| And I’m really uncomfortable with the notion that a simple majority of workers can force the rest to either join the union or quit, it seems to me to undermine freedom of association, since its forcing you to associate with a group.
Let's look at this 'freedom of association' thing. The weird thing is, the right's strange objection to being 'forced' to join a union only seems to show up with regard to unions. Companies can basically force you to do whatever they want, so it's entirely reasonable to force you to join a union.
Likewise, companies can enter 'partnerships' and make demands on each other all the time, including demands that they make _each other's_ workers do something, which no one seems to have a problem with.
The only time this is ever a problem is when it's something corporate American _as a whole_ doesn't really want to agree to, so, somehow, the rights of the worker to 'not do what the company says' magically appear out of thin air. But let's make an identical example to a union using two corporations and see if you have a problem with it:
You work for company X. X decided to go into partnership with company Y on project XY. You have been assigned to it. It is physically located at Y, so you have to go to work there. People at Y have to pay for a parking pass. So now, you have pay for one, because, duh, you have to park. You also have to wear a Y-assigned ID badge while in Y.
Yeah, well, that was the example. Bet you were expecting more. Don't need it. You were just forced to 'associate' with the other company, and you were just forced to 'pay dues'.
Do you have some _right_ to work for company X without doing this? When they assign you to project XY can you just say 'Nope, not joining.'? When you got hired, were you allowed to say 'Except I won't work on XY.' Did company X just have no right to agree to XY in the first place?
Of course not, and no one argue that. But, somehow, when Y is a union, of course workers suddenly have 'rights' in that regard, which is utter nonsense.
Corporate America is always willing to argue that they _shouldn't be allowed_ to do things that help workers. Not 'being allowed' to do things let them claim it's not their fault.
Just because statistics are mathematically correct does not make them 'true'. Did you know that only 0.01% of people pay 99% of all boat taxes?
| If I were to say “the highest-earning 20% of people paid 68.9% of federal taxes in 2007,” would that be dishonest? If so, how? Does the fault lie with me? With Brookings? With the CBO, where they source their numbers?
The fault lies with whoever decided to state income tax as if it was in any way related to the percentage of people who paid it.
Here's a question: Do you think it is honest for me to say:
99% of car accidents happen in only 0.01% of America. We should bar cars from operating in those dangerous areas.
Do you think it's okay for me to run around stating statistics about the 'dangerous 0.01% of America', and demand that something be done about it?
Does your opinion change when you learn that by '0.01%', I was referring to the part of America that is _roads_?
No, people _do not_ get to state thing that are technically true but wildly misleading in politics. Not without getting called liars.
Stating 'percent paid in income tax' as compared to 'percent of people' is wildly misleading, so misleading it is, in fact, a lie.
Anyone who quotes how much 'a percentage of people pay in taxes' is _inherently_ dishonest or just plain ignorant. Income taxes are on _income_, not 'people'.
'The top 23% of _income_ generates 40% of income tax revenue.' That is how you say that.
Any other way of stating that is a lie. Any mention of a percentage of _people_ compared to a percentage of _tax revenue_ is a lie.
Not misleading, not tricky, and outright, an actual, literal lie using statistics. Those two things cannot be compared. They are not comparable.
It's like saying '99% of car accidents happen in only 0.01% of America.', or '0.00000000000000000000000001% of the population has a college degree.' or '1% pays 90% of the gasoline tax.' (Bonus point for people who can figure those out.)
We should not put up with deliberate lies in our political discussion.
It's ironic that there really _is_ a public union that is much too powerful and abuses its power at all turn, not just internally but in stuff like protecting people who commit actual criminal actions.
Oh, and on top of that, if _any_ job is was ever so critical that a strike would be disastrous and thus should not be allowed in the interest of public safety, they're it. And yet there are places that do not allow teachers to strike, but allow them to, like Wisconsin is trying to be.
...and, yet, for some reason, the police union always gets excluded from this little 'attack the unions' nonsense.
As I've said elsewhere, the problem isn't public unions doing better, the problem is we all (except the rich) started doing worse, and everyone (except the rich) need to tighten their belt. But this is not a budget issue, this is a 'strip unions of power', as evidenced by the fact that Wisconsin public unions have offered to do everything that the governor wants, but apparently it's not enough...he's really just trying to kill them.
And what 'brands you as a liberal' is actually looking at this from some sort of logical perspective instead of a knee-jerk anti-union one. Shame on you.
They're not even really anti-spending, they just think they are. They're _anti-tax_. You cannot be in favor of what they are in favor of and be 'anti-spending'.
Hell, they're not even actually anti-tax. For example, they have failed to understand that the ACA lowers government spending. They're anti-tax on stupid pills.
The 'Tea Party' is best described as 'The Republican base, hijacked by Fox and the Koch brothers and other superrich'.
The only way in that they are different from the Republicans is that they _believe_ all the dumb things the Republicans have been pandering to the base with for the last few decades, making them spectacularly misinformed about almost everything.
They're about as far from honest libertarians as humanly possible in politics.
However, they do have many of the same interests as dishonest libertarians...they're just not also pretending 'Yeah, that whole constitution rights thing is interesting we'll get around to it after we deal with this horrible taxes'. The Tea Party is what happens when those people decide to stop hiding and just outright state all their authoritarian jingoistic nonsense.
Incidentally, it's _astonishing_ to watch a group be anti-state and talk about overthrowing the government with violence and be fascist assholes at the same time.
The rich paying 5% more? A violation of your rights. Demanding that states have the right to bankrupcy so they can get out contracts everyone signed? Just fine.
The government requiring that medical insurance companies don't drop sick people? A violation of your rights. Vagina inspectors making sure women didn't have an abortion? Just fine.
Fixing the 'gun show' laws so that actual convicted felons can't buy guns? A violation of your rights. Locking people up without cause, torturing them,and then refusing to let them sue? Just fine.
From this we can conclude that anything is fine if it is aimed at a) women, or b) foreigners, or c) workers, whereas nothing is okay if it's aimed at a0 the rich, or b) corporations, or c) 'real americans'.
I'm glad you made that rant instead of me, because I as really this close to it, and I'm trying to not do rants that piss people off here. (Although I refrain from calling groups insulting names.)
But, to summarize the important point: The far right in this country are often anti-education and anti-science. Anti-science is not the same as being anti-fact, which both the far left and far right are sometimes, but against the entire premise of science.
I.e., the far left often have really really stupid ideas, but they, in general, accept the modern world, the enlightenment, and that science can tell them the truth. Even the mysticism presents as pseudo-science. They are 'pro-discovering-stuff', even if their facts are utterly made up nonsense about vaccines and healing crystals and even communism.
The far right, OTOH, seems outright hostile to science and education, outright hostile to the idea that anyone would try to figure anything out. they seem to think facts are just handed to them, either via the Bible or via what they imagine Adam Smith said. This makes them a _spectacularly_ poor fit in the academic world. (And, I should point out, in the news world.)
And when I say 'the far right', I actually generally mean 'the right'. There actually are moderate right people in academic...but they're to the left of the people complaining about the liberal bias, so don't count.
Indeed. I'd even be okay with some peacekeeping mission on the ground, backed by the UN. Not to overthrow anyone, but to protect protesters.
Unlike a lot of stuff we _pretend_ it's illegal for other countries to do, like build nuclear weapons or chant 'death to America', actually slaughtering your own citizens _is_ illegal.
