That graphic shows that the bottom quintile's share of tax payments is roughly half their share of income.

Exactly. Deregulation has created an environment in which niche producers can survive and even thrive in the face of declining market share. Consumes have options, and that's what matters. If you can't handle the fact that they still choose to buy Budweiser and Coors, that's between you and your therapist.

I would like Obama to take more vacations. And get some new hobbies. Maybe a few mistresses, too. Anything to keep him from signing new legislation.

Isn't it cute when people who don't have a clue what libertarianism is think that they're qualified to critique it?

Huh. Well I'll be.

It's funny you should mention Ayn Rand, because this post reminds me of something a character in one of her novels might have said. "If freedom means I have to think, I want no part of it!"

I tend to assume her stuff is just caricature, and the real-world left just keeps proving me wrong. I should probably start giving her the benefit of the doubt.

A while back there were two girls of whom I was more or less equally fond, and who both seemed to like me. They knew each other, so I didn't want to ask both of them out. I had to pick one. I couldn't make up my mind, and ended up not asking either out.

I think the government needs to step in and make these kinds of decisions for everyone.

That has the feel of an urban legend. Might be true, but I'm skeptical.

Or homosexuality? Since society as a whole decided that this was something that should not be tolerated, persecution of homosexuals was not at all problematic, correct?

When there are 51 data points available, and someone chooses make a chart out of two of them, how likely is it that those two data points are representative?

I didn't say anything about the wisdom of spending a trillion dollars on the war. I just pointed out that there was no urgent need to raise taxes to pay for the war specifically, because a deficit of less than 1% of GDP just isn't that big a deal.

The skew of McGovern's proposed surtax makes it pretty obvious what's going on here: Leftists want to raise taxes on successful people. They always have wanted to do this, and they always will want to do this, regardless of the details of the country's fiscal situation. The war is merely the raison du jour for doing so.

To put that trillion dollars into perspective, total federal spending over the last ten years has been $30 trillion. Total GDP over the same time period was over $140 trillion, meaning that the war cost about 0.7% of GDP. A government can sustain a deficit of 2-3% of GDP indefinitely, because at this rate GDP tends to grow faster than the debt.

Say what you want about the philosophical merits of the war; fiscally speaking it's the least of our problems.

That said, cutting domestic spending is another option for offsetting the war spending.

Yes, I’m sure this guy was able to succeed. He probably had a stable home life, a four-year college degree, and most likely, a decent credit score.

But wasn't Ehrenreich's claim precisely that even a person with these qualifications couldn't succeed under similar circumstances?

And why do you keep speculating about his credit score if you acknowledge that he didn't actually use credit?

It seems to me that that's the point. The lesson Ehrenreich wanted us to learn, I gather, was that there are real material barriers to escaping poverty---that the poor are just like you and me, except that for whatever reason no one will pay them more than minimum wage.

Shepard's point, I think, was that the reason the (non-immigrant) poor are poor is that they lack basic life skills---that the barriers to escaping poverty are cultural, not material. And really, isn't "life skills" just a euphemism for not being a total screw-up? It's not like the poor are poor because they haven't learned how to do calculus or write a term paper.

Eh...you're kind of equivocating here. When you say "success stories," you're talking about extraordinary success. I don't think many people would disagree that extraordinary success requires extraordinary ability and/or extraordinary luck.

But when the criterion for success is just not to be poor, it doesn't take either of those things. All you really have do to not be poor in America is demonstrate a modicum of responsibility. Graduate from high school, get a job, show up consistently, don't use drugs, and don't get pregnant. More than 85% of Americans manage to be not-poor every day.

Tell me how a single mother with two kids...

Let's be honest: That's the problem right there. The number one cause of poverty in America is having children you can't afford. What do you want me to say? She had an opportunity to be not-poor, and she blew it. That doesn't negate the fact that she had that opportunity.

The obvious counterpoint to Ehrenreich is Scratch Beginnings.

