Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Guys, solid debate. But the issue with our country as a whole, is that we have gone from a Center-Right country to now a Center-Left country due to the high amount of immigrants coming in, those coming across the border and the MEDIA/Entertainment industry promoting values that are staged around a Center-Left approach that programs the majority of citizens.
This position is not one that I hear often, but it is highly amusing. The U.S. - right now - is "Center-Left"? Obama is constantly being decried as being a radical Socialist - with polls to back up this perspective. Yet, by nearly every measure - including the health care reform - he sits to the right of Nixon. No, seriously, find an issue where he is demonstrably to the left of Nixon.
We have the second-lowest unionization rate in the developed world and extremely lax labor organizing laws (which favor companies)... and yet Obama and the current political zeitgeist has moved to center-left? Taxes, while slightly more progressive than before, hardly have the positive effect that the 70% tax rates and 28+% capital gains rates of the 1930-1980 corridor had; namely, that they forced capital to reinvest. I mean, even the oft-mentioned canard about food stamps misses out on two realities: 1) Bush was the one who loosened the requirements, and 2) Food stamp use is declining again now that the slow recovery is reaching a larger portion of the population.
What am I saying as a whole? The days of the US being the world super power are coming to a close. I'm 31, by the time I'm 61 (30 years in 2044) this will be a totally LEFT country with an economic system that is either totally socialism or as close to socialism as you are going to get. Capitalism will be no more, it will be squeezed out due to regulation and the Government will regulate profit caps, amongst a host of other things.
Oh, I yearn for the day. I don't see any evidence for your projection, but I can say I would be immensely pleased!
Quote:
> You can argue with a person on the left all day long on why NOT creating kids before you can take care of them is important, working hard/acquiring a skill and getting into the middle class is important FIRST before making kids.....they will never agree with you.
Unless you can show that humanity of any era at any time has eliminated horny teenagers and twentysomethings, this is a worthless critique. First, people ALWAYS had kids before they had reached solid earnings capacity. Married and pregnant at 18 or 19 was once the subject of wholesome B-movies. Actually, the average age at which women give birth has increased and teenage pregnancy has declined rapidly in the U.S. for decades (it's 40% lower than it was 20 years ago). What's changed is the ability to support a household with one earner. Moreover, more people get college degrees now than ever before and by every measure young people are more skilled than previous generations; what has changed is the ROI.
And nobody should give me any B.S. about skilled trades and picking better majors. Only a small fraction of low-wage workers would need to migrate to skilled trades before saturating that market.
Quote:
You can argue with a person on the left all day that people living on welfare for 15 years is bad for the overall economy, they will never agree with you.
TANF (i.e. welfare) has been limited to 2 years consecutively and 5 years lifetime since the 1996 reform. Even the state exceptions don't lead to anything like what you are talking about. This is the most paper-thin of strawmen, based as it is upon bogeymen that don't exist...
Quote:
You can argue with a person on the left all day that there's no "The Man" holding them back, the only thing holding them back are their own bad personal choices....they will never agree with you.
I don't know if you arguing with some 1960s representation of the left, but we don't use "The Man" anymore, except for jokes or exaggeration. However, inequalities in income, educational experience, incarceration rates, etc... do create fundamental bargaining inequalities that "hold people back". It has nothing to do with personal choices. Again, how many people have actually thought about what "libertarian free will" means? It means rejecting even the most basic logic. It means assuming that human decisionmaking arises from the ether from some unspecified universal font of knowledge and ethics. That our individual decisions are uncaused causes.
But it's necessarily untrue. Personal responsibility is a bogus illusion meant to justify inequality. Nobody chooses their genetics, parents, neighborhood, country or region of birth. Nobody chooses which schools they go to growing up, which diseases they are exposed to, which class of peers they are exposed to, or which dialect they learn. No person decides which ethics (if any) their parents instill in them, whether they have two parents or one, in which religion they are inculcated, and which political party they are told is good or bad from an early age.
All of those factors not only "influence you", they ARE you. Unchosen factors are 100% of who you are and who you become. And those factors thus create 100% of the framework within which you evaluate new information and make decisions. The causal chain of determination never stops. You are not your own prime mover. The only just society is one that dispenses with the diseased and totally unsupportable notion of "personal responsibility" as its animus for creating policies.
