Republicans

[sciwizam]

Virtually all Republoicans, and far too many corporatist Democrats, are guilty. Progressive Dems are the only major faction who is not, who put the public interest first. Anyone saying otherwise is... 'partisan excrement'.

Da Nile, 'tis not just a river in Egypt.

 

[palehorse]

In the wonderful new 21st Century, neither party has the market cornered on catering to the wealthy, receiving unchecked corporate handouts, or spending your money like it's going out of style. They're all guilty of all of the above. Period.

That's the truth. Anyone who tries to tell you anything else is entirely full of partisan shit.

Virtually all Republoicans, and far too many corporatist Democrats, are guilty. Progressive Dems are the only major faction who is not, who put the public interest first. Anyone saying otherwise is... 'partisan excrement'.

Exhibit A.

 

[Craig234]

Exhibit A.

Exhibit A.]

Note the lack of one fact so support his or the other hyenas' claims.

Now, pick a few bills lf the year that YOU feel best repesent the corporatocracy versus the public interest - best, pick amendments that were proposed, because that's the real test better than final bills.

See who voted how, and you will find again and again, the votes were not as the hyenas say, 435-0 House,l 100-0 for the Senate, against the public interest.

You will find consistently there are 20%-30% votes for the public interest. See who they are - the progressive Dems. I've looked up the votes, the ignorant hyenas haven't. What do you see?

 

[palehorse]

Exhibit A.]

Note the lack of one fact so support his or the other hyenas' claims.

Now, pick a few bills lf the year that YOU feel best repesent the corporatocracy versus the public interest - best, pick amendments that were proposed, because that's the real test better than final bills.

See who voted how, and you will find again and again, the votes were not as the hyenas say, 435-0 House,l 100-0 for the Senate, against the public interest.

You will find consistently there are 20%-30% votes for the public interest. See who they are - the progressive Dems. I've looked up the votes, the ignorant hyenas haven't. What do you see?

Please name the most prominent representative of this "public interest" group of reps you so often refer to. Heck, give us the top three.

 

[woolfe9999]

Craig, how are these progressives raising their campaign funds? Take a look and you'll find it is from unions and other liberal special interest groups. Don't we really need to take all the special interest money out of the system, and not just the corporate money?

- wolf

 

[sciwizam]

http://www.opensecrets.org/

 

[Craig234]

Craig, how are these progressives raising their campaign funds? Take a look and you'll find it is from unions and other liberal special interest groups. Don't we really need to take all the special interest money out of the system, and not just the corporate money?

- wolf

That's a fair question. The liberas don't get elected by magic - they have, if a much smaller source, a source of donors elsewhere that I'd argue is mucd more aligned with the public interest, including labor.

But I'm fine with all of tibeing replaced - the lion's share from very corrupt corproate and other wealth interests along with organized groups on the left, as long as it's all done.

Any such broad replacement will utlimaely favor the public interest and the left.

 

[Atreus21]

There is of course an alternative.

Cut off all trade with nations that have gross human rights violations. (Child labor, wages below $2/day, etc)

Enthusiastic agreement with child labor, but not with the wage stipulation. Wages of $2 a day are pretty good when bread costs $0.05.

Tax all imports from nations with wages below the US minimum wage inversely with the disparity. Ex: China institutes a minimum wage of $1 an hour. US min wage is $8 an hour. This is 12.5% of the minimum wage of the U.S. Therefore, all imports from china should be taxed at 87.5% upon entering US ports.

It's not a complicated subject, people just don't want to stop exploiting others.

Hesitating disagreement, due to my limited economic understanding.

Something tells me that this would make prices of normal goods skyrocket. Whiping out foreign competition through taxes will, in the long run, be bad for our economy and China's too.

If we cut off economic ties with China, to say nothing of taxing their goods at 87%, if it doesn't touch off a declaration of war from the Chinese, will definitely touch off a seriously bad series of retaliatory economic sanctions. I'm not smart enough to predict all the ramifications of such an event.

I'm sorry, but I just don't think it's that simple.