However, due to some utterly incomprehensible reason, we're in the middle of the two longest wars in American history, and can't really afford to do anything at all.
I wouldn't know, I dropped out of CS because I couldn't do the Calculus 2 required. (Which, I must point out, is not actually used in 99.999% of programming. Programming rarely uses even trig. The requirement is due to the math department's desperate attempt to hold on to the CS major, despite it not having more to do with math than, for example, chemistry.)
But I got at least two thirds of the way through the actual computer classes, and, yeah. They'd talk about OOP (Which I was fairly dismissive of, being a C programmer. I didn't realize how useful it was until later.) and designing a _program_ in parts...
...but nothing about designing a system, nothing about the fact that different parts of the system can be in different places and do different things and how to make them all work together. No, there was just a giant blob of a 'program', which, no matter how well designed, was a single entity...and _maybe_ a database server it connected to, although that was literally one class where that was explained.
Perhaps that stuff was later on, although I doubt it. CS, when I took it in 1999-2001, was really crippled by the sheer number of people who didn't understand programming at all, and just did things by rote, so they had to keep going over basic concepts.
I just care about the demonstrative fact you have to some sort of monetary cycle, where money is spent and used to pay people who then spent the money. Right now, we have a cycle where the rich, instead of paying Americans, are paying 20% to people in China and keeping the rest themselves.
That cannot continue. Economies cannot be unidirectional. Americans cannot keep purchasing if they do not get any money to spend. They can borrow for a decade, and then that's all. (And we already _did_ that.)
As for Negative Income Taxation, what you have failed to realize that it's REDISTRIBUTING THE WEALTH and thus will never happen in the US. (Despite, as I pointed out, deductions appear to be deliberately set up so as to pay only the middle class and above.)
> I definitely disagree about trade barriers. I’m an economist by training and I specialised in trade theory. Believe me when I tell you there really isn’t a good reason to impede the flow of international commerce, barring a state or war or something similar.
I don't want to 'impede' them, I just want to tax offshoring production and whatnot to China. We have almost no production left in this country, we've become a hollowed-out shell of a country without a manufacturing base.
If you can think of some way to undo that without trade barriers, I'm all for it. And, no, 'waiting the entire world's standard of living to catch up to ours so that offshoring isn't so cheap' does not seem that plausible.
> 4) Working out where to start: I agree for the most part, but I would note that there is a place for division of labour here. Since I’m an economist I’m probably going to be more help on the welfare system than I am on the Drug War.
Don't sell yourself short. You're not a part of the prison-law enfforcement-industrial complex, or a baboon (I assume), so you'd probably come up with a better plan than the Drug War just by default.
...I think I just insulted baboons there.
> I agree completely, while I’m concerned about taxes on occasion, my concern is about the deleterious incentive effects of high effective marginal tax rates (one reason I support lower rates with less deductions).
I agree utterly with 5, but for different reasons, ha. But first let me state that somewhere above 75% of deductions should be removed. We like to have incentives for _really_ stupid things. Why are we having deductions for mortgage payments but not rent? Or why have a deduction for that at all, considering that everyone is supposedly playing fo shelter.
So, yes, lower taxes, less deductions...but...
...the reason I don't like deductions, even the remaining sane ones, is because deductions are very regressive. Poor people are essentially immune to them, because they don't have any income to deduct from.
I'd much rather we have deductions as actual rebates that are independent of taxes.
If it's worth letting a rich person keep $500 dollars of their taxes to do X, it's worth letting a poor person do the same...even if they aren't _paying_ taxes and would just be handed a check for $500. If that behavior is _actually_ worth $500, it's worth it whoever does it, right?
I don't actually see the logic of any other behavior. It's just more poor people punching. If we're paying people to do things, we should pay them regardless if they're rich or not. (But, like I said, the number of these things should be vastly reduced.)
> Apart from that, the real rate of taxation is the rate of spending (as Milton Friedman put it). To talk about taxes and spending as if they were different things is pointless.
If I were gay, (and in a state where it was legal), I'd ask you to marry me. I made exactly this point somewhere else here. There's no such thing as 'tax rate policy'. You can argue who and what and when things are taxes, but the rate is 'however much you need to cover spending'. That's not something you can actually debate.
Really? I can think offhand someone who actually died of starvation in 2005: Terri Schiavo. Here's someone in 2010:
http://www.ajc.com/news/bride-in-coma-27-620657.html
Perhaps you remember that rather absurd situation where, thanks to our absolute opposition to euthanasia of any sort, we instead starve them to death? Sorta gruesome.
However, as I've repeatedly said, normal human beings do not die of 'starvation'. Nowhere on the planet. A few get caught in cave-in or locked in rooms somewhere or have a feeding tube removed, but statistically no one dies of actual 'starvation'. If you can find _bugs_, you don't die of starvation.
Saying 'People don't die from lack of food because no one dies of starvation is like saying 'People don't die from too much water because no one overdoses on water and dies of water toxicity.'
Well, no. They just _drown_. Likewise, people die of complications of malnutrition. Here, and elsewhere.
Most of the homeless, at least most of the homeless a decade ago, are indeed on the street because of some sort of mental problems. (As the economy has fallen apart and foreclosures have risen, I suspect the number of sane people on the street has increase, although I have no idea how much.)
But that doesn't really disprove the fact that they're dying of malnutrition. Even mentally ill people will eat if they have food. If people can walk around by themselves, they will eat food if hungry. They aren't because they don't have food, not because they don't want to.
Yes, the lack of mental capacities makes plenty of them miss food they could get, but pretty much all the food is used anyway. It's not like there's extra food piling up with soup kitchens wishing the homeless would show up to eat it. It's just the more mentally competent they are, the better fed they are, but that doesn't mean even the most competent are getting _enough_ nutrients.
And let's not get into the fact that some of the first signs are malnutrition are deceased mental capacities. In fact, the mental problems associated with chronic alcoholism (including DTs) are actually thiamine deficiency, which obviously becomes much worse, much faster, with a diet actually low in thiamine.
At some point, the question is 'How many of these mental problems are caused, or at least exacerbated, by malnutrition in the first place?'.
I think most of the problems are due to scope, in particular, too large a scope. Or, a better way to put it might be 'lack of following standards' or even 'lack of interfaces'. They design a giant interlocked system with a dozen different aspects, and can't make it work, and it all falls apart.
That is not how you design software, and I've thought that every time I've heard about the last government software disaster.
You have backends. You have frontends. You have data filtering. You have web pages. You have printing facilities. Whatever. These are all separate things.
You don't go and replace it all. You replace part of it, and write backwards compatible interfaces to the other parts, which get removed as those parts get replaced too. In fact, at some point the interfaces become somewhat standardized and don't need changing, or just need a file format change from EDI to XML or whatever. (Bad example for intra-government data, but whatever.)
But all the disasters seem to be 'Well, this entire multi million dollar project didn't work', at which point I'm baffled as to what, exactly, they were attempting to do, until I realize they were essentially trying to replace an entire functioning system with another system, all at once.
All software projects have failure as a possibility. The question is, do we want the entire $100 million project failing because of some poor decision made in the 'web output' module, or do we want just the $5 million 'web output' project failing?