Quote:
You can argue with a person on the left all day that 75% tax rates will harm innovation, capitalism and the free market which are the reasons why the US became the superpower that it did....they will never agree with you.
Odd, then, how our greatest growth came after cracking down on free-market monopolies, instituting steep progressive income taxes (70-90% from 1935-1981), and regulating food/medicine/securities/unions/banking heavily. Then again, why is the free market inherently valuable? The free market is inefficient and self-eating.
Quote:
You can argue with a person on the left all day that FREE HEALTHCARE FOR ALL will harm healthcare innovation, healthcare services, the free market, etc.....they will never agree with you.
Probably because the free market doesn't work for healthcare due to unbridgeable information asymmetries between patients and providers. Also probably because every other nation in the developed world has far less expensive healthcare with similar outcomes and has proved your paranoid fears wrong for several decades. Also Also, because so much "innovation" comes in the form of new patents for recombinations of old drugs and because research spending - by percentage - doesn't come near to explaining why our healthcare costs are so much higher. In fact, as Uwe Reinhardt has consistently explained, it's because our per-procedure charges are much higher than other nations across the board.
Quote:
You can argue with a person on the left all day that FREE COLLEGE DEGREES FOR ALL will harm the economy.....they will never agree with you.
Probably because - once again - other nations that subsidize and regulate higher ed much more strongly have not collapsed. Actually they are the nations that constantly beat us in educational achievement.
More importantly, your argument is paradoxical. If people have to get skills to "deserve" decent wages and earn the right to have kids, and we have few high or medium-paying jobs for people without degrees, and people who come from low-income households must go deeply in debt (partially defeating the economic rationale for attending college).... then how can you argue against subsidizing college degrees?
It seems your economic ideology is one that sees massive inequality as a necessity for society. You want people to look down on, people who get trapped in economic stagnation and have few avenues for upward mobility but whom you can blame on the grounds of personal responsibility anyways.
Quote:
You can argue with a person on the left all day that BANNING GUNS FROM EVERYBODY'S POSSESSION will put the average citizen/household in more danger....they will never agree with you.
Probably because - aside from John Lott Jr.'s constantly debunked partisan statistical idiocy - there is no evidence that it's true. There is at least as much evidence that the opposite is true (more guns in more homes leads to more deadly domestic disputes and accidental deaths). Then again, the percentage of Americans who favor a total ban on guns is negligible. Don't tilt too hard at those windmills.
Quote:
You can ARGUE with a person on the left all day that regulating something as stupid as a LIVABLE wage is hard to define, hard to measure, and is damn near impossible for a Burger King franchise shop to pay for every person working for them....they will never agree with you.
Probably because labor costs are a relatively small fraction of all costs associated with most firms that pay sub-$10 wages. Also because nations with much higher minimum wages or union-negotiated "industry minimum wages" have seen no negative impact on total employment from implementing those wages. Also because that's true from historical research on minimum wage laws here and around the world. Oh, and also because even struggling chains like BK are highly profitable with grossly uneven intra-company income distributions.
I would agree it is hard to measure, but your argument is a simple line drawing fallacy. The inability to draw a precise line doesn't mean that moving along the spectrum of outcomes in one direction or another is thus bad or fruitless. Lining up living wage estimates according to cost of living is not something I am opposed to, but I think it should be more in the form of EITC adjustments and/or "bonuses" based on region.
Quote:
You can ARGUE with a person on the left all day that having $20 Minimum Wage regulations across the country will CREATE MORE UNEMPLOYMENT....they will never agree with you.
Maybe $20 would create more unemployment and inflation, but even $15 minimum wage in Australia has not done anything of the sort. Scandinavian fast food and retail workers making $20 (still more than ours once adjusting for taxes and cost of living, especially given their return on taxes...) hasn't done that. The reality is that the marginal value of low-wage workers is much higher than their pay. Bargaining inequalities and information asymmetries in the labor market are the reason that people don't just "get what they are worth"...
Quote:
So guys, I would just start planning for the decline. The fact is the people who THINK stupidly like this aren't the minority, they are the majority....and the fact is within 30 years they will totally RUN this country which means goodbye capitalism, goodbye free market, and say hello to SOCIALISM.