 

[werepossum]

And so we will keep more manufacturing jobs, and the people who work those jobs will live like the people who now work those jobs in China. Bust unions and lower the minimum wage in order to retain manufacturing jobs? So we have people working in factories for $4 an hour, and we have a tax cut which will not benefit those people as you don't pay taxes on wages that low even under the current system. Basically what you are advocating here is that we fight to retain manufacturing jobs that will be approximately like manufacturing jobs in China, or another analogy is to manufacturing jobs in our early period of industrialization, in the late 19th century. Why again do we want to retain a large base of sub-poverty line jobs? I'd rather leave those to the Chinese, who will eventually destabilize politically unless they start sharing their enlarged economic pie with their impoverished workers. In other words, they themselves will eventually have to implement the reforms we made over 100 years ago, the ones you want to roll back.

I don't personally see a problem with the U.S. economy being services oriented, with a small manufacturing sector, and an emphasis on technological innovation, and selling/exporting the innovations. Once upon a time we were a manufacturing based economy, and we prospered, particularly because those with manufacturing jobs lived well because of things likes unions and minimum wage. But we couldn't compete and those jobs went elsewhere, to places without those reforms. Yet somehow we still prosper. Even in the worst recession in 80 years, our standard of living is 10x that of countries who pay their workers slave wages.

- wolf

No big secret to it, we're prospering on credit and by selling the farm. We have been unable to date to break even as a service economy as most of our services are provided to each other. Most of the services the world wants and needs are available at lower cost from other countries. As low cost countries like China and India become better educated and we become less educated, the erosion of our service economy will only continue at an ever increasing pace. We are not inherently smarter or better than other nations and other peoples, we have no vast well of untapped potential not enjoyed by other humans, and whatever technological edge we had left from our heyday was given away in the 90s. We cannot survive indefinitely as a material-based society with a service-based economy; eventually we will run out of businesses and land to sell, and then run out of credit. (I could argue that tumbling sales and increasing rates of return on T-bills indicates that we are almost out of credit now, but no one really knows how long others will continue to finance us at any interest rate.)

We have three possible paths. First, we give up stuff - automobiles, electronics, large detached homes in the suburbs, military equipment - and become an aesthetic society that owns little. Second, we join in a race to the bottom with China, India, Mexico and most of the world. Or third, we figure out how to restore domestic manufacturing, probably by manipulating tax and tariff laws. Or we will inevitably go bankrupt. All three of these paths require us to consume less stuff and lower our lifestyles. There is no combination I can see that would allow us to continue consuming the same amount of product; either stuff is manufactured using cheap foreign labor (in which case money flows out of the country until our wealth runs out), or stuff is manufactured with our own cheap labor (in which our wages are less and we can afford less stuff), or stuff is manufactured with our own expensive labor (in which case goods are more expensive and we can afford less stuff.) Mindless platitudes such as "We can compete with anybody" or "We don't need manufacturing jobs, they are obsolete" are belied by history since we began losing our manufacturing, in our ever-increasing trade deficits and national debt.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

The 'spend on the poor' issue is a red herring - designed to take an issue that's a tiny sliver of the economy, and get you to put yourself on the 'side' of the richer and enable a whole other agenda.

The spending on the poor is a small part of what's going on in our economy, and you should not let yourself get pulled away from the larger issues of big corruption at the top.

My kids are going to have their school budgets cut - again- to pay for the ever expanding monster known as medicaid. I don't mind helping those who need it, but I see women having their third and fourth child while on it. The same government who people want to have run everything allow this and other abuses. This isn't a "tiny" sliver of the economy, it's a nightmare that our Dems won't touch. A very committed voter base.

 

[MotF Bane]

So many lines of Craigspam ignored. This truly is glorious, I don't have to deal with his partisan hackery and lies, nor his blind ignorance.

My kids are going to have their school budgets cut - again- to pay for the ever expanding monster known as medicaid. I don't mind helping those who need it, but I see women having their third and fourth child while on it. The same government who people want to have run everything allow this and other abuses. This isn't a "tiny" sliver of the economy, it's a nightmare that our Dems won't touch. A very committed voter base.

