If he was such a tool for progressives, he'd be pushing for progressive policies. Instead, he has ramped up the war in Afghanistan, implemented a spending freeze, and passed a health care bill that was rewarmed Republican ideas from the 1990s.
Income and Insight
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If he was such a tool for progressives, he'd be pushing for progressive policies. Instead, he has ramped up the war in Afghanistan, implemented a spending freeze, and passed a health care bill that was rewarmed Republican ideas from the 1990s.
oreo
Gold Member
They call it "Obama's flood the basement economics" for a reason---
Someone making 24K per year is probably not paying a single penny in federal income tax--but is more than likely reaping the rewards of this administration--through all the subsidies for cars, homes, save your homes, etc. etc. etc.Funny how hand-outs do that--LOL
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if they have kids, someone making 50k is probably paying no income tax....
a couple making 20k without kids, pays a little bit in income tax...at 19k they pay nothing.
most people not paying income tax have kids....and all the deductions and credits for them keep them from having to pay any....
i don't believe for one nano second that the 46% not paying income tax in this country are poor or even close to poverty level....they just have children.
a couple making 20k without kids, pays a little bit in income tax...at 19k they pay nothing.
most people not paying income tax have kids....and all the deductions and credits for them keep them from having to pay any....
i don't believe for one nano second that the 46% not paying income tax in this country are poor or even close to poverty level....they just have children.
EriktheRed
Eh...
Bfgrn
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Let's take a few of your points and shine some light of reality on them...
Please provide the 'numerous other similar studies', because when I 'google' that study, ALL that comes up is page after page of the right wing echo chamber citing THAT study.
You claim: 'it is mostly conservatives who are on the front lines running and manning the orphanages, leper colonies, soup kitchens, food pantries, thrift shops, homeless shelters, treatment centers, halfway houses, mission programs to some of the world's most desperate people, etc.'
Please provide the evidence to support that claim. Because if you read THE Arthur Brooks study, you will find the opposite is true.
Arthur Brooks writes: "When it comes to giving or not giving, conservatives and liberals look a lot alike. Conservative people are a percentage point or two more likely to give money each year than liberal people, but a percentage point or so less likely to volunteer [citing the 2002 General Social Survey (GSS) and the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (SCCBS)]". (pp. 21-22)
So, according to THE Arthur Brooks study: conservatives believe in the giving of mammon and liberals believe in the giving of themselves.
You couldn't win a battle of 'quotations'. The attitudes of loathing, dehumanizing and degrading the poor and minorities IS what defines the right, conservatives and today's Republican party. You don't need to look any farther than the posts seen every day on this board. Please find me ONE post on this board where a liberal dehumanizes or degrades the poor or minorities. You certainly will find PLENTY of dehumanizing and degrading talk about the poor and minorities from the right here. THAT is NOT how compassion manifests in human beings. You can't call loathing compassion! I'd love to have a nickle for every time I am called a 'bleeding heart' liberal. The TRUTH is we are called that by people with no compassion for others. But they are unable to internalize their lack of compassion, so they externalize it by accusing liberals of either being disingenuous, weak or both.
So Foxfyre, what next? Are you going to forward that argument that the Nazi's were humanitarians?
"Republicans care more about property, Democrats care more about people"
Ted Sorensen - President Kennedy's Special Counsel & Adviser, and primary speechwriter
"Have you ever heard of a bleeding heart Republican?"
Paul Craig Roberts - the father of Reaganomics
Luke 16:13-15…
[13] No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon (money)
[14] The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.
[15] He said to them, "You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight.
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Bfgrn
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WHAT I am saying is pretty simple. You call yourself a conservative on the issues of regulation and consumer protection AND that the GOP's approach is closer to YOUR stance.
What I am saying is you are wrong...'Conservatives' and the current Republican party has become THE party of regulatory capture and DE-regulation. IF you expect that somehow consumer protection will be spawned by that approach, then I have a bridge you might want to buy. 'Conservatives' and the current Republican party believe in business and corporation protection...and consumers best BEWARE.
I just showed you
Nonsense.
Both parties are internationalist interventionists.
And pox on both their houses,
They pander to their corporate masters...both of them.
Worthless sods.
We are our brother's keeper.....(that's called ''socialism'' by rightwingers)
According to the Bible, and Christianity.
It is not we are our brother's keeper EXCEPT.....FILL IN THE BLANK
Of course one can continue to be the goats instead of the sheep, but Christ is on to you!
According to the Bible, and Christianity.
It is not we are our brother's keeper EXCEPT.....FILL IN THE BLANK
Of course one can continue to be the goats instead of the sheep, but Christ is on to you!
In my opinion, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' puts a negative connotation on 'keeper'. Cain of course was not wanting to admit that he murdered his brother, but he did that by emphasizing that his brother was not a sheep or goat to be owned or kept and therefore he had no authority over his brother's whereabouts.