Strange how most economists would be "Center-Left", how the most educated class of people (Master's/Doctor's/Lawyers/PhD's) are fairly strongly left by voting and professed ideology. The free market, left to its own devices, creates huge pools of cheap labor, shifts returns to capital, destroys utility, misallocates capital, leads to ever more seismic boom-bust cycles, and ends inevitably in depression and social revolt. Your greatest hope to maintain any sort of market is to bank on the Social Democrats who you mislabel as Socialists.
That said, I really hope you are right. We are long past due on genuine Socialism here. We have huge surpluses, enormous wealth, and receive little or no social benefit from it. With Socialism, we could finally have rational economic outcomes. We can have a society that guides the economy to support human needs and desires, and shares in the economic benefit created by all (and never by a handful of individuals), instead of claiming (like Mark Paolella) that some 1700s idea of property-as-sacred should reign over all other legitimate moral concerns.
Last edited by kwhitegocubs; 09-19-2014 at 04:19 AM..
Reason: Clarification
Simple - have the benefits phase out gradually with income instead of abruptly dropping from full to zero.
And allow work-related expenses (within reason) to be deducted from income used to determine benefits.
The combination of these things would result in incentives to work more/harder, without total abolition of public assistance and the resulting crime and social problems.
Putting food on your table, a roof over your head, and clothes on your children should be the incentive to work more/harder.
This position is not one that I hear often, but it is highly amusing. The U.S. - right now - is "Center-Left"? Obama is constantly being decried as being a radical Socialist - with polls to back up this perspective. Yet, by nearly every measure - including the health care reform - he sits to the right of Nixon. No, seriously, find an issue where he is demonstrably to the left of Nixon.
We have the second-lowest unionization rate in the developed world and extremely lax labor organizing laws (which favor companies)... and yet Obama and the current political zeitgeist has moved to center-left? Taxes, while slightly more progressive than before, hardly have the positive effect that the 70% tax rates and 28+% capital gains rates of the 1930-1980 corridor had; namely, that they forced capital to reinvest. I mean, even the oft-mentioned canard about food stamps misses out on two realities: 1) Bush was the one who loosened the requirements, and 2) Food stamp use is declining again now that the slow recovery is reaching a larger portion of the population.
Oh, I yearn for the day. I don't see any evidence for your projection, but I can say I would be immensely pleased!
Unless you can show that humanity of any era at any time has eliminated horny teenagers and twentysomethings, this is a worthless critique. First, people ALWAYS had kids before they had reached solid earnings capacity. Married and pregnant at 18 or 19 was once the subject of wholesome B-movies. Actually, the average age at which women give birth has increased and teenage pregnancy has declined rapidly in the U.S. for decades (it's 40% lower than it was 20 years ago). What's changed is the ability to support a household with one earner. Moreover, more people get college degrees now than ever before and by every measure young people are more skilled than previous generations; what has changed is the ROI.
And nobody should give me any B.S. about skilled trades and picking better majors. Only a small fraction of low-wage workers would need to migrate to skilled trades before saturating that market.
TANF (i.e. welfare) has been limited to 2 years consecutively and 5 years lifetime since the 1996 reform. Even the state exceptions don't lead to anything like what you are talking about. This is the most paper-thin of strawmen, based as it is upon bogeymen that don't exist...
I don't know if you arguing with some 1960s representation of the left, but we don't use "The Man" anymore, except for jokes or exaggeration. However, inequalities in income, educational experience, incarceration rates, etc... do create fundamental bargaining inequalities that "hold people back". It has nothing to do with personal choices. Again, how many people have actually thought about what "libertarian free will" means? It means rejecting even the most basic logic. It means assuming that human decisionmaking arises from the ether from some unspecified universal font of knowledge and ethics. That our individual decisions are uncaused causes.
But it's necessarily untrue. Personal responsibility is a bogus illusion meant to justify inequality. Nobody chooses their genetics, parents, neighborhood, country or region of birth. Nobody chooses which schools they go to growing up, which diseases they are exposed to, which class of peers they are exposed to, or which dialect they learn. No person decides which ethics (if any) their parents instill in them, whether they have two parents or one, in which religion they are inculcated, and which political party they are told is good or bad from an early age.
All of those factors not only "influence you", they ARE you. Unchosen factors are 100% of who you are and who you become. And those factors thus create 100% of the framework within which you evaluate new information and make decisions. The causal chain of determination never stops. You are not your own prime mover. The only just society is one that dispenses with the diseased and totally unsupportable notion of "personal responsibility" as its animus for creating policies.