They need to sit down and look at their data, and organize and label it. Then they need to figure out how to move it around, and then they write stuff to do _each specific instance_ of that. They do not need to write some huge glob of software to start with.
And for every dollar they spend on a salad is less _actual calories_, which would result in them starving to death in the actual medical sense. But I'm not participating in this stupidity anymore.
I was asked to demonstrate 'a single example of someone starving to death', (Note this was not a claim I made, it was a claim someone else pretended I made) and I pointed out that the _homeless_ (not the poor) do 'starve to death', in the colloquial sense of 'dying due to lack of food all the time', because they are killed by malnourishment. I also claimed that about half the deaths of the homeless were due to malnutrition.
No one has actually chosen to argue with this, at all, so I'll consider the argument won at this point. People _do_ die due to lack of food in American, namely, the homeless, point proven, the end, it's over.
I _also_ said that the poor are also malnourished to some extent, and that _also_ causes some deaths, but that was just an aside.
I'm not going to sit here and argue about some hypothetical 'poor' people who go out and buy Big Macs as if it's a rebuttal to my assertions that _THE HOMELESS_ die from lack of food, just because I happened to mention the poor also have problems in that regard, and some people have hallucinated that 'the poor' I was talking about can afford afford Big Macs. (Hint: I wasn't talking about those poor. I was talking about the 'eating pinto beans and rice six times a week' poor.)
Hell, _that_ wasn't even my actual point, it was a damn _metaphor_, as I've repeatedly explained. Corporations aren't reducing the amount of _food_ they pay us, because they've, uh, never paid us in food.
Seriously, I'm finding this a very strange discussion. Almost no one is disputing my actual points. Half the people have chosen to my 'starving us to death' as if I actually meant that corporations were running around and taking food from us, which is just crazy insane. It's called hyperbole and metaphor, people.
And the other half have disputed the 'We're worse off than a decade ago' thing, which, admittedly, is at least a point I was actually making, so they're saner than the first people. Although it's pretty obvious when you look at, I dunno, any statistic that exists at all, and I'm unsure why some people here don't seem to know it.
Secondly, you've now blurred the issue with poor people. I was basically talking about the _homeless_. I just mentioned the poor in an aside that they're generally malnourished also.
Thirdly, will you please explain the 'big difference' between someone who does not get vitamin D from the 'dirt and shit' he eats, doesn't produce enough NK cells, and dies of an infection, and someone who does not who does not get vitamin D from the Big Macs he eats, doesn't produce enough NK cells, and dies of an infection?
Oh, wait, I know this one. The latter don't _look_ like they don't have enough food. They just happened to get sick and die from a normal infection, how sad.
I'm not sure why I'm having to argue all these fringe things of my post instead of the actual point it made.
The point is, for the last decade, and even the one before that to some level, wages stopped going up. Productivity was still up, until the recession hit 'the economy' was doing great...
...and almost everyone was living off of borrowed money, and certainly weren't saving. (And, contrary to what crazy people, this wasn't by choice.)
You do the math to figure out where all that money went instead. Or just look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MeanNetWorth2007.png
We can argue exactly how it got there, but whatever. Prices were just an aside to start with. The money is not here. The money is there. It was all a very sneaky and complicated process, boiling the frog alive, where no one noticed, but 'how' is not important. It happened.
The problem, the actual thing I'm trying to state, is that the corporations have drained all the wealth out of people and put it in the hands of a few. So, of course, the sane thing to do is to point at the few people the corporations haven't managed to drain all the wealth from, government workers, and yell 'GET THEM!'.
I could care less government unions. I think unions are a very good thing, but if people want to argue we shouldn't have government ones, whatever, as long as we have strong private one's they'll raise wages for everyone anyway. I think some sort of restrictions like 'Must give six months notice to strike' and stuff like that would be reasonable.
But 'basic conflict' is just insane. These people used to have much crappier payscales than us, back in the 1970 and 1980. _Their_ payscale didn't change, _they_ didn't have corporations constantly cutting back in every imaginable way and shipping jobs overseas and shipping increases in the bottom line straight up.
They stayed the same place while a lowering tide sunk all other boats. Do not look at them like they're the problem, the problem is some people _stole all our water_.
> We Americans love our fellow Americans and would never let them starve.
Did you actually read my followup? No one on the entire planet actually 'starves' in the sense of 'dying from lack of calories', except people who get locked in rooms or break a leg in the wilderness or have their feeding tube removed or something. _No one_. Not even the starving kids with the bulging bellies in Ethopia or wherever.
They, and about half the homeless deaths here, die from constant _malnutrition_, no matter what we put on the death certificate. 'Exposure'? Caused by malnutrition weakening the body. 'Disease'? Caused by malnutrition weakening the immune system. 'Heart failure'? Caused by malnutrition weakening the heart.
Homeless people die of stuff that well-fed people would live through all the time. _Poor_ people even do it. Poor people get diseases healthy people would shrug off.
So, yes, a _lot_ of people die in this country from lack of food. They just die from something caused by a lack of vitamin C or protein or whatever, instead of dying from a lack of _calories_, which is what 'starvation' actually means, and requires something like two cans of soda a day to avoid, or eating a soup kitchen once a week. You cannot actually be _healthy_ on two cans of soda a day or a meal a week.
As my comment was a metaphor about people lacking money, this really isn't important, but it's somewhat blowing my mind that people here think no one in America dies from a lack of food.
The CPI is designed to measure _actual average spending_, and not _equivalent_ spending. (Which is a lot of people call 'manipulation', but it's really just how it works.)
My claim is basically that we've been making do with less and less. That our purchasing power has gone down in relation to wages.
If people buy less and less, the BLS will happily alter the CPI to include that fact. In fact, that happens automatically, because the CPI is essentially a survey of 'What people bought and how much they spent on it'. The CPI is not measuring what most people think it's measuring. (And shouldn't be used many places it is used.)
Now, if you're talking about something _besides_ the CPI from the BLS, something that actually measures the price of food, not the price of 'food in the amount that people purchase it', I'd like to see it. (Not sure the BLS would be the people doing that, though.)
> Doesn’t really look much like an analogy to me, because if you replace “food” with “money”, it makes no sense
Really? Huh.
It’s all nonsense. Corporate America has been slowly taking everyone's income away, and we’re looking and spotting the one group of people not employed by Corporate America and who still have money and yelling ‘They have money! They must have stole it from us! Get them!’.
This is because people are actually paid in money.
>Look, I really hate to agree with Heidegger but claiming that the average person in the US is actually materially worse off than they were at some point in the relatively distant past is just totally unsubstantiated and silly.
Distant past? I'm talking about a decade ago!
You did see the other post I made where prices of everything had gone up, but the wages had not, right?
While that's just the cost of food by itself, I think we can just automatically accept the idea that wages haven't gone up 58% since 2007!
But that's since 2007...let's see...here:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/08/14/logan-american-dream/
'After inflation, weekly wages were 0.3% lower in June 2008 than they were in March 2001. But the price of food is up 25% over the same period, transportation by 36%, fuels and utilities by 53%, and college tuition—the key to the middle class—by 68%.'
I think the first part of that is worth repeating 'After inflation, weekly wages were 0.3% lower in June 2008 than they were in March 2001.'. The American people are having literally have no change in in their wages at all after inflation.
Also note that doesn't mention how much _housing_ went up. I hope I don't need to document that!