The subtle teaching is what I have been saying. We are not to treat people as sheep or cattle and take authority over them. And too often government programs tend to put whole 'herds' of people into dependency and therefore at the mercy of government.
It is my faith that God expects us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit those in prison. I think that is the driving force behind a great deal of charitable giving and a lot of that is based on religious convictions. Arthur Brooks has another excellent detailed commentary on that very thing here:
Hoover Institution
But the Biblical lesson is quite clear at least to me. Compassion can involve enlisting the help of others, as the Samaritan enlisted the help of the Inn keeper to help the injured traveler. But the Samaritan did not expect the Inn keeper to also sustain the cost, but left him with the funds to do it.
It is not charity when we hand people off to the government to take care of and expect others to do and pay for the job we ourselves are commanded to do. It is not charity to force others to provide the time, energy, resources, funds, etc. so that we are absolved of that responsibility. One is not compassionate to demand that another do what he or she should himself do.
And as I have previously stated, in my opinion, the negative consequences of government doing it offsets much if not most of the good. All those folks stocking and manning the food pantries, thrift shops, volunteering at the Salvation Army, etc. are accomplishing real good and utilizing resources much more efficiently and effectively than any one-sized-fits-all government program can possibly do.
The subtle teaching is what I have been saying. We are not to treat people as sheep or cattle and take authority over them. And too often government programs tend to put whole 'herds' of people into dependency and therefore at the mercy of government.
It is my faith that God expects us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit those in prison. I think that is the driving force behind a great deal of charitable giving and a lot of that is based on religious convictions. Arthur Brooks has another excellent detailed commentary on that very thing here:
Hoover Institution
But the Biblical lesson is quite clear at least to me. Compassion can involve enlisting the help of others, as the Samaritan enlisted the help of the Inn keeper to help the injured traveler. But the Samaritan did not expect the Inn keeper to also sustain the cost, but left him with the funds to do it.
It is not charity when we hand people off to the government to take care of and expect others to do and pay for the job we ourselves are commanded to do. It is not charity to force others to provide the time, energy, resources, funds, etc. so that we are absolved of that responsibility. One is not compassionate to demand that another do what he or she should himself do.
And as I have previously stated, in my opinion, the negative consequences of government doing it offsets much if not most of the good. All those folks stocking and manning the food pantries, thrift shops, volunteering at the Salvation Army, etc. are accomplishing real good and utilizing resources much more efficiently and effectively than any one-sized-fits-all government program can possibly do.
FA_Q2
Gold Member
And you continually put forth that the democrats are different. I did say the GOP has lost its way and no longer has any real conservative in it anymore. The Democrats are actually worse here though. Not only do the champion bad regulation but they do so blatantly. If you can't see that then you are just seeing what they want you too.
You just showed me what?
Bfgrn
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I just showed you that the Republican's health care plan was based on consumer ingestion.
Take you pick of Republican 'causes'...'tort' reform; a corporate funded propaganda to campaign to protect corporations, business and the elite, and screw the consumer and victims of incompetence or neglect. Medicare D - a handout to big pharma and insurance cartels.
If you really want consumer protection and holding corporation's accountable, you will find it the farther left you go in the Democratic party...people like Dennis Kucinich, George Miller and Bernie Sanders.
antagon
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i wont say that globalization and automation are problems, per sa. these are tactics which some of our larger, multinational businesses use to affect the creation of wealth that capitalism is all about. as to whether it is related to the topic at hand, i contend that functions of capitalism, including these, bank on the government's continued investment. much of that investment comes by way of social policies - especially in a contraction/recovery.
i acknowledge the side-effects and externalities to social policies, and contended earlier that these should be reigned in. i contend, again, that a discussion of these externalities alone is just as pointless as a discussion of capitalism which only focuses on the greed at play in the system. the fact of the matter is that capitalism is a big part of what makes life great in the developed world, and that social policy is a big part of what makes capitalism work in the first place.
i only contend that this basis is changing from using people to make more money toward more efficient, less labor-dependent processes to achieve the same.
the unemployment rates all show the portion of the labor market which is not used or under-utilized. the labor market is characterized by non-institutional persons over a certain age who are able to work. in this way, you couldn't gain any insight into which people are on welfare or SS, in prison, or working in non-civilian government employment - all communal functions. some, like entitlements and prison, are decidedly socialist.
with the incarceration rate better than doubling in fewer than 10 years, welfare roles at the highest point in history, a boom of civilian public employment, and a bubble of non-civilian cold-war workers, can the 5% reagan/h.w.bush 'full-employment' state of the late 80s really indicate the same as clinton's 5% or dubya's 5%? we attain +/- 5% employment every ten years or so. we have to look at the labor market within the economy in order to scrutinize my claim, and the unemployment rate does not do that at all.