Funny how schools are so quick to have their budgets cut. At least in my town, fire and police are also cut hand-in-hand with the school system. But instead, our senior citizens have a grand new recreation center, and we are constructing another school (despite having just laid off teachers due to lack of funding).

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

So many lines of Craigspam ignored. This truly is glorious, I don't have to deal with his partisan hackery and lies, nor his blind ignorance.



Funny how schools are so quick to have their budgets cut. At least in my town, fire and police are also cut hand-in-hand with the school system. But instead, our senior citizens have a grand new recreation center, and we are constructing another school (despite having just laid off teachers due to lack of funding).

We had most everything cut to feed the Progressive agenda here in NY. Education being the one now gutted is the most ironic.

 

[woolfe9999]

My kids are going to have their school budgets cut - again- to pay for the ever expanding monster known as medicaid. I don't mind helping those who need it, but I see women having their third and fourth child while on it. The same government who people want to have run everything allow this and other abuses. This isn't a "tiny" sliver of the economy, it's a nightmare that our Dems won't touch. A very committed voter base.

Don't know where you live, but Medicaid is a big problem in California where it constitutes about 17% of our total state budget. We have threefold problems with Medicaid here. First, we have a higher income threshold for elibility than most other states, and second, our Medicaid covers all kinds of things not covered in other Medicaid systems, like chiropractic, accunpuncture, etc. Finally, as a "wealthy" state we get a lower matching contribution from the federal government than less wealthy states. In most states, Medicaid is closer to 7-8% of their budget.

I notice that Schwartzenegger is now asking the federal government to exempt California from the stimulus bill rules that require states taking stimulus money to not cut things like Medicaid and education. What he wants to do is get permission to make Medicaid cuts, for example, to reduce the threshold income requirement for eligibility, and cut back on benefits. The healthbill will then require that benefits be expanded to certain minimum thresholds, and that the income threshold be raised to 133% FPL (Cal is currently at 106% FPL which is above the national average.) But the federal government has to pick up the entire tab for these expansions until 2017, and thereafter it pays for about 90% of the expansion. So if we are able to cut our Medicaid before the it kicks in (in 2013), then we will expand it beyond what it is now, but at the expense of the federal government. It's a clever ploy, but I doubt he'll get permission to do it.

- wolf

 

[MotF Bane]

We had most everything cut to feed the Progressive agenda here in NY. Education being the one now gutted is the most ironic.

Ouch, NY. One of the few places I'd consider as worse than MA, no offense to you of course. MA has created a spectacular failure of a healthcare "reform", and is now thoroughly in debt, but from my time in NY (RIT), it seemed like your state was hellbent on taxing everything.

 

[Specop 007]

History shows this to be true? It's odd, because in Europe they stress equality of outcome more so than here, and Europe has a standard of living very similar to the U.S., in other words, the highest in the world.

Some liberals might argue that there isn't equality of opportunity, because not everyone is born into a situation that offers the same opportunity as everyone else. Equality of opportunity is a nice theory, but it doesn't exist in the real world.

But let's set that aside for the moment, and address what I think is either a straw man characterization of liberals, or else is a characterization of only its most extreme elements. Modern day liberals believe in welfare captialism, with the emphasis being about relatively equal on both. That is not a philosophy of absolutely equal outcomes.

I personally have no problem with people getting rich, and staying rich. I think people who are more talented and/or practice a more rigorous work ethic should live more comfortably than those less talented or industrious, and I think they should even live luxoriously. The rich can keep their BMW's and their yachts, and eat their lobster, and the middle class can keep their big screen TV's and eat their steak. What I believe, rather, is that society should provide a minimum, bare bones standard of living for all of its citizens. That means that they can provide food for themselves and their kids, that they can keep their electricity on, and that they have access to basic, inexpensive healthcare. You can provide this basic standard, and there is plenty of pie left over for extremely uneven distribution of wealth, meaning extremely UNequal outcomes, for the vast majority who live above that basic threshold.

