I disagree. Peas are good raw, right out of the pod. Their high sugar content makes them sweet. Brussels sprouts are delicious when sliced in half, steamed in olive oil and garlic. Sadly, most markets sell sprouts when they have grown too large and tough. Lima beans I can't endorse. Fire-roasted in the pod they are not bad, but too much work for what you get.
To be clear, I am talking about actual vegetables here, not Federal budget cuts.
It's not my claim, it's Heritage Foundation's claim, and that strikes me as something of an overstatement of the claim Heritage is making. I don't think Heritage is arguing that there is no poverty anymore. Heritage's real and more modst claim, I think, is that the social welfare system is doing all the good it is ever going to be able to do right now, and extending it further will result not only in diminishing returns but increasing abuses.
My claim is that Heritage's data is suspect. It's not reasonable to measure affluence and quality of life on an index that has one-third of its measurements based upon television and things that support it. It's not at all clear to me that hunger and homelessness are truly as rare as Heritage claims. And when these programs are cut -- by which I mean absolute dollar spending on them will decrease -- it's going to suck, suck, suck, because there are lots of people who rely on them to meet the minimal quality-of-life needs like "having enough food to eat" and "living in a structure sheltered from the elements." But I am convinced that we're going to have to do it anyway because if we don't do it now, we're going to have to do it later, and at that point we're going to have to do more of it and to more people. The peas aren't going to taste any better sitting there on our plate getting cold.
I'm not trying to play games and I'm sorry if you thought I was. If you like to play games, I post a trivia question pretty much every week and this week's seems to be stumping people so far. This, however, is a serious policy discussion.
FWIW, my read of the progressive left is rather different than yours. Progressives, it seems to me, are coming to terms with accepting inflation-adjusted "constant" numbers of entitlement spending as a barely-digestible compromise. But significant expansion of social welfare support is a very real and immediate goal of that quarter of our political spectrum, an expansion to be "paid for" preferably by way of slashing military spending. To be "progressive" means, in no small part, to be commited to the idea that an expanded and strengthened regime of social welfare policies is in the national interest. Naturally, someone with that would react with revulsion at this study from Heritage.
Given that definition of what it is to be a progressive, I do not count myself among their number. I can make common cause with them on some other issues but not this one. That does not, however, mean that I dismiss poverty as an insignificant social and economic issue. I see evidence of real poverty and its tangible effects on peoples' lives every day I go to court. I don't pretend to have a silver bullet to solve the problem, either.
I'm reminded of an observation I made in January about affluence and sources of income, which I referred to as the Tennessee Taxonomy. Just because you are deriving your income from public entitlements does not mean that you are living a comfortable lifestyle -- nor does it mean you are living an uncomfortable lifestyle. Similarly, if you work for a living or if you live off of accumulated capital, this also is not necessarily indicative of the quality of your lifestyle.
Here, the question is whether someone who meets the definition of "poverty" is nevertheless able to live an affluent life. My observation was that yes, this is possible, but very uncommon. As to TVD's point that cable and indeed TV are, in fact, luxuries, we should take into account that if there is enough money to get at least one TV and some kind of non-broadcast programming into it, we're seeing someone who is not at the extreme end of the "lack of affluence" spectrum, regardless of where the money comes from.
...how much of that goes to malpractice insurance?
Less than one percent.
How much is being charged to cover the cost of people who walk into the ED, get treated, and walk out without paying a dime?
About one percent.
How much is simply part of the negotiating game that providers play with insurers
Quite a lot.
“doctors are a bunch of greedy fuckers”
1) What's wrong with a doctor liking money? What's wrong with a doctor charging money for her services and even withholding services for non-emergent care if payment is not apparently forthcoming? 2) Lawyers and insurance company executives are greedy fcukers too. So, it seems, are writers with children that have medical problems; despite wanting and needing his kid to receive rhinoribbonectomy, Erik nevertheless didn't want to pay more than he really had to and is not unreasonable for questioning the price for this service. Conclusion: We're all greedy fcukers and that's what makes the world go 'round. 3) In the situation described, The doctor's instructions were to charge the minimum, which doesn't sound all that greedy to me. The doctor appears to have had no particular idea what was going to be charged and the price was determined by a combination of the billing clerk and the pre-set billing codes.