Conceptually, this project strikes me as a lot more credible than Ehrenreich's. Ehrenreich basically set out to prove that a person in a certain situation can't succeed. She had an incentive to make a hash of it, and unsurprisingly, she did.

It's easy to fail when you could have succeeded, but, tautologically, it's impossible to succeed when it's impossible to succeed. Shepard proved that a poor person can get ahead; all Ehrenreich proved is that Ehrenreich didn't.

One of the most obvious problems with the old anti-miscegenation laws was that they legislated who whites or blacks could marry while ignoring the existence of interracial people (who consequently lacked all legal standing to marry).

Do you know for a fact that biracial people were legally barred from marrying anyone, or are you just assuming that because you think it makes sense? I was under the impression that people with visibly discernable black ancestry were considered to be black.

I just assumed that he was talking about the blonde's hairstyle.

The kings and nobles that ruled them were vane, corrupt and cared little for those they were charged with protecting.

"Vane" meaning that they know which way the wind is blowing, no doubt.

I'm not getting the allegory at all, so I don't have anything constructive to say. I just wanted to point out the unintentionally apt misspelling.

Labor scarcity as such isn't a good thing. What pushes wages up is a high capital-to-labor ratio. Holding capital constant, reducing the supply of labor increases wages, which is good for workers. But obviously there's going to be a net reduction in total factor productivity, which means that the combined losses of investors (through lower returns to capital) and consumers (through higher prices) will be greater than labor's gains.

And that's just in the short term. In the long term, reducing the returns to capital may impede the formation of capital through lower savings rates, as of course will the higher government spending needed to pay people not to work. In the not-too-distant future we could end up with wages lower than they would have been if we'd just left things well enough alone.

Besides, with the impending retirement of the underreproducing baby boomers, we're likely to see a contraction in the labor supply anyway, and all indications are that it's not going to be pretty. We don't want fewer people working; we want more ways to employ their labor productively.

By the way, it's a bit surreal to see a proponent of the welfare state admit that paying people not to work will actually induce people not to work. For decades, conservatives and libertarians have been saying just this, and the left has been denying it. But I guess they can admit it now that they've found a way to put a positive spin on it?

I do find it curious, though, that you’d target the people receiving government help for subsistence and survival as the ones whose money ought to be taken to cover folks in Africa.

Well, the model I have in mind is that we're willing to spend a certain amount of money on helping the poor. Given that constraint, it makes sense to spend that money to help the third-world poor. You could argue that we should increase the amount of money we spend helping the poor, but I think that for any reasonable amount of money we're willing to spend, it's going to make utilitarian sense to spend it all on the third-world poor.

People like to use these extreme examples, but they're just that--extreme examples. These advantages may increase the chances of becoming rich (though adoption studies suggest that they don't help as much as you might assume), but they're not needed to stay out of poverty. This is obviously true, because the vast majority of Americans don't have these advantages and yet are not poor.

"Come meet me on the south side of Chicago..."

I'd rather not. I hear that's the baddest part of town.

The specificity of the locations you named should be enough to give you pause. Mexicans cross a desert on foot to get here, and they do all right. Cubans cross 150 miles of ocean in rowboats and bathtubs to get here, and they do all right. With that in mind, is it really all that unreasonable to wonder why people in East St. Louis can't just take a cross-town bus?

Oh. I thought you meant economically plausible. I'll grant that, given that people like to get stuff for free and hate foreign aid, it's not politically workable in the context of mass democracy.

Step 2 is to take the money that we were going to spend on the domestic poor and instead spend it on the foreign poor.

Really, I don't see why the left isn't all over this. From a utilitarian perspective, it's nuts to spend money on expensive medical treatments of dubious value for old people when children in the third world are dying from lack of food and basic medical care. If we're going to force taxpayers to cough up money to help the poor, we should at least use it to help people who are actually poor.

Incidentally, this is one reason why I'm not a big fan of the welfare state. I just can't muster up much sympathy for a person who, having had the great fortune and privilege to be born in a place and time where it's easy not to be poor, then goes and squanders that opportunity.