I am afraid you are making the mistake of equating welfare capitalism with communism when they are not the same thing. Welfare capitalism actually exists about midway between the extremes of unfettered, laissez faire capitalism on the one hand, and communism on the other.

You are perfectly free to disagree with modern day liberalism. Just be careful to understand what it really is. Liberals may want *more* equality of outcome than conservatives, but no one is arguing for anything even remotely close to absolute equality of outcomes.

- wolf

Liberals constantly push for more equality of outcome. I doubt they would go so far as to actually round up all the dollars in the country and evenly distribute them out but none the less they are always seeking to expand the social programs or add to the people that are eligible for them.

Outside of that there is equality of opportunity, there is simply no arguing that point. The most poor inner city child has the same opportunity to go to college as the rich suburbanite. The problem is the social structure in place in the poor childs life which he falls prey to. But the college will not disallow poor inner city children from applying.

The programs and facilities are in place for ANYONE in this country to go to grade school, high school and on to college. Far too many liberals wish to blame lack of family support and a culture which promotes crime as a lack of opportunity. Tis bullshit I say.

As to the issue of providing a basic standard of living.... Why? Its rife with abuse. Hell, it promotes failure. You get paid x for a child, and you get paid MORE money to have another child! The ultimate responsibility in providing any standard of living does not fall to you or I, it falls to the family. Remember that non existent support structure I mentioned earlier? Social programs make it easy to turn out back on our won and push the responsibility on to "someone else". In this case someone else happens to be "We the taxpayers".

 

[Specop 007]

This is the myth at the root of much of Specop's wrong views. Not one person supports what he says they do.

He confuses 'rich and poor' as something like the example above, between the neurosurdian who should make far more than the sweeper, and is clueless what 'rich and poor' are really about.

He has no idea about the behavior of the worst corporate interests and the ultra rich - how their practices drain wealth and opportunity from society. The issues are billions ane he thinking it's about a surgeon.

He can't be educated - he won't go near the books that would fill him in.

But recognize it's the left who will be good for the sweeper and the surgeon, and the right who will unwilltingly screw them both.

When the right - corporatist Dems and Republicans - let Wall Street go crazy and earn neraly half the profits in the country and create systemic risk - it put both the sweeper and surgeon at risk.

When the right - corporatist Dems and right-wng Repubublicans - put provisions in bills big donor big pharma drug prices would not be negotiated by the government, the sweeeper and surgeon got screwed.

How many jobs have poor people created? None.

How many taxes do poor people pay? None.

Those damned evil greedy rich folk. Damn them to hell.

The simple fact your arguments fails, time and time again, is because wealth is NOT finite. if I get more of the pie it is not at your expense. The pie grows for all who wish a slice. The rich have taken NOTHING from you, your own inability to be successful has.

You simply choose to blame your own failings on some random "rich person". You are jealous of his success because you are unable to create your own.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

We had most everything cut to feed the Progressive agenda here in NY. Education being the one now gutted is the most ironic.

But...but...the Progressives are for the public interest! Education isn't public inter....err, uh, wait a minute.

 

[woolfe9999]

Liberals constantly push for more equality of outcome. I doubt they would go so far as to actually round up all the dollars in the country and evenly distribute them out but none the less they are always seeking to expand the social programs or add to the people that are eligible for them.

Outside of that there is equality of opportunity, there is simply no arguing that point. The most poor inner city child has the same opportunity to go to college as the rich suburbanite. The problem is the social structure in place in the poor childs life which he falls prey to. But the college will not disallow poor inner city children from applying.

The programs and facilities are in place for ANYONE in this country to go to grade school, high school and on to college. Far too many liberals wish to blame lack of family support and a culture which promotes crime as a lack of opportunity. Tis bullshit I say.

As to the issue of providing a basic standard of living.... Why? Its rife with abuse. Hell, it promotes failure. You get paid x for a child, and you get paid MORE money to have another child! The ultimate responsibility in providing any standard of living does not fall to you or I, it falls to the family. Remember that non existent support structure I mentioned earlier? Social programs make it easy to turn out back on our won and push the responsibility on to "someone else". In this case someone else happens to be "We the taxpayers".