The argument, of course, is that we do not need to increase, and possibly can decrease, spending on social welfare programs because "the poor" don't really have it all that bad: for the most part, they have enough to eat, they have somewhere to live, they have households that offer things that at one time were considered luxuries.
A concomitant challenge is asking what index we will use to define poverty. Is it simply income? Is it quality of life, and if so what metric will be used to define it? At your blog, I observed that if quality-of-life is measured by amenities in one's household, my relatively affluent household would look worse off than the median household of below-the-poverty-line households surveyed by the Department of Commerce.
The data and conclusions of the study might not be correct. The factual observations underlying the study are subject to challenge -- is it really true that only .06% of Americans do not have enough food to eat? Is it really true that there is so very little homelessness as the study claims? Is it right to count a refrigerator as a "luxury" amenity? After all, without one, food tends to spoil much faster raising the possibility that hunger would increase and nutrition would decrease.
But the whole article does raise a set of worthwhile questions and observations -- perhaps it is not unreasonable to say that a person with enough food to eat is "less poor" than someone who routinely goes hungry, and it might be the case that our social safety net is such that there really are only a small number of people who are routinely hungry. If that is truthfully the case, then perhaps it's reasonable to suggest that, at least, we may hold at least some portion our government's social welfare spending at its current level without violating principles of social justice.
Alan, I am a resident of Los Angeles County, too far north to be affected by Carmageddon today, and have been a Californian for three quarters of my life.
Milk wasn't mayor. He ran for S.F. City/County Supervisor, and lost; ran again, lost; ran for Assembly, lost; ran for Supervisor, won; got an antidiscrimination law passed and made some headlines; got shot by Dan White after serving less than 11 months. It was the start of a promising political career and seems to me he probably would have been mayor after Moscone instead of Feinstein had Dan White not flipped out the way he did.
As to Ghandi, Christopher Hitchens' recent review of a Gandhi biography provides an interesting gloss on some of Gandhi's correspondence and ideas viz. Hitler and other kinds of diplomacy. Hitch, of course, loves to disapotheosize figures like that so why not take down Gandhi, too?
The military's mission is to protect and defend the society which sponsors it. Killing -- or at minimum, being able and willing to kill -- is most certainly a part of fulfilling that mission. But so is subordination of its command structure to the civilian political powers and the rule of law.
That means that the military must comply with lawful instructions given to it by the Commander in Chief and it must comply with the law of the land, which originates from Congress and the courts. To follow the law is therefore part of the mission of the military.
Well, there's different levels of discretion. If you have enough gro-lamps that your roof won't hold snow in the winter that might be a tip-off to observant neighbors that something's up. The cops don't need a search warrant to look at your roof from the street.
I went to Catholic high school and graduated in '88. No doubt was in my mind then that the RCC thought homosexuality inherently morally bad; I was less certain about the people who engaged in such behavior.
In the quote cited by Tim I intended merely to highlight that in this arena drawing the line between tolerance and deference is difficult.
In the video there is an occupant of a house who gets shot and killed. Which is disturbing enough. But those whose job it is to defend cops will be quick to point out that a cop who sees someone making a threatening gesture is justified in using his weapon to defend himself. There isn't nearly enough video in this clip to tell whether what we saw was a righteous kill, or a murder.
Dude, at this site I expect no mercy. If I advance a proposition that is not intellectually tenable, I expect to get savaged for it. I do not believe I equated child abduction and child prostitution. Nor did I pooh-pooh the serious nature of either crime.
A weak defense against a formidable ALL CAPS ASSAULT, I know, but it's the best I can do from my mobile phone between court hearings.
The issue of whether all SSM opponents are bigots deserves full discussion. I'm largely with Blaise on this in that I think most of the anti-SSM votes are the result of either misinformation or of thoughtlessness rather than invidious prejudice. People are not evil when they say, "Hey, my church should be able to do what it wants" or "I want to control how my kids learn about sexuality."
It's understandable that people might not grasp the difference between a public accomodation and a private religious institution when civil rights laws are enforced in courts; the distinction can be subtle and the legal lines are both blurry and subject to reasonable, non-bigoted criticism (although I personally believe that they are, on balance, drawn appropriately). So while the fear of churches being sued for not dispensing SSM ceremonies is, in fact, a phantom, it is a phantom that looks enough like a real issue that people could be reasonably confused by it.