...but, wait, how do you have skyrocketing prices with normal inflation? Shouldn't inflation be somewhere near _halfway_ between wages and price, so that prices go up X% and wages down X%? If the cost of everything went up an average of 30% after inflation, and wages were the same, isn't inflation broken?
That seems almost like a paradox...until you remember that how you cancel out inflation is remove money from the market. Normally this is done by the government reducing the money supply, but apparently it also works if the superrich run off with it too and it's not actually used to buy food and gas and whatnot.
Who on earth said the word 'millions'? That word isn't even in my post. In fact, that word appears exactly once on this entire page besides your post, in reference to an amount of money.
And perhaps you should learn what a metaphor is. In case you weren't paying attention, union members do not get paid in food. No one does. The food was a _metaphor_ for money.
To actually answer your question (I'll pretend you asked it in good faith), the US has about 150 starvation deaths each year, but generally most of those are in the form of 'accident' or 'suicide' or 'murder' instead of not being able to afford food.
But those are just deaths due 'not enough calories', which is the technical definition of starvation. In fact, in the entire world, actual 'starvation' is not that common, even in all those places where people are, in the colloquial sense, 'starving to death'. ('The colloquial sense' is not the same as a 'metaphor'. Please consult an English teacher for more information.) Those people are not actually dying from 'starvation'.
Those people, and a moderately large group in America also, are dying from _malnutrition_, which is when they get enough daily calories to keep functioning, but are missing nutrients. You can tell the difference in photographs because continual malnutrition of this gives these people large stomachs whereas continual starvation gives them...uh...death in three weeks. (There's not actually such a problem as 'long term starvation' in the technical sense. No country can be 'starving' for years. Three weeks, then you die.)
After years and months of _malnutrition_, they will quickly and without and fuss die of something, heart failure is the most common. In the US, with the homeless, this usually coincides with bad weather, so is commonly called 'exposure' in death rates, but it's at least halfway due to malnutrition....healthy people, like the recently homeless, usually live through harsh weather just fine.
Another common and fun one is infection. (Note that 'fun' is sarcasm, which is unrelated to metaphor.) Get a cold? Oh, look, you can't fight it off because you're so malnourished, and you're dead.
Even the homeless can afford ramen noodles or other sources of calories so they do not die of starvation. At worse they will eat plants. What they _can't_ afford is food with the nutrients they need to keep healthy.
The problem here is not anything to do with public unions. I would argue in a sane economy, public unions are sorta pointless, because other unions tend to raise the level for everyone else.
The problem is, after decades of class and anti-union warfare, everyone else's wages suck, while public unions have managed to maintain their pay and pension. It's not that they're doing 'better', it's that _everyone else_ had their wages and benefits slowly sucked out by giant corporations.
Heck, public workers actually still make _less_ than private workers. They just have good pension plans, you know, like we used to have with companies, back when we have job security and whatnot too. This was before everyone was supposed to start saving in 401ks themselves, but didn't because they had to use that 'extra' money to buy food because their wages didn't go up for a decade? Remember that? Remember how prices kept going up, but wages somehow never did, so everyone spent their savings, and then money they did have? Remember how that's still true?
It's all nonsense. Corporate America has been slowly starving everyone to death, and we're looking and spotting the one group of people not employed by Corporate America and who still have food and yelling 'They have food! They must have stole it from us! Get them!'.
Yes, folks, they still have stuff, let's take it from them too. When we do the government will spend less money, so we can give even _bigger_ tax brakes to the rich and corporate America.
And then...the poor! They're getting stuff from the government too! We should take that stuff away from them, and maybe somehow a tiny fraction of that could go to our pockets, if the rich will let us keep it. And a few years from now, when we've gotten all the stuff from them, we can declare war on Canada, too. I hear they still have stuff, too.
Let no one turn around and wonder where all the stuff we used to have has wandered off to.
A real 'broken windows' policy of policing liberty would be stuff like requiring the police to monitor all interactions with the public. Or demanding that their city issue parade permits in a non-biased manner. Or attempt to get courts to start using treatment instead of punishment for drug violations.
You can either start at the top and worry about huge violations of liberty, or start at the bottom and worry about smaller local ones. Starting at the top and worrying about microscopic things is just inane.
It's like someone declaring they're a mountain climber, and they're going to start by climbing 20 feet up a hill next to Mount Everest. Yeah, um, why don't they try climbing something local first, before flying around the world? Or, hell, get a team, and try actually climbing Everest to some actual milestone? Their plan makes no sense.
And it's even weirder than that. There are entire climbing climbs that strategize about how to climb that hill. People become famous for trying to climb the hill. People demonize the hill, and make pithy quotes about how they climb it because it's there.
You don't need to get people to 'sign up for it', probably half the population is already there, it's just that the political parties are operating in such an idiotic manner that there's no solution.
No one who spends any time looking at it can come up with an justification for the manner in which we operate the drug war. It's obvious we'd be better off than the status quo if we'd just legalize everything. There people is an even _better_ solution, with treatment and whatnot, and I'm all for trying to find it, but when we'd clearly be better off with no laws at all, the system is broken.
As a progressive, there's plenty I probably disagree with you on, like trade barriers, which I think we actually should have against anyone without a comparable economy. And I would say 'education', but I'm not sure if you mean our _current_ national education system which is just gibberish, or any at all. I think we should have some sort of national education thing...that doesn't look anything like what we have.
But, seriously, that's not important. What is important is there are honest libertarians, who actually look at the infringements of liberty, which start with actual constitutional violations, and range down to just stupid counterproductive, but constitutional, laws, and think we should start there.
And, the honest ones say, we can worry about replacing (not removing, replacing) the welfare state sometimes after we solve the problem of generational poverty, which we will have solved somewhere after we've gotten rid of the War on Some Drug Users, which we're only going to care about after we close Gitmo.
At _that_ point, after we've fixed all that, presumably sane libertarians and sane liberals can have the drag-out fight about our entire different world view and There Can Be Only One or whatever is supposed to happen then, which is about as vague as what is supposed to happen in those movies, and will also happen in the distance future or another planet or whatever. Who cares, we'll be long dead.
And then there are dishonest libertarians, whose entire idea idea of liberty is apparently 'How much taxes am I paying?'. (And this new 'Tea Party' is the same way.)
Now, generally, people who say 'Why do you care about this thing instead of this other thing' are attempting to deflect the issue. It is not reasonable to demand that people try to fix the much-worse conditions in Haiti before they do something about Detroit.
But that only goes to a certain point before it really does turn into hypocrisy. Especially since all the unconstitutional and obviously stupid things our government does costs us _more_ than welfare. Anyone who _actually_ felt that 'taxes were just as important an infringement of liberty as imprisoning people without trial' would, um, duh, realize that imprisoning people without trial, and the entire war effort, also costs money. So yeah.
At this point, these dishonest libertarians worrying about welfare has pretty clearly turned into 'poor people punching'.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Death and Life of the Great American Middle Class”
| And I’m really uncomfortable with the notion that a simple majority of workers can force the rest to either join the union or quit, it seems to me to undermine freedom of association, since its forcing you to associate with a group.
Let's look at this 'freedom of association' thing. The weird thing is, the right's strange objection to being 'forced' to join a union only seems to show up with regard to unions. Companies can basically force you to do whatever they want, so it's entirely reasonable to force you to join a union.