Odd, then, how our greatest growth came after cracking down on free-market monopolies, instituting steep progressive income taxes (70-90% from 1935-1981), and regulating food/medicine/securities/unions/banking heavily. Then again, why is the free market inherently valuable? The free market is inefficient and self-eating.
Probably because the free market doesn't work for healthcare due to unbridgeable information asymmetries between patients and providers. Also probably because every other nation in the developed world has far less expensive healthcare with similar outcomes and has proved your paranoid fears wrong for several decades. Also Also, because so much "innovation" comes in the form of new patents for recombinations of old drugs and because research spending - by percentage - doesn't come near to explaining why our healthcare costs are so much higher. In fact, as Uwe Reinhardt has consistently explained, it's because our per-procedure charges are much higher than other nations across the board.
Probably because - once again - other nations that subsidize and regulate higher ed much more strongly have not collapsed. Actually they are the nations that constantly beat us in educational achievement.
More importantly, your argument is paradoxical. If people have to get skills to "deserve" decent wages and earn the right to have kids, and we have few high or medium-paying jobs for people without degrees, and people who come from low-income households must go deeply in debt (partially defeating the economic rationale for attending college).... then how can you argue against subsidizing college degrees?
It seems your economic ideology is one that sees massive inequality as a necessity for society. You want people to look down on, people who get trapped in economic stagnation and have few avenues for upward mobility but whom you can blame on the grounds of personal responsibility anyways.
Probably because - aside from John Lott Jr.'s constantly debunked partisan statistical idiocy - there is no evidence that it's true. There is at least as much evidence that the opposite is true (more guns in more homes leads to more deadly domestic disputes and accidental deaths). Then again, the percentage of Americans who favor a total ban on guns is negligible. Don't tilt too hard at those windmills.
Probably because labor costs are a relatively small fraction of all costs associated with most firms that pay sub-$10 wages. Also because nations with much higher minimum wages or union-negotiated "industry minimum wages" have seen no negative impact on total employment from implementing those wages. Also because that's true from historical research on minimum wage laws here and around the world. Oh, and also because even struggling chains like BK are highly profitable with grossly uneven intra-company income distributions.
I would agree it is hard to measure, but your argument is a simple line drawing fallacy. The inability to draw a precise line doesn't mean that moving along the spectrum of outcomes in one direction or another is thus bad or fruitless. Lining up living wage estimates according to cost of living is not something I am opposed to, but I think it should be more in the form of EITC adjustments and/or "bonuses" based on region.
Maybe $20 would create more unemployment and inflation, but even $15 minimum wage in Australia has not done anything of the sort. Scandinavian fast food and retail workers making $20 (still more than ours once adjusting for taxes and cost of living, especially given their return on taxes...) hasn't done that. The reality is that the marginal value of low-wage workers is much higher than their pay. Bargaining inequalities and information asymmetries in the labor market are the reason that people don't just "get what they are worth"...
Strange how most economists would be "Center-Left", how the most educated class of people (Master's/Doctor's/Lawyers/PhD's) are fairly strongly left by voting and professed ideology. The free market, left to its own devices, creates huge pools of cheap labor, shifts returns to capital, destroys utility, misallocates capital, leads to ever more seismic boom-bust cycles, and ends inevitably in depression and social revolt. Your greatest hope to maintain any sort of market is to bank on the Social Democrats who you mislabel as Socialists.
That said, I really hope you are right. We are long past due on genuine Socialism here. We have huge surpluses, enormous wealth, and receive little or no social benefit from it. With Socialism, we could finally have rational economic outcomes. We can have a society that guides the economy to support human needs and desires, and shares in the economic benefit created by all (and never by a handful of individuals), instead of claiming (like Mark Paolella) that some 1700s idea of property-as-sacred should reign over all other legitimate moral concerns.
Genuine socialism is an utopian dream. It's fine to learn it as science fiction but people should move on to the real world. The vast majority of times "socialism" is just an excuse label to justify whatever and however many injustices, violence, and advantage taking. There is nothing genuine about strategically creating a dependent class, nothing genuine about pathetically taking advantage of others in the name of the "greater good". Your social democracy is good for the rich and bad for the middle class.
When you mix the recipe of socialist thinking and human nature, each time you get misery. The left then march to complain about humans not doing what the left dictate. It goes like that to no end. Those in the left bring out the worst of them while singing beautiful nouns and adjectives. They try hard to act just but hatred and prejudice are used intentionally and sometimes unconsciously.
