyache about it.
Any medical plans I have are the result of good decisions and planning that I’ve done throughout my life. That includes good insurance plans for the type of incident your father went through. I’m sorry he ended up in a bad situation. I don’t believe I should be forced to pay for it though unless I choose to. The problem with the government taking from me is I get no say in who my money helps. Sure, it might help deserving people like your father, but it’s also given to folks who decided smoking crack was a good way of life for them. I won’t even go into the overhead of having government involved.
So you’re basically a clone of your parents and their values? My values come from a myriad of people and experiences, not merely my parents. Children from “shiftless, lazy, irresponsible, alcoholics” can and do escape the life their parents have succumbed to. But you probably think that’s all to the credit of a bigger government.
Taking money from others against their will isn’t ‘encouraging’ them to be nice. It encourages me to be bitter. But then you don’t care about an individual, you care about masses (who are ironically nothing more than a group of individuals).
I agree that improving bad situations is good for everyone. What I don’t agree on is the government being used as an instrument to plunder my earnings. I think how charitable I decide to be and to whom I extend that charity should be my decision.
Ah well, good to see another politics argument become an exercise in name calling.
I did like this though:
Just as an aside: I’m a succesful guy (he says modestly), running a profitable company. I’m damned if I can’t recognise that a lot of the business decisions I’ve made that turned out to be right could just as easily have been wrong if circumstance had turned against me. Resources spent breaking into new markets , taking on extra staff in preparation for new orders, money spent on marketing - all of these were decisions that could have, in the fledgeling days of the company, ended in ruin.
Business involves as much luck as financial acumen. I’ve seen other people, just as smart and hard working as me, whose ventures have failed despite their best choices and efforts. Any person who honestly thinks they’ve had great success purely down to their own ingenuity is spectacularly misled.
Even further nitpicking…
I would have to say that Chronolicht’s statement was very close to being right on the money. As I recall, around 50% of the registered voters voted, and almost 99% of them voted for a bloated, fat, white, facist male party in the last presidential election.
[/nitpick]
While I’m not a liberal, its easy to see that President Bush doesn’t have a good understanding of Macro-economics. He’s cutting taxes for the purpose of cutting taxes. But he wants to spend money on a missile defense shield. Sound familiar? He’s making the exact same mistakes that Reagan did in his terms. And if you remember, Reagan’s tactics immersed the country in debt, and pretty much destroyed the rebounding economy. So while I don’t dislike Bush, it appears that he’s going to evolve into the same type of economy-killer that his father’s boss was. And the reasons are exactly the same: because he wants to become more well-liked and because he (and his staff) have no understanding of basic economic principles.
Its easy to cut taxes, but its also very naive. The government still needs money and the programs that you are opposed to will still get funded. Now the government will just have to borrow more. And with Greenspan still keeping interest rates low, a huge capital vacuum will be created. This will force interest rates higher, cause the national debt to elevate once again, and cripple the economy.
So enjoy your tax cuts, but remember, it will most likely lead to at least a few of your friends and/or family losing their jobs, and it will undoubtedly lead to the demise of the economy, and without question, will create debt that our children will have to work hard to pay back.
And if you doubt what I’m saying, read a book on Macro-economics. The first few chapters will confirm what I’m saying. Its something that Bush should’ve probably done before forcing through his fiscally-irresponsible tax cuts.
Absolutely absurd. I come from an upper-middle class family. I am currently a corporate litigator earning in the low six figures and carrying approximately $10,000 in student debt. I am in my situation because I went to an elite high school, had my tuition at college fully paid by my grandfather, and only had to borrow $45,000 to pay for law school - most of my classmates borrowed approx $110,000.
Say I came from an inner-city family. Assuming I learned enough in my dysfunctional grade and high schools to do well on the SATs, I would likely have to add at least one year to my college education for remedial studies, and, of course would have had to pay the full load of college (that is, borrow it), as well as law school. And, of course, much of that money would have been at a higher interest rate, as it would have been above the Stafford limits.