That does not excuse the leaders of the SSM movement, who exploit these misunderstandings and confusion, whose activism demands that they think through the moral and policy implications of what they advocate, and who deliberately spread misinformation and lies about SSM to a credulous public. Maggie Gallagher and her National Organization for Marriage are particularly bad offenders in this regard.
For something to "Jump the Shark" means that its quality of the product goes on an irretrievable and irredeemable downward slope. You're never going to take Fonzie seriously as a lovable tough guy again after he water-skis over a shark while on vacation in California.
Despite all of the yuck discussed in the post, I'm not sure that we're so far gone that we have to pronounce the whole of American politics irretrievable and irredeemable. Roman politics got pretty decadent during the later years of Tiberius' reign, and while Claudius provided a few sober years, it didn't get better again until after the Year of the Four Emperors. But it got better -- which I offer as proof that it can get better for us, too.
Hopefully it doesn't take a crisis of that magnitude for us to come to our senses again. But yes, it probably will take a crisis of some kind.
I can't fault Elias for expressing cynicism about the White House's attitude towards the rule of law and the Constitution's limits on powers. I tend to share that attitude and his profound disappointment with a President who had led us to expect better from his Administration in this arena than what we've been getting.
But I do think this is a significant issue, one which warrants sober comment, analysis, and concern. The political ironies of the immdiate situation, the backdrop of a seemingly pointless I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-A-War, and the prospect of the promised-for-forty-years showdown about the Constitutionality of the WPR, leaves me thinking that this will be one of the most significant legal issues of the year.
Ask and ye shall receive. I've set up three posts for the front page, spacing them out in time for today because I still don't want to monopolize things.
On “Bad prices, public spending, and poverty”
I disagree. Peas are good raw, right out of the pod. Their high sugar content makes them sweet. Brussels sprouts are delicious when sliced in half, steamed in olive oil and garlic. Sadly, most markets sell sprouts when they have grown too large and tough. Lima beans I can't endorse. Fire-roasted in the pod they are not bad, but too much work for what you get.
To be clear, I am talking about actual vegetables here, not Federal budget cuts.
"
It's not my claim, it's Heritage Foundation's claim, and that strikes me as something of an overstatement of the claim Heritage is making. I don't think Heritage is arguing that there is no poverty anymore. Heritage's real and more modst claim, I think, is that the social welfare system is doing all the good it is ever going to be able to do right now, and extending it further will result not only in diminishing returns but increasing abuses.
My claim is that Heritage's data is suspect. It's not reasonable to measure affluence and quality of life on an index that has one-third of its measurements based upon television and things that support it. It's not at all clear to me that hunger and homelessness are truly as rare as Heritage claims. And when these programs are cut -- by which I mean absolute dollar spending on them will decrease -- it's going to suck, suck, suck, because there are lots of people who rely on them to meet the minimal quality-of-life needs like "having enough food to eat" and "living in a structure sheltered from the elements." But I am convinced that we're going to have to do it anyway because if we don't do it now, we're going to have to do it later, and at that point we're going to have to do more of it and to more people. The peas aren't going to taste any better sitting there on our plate getting cold.
"
I'm not trying to play games and I'm sorry if you thought I was. If you like to play games, I post a trivia question pretty much every week and this week's seems to be stumping people so far. This, however, is a serious policy discussion.
FWIW, my read of the progressive left is rather different than yours. Progressives, it seems to me, are coming to terms with accepting inflation-adjusted "constant" numbers of entitlement spending as a barely-digestible compromise. But significant expansion of social welfare support is a very real and immediate goal of that quarter of our political spectrum, an expansion to be "paid for" preferably by way of slashing military spending. To be "progressive" means, in no small part, to be commited to the idea that an expanded and strengthened regime of social welfare policies is in the national interest. Naturally, someone with that would react with revulsion at this study from Heritage.
Given that definition of what it is to be a progressive, I do not count myself among their number. I can make common cause with them on some other issues but not this one. That does not, however, mean that I dismiss poverty as an insignificant social and economic issue. I see evidence of real poverty and its tangible effects on peoples' lives every day I go to court. I don't pretend to have a silver bullet to solve the problem, either.