Likewise, companies can enter 'partnerships' and make demands on each other all the time, including demands that they make _each other's_ workers do something, which no one seems to have a problem with.
The only time this is ever a problem is when it's something corporate American _as a whole_ doesn't really want to agree to, so, somehow, the rights of the worker to 'not do what the company says' magically appear out of thin air. But let's make an identical example to a union using two corporations and see if you have a problem with it:
You work for company X. X decided to go into partnership with company Y on project XY. You have been assigned to it. It is physically located at Y, so you have to go to work there. People at Y have to pay for a parking pass. So now, you have pay for one, because, duh, you have to park. You also have to wear a Y-assigned ID badge while in Y.
Yeah, well, that was the example. Bet you were expecting more. Don't need it. You were just forced to 'associate' with the other company, and you were just forced to 'pay dues'.
Do you have some _right_ to work for company X without doing this? When they assign you to project XY can you just say 'Nope, not joining.'? When you got hired, were you allowed to say 'Except I won't work on XY.' Did company X just have no right to agree to XY in the first place?
Of course not, and no one argue that. But, somehow, when Y is a union, of course workers suddenly have 'rights' in that regard, which is utter nonsense.
Corporate America is always willing to argue that they _shouldn't be allowed_ to do things that help workers. Not 'being allowed' to do things let them claim it's not their fault.
"
Just because statistics are mathematically correct does not make them 'true'. Did you know that only 0.01% of people pay 99% of all boat taxes?
| If I were to say “the highest-earning 20% of people paid 68.9% of federal taxes in 2007,” would that be dishonest? If so, how? Does the fault lie with me? With Brookings? With the CBO, where they source their numbers?
The fault lies with whoever decided to state income tax as if it was in any way related to the percentage of people who paid it.
Here's a question: Do you think it is honest for me to say:
99% of car accidents happen in only 0.01% of America. We should bar cars from operating in those dangerous areas.
Do you think it's okay for me to run around stating statistics about the 'dangerous 0.01% of America', and demand that something be done about it?
Does your opinion change when you learn that by '0.01%', I was referring to the part of America that is _roads_?
No, people _do not_ get to state thing that are technically true but wildly misleading in politics. Not without getting called liars.
Stating 'percent paid in income tax' as compared to 'percent of people' is wildly misleading, so misleading it is, in fact, a lie.
"
Anyone who quotes how much 'a percentage of people pay in taxes' is _inherently_ dishonest or just plain ignorant. Income taxes are on _income_, not 'people'.
'The top 23% of _income_ generates 40% of income tax revenue.' That is how you say that.
Any other way of stating that is a lie. Any mention of a percentage of _people_ compared to a percentage of _tax revenue_ is a lie.
Not misleading, not tricky, and outright, an actual, literal lie using statistics. Those two things cannot be compared. They are not comparable.
It's like saying '99% of car accidents happen in only 0.01% of America.', or '0.00000000000000000000000001% of the population has a college degree.' or '1% pays 90% of the gasoline tax.' (Bonus point for people who can figure those out.)
We should not put up with deliberate lies in our political discussion.
"
It's ironic that there really _is_ a public union that is much too powerful and abuses its power at all turn, not just internally but in stuff like protecting people who commit actual criminal actions.
Oh, and on top of that, if _any_ job is was ever so critical that a strike would be disastrous and thus should not be allowed in the interest of public safety, they're it. And yet there are places that do not allow teachers to strike, but allow them to, like Wisconsin is trying to be.
...and, yet, for some reason, the police union always gets excluded from this little 'attack the unions' nonsense.
As I've said elsewhere, the problem isn't public unions doing better, the problem is we all (except the rich) started doing worse, and everyone (except the rich) need to tighten their belt. But this is not a budget issue, this is a 'strip unions of power', as evidenced by the fact that Wisconsin public unions have offered to do everything that the governor wants, but apparently it's not enough...he's really just trying to kill them.
And what 'brands you as a liberal' is actually looking at this from some sort of logical perspective instead of a knee-jerk anti-union one. Shame on you.
On “Government Spending and Liberty”
Heh. You made that too specific. I shall fix:
| Inspected on itself, Obama’s record is horrific. Inspected in comparison to the other side, and he is benign. Which is frankly terrifying.
"
They're not even really anti-spending, they just think they are. They're _anti-tax_. You cannot be in favor of what they are in favor of and be 'anti-spending'.
Hell, they're not even actually anti-tax. For example, they have failed to understand that the ACA lowers government spending. They're anti-tax on stupid pills.
The 'Tea Party' is best described as 'The Republican base, hijacked by Fox and the Koch brothers and other superrich'.
The only way in that they are different from the Republicans is that they _believe_ all the dumb things the Republicans have been pandering to the base with for the last few decades, making them spectacularly misinformed about almost everything.
They're about as far from honest libertarians as humanly possible in politics.
However, they do have many of the same interests as dishonest libertarians...they're just not also pretending 'Yeah, that whole constitution rights thing is interesting we'll get around to it after we deal with this horrible taxes'. The Tea Party is what happens when those people decide to stop hiding and just outright state all their authoritarian jingoistic nonsense.
Incidentally, it's _astonishing_ to watch a group be anti-state and talk about overthrowing the government with violence and be fascist assholes at the same time.
The rich paying 5% more? A violation of your rights. Demanding that states have the right to bankrupcy so they can get out contracts everyone signed? Just fine.
The government requiring that medical insurance companies don't drop sick people? A violation of your rights. Vagina inspectors making sure women didn't have an abortion? Just fine.
Fixing the 'gun show' laws so that actual convicted felons can't buy guns? A violation of your rights. Locking people up without cause, torturing them,and then refusing to let them sue? Just fine.
From this we can conclude that anything is fine if it is aimed at a) women, or b) foreigners, or c) workers, whereas nothing is okay if it's aimed at a0 the rich, or b) corporations, or c) 'real americans'.
On “Liberal Academia (Part 1)”
I'm glad you made that rant instead of me, because I as really this close to it, and I'm trying to not do rants that piss people off here. (Although I refrain from calling groups insulting names.)
But, to summarize the important point: The far right in this country are often anti-education and anti-science. Anti-science is not the same as being anti-fact, which both the far left and far right are sometimes, but against the entire premise of science.
I.e., the far left often have really really stupid ideas, but they, in general, accept the modern world, the enlightenment, and that science can tell them the truth. Even the mysticism presents as pseudo-science. They are 'pro-discovering-stuff', even if their facts are utterly made up nonsense about vaccines and healing crystals and even communism.
The far right, OTOH, seems outright hostile to science and education, outright hostile to the idea that anyone would try to figure anything out. they seem to think facts are just handed to them, either via the Bible or via what they imagine Adam Smith said. This makes them a _spectacularly_ poor fit in the academic world. (And, I should point out, in the news world.)
And when I say 'the far right', I actually generally mean 'the right'. There actually are moderate right people in academic...but they're to the left of the people complaining about the liberal bias, so don't count.
On “US Intervention in Libya”
Indeed. I'd even be okay with some peacekeeping mission on the ground, backed by the UN. Not to overthrow anyone, but to protect protesters.
Unlike a lot of stuff we _pretend_ it's illegal for other countries to do, like build nuclear weapons or chant 'death to America', actually slaughtering your own citizens _is_ illegal.