So now, presuming I was able to make it through law school, I would be making in the low six figures, while carrying around $250,000 in debt. A bit of difference. And that doesn’t consider the likelihood that, due to my worse early education, I wouldn’t have gotten into the elite college and law schools I got into, and therefore wouldn’t have gotten the job at the elite law firm I work for, and would be working at a smaller firm making around $55,000.
Anyway, back to the OP - I’m a fiscal conservative, and I was against the tax cut. America has two long term economic problems that must be addressed - the federal debt overhang, and Social Security.
If we fiscal conservatives want to switch SS to a private program, we have to account for the fact that we cannot do so with current retirees and people approaching retirement age - a contract exists with them. So, contributions still need to be made to fund the current and soon-to-be retirees’ payments.
There are two options for doing that. The first is to double-bill current workers - one set of payments to their private retirement fund, and one set to Social Security. Try to get that through Congress, even if you wanted to increase taxes.
The second is to use the surplus to fund the current and soon retirees’ SS payments.
Oh yeah, we can’t do that anymore, there isn’t a surplus. Guess we’re stuck with choice No. 1.
Sua
When does a meritocracy become a winner-takes-all society?
How far should we go down that road?
Some people are always going to be brighter, more talented, harder-working and, yes, luckier than others. You may understandably see it as fair that they should end up in positions of power and be well rewarded.
But what of the guy who simply can’t compete? Should we toss him on the scrapheap just because he can’t keep up with society? He may well “deserve” to lose relative to the high flyers. But that shouldn’t mean that we simply harden our hearts and let him and his family starve. So I ask you: when does meritocracy become winner-takes-all?
pan
I do agree with the implication here that the government is an expensive mechanism for dispensing funds. Although the government may claim to have the society’s best interests at heart, I most certainly do not trust the US government to spend our tax money efficiently. I realize that our tax money goes through many greedy hands before any of it gets spent on programs that will help the people, and all of those hands take a share.
To be honest, I don’t feel strongly enough about this whole thing to be participating. I do think that the tax cuts are wrong at this point, and especially wrong because I think most of the cuts are helping those who need it the least. But it isn’t like I think the government would actually do anything intelligent with the money if there were no tax cuts.
This is not true, but I don’t see the point of pursuing it.
I suppose I agree with this, but I can’t think of a better alternative just now.
While I do feel strongly about this topic, I tend to think it falls into the same category as gun control and abortion; i.e. all the talk in the world isn’t going to change peoples’ opinions on it on either side. Having said that, I should know better than to even start in on this and I’ll take this opportunity to bow out.
Would someone (any of you who’ve made the statement) please explain how the tax refund benifits the rich “much” more? The maximum refund anyone is getting is $600
quoting from the mailing the IRS sent " Married filing jointly or qualifying Widow(er)-
The ammount of your check will be the lesser of:
-$600
-5% of your taxable income
or your income tax liability"
note, their bolding, not mine.
(For head of household it’s the same except $500 max. and single or filing seperately is $300 max.)
So how does that help the rich oh-so-much more than the poor? My parents are by no means rich- as evidence my brother qualified for many needs based college loans this year- but they’re getting over $500 of the $600 max. How do you explain that? Even if a lower-middle class family some how fit your definition of “rich” you’re still off the mark if you truely believe $600 is going to benifit the rich or the poor much, it’s simply too small an amount of money.
The refund check is simply part of the tax cut, and a late addition to the tax cut plan. The tax cut is spread out over the next ten years, and the marginal rates in the higher tax brackets are going to go done considerably more than the marginal rates in the lower tax brackets. So those people earning more money will get both an absolutely and a relatively larger reduction in their tax payments.