"
I'm reminded of an observation I made in January about affluence and sources of income, which I referred to as the Tennessee Taxonomy. Just because you are deriving your income from public entitlements does not mean that you are living a comfortable lifestyle -- nor does it mean you are living an uncomfortable lifestyle. Similarly, if you work for a living or if you live off of accumulated capital, this also is not necessarily indicative of the quality of your lifestyle.
Here, the question is whether someone who meets the definition of "poverty" is nevertheless able to live an affluent life. My observation was that yes, this is possible, but very uncommon. As to TVD's point that cable and indeed TV are, in fact, luxuries, we should take into account that if there is enough money to get at least one TV and some kind of non-broadcast programming into it, we're seeing someone who is not at the extreme end of the "lack of affluence" spectrum, regardless of where the money comes from.
"
Less than one percent.
About one percent.
Quite a lot.
1) What's wrong with a doctor liking money? What's wrong with a doctor charging money for her services and even withholding services for non-emergent care if payment is not apparently forthcoming? 2) Lawyers and insurance company executives are greedy fcukers too. So, it seems, are writers with children that have medical problems; despite wanting and needing his kid to receive rhinoribbonectomy, Erik nevertheless didn't want to pay more than he really had to and is not unreasonable for questioning the price for this service. Conclusion: We're all greedy fcukers and that's what makes the world go 'round. 3) In the situation described, The doctor's instructions were to charge the minimum, which doesn't sound all that greedy to me. The doctor appears to have had no particular idea what was going to be charged and the price was determined by a combination of the billing clerk and the pre-set billing codes.
"
The argument, of course, is that we do not need to increase, and possibly can decrease, spending on social welfare programs because "the poor" don't really have it all that bad: for the most part, they have enough to eat, they have somewhere to live, they have households that offer things that at one time were considered luxuries.
A concomitant challenge is asking what index we will use to define poverty. Is it simply income? Is it quality of life, and if so what metric will be used to define it? At your blog, I observed that if quality-of-life is measured by amenities in one's household, my relatively affluent household would look worse off than the median household of below-the-poverty-line households surveyed by the Department of Commerce.
The data and conclusions of the study might not be correct. The factual observations underlying the study are subject to challenge -- is it really true that only .06% of Americans do not have enough food to eat? Is it really true that there is so very little homelessness as the study claims? Is it right to count a refrigerator as a "luxury" amenity? After all, without one, food tends to spoil much faster raising the possibility that hunger would increase and nutrition would decrease.
But the whole article does raise a set of worthwhile questions and observations -- perhaps it is not unreasonable to say that a person with enough food to eat is "less poor" than someone who routinely goes hungry, and it might be the case that our social safety net is such that there really are only a small number of people who are routinely hungry. If that is truthfully the case, then perhaps it's reasonable to suggest that, at least, we may hold at least some portion our government's social welfare spending at its current level without violating principles of social justice.
On “In Which I Return To Dangerous Territory About Which I Am Admittedly Ignorant”
Alan, I am a resident of Los Angeles County, too far north to be affected by Carmageddon today, and have been a Californian for three quarters of my life.
"
Milk wasn't mayor. He ran for S.F. City/County Supervisor, and lost; ran again, lost; ran for Assembly, lost; ran for Supervisor, won; got an antidiscrimination law passed and made some headlines; got shot by Dan White after serving less than 11 months. It was the start of a promising political career and seems to me he probably would have been mayor after Moscone instead of Feinstein had Dan White not flipped out the way he did.
As to Ghandi, Christopher Hitchens' recent review of a Gandhi biography provides an interesting gloss on some of Gandhi's correspondence and ideas viz. Hitler and other kinds of diplomacy. Hitch, of course, loves to disapotheosize figures like that so why not take down Gandhi, too?
On “Department of Sardonic Understatement”
The military's mission is to protect and defend the society which sponsors it. Killing -- or at minimum, being able and willing to kill -- is most certainly a part of fulfilling that mission. But so is subordination of its command structure to the civilian political powers and the rule of law.
That means that the military must comply with lawful instructions given to it by the Commander in Chief and it must comply with the law of the land, which originates from Congress and the courts. To follow the law is therefore part of the mission of the military.
On “A Decade of Decriminalization”
Well, there's different levels of discretion. If you have enough gro-lamps that your roof won't hold snow in the winter that might be a tip-off to observant neighbors that something's up. The cops don't need a search warrant to look at your roof from the street.