However, due to some utterly incomprehensible reason, we're in the middle of the two longest wars in American history, and can't really afford to do anything at all.
On “A Basic Conflict”
I wouldn't know, I dropped out of CS because I couldn't do the Calculus 2 required. (Which, I must point out, is not actually used in 99.999% of programming. Programming rarely uses even trig. The requirement is due to the math department's desperate attempt to hold on to the CS major, despite it not having more to do with math than, for example, chemistry.)
But I got at least two thirds of the way through the actual computer classes, and, yeah. They'd talk about OOP (Which I was fairly dismissive of, being a C programmer. I didn't realize how useful it was until later.) and designing a _program_ in parts...
...but nothing about designing a system, nothing about the fact that different parts of the system can be in different places and do different things and how to make them all work together. No, there was just a giant blob of a 'program', which, no matter how well designed, was a single entity...and _maybe_ a database server it connected to, although that was literally one class where that was explained.
Perhaps that stuff was later on, although I doubt it. CS, when I took it in 1999-2001, was really crippled by the sheer number of people who didn't understand programming at all, and just did things by rote, so they had to keep going over basic concepts.
On “Government Spending and Liberty”
I don't care about 'trade deficits' at all.
I just care about the demonstrative fact you have to some sort of monetary cycle, where money is spent and used to pay people who then spent the money. Right now, we have a cycle where the rich, instead of paying Americans, are paying 20% to people in China and keeping the rest themselves.
That cannot continue. Economies cannot be unidirectional. Americans cannot keep purchasing if they do not get any money to spend. They can borrow for a decade, and then that's all. (And we already _did_ that.)
As for Negative Income Taxation, what you have failed to realize that it's REDISTRIBUTING THE WEALTH and thus will never happen in the US. (Despite, as I pointed out, deductions appear to be deliberately set up so as to pay only the middle class and above.)
"
> I definitely disagree about trade barriers. I’m an economist by training and I specialised in trade theory. Believe me when I tell you there really isn’t a good reason to impede the flow of international commerce, barring a state or war or something similar.
I don't want to 'impede' them, I just want to tax offshoring production and whatnot to China. We have almost no production left in this country, we've become a hollowed-out shell of a country without a manufacturing base.
If you can think of some way to undo that without trade barriers, I'm all for it. And, no, 'waiting the entire world's standard of living to catch up to ours so that offshoring isn't so cheap' does not seem that plausible.
> 4) Working out where to start: I agree for the most part, but I would note that there is a place for division of labour here. Since I’m an economist I’m probably going to be more help on the welfare system than I am on the Drug War.
Don't sell yourself short. You're not a part of the prison-law enfforcement-industrial complex, or a baboon (I assume), so you'd probably come up with a better plan than the Drug War just by default.
...I think I just insulted baboons there.
> I agree completely, while I’m concerned about taxes on occasion, my concern is about the deleterious incentive effects of high effective marginal tax rates (one reason I support lower rates with less deductions).
I agree utterly with 5, but for different reasons, ha. But first let me state that somewhere above 75% of deductions should be removed. We like to have incentives for _really_ stupid things. Why are we having deductions for mortgage payments but not rent? Or why have a deduction for that at all, considering that everyone is supposedly playing fo shelter.
So, yes, lower taxes, less deductions...but...
...the reason I don't like deductions, even the remaining sane ones, is because deductions are very regressive. Poor people are essentially immune to them, because they don't have any income to deduct from.
I'd much rather we have deductions as actual rebates that are independent of taxes.
If it's worth letting a rich person keep $500 dollars of their taxes to do X, it's worth letting a poor person do the same...even if they aren't _paying_ taxes and would just be handed a check for $500. If that behavior is _actually_ worth $500, it's worth it whoever does it, right?
I don't actually see the logic of any other behavior. It's just more poor people punching. If we're paying people to do things, we should pay them regardless if they're rich or not. (But, like I said, the number of these things should be vastly reduced.)
> Apart from that, the real rate of taxation is the rate of spending (as Milton Friedman put it). To talk about taxes and spending as if they were different things is pointless.
If I were gay, (and in a state where it was legal), I'd ask you to marry me. I made exactly this point somewhere else here. There's no such thing as 'tax rate policy'. You can argue who and what and when things are taxes, but the rate is 'however much you need to cover spending'. That's not something you can actually debate.
On “A Basic Conflict”
Really? I can think offhand someone who actually died of starvation in 2005: Terri Schiavo. Here's someone in 2010:
http://www.ajc.com/news/bride-in-coma-27-620657.html
Perhaps you remember that rather absurd situation where, thanks to our absolute opposition to euthanasia of any sort, we instead starve them to death? Sorta gruesome.
However, as I've repeatedly said, normal human beings do not die of 'starvation'. Nowhere on the planet. A few get caught in cave-in or locked in rooms somewhere or have a feeding tube removed, but statistically no one dies of actual 'starvation'. If you can find _bugs_, you don't die of starvation.
Saying 'People don't die from lack of food because no one dies of starvation is like saying 'People don't die from too much water because no one overdoses on water and dies of water toxicity.'
Well, no. They just _drown_. Likewise, people die of complications of malnutrition. Here, and elsewhere.
"
Most of the homeless, at least most of the homeless a decade ago, are indeed on the street because of some sort of mental problems. (As the economy has fallen apart and foreclosures have risen, I suspect the number of sane people on the street has increase, although I have no idea how much.)
But that doesn't really disprove the fact that they're dying of malnutrition. Even mentally ill people will eat if they have food. If people can walk around by themselves, they will eat food if hungry. They aren't because they don't have food, not because they don't want to.
Yes, the lack of mental capacities makes plenty of them miss food they could get, but pretty much all the food is used anyway. It's not like there's extra food piling up with soup kitchens wishing the homeless would show up to eat it. It's just the more mentally competent they are, the better fed they are, but that doesn't mean even the most competent are getting _enough_ nutrients.
And let's not get into the fact that some of the first signs are malnutrition are deceased mental capacities. In fact, the mental problems associated with chronic alcoholism (including DTs) are actually thiamine deficiency, which obviously becomes much worse, much faster, with a diet actually low in thiamine.
At some point, the question is 'How many of these mental problems are caused, or at least exacerbated, by malnutrition in the first place?'.
"
I think most of the problems are due to scope, in particular, too large a scope. Or, a better way to put it might be 'lack of following standards' or even 'lack of interfaces'. They design a giant interlocked system with a dozen different aspects, and can't make it work, and it all falls apart.
That is not how you design software, and I've thought that every time I've heard about the last government software disaster.
You have backends. You have frontends. You have data filtering. You have web pages. You have printing facilities. Whatever. These are all separate things.
You don't go and replace it all. You replace part of it, and write backwards compatible interfaces to the other parts, which get removed as those parts get replaced too. In fact, at some point the interfaces become somewhat standardized and don't need changing, or just need a file format change from EDI to XML or whatever. (Bad example for intra-government data, but whatever.)
But all the disasters seem to be 'Well, this entire multi million dollar project didn't work', at which point I'm baffled as to what, exactly, they were attempting to do, until I realize they were essentially trying to replace an entire functioning system with another system, all at once.
All software projects have failure as a possibility. The question is, do we want the entire $100 million project failing because of some poor decision made in the 'web output' module, or do we want just the $5 million 'web output' project failing?