You're trying to tell me there is equality of opportunity for poor people to go to college, when their parents can't pay the bill? There are certainly some need based scholarships, but that doesn't even begin to cover it. For that matter, there isn't equality of opporunity in K-12, because some people happen to live in areas with better school systems than others. Equality of opportunity exists in a relative sense and to some degree. As an absolute, it is a theoretical concept. Sure, in theory, any one person born into a disadvantaged situation can become rich or be President, but in reality, some people encounter far more obstacles than others, through no choice of their own.

I do agree in part with your closing remarks. I think a program like welfare should not be an unlimited freeload. I supported the replublican lead welfare reform of the 1990's, and still do. I think you can have a welfare system that is structured to exclude many of the lazies who would take advantage of it, though you will of course never have a perfect system. I don't mind many of the lazies falling through the cracks, or that some might still be able to game the system, so long as the bulk of recipients are people who have a legitimate need. Welfare should be conditioned on getting those who are able to work back to work, while providing for those who aren't.

As for healthcare, that is a different situation. We have too many hardworking people in this country - people who work for small businesses or are self-employed - with no real access to even basic healthcare. Yes, I do think a safety net should be extended to these people.

- wolf

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Don't know where you live, but Medicaid is a big problem in California where it constitutes about 17% of our total state budget. We have threefold problems with Medicaid here. First, we have a higher income threshold for elibility than most other states, and second, our Medicaid covers all kinds of things not covered in other Medicaid systems, like chiropractic, accunpuncture, etc. Finally, as a "wealthy" state we get a lower matching contribution from the federal government than less wealthy states. In most states, Medicaid is closer to 7-8% of their budget.

I notice that Schwartzenegger is now asking the federal government to exempt California from the stimulus bill rules that require states taking stimulus money to not cut things like Medicaid and education. What he wants to do is get permission to make Medicaid cuts, for example, to reduce the threshold income requirement for eligibility, and cut back on benefits. The healthbill will then require that benefits be expanded to certain minimum thresholds, and that the income threshold be raised to 133% FPL (Cal is currently at 106% FPL which is above the national average.) But the federal government has to pick up the entire tab for these expansions until 2017, and thereafter it pays for about 90% of the expansion. So if we are able to cut our Medicaid before the it kicks in (in 2013), then we will expand it beyond what it is now, but at the expense of the federal government. It's a clever ploy, but I doubt he'll get permission to do it.

- wolf

I have you beat, or you me. I live in western NY and we have the highest per capita taxes in the US. Our governor and legislature has made it quite clear that we are not going to cut Medicaid and similar programs. We will pay even more and those who do are going to have fewer services. Businesses are once again fleeing and higher income earners are going too. That leaves those who cannot to pay even more. We are in a death spiral, and those in charge do not care. I hope I'm able to get out of here before it all goes south, but that remains to be seen. I feel sorry for the poor bastards who cannot.

 

[Ozoned]

I have a question. I grew up in a small, New Jersey town. I'd say most people in my town were fairly Conservative, as I defined it at the time. Many people went to Church, many people were religious, and for the most part, I felt it was a fairly wealthy area. When I graduated High School, I went to a really liberal College - but I didn't really know what that meant at the time. I took up a Political Science minor and began taking classes. Most of my classes taught the same thing: Global warming is bad, big business ruins the world because they all dump their waste in foreign countries, that we as a first world country cause less developed nations to be dependent on us (dependency theory) or that we try to make them like us (modernization theory?).

My education never really touched on social issues like abortion rights, gay marriage, etc., so I'll leave the social issues out of the picture. But where it did leave me is with a liberal bias: who wouldn't want to help the poor countries? who wouldn't want to stop big US business from dumping trash in costa rica? who wouldn't want to pay more taxes so that we can all have a fair life? After all, it isn't people's fault that they don't have a job, it's the big business's fault for not providing them and being greedy with money... /brainwashed

In any event, I've been reading a lot on the health care bill lately, and I find it quite odd that almost every democrat is in support of it, and every conservative is against it. My democratic friends into politics will argue that the republicans aren't supporting it because "they want to keep the corrupt health care companies going so that they can put more money in their pockets". Surely that isn't the entire truth - is it? Is every republican in congress voting against this bill simply because they don't want to lose the massive amount of profits they are making?