On “Scandinavian Reality Blindness”
I went to Catholic high school and graduated in '88. No doubt was in my mind then that the RCC thought homosexuality inherently morally bad; I was less certain about the people who engaged in such behavior.
In the quote cited by Tim I intended merely to highlight that in this arena drawing the line between tolerance and deference is difficult.
"
School me. What's the difference?
On “The problem with tasers”
In the video there is an occupant of a house who gets shot and killed. Which is disturbing enough. But those whose job it is to defend cops will be quick to point out that a cop who sees someone making a threatening gesture is justified in using his weapon to defend himself. There isn't nearly enough video in this clip to tell whether what we saw was a righteous kill, or a murder.
On “Well Intentioned Hysteria”
Dude, at this site I expect no mercy. If I advance a proposition that is not intellectually tenable, I expect to get savaged for it. I do not believe I equated child abduction and child prostitution. Nor did I pooh-pooh the serious nature of either crime.
A weak defense against a formidable ALL CAPS ASSAULT, I know, but it's the best I can do from my mobile phone between court hearings.
On “Same-Sex Marriage in New York”
The issue of whether all SSM opponents are bigots deserves full discussion. I'm largely with Blaise on this in that I think most of the anti-SSM votes are the result of either misinformation or of thoughtlessness rather than invidious prejudice. People are not evil when they say, "Hey, my church should be able to do what it wants" or "I want to control how my kids learn about sexuality."
It's understandable that people might not grasp the difference between a public accomodation and a private religious institution when civil rights laws are enforced in courts; the distinction can be subtle and the legal lines are both blurry and subject to reasonable, non-bigoted criticism (although I personally believe that they are, on balance, drawn appropriately). So while the fear of churches being sued for not dispensing SSM ceremonies is, in fact, a phantom, it is a phantom that looks enough like a real issue that people could be reasonably confused by it.
That does not excuse the leaders of the SSM movement, who exploit these misunderstandings and confusion, whose activism demands that they think through the moral and policy implications of what they advocate, and who deliberately spread misinformation and lies about SSM to a credulous public. Maggie Gallagher and her National Organization for Marriage are particularly bad offenders in this regard.
On “Best Summary Judgment Motion Ever”
Nei miei sogni.
"
Other lawyers can get away with stuff like this. Not me.
*sigh*
I just need a client as awesome as Mark Cuban, I suppose.
On “When did the American political system jump the shark?”
For something to "Jump the Shark" means that its quality of the product goes on an irretrievable and irredeemable downward slope. You're never going to take Fonzie seriously as a lovable tough guy again after he water-skis over a shark while on vacation in California.
Despite all of the yuck discussed in the post, I'm not sure that we're so far gone that we have to pronounce the whole of American politics irretrievable and irredeemable. Roman politics got pretty decadent during the later years of Tiberius' reign, and while Claudius provided a few sober years, it didn't get better again until after the Year of the Four Emperors. But it got better -- which I offer as proof that it can get better for us, too.
Hopefully it doesn't take a crisis of that magnitude for us to come to our senses again. But yes, it probably will take a crisis of some kind.
On “Cyrenaica Conflict Causes Constitutional Crisis”
I can't fault Elias for expressing cynicism about the White House's attitude towards the rule of law and the Constitution's limits on powers. I tend to share that attitude and his profound disappointment with a President who had led us to expect better from his Administration in this arena than what we've been getting.
But I do think this is a significant issue, one which warrants sober comment, analysis, and concern. The political ironies of the immdiate situation, the backdrop of a seemingly pointless I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-A-War, and the prospect of the promised-for-forty-years showdown about the Constitutionality of the WPR, leaves me thinking that this will be one of the most significant legal issues of the year.
"
I concur. I doubt the White House wants to go down the "legislative intent" road with this approach to the WPR.
"
Okay, are we done with this now, fellas? Flame wars are good for the comments count and all, but this isn't helping advance the discussion much.
"
I dig in to the statute itself, and tease out the loophole I think the President is aiming at, on my sub-blog.
On “Post-GOP debate open thread”
* Gary Johnson was... absent.
On “One more blog, for good measure”
You should have. Still can, as far as I'm concerned. Let's see if we can't get Erik to set you up with passwords and privileges.
"
Ask and ye shall receive. I've set up three posts for the front page, spacing them out in time for today because I still don't want to monopolize things.