They need to sit down and look at their data, and organize and label it. Then they need to figure out how to move it around, and then they write stuff to do _each specific instance_ of that. They do not need to write some huge glob of software to start with.
"
And for every dollar they spend on a salad is less _actual calories_, which would result in them starving to death in the actual medical sense. But I'm not participating in this stupidity anymore.
I was asked to demonstrate 'a single example of someone starving to death', (Note this was not a claim I made, it was a claim someone else pretended I made) and I pointed out that the _homeless_ (not the poor) do 'starve to death', in the colloquial sense of 'dying due to lack of food all the time', because they are killed by malnourishment. I also claimed that about half the deaths of the homeless were due to malnutrition.
No one has actually chosen to argue with this, at all, so I'll consider the argument won at this point. People _do_ die due to lack of food in American, namely, the homeless, point proven, the end, it's over.
I _also_ said that the poor are also malnourished to some extent, and that _also_ causes some deaths, but that was just an aside.
I'm not going to sit here and argue about some hypothetical 'poor' people who go out and buy Big Macs as if it's a rebuttal to my assertions that _THE HOMELESS_ die from lack of food, just because I happened to mention the poor also have problems in that regard, and some people have hallucinated that 'the poor' I was talking about can afford afford Big Macs. (Hint: I wasn't talking about those poor. I was talking about the 'eating pinto beans and rice six times a week' poor.)
Hell, _that_ wasn't even my actual point, it was a damn _metaphor_, as I've repeatedly explained. Corporations aren't reducing the amount of _food_ they pay us, because they've, uh, never paid us in food.
Seriously, I'm finding this a very strange discussion. Almost no one is disputing my actual points. Half the people have chosen to my 'starving us to death' as if I actually meant that corporations were running around and taking food from us, which is just crazy insane. It's called hyperbole and metaphor, people.
And the other half have disputed the 'We're worse off than a decade ago' thing, which, admittedly, is at least a point I was actually making, so they're saner than the first people. Although it's pretty obvious when you look at, I dunno, any statistic that exists at all, and I'm unsure why some people here don't seem to know it.
"
Firstly, I have no idea why you responded here.
Secondly, you've now blurred the issue with poor people. I was basically talking about the _homeless_. I just mentioned the poor in an aside that they're generally malnourished also.
Thirdly, will you please explain the 'big difference' between someone who does not get vitamin D from the 'dirt and shit' he eats, doesn't produce enough NK cells, and dies of an infection, and someone who does not who does not get vitamin D from the Big Macs he eats, doesn't produce enough NK cells, and dies of an infection?
Oh, wait, I know this one. The latter don't _look_ like they don't have enough food. They just happened to get sick and die from a normal infection, how sad.
"
I'm not sure why I'm having to argue all these fringe things of my post instead of the actual point it made.
The point is, for the last decade, and even the one before that to some level, wages stopped going up. Productivity was still up, until the recession hit 'the economy' was doing great...
...and almost everyone was living off of borrowed money, and certainly weren't saving. (And, contrary to what crazy people, this wasn't by choice.)
You do the math to figure out where all that money went instead. Or just look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MeanNetWorth2007.png
We can argue exactly how it got there, but whatever. Prices were just an aside to start with. The money is not here. The money is there. It was all a very sneaky and complicated process, boiling the frog alive, where no one noticed, but 'how' is not important. It happened.
The problem, the actual thing I'm trying to state, is that the corporations have drained all the wealth out of people and put it in the hands of a few. So, of course, the sane thing to do is to point at the few people the corporations haven't managed to drain all the wealth from, government workers, and yell 'GET THEM!'.
I could care less government unions. I think unions are a very good thing, but if people want to argue we shouldn't have government ones, whatever, as long as we have strong private one's they'll raise wages for everyone anyway. I think some sort of restrictions like 'Must give six months notice to strike' and stuff like that would be reasonable.
But 'basic conflict' is just insane. These people used to have much crappier payscales than us, back in the 1970 and 1980. _Their_ payscale didn't change, _they_ didn't have corporations constantly cutting back in every imaginable way and shipping jobs overseas and shipping increases in the bottom line straight up.
They stayed the same place while a lowering tide sunk all other boats. Do not look at them like they're the problem, the problem is some people _stole all our water_.
"
> We Americans love our fellow Americans and would never let them starve.
Did you actually read my followup? No one on the entire planet actually 'starves' in the sense of 'dying from lack of calories', except people who get locked in rooms or break a leg in the wilderness or have their feeding tube removed or something. _No one_. Not even the starving kids with the bulging bellies in Ethopia or wherever.
They, and about half the homeless deaths here, die from constant _malnutrition_, no matter what we put on the death certificate. 'Exposure'? Caused by malnutrition weakening the body. 'Disease'? Caused by malnutrition weakening the immune system. 'Heart failure'? Caused by malnutrition weakening the heart.
Homeless people die of stuff that well-fed people would live through all the time. _Poor_ people even do it. Poor people get diseases healthy people would shrug off.
So, yes, a _lot_ of people die in this country from lack of food. They just die from something caused by a lack of vitamin C or protein or whatever, instead of dying from a lack of _calories_, which is what 'starvation' actually means, and requires something like two cans of soda a day to avoid, or eating a soup kitchen once a week. You cannot actually be _healthy_ on two cans of soda a day or a meal a week.
As my comment was a metaphor about people lacking money, this really isn't important, but it's somewhat blowing my mind that people here think no one in America dies from a lack of food.
"
The CPI is designed to measure _actual average spending_, and not _equivalent_ spending. (Which is a lot of people call 'manipulation', but it's really just how it works.)
My claim is basically that we've been making do with less and less. That our purchasing power has gone down in relation to wages.
If people buy less and less, the BLS will happily alter the CPI to include that fact. In fact, that happens automatically, because the CPI is essentially a survey of 'What people bought and how much they spent on it'. The CPI is not measuring what most people think it's measuring. (And shouldn't be used many places it is used.)
Now, if you're talking about something _besides_ the CPI from the BLS, something that actually measures the price of food, not the price of 'food in the amount that people purchase it', I'd like to see it. (Not sure the BLS would be the people doing that, though.)
"
> Doesn’t really look much like an analogy to me, because if you replace “food” with “money”, it makes no sense
Really? Huh.
It’s all nonsense. Corporate America has been slowly taking everyone's income away, and we’re looking and spotting the one group of people not employed by Corporate America and who still have money and yelling ‘They have money! They must have stole it from us! Get them!’.
This is because people are actually paid in money.
>Look, I really hate to agree with Heidegger but claiming that the average person in the US is actually materially worse off than they were at some point in the relatively distant past is just totally unsubstantiated and silly.
Distant past? I'm talking about a decade ago!
You did see the other post I made where prices of everything had gone up, but the wages had not, right?
"
Huh? I thought it was common knowledge. Uh, let me find some links:
http://current.com/news/92609901_the-food-prices-up-58-with-many-facing-a-freeze-on-wages-the-cost-of-groceries-has-rocketed-since-2007.htm
While that's just the cost of food by itself, I think we can just automatically accept the idea that wages haven't gone up 58% since 2007!
But that's since 2007...let's see...here:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/08/14/logan-american-dream/
'After inflation, weekly wages were 0.3% lower in June 2008 than they were in March 2001. But the price of food is up 25% over the same period, transportation by 36%, fuels and utilities by 53%, and college tuition—the key to the middle class—by 68%.'