Or something else I learned: big pharmaceutical companies don't want to make HIV drugs cheaper for poor people overseas because it will hurt their bottom line. True?

I personally hate all the spending we've been doing lately. It's ridiculous. But I once remember hearing something from a friend that "The republicans spend and spend and spend, and then the Democrats come in once a decade and clean up the deficit". If that's the case, then why does it seem like the deficit is getting larger and larger?

The point of this thread isn't to rant or flame. The point is to show you where my bias education has left me, and why I've begun to question things I've been told or taught. Can someone clarify?

Heh. You are ahead of the curve. Don't ever quit "learning".

People that have government jobs tend to vote for democrats rather than republicans.

The Democratic leadership wants to see a single payer universal health care system.

How many private sector jobs will be exchanged for government jobs when this comes to pass?

Health care is approx. 20% of GDP.

THINK IN TERMS OF VERY LARGE NUMBERS.

 

[woolfe9999]

That's a fair question. The liberas don't get elected by magic - they have, if a much smaller source, a source of donors elsewhere that I'd argue is mucd more aligned with the public interest, including labor.

But I'm fine with all of tibeing replaced - the lion's share from very corrupt corproate and other wealth interests along with organized groups on the left, as long as it's all done.

Any such broad replacement will utlimaely favor the public interest and the left.

While I appreciate your showing some consistency here in that you generally agree with me, I am no so sure that left wing public interest groups necessarily align that well with the public interests. Unions are the major source of funding for progressives, and they represent a special interest which is in the minority here.

The clearest case is the relationship between teacher's unions and the democratic party. Teacher's unions are enemies of the notion of paying teachers based on merit instead of just seniority, and most importantly, of firing bad teachers. Dems believe in providing high funding for education, which I generally support, but then we can't get the real bang for our buck because dems are too aligned with teacher's unions. The result is that while there is some correlation between per pupil spending and quality, the correlation is much weaker than it would be if we were able to subvert the interest of this union.

Another example was with the auto bailout. The unions there needed to agree that their members would take a substantial hit, at least in the short term, to keep these businesses afloat. Instead, we got a situation where the taxpayers had to bear the lion's share of the burden of keeping them afloat, because the dems are beholden to the unions.

- wolf

 

[Acanthus]

Enthusiastic agreement with child labor, but not with the wage stipulation. Wages of $2 a day are pretty good when bread costs $0.05.



Hesitating disagreement, due to my limited economic understanding.

Something tells me that this would make prices of normal goods skyrocket. Whiping out foreign competition through taxes will, in the long run, be bad for our economy and China's too.

If we cut off economic ties with China, to say nothing of taxing their goods at 87%, if it doesn't touch off a declaration of war from the Chinese, will definitely touch off a seriously bad series of retaliatory economic sanctions. I'm not smart enough to predict all the ramifications of such an event.

I'm sorry, but I just don't think it's that simple.

This would cause goods to correct from their artificially low prices. Cost of living would rise, but so would employment to fill in the massive chinese manufacturing hole.

The only way for them to sell things to the US again would be to stop exploiting their people... What a novel idea! Also china imports about 1/3rd of what they export to us, and it is largely food and raw materials... If we begin actually making our own shit again we can use the excess raw materials.

The long and short of it... Prices would rise, however so would employment, and you'd have the benefit of a clean conscience...

 

[Acanthus]

How many jobs have poor people created? None.

How many taxes do poor people pay? None.

Those damned evil greedy rich folk. Damn them to hell.

The simple fact your arguments fails, time and time again, is because wealth is NOT finite. if I get more of the pie it is not at your expense. The pie grows for all who wish a slice. The rich have taken NOTHING from you, your own inability to be successful has.

You simply choose to blame your own failings on some random "rich person". You are jealous of his success because you are unable to create your own.