Sua
Pyrrhonist: *The Governmentalists [sic] vocally oppose these tax cuts based on [their] own faith in the system to do things right, or at least do things better, when funded by my earnings. They bellyache about how bad it is to return the money to the people who paid it instead of the people they claim need it, but their theories of better life in under [? sic] Government spending programs [are?] strictly chimerical, no more evidence [exists] that such would come to pass than there is for the existence of invisible pixies. *
Really. Do you imagine that elderly people were better off without “Government spending programs” such as Social Security and Medicare? Do you imagine that our systems of health care, corporate R&D, and higher education aren’t actually benefited by government spending on programs like the NSF, NIH, CDC, and NIST? Do you think that our quality of life isn’t improved by having effective governmental safety and health regulation via institutions like the EPA, OSHA, and the NRC? Do you think that federal welfare assistance and Medicaid don’t actually help keep millions of poor children healthier and better-fed than they would otherwise be? If you seriously believe any of these ridiculous notions, I can easily provide you with much more and better evidence to the contrary than you’ll ever find for the existence of invisible pixies.
It is certainly true that a lot of governmental spending is wasteful and inefficient, and you’re not likely to find any people who really conform to your straw-man “Governmentalist” profile in blindly supporting everything the government does and believing that all the results are bound to be good. Most of us liberals are quite rational and realistic individuals, and many of us consider it very important to stay well-informed about the actual activities of government and the effects they really produce, so that we can tell which programs are useful and which are not. Within that rational framework, it’s perfectly reasonable (though, of course, always debatable) to conclude that there are enough useful options for government spending (including, as others have pointed out, paying down our high national debt) to justify opposing a trillion-plus-dollar tax cut, of which 40% is going to the richest 1% of the population anyway.
Unfortunately, although in real life it’s hard to find these hypothetical “Governmentalists” who mindlessly promote any and all government spending, it’s all too easy to find their opposites, the “antigovernmentalists” who mindlessly oppose it. They don’t bother to be informed about what government spending actually does and what its effects actually are; many of them are so detached from reality as to believe that more federal money is spent on welfare than on defense (as a 1994 poll found). They’re not interested in rational discussion of how to support and fund effective programs, or how to move effective social policy out of the public sector into the private sector. All they’re really interested in is griping about how much they dislike taxes. And their poster child is Pyrrhonist.
Fredge: What I don’t agree on is the government being used as an instrument to plunder my earnings.
Referring to taxation as “plunder” or “theft” is like referring to capital punishment or abortion as “murder”: it doesn’t really make any sense unless you ignore the actual definition of the term in question. It’s essentially just a rhetorical trick to associate the negative emotional impact of crime with a legal governmental policy that you don’t happen to like.
And as I’ve pointed out before (on just about every one of these taxation threads, seems like), speaking about “your” earnings as though the government obviously has no more right to share in them than your third cousin’s ex-wife’s stepfather-in-law does is another somewhat misleading semantic trick. Sure, I believe that “your” earnings (after taxes) are legally yours. Sure, I support your right to tell your third cousin’s ex-wife’s stepfather-in-law to buzz off if he comes around asking for a handout. But in fact, “your” earnings, and your ability to keep them, are made possible largely by governmental structures that are paid for with tax dollars. It’s not just luck and your own hard work that allowed you to be successful; it’s also tax breaks for your corporation or industry, the subsidies that helped fund your educational institutions, various subsidies and tax breaks that enable your employees to live on lower salaries and thus increase your profits, law enforcement that protects your physical and liquid assets, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum. Lots of other people contributed money to those things without being asked whether they really wanted to. Quit whining about being required to give something back.
I’m pissed off by the Dubya tax cut because it’s a blatantly desperate attempt to get respect from the American people. “Please accept me as the legitimate president! Let’s just forget about that Florida hijack already, okay? Here’s a few hundred dollars, stop calling me a fraud and let’s let bygones be bygones, huh?”
Sorry, George, but you’re still a fake and a loser, who got into office only because Rehnquist, O’Connor, and Scalia wanted a Republican president in office and were willing to compromise themselves to get one. And that smarmy, self-congratulating letter from the IRS ain’t gonna change the public’s dim perception of you, either.
I wonder how many people are going to send their refund check (or part of it) to the DNC?