I think the first part of that is worth repeating 'After inflation, weekly wages were 0.3% lower in June 2008 than they were in March 2001.'. The American people are having literally have no change in in their wages at all after inflation.
Also note that doesn't mention how much _housing_ went up. I hope I don't need to document that!
...but, wait, how do you have skyrocketing prices with normal inflation? Shouldn't inflation be somewhere near _halfway_ between wages and price, so that prices go up X% and wages down X%? If the cost of everything went up an average of 30% after inflation, and wages were the same, isn't inflation broken?
That seems almost like a paradox...until you remember that how you cancel out inflation is remove money from the market. Normally this is done by the government reducing the money supply, but apparently it also works if the superrich run off with it too and it's not actually used to buy food and gas and whatnot.
Weird, huh?
"
Who on earth said the word 'millions'? That word isn't even in my post. In fact, that word appears exactly once on this entire page besides your post, in reference to an amount of money.
And perhaps you should learn what a metaphor is. In case you weren't paying attention, union members do not get paid in food. No one does. The food was a _metaphor_ for money.
To actually answer your question (I'll pretend you asked it in good faith), the US has about 150 starvation deaths each year, but generally most of those are in the form of 'accident' or 'suicide' or 'murder' instead of not being able to afford food.
But those are just deaths due 'not enough calories', which is the technical definition of starvation. In fact, in the entire world, actual 'starvation' is not that common, even in all those places where people are, in the colloquial sense, 'starving to death'. ('The colloquial sense' is not the same as a 'metaphor'. Please consult an English teacher for more information.) Those people are not actually dying from 'starvation'.
Those people, and a moderately large group in America also, are dying from _malnutrition_, which is when they get enough daily calories to keep functioning, but are missing nutrients. You can tell the difference in photographs because continual malnutrition of this gives these people large stomachs whereas continual starvation gives them...uh...death in three weeks. (There's not actually such a problem as 'long term starvation' in the technical sense. No country can be 'starving' for years. Three weeks, then you die.)
After years and months of _malnutrition_, they will quickly and without and fuss die of something, heart failure is the most common. In the US, with the homeless, this usually coincides with bad weather, so is commonly called 'exposure' in death rates, but it's at least halfway due to malnutrition....healthy people, like the recently homeless, usually live through harsh weather just fine.
Another common and fun one is infection. (Note that 'fun' is sarcasm, which is unrelated to metaphor.) Get a cold? Oh, look, you can't fight it off because you're so malnourished, and you're dead.
Even the homeless can afford ramen noodles or other sources of calories so they do not die of starvation. At worse they will eat plants. What they _can't_ afford is food with the nutrients they need to keep healthy.
"
The problem here is not anything to do with public unions. I would argue in a sane economy, public unions are sorta pointless, because other unions tend to raise the level for everyone else.
The problem is, after decades of class and anti-union warfare, everyone else's wages suck, while public unions have managed to maintain their pay and pension. It's not that they're doing 'better', it's that _everyone else_ had their wages and benefits slowly sucked out by giant corporations.
Heck, public workers actually still make _less_ than private workers. They just have good pension plans, you know, like we used to have with companies, back when we have job security and whatnot too. This was before everyone was supposed to start saving in 401ks themselves, but didn't because they had to use that 'extra' money to buy food because their wages didn't go up for a decade? Remember that? Remember how prices kept going up, but wages somehow never did, so everyone spent their savings, and then money they did have? Remember how that's still true?
It's all nonsense. Corporate America has been slowly starving everyone to death, and we're looking and spotting the one group of people not employed by Corporate America and who still have food and yelling 'They have food! They must have stole it from us! Get them!'.
Yes, folks, they still have stuff, let's take it from them too. When we do the government will spend less money, so we can give even _bigger_ tax brakes to the rich and corporate America.
And then...the poor! They're getting stuff from the government too! We should take that stuff away from them, and maybe somehow a tiny fraction of that could go to our pockets, if the rich will let us keep it. And a few years from now, when we've gotten all the stuff from them, we can declare war on Canada, too. I hear they still have stuff, too.
Let no one turn around and wonder where all the stuff we used to have has wandered off to.
On “Government Spending and Liberty”
A real 'broken windows' policy of policing liberty would be stuff like requiring the police to monitor all interactions with the public. Or demanding that their city issue parade permits in a non-biased manner. Or attempt to get courts to start using treatment instead of punishment for drug violations.
You can either start at the top and worry about huge violations of liberty, or start at the bottom and worry about smaller local ones. Starting at the top and worrying about microscopic things is just inane.
It's like someone declaring they're a mountain climber, and they're going to start by climbing 20 feet up a hill next to Mount Everest. Yeah, um, why don't they try climbing something local first, before flying around the world? Or, hell, get a team, and try actually climbing Everest to some actual milestone? Their plan makes no sense.
And it's even weirder than that. There are entire climbing climbs that strategize about how to climb that hill. People become famous for trying to climb the hill. People demonize the hill, and make pithy quotes about how they climb it because it's there.
At some point, everyone else's head explodes.
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You don't need to get people to 'sign up for it', probably half the population is already there, it's just that the political parties are operating in such an idiotic manner that there's no solution.
No one who spends any time looking at it can come up with an justification for the manner in which we operate the drug war. It's obvious we'd be better off than the status quo if we'd just legalize everything. There people is an even _better_ solution, with treatment and whatnot, and I'm all for trying to find it, but when we'd clearly be better off with no laws at all, the system is broken.
As a progressive, there's plenty I probably disagree with you on, like trade barriers, which I think we actually should have against anyone without a comparable economy. And I would say 'education', but I'm not sure if you mean our _current_ national education system which is just gibberish, or any at all. I think we should have some sort of national education thing...that doesn't look anything like what we have.
But, seriously, that's not important. What is important is there are honest libertarians, who actually look at the infringements of liberty, which start with actual constitutional violations, and range down to just stupid counterproductive, but constitutional, laws, and think we should start there.
And, the honest ones say, we can worry about replacing (not removing, replacing) the welfare state sometimes after we solve the problem of generational poverty, which we will have solved somewhere after we've gotten rid of the War on Some Drug Users, which we're only going to care about after we close Gitmo.
At _that_ point, after we've fixed all that, presumably sane libertarians and sane liberals can have the drag-out fight about our entire different world view and There Can Be Only One or whatever is supposed to happen then, which is about as vague as what is supposed to happen in those movies, and will also happen in the distance future or another planet or whatever. Who cares, we'll be long dead.
And then there are dishonest libertarians, whose entire idea idea of liberty is apparently 'How much taxes am I paying?'. (And this new 'Tea Party' is the same way.)
Now, generally, people who say 'Why do you care about this thing instead of this other thing' are attempting to deflect the issue. It is not reasonable to demand that people try to fix the much-worse conditions in Haiti before they do something about Detroit.
But that only goes to a certain point before it really does turn into hypocrisy. Especially since all the unconstitutional and obviously stupid things our government does costs us _more_ than welfare. Anyone who _actually_ felt that 'taxes were just as important an infringement of liberty as imprisoning people without trial' would, um, duh, realize that imprisoning people without trial, and the entire war effort, also costs money. So yeah.
At this point, these dishonest libertarians worrying about welfare has pretty clearly turned into 'poor people punching'.
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