1. Wealth is finite, Economics is a zero sum game, the only added "wealth" is inflation and labor pool.

2. Concentration of said limited wealth is what hardens a recession. When a large amount of investment money dries up because the rich get cold feet, recessions happen. The more money that gets frozen up, the deeper the recession. ARRA and TARP try to circumvent this by forcing investment via public works and keeping lenders in business (we can debate all day whether it actually does anything, but that is the idea behind them).

 

[daishi5]

And so we will keep more manufacturing jobs, and the people who work those jobs will live like the people who now work those jobs in China. Bust unions and lower the minimum wage in order to retain manufacturing jobs? So we have people working in factories for $4 an hour, and we have a tax cut which will not benefit those people as you don't pay taxes on wages that low even under the current system. Basically what you are advocating here is that we fight to retain manufacturing jobs that will be approximately like manufacturing jobs in China, or another analogy is to manufacturing jobs in our early period of industrialization, in the late 19th century. Why again do we want to retain a large base of sub-poverty line jobs? I'd rather leave those to the Chinese, who will eventually destabilize politically unless they start sharing their enlarged economic pie with their impoverished workers. In other words, they themselves will eventually have to implement the reforms we made over 100 years ago, the ones you want to roll back.

I don't personally see a problem with the U.S. economy being services oriented, with a small manufacturing sector, and an emphasis on technological innovation, and selling/exporting the innovations. Once upon a time we were a manufacturing based economy, and we prospered, particularly because those with manufacturing jobs lived well because of things likes unions and minimum wage. But we couldn't compete and those jobs went elsewhere, to places without those reforms. Yet somehow we still prosper. Even in the worst recession in 80 years, our standard of living is 10x that of countries who pay their workers slave wages.

- wolf

The United States used to prosper as a manufacturing based economy because most of the other major manufacturers had their industrial base bombed to ruins in WWII. Our manufacturing economy has been on the decline as countries have either rebuilt, or built up for the first time. I think the manufacturing economy was a fluke of opportunity, and had we had many other nations competing to be the manufacturers we would still be looking at the gross disparities we had before the world wars. I am still worried that global competition will drive us into that situation, however it seems that U.S. firms have some strange resistance to lowering wages. Wages seem to have stagnated in the lower levels, but for some reason they have not dropped. Which I actually think is a good thing considering what I would have expected.

However, we should be retaining some less than poverty jobs. The hard truth is that some americans are either not capable, or not willing to produce above poverty level outputs. I believe we should have some safety net that prevents them from suffering because of this, but that doesn't mean we could not benefit from increased output. For example, assume that the average non-working welfare recipient can produce $15000 worth of output. He would normally be paid somewhere around $6-7,000 for that output. Instead he produces no output and we give him $30,000 to provide basic levels of subsistence. We would all be better off if he produced $15,000 of "work" was paid $6,000 and we gave him $28,000. This is off the top of my head, but it is very possible to increase the nations prosperity through low pay jobs without removing their safety net.

Just to forestall any protests, I don't want to force them to work. But, I believe welfare and pay should be structured that anyone can work, even low paying jobs, and that welfare benefits + pay should be greater than welfare alone, so that even the least capable person on welfare could increase their standard of living by working more or increasing their productivity somehow through learning or other means. And, I have not had the misfortune to require unemployment or welfare yet, so I am mostly clueless as to how they are actually structured.

 

[Special K]

How many jobs have poor people created? None.

How many taxes do poor people pay? None.

Those damned evil greedy rich folk. Damn them to hell.

The simple fact your arguments fails, time and time again, is because wealth is NOT finite. if I get more of the pie it is not at your expense. The pie grows for all who wish a slice. The rich have taken NOTHING from you, your own inability to be successful has.

You simply choose to blame your own failings on some random "rich person". You are jealous of his success because you are unable to create your own.

Is it even theoretically possible for everyone to be a millionaire in today's dollars, i.e. discounting inflation? Is it really possible for everyone to earn the means to enjoy what most Americans would term an "upper-middle class" lifestyle?