It's no surprise that left wing rhetoric sounds great. It is supposed to be full of great words. In reality this "genuine socialism" is nothing but ignorant. At most, it expresses the speaker's wishful thinking and explains what he or she would do. But we have to risk assuming that the person is honest and genuine and Even that is just one person. It has no controlling power in regulating other peoples behaviors. It's no even a prediction. Just wishful thinking. And even if this poster himself or herself is genuine about genuine socialism, it literally means nothing.
The part that people miss is this: they think the key is to explain how social democracy or even socialism works better in theory, when everybody wants to know how it works in reality. This system is almost always presented with nearly no flaws. It's a "wouldn't it be nice" argument. It's almost like the left think that the more flawless their system sounds the more we the people subscribe to it. I say it's actually the total opposite. Most systems and most people are terribly flawed. They have limits. They are hypocritical. They are full of politics. Their deliverables often pale compared to their promises. It's just one on those human patterns that left wing ideologues never seem to get. Dot get me wrong. The right wing makes the same mistake. Their religious doctrines also ignore human nature. In fact communism was a system heavily borrowed from Christianity's ways of doing things. The political left in the west today is just yet another church.
Ha. Europe is not a good example. You haven't seen anything yet. Globalization is transforming the European housing market, job market, and education market. Some of the most important things for the next gee eaton of Europeans. Meanwhile their demographics are also changing. The European model and ideas don't necessarily accord with those of euroeps hardworking new immigrants. We'll see. In 30 years, Europe will be much more like the US. European countries will have to go through a fundamental renegotiation of social contract and re envisioning of what kind of societies they are. It is a good thing that Islam is gaining momentum. The modern western civilization is an illness, a cancer. Fortunately America will be more like Mexico and Central America. Europe will embark on another round of its historical patterns with the Middle East, the change of guards, hands, and fortune.
The "modern western civilization is an illness, a cancer" ?? "It's a good thing Islam in gaining momentum" ??
No kidding, huh?
Why the heck are you here, then? Why wouldn't you want to live in a poor, possibly war-torn Muslim country? I think you'd find an economic and political mind-set that better suits your own, and the standard of living is one that you seem to think you could happily accept.
Mind you, on a more personal level, you may find Islam not very accepting of you. Oh, well. Can't have everything, I suppose.
Last edited by newdixiegirl; 09-19-2014 at 07:16 AM..
The key problem is that the left today wants subsidies not only for the truly needy but also for lots of people who are of low aspiration or are encouraged to become dependent. It's one thing if the left truly believes in its ideology, which is more acceptable even though I don't fully subscribe to that. It's totally another thing that he left today just wants votes by strategically creating a dependent class as a political strategy in the name of social justice. In so doing, the left has alienated much of its own supporters who innocently believed in the original ideology.
The Democratic Party can be summed as the following. They want an increasing supply of future voters. They want to cultivate market demand for their party and its ideas on paper. Meanwhile, they are deeply in the pockets so to speak. One minute they sound like a socialist party, another minute, they are immediately a different kind of Republican Party.
I do not have partisanship with either party. But watching the Democratic Party is an amusing undertaking.
This forum is not a place to be bashing a party and perpetuating stereotypes.
I have resisted the temptation to bash Republicans on this forum, may I ask you resist your temptation to bash Democrats and let us respectfully disagree?
Socialism hurts everyone, because it is based on a corrupt and depraved premise. That it is acceptable to take the property of one person, and give it to another based on his or her need.
"I need something. You have it. I am going to take it."
Is that a precept upon which to build a rational and moral society? No. Of course not.
Don't you realize that zero wealth redistribution hurts everyone as well?
Think about it. If the business owner has the responsibility for paying ones livelihood, then doesn't that mean that they had the responsibility of becoming a business owner first? Forcing people to pay more is the same as forcing people to start a business. The former is accepted while the latter is not. It's the same thing. You mandate the second step of a process where the first step is voluntary.
The thing is its fine if you do nothing. No one can force. But once you start a business and prove that you are motivated, oh baby you have obligations. It has gone from minimum wage to livable wage. What's next? Desirable wage? Reasonable wage? Good wage? Satisfactory wage? Happy wage?
The slippery slope argument goes both ways, though.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