where you argue that a drop-off in one economic activity gives rise to another, moving jobs with it, i dont disagree. but there are more ways which the economy accommodates the invariable inflexibility in the job market, and which account for more individuals than the job market does in the short term. take a look at detroit, MI. this is a city directly hit by globalization, modernization and industrial management technologies. while each of these developments may have bode well for automakers, the economy there has been devastated. the job-loss has not been temporary as you prescribe. the exodus from the city has been a drag on neighboring economies. persons over a certain age found it harder to retrain to new-sector jobs. people found it hard to move from their homes to entirely new cities. the role which prison, welfare, UI and SSI play in these circumstances is massive.
so far, you and fox have approached entitlements as if lazy people are turning down piles of jobs. my counter-proposal reminds that the amount of labor involved in every dollar made is reducing at an increasing rate year on year. hours are decreasing (11% since 1964 per bls establishment survey), OECD's employed to population ratio is declining (though slightly, to the tune of 1% per decade (+/-3,000,000 americans/decade) ). this means that entitlements are increasing as a shrinking job market turns down piles of job-seekers.
the reason why i think all of this applies to the convo at hand, is when y'all come around to actual solutions, basing them on flooding the labor market with former state dependents wouldn't solve an issue in the wider economy. rather, it will create a liability. welfare and prison need to be fixed, among other programs, but ultimately, there is a lot of work to do in the wider economy to keep the job growth we have on target.
antagon
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this is not a conservative/liberal issue. i dont have an affiliation with either of those labels, to add.
this is a business advocacy issue. 'reforms' have boxed the GOP out of this role, and i think the social conservative populist base that has replaced the wall-street republicans of the seventies and eighties are clueless garbage.
where businesses used to act above the board for campaign finance, now, lobbies are the only basis. this excludes real politics from elections, leaving the sort of pandering we'd seen in the last election. it has helped to bring the democrats to the center such that their agenda is more plausible to business/economic interests, but it has pushed the GOP to a right-finge which i dont think knows squat about politics, economics or government.
hundreds of millions of americans wont buy it with a vote.
antagon
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this is what i've been trying to get across. welfare is not charity. these are not the intentions of policies like these, particularly in the US. the positive and negative social implications of entitlement policies are externalities to the economic aims which have revolutionized the societies which have put them to use for a few decades. these economic aims far and vastly outshine the social side-effects, furthermore.
i think that it is out of touch to even argue that the social pitfalls out-weigh the benefits once you look at a bit of US history and do some social comparisons to today's non-entitled citizens of the world.
Greenbeard
Gold Member
Seems like as good a place as any to bring up a recent post on Free Exchange
Smart social policies do have certain advantages.
How to explain the differences? Stronger automatic stabilisers and labour market protections helped insulate workers from the effect of the downturn in some places. Italy and Germany have well-known labour sharing programmes in place; where American employers might meet slackening demand by trimming workforces, German employers are encouraged to hoard labour and reduce hours worked. Meanwhile, America faces structural adjustments that other countries, like Canada, have largely come through already. It's interesting to think about how leaders from different countries might place different emphasis on demand-side versus structural measures to boost the economy, based on these performances.
Smart social policies do have certain advantages.
antagon
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Seems like as good a place as any to bring up a recent post on Free Exchange
How to explain the differences? Stronger automatic stabilisers and labour market protections helped insulate workers from the effect of the downturn in some places. Italy and Germany have well-known labour sharing programmes in place; where American employers might meet slackening demand by trimming workforces, German employers are encouraged to hoard labour and reduce hours worked. Meanwhile, America faces structural adjustments that other countries, like Canada, have largely come through already. It's interesting to think about how leaders from different countries might place different emphasis on demand-side versus structural measures to boost the economy, based on these performances.
Smart social policies do have certain advantages.
there's a lot more to this than public policy, but it is worthy to consider some connection there. most crucially is our being the epicenter of the crisis which just briefly tugged rather than dragged on foreign economies. the asset loss simply doesnt compare in these nations.
next, the small business basis of US employment is adversely affected by credit stagflation and low demand. because small business investment is not very sophisticated, and owners are heavily invested in their enterprises, the option to sustain big-biz losses supported by investors, assets, bridge loans, bail-outs and retained earnings is not feasible. the axe simply comes out faster.
lopping 33% of your staff could come as easy as laying of 2 or 10 employees for the businesses which aggregate 90-some percent of american employment. relative to the US, i'm sure none of these nations are biased so heavily to small business employment.
Most of the small businesses around here however do the labor sharing thing as long as they can though. If it comes down to keep a valued employee or not, of course a weaker employee is laid off, but I've run across several crews where everybody is simply working fewer hours so that all can keep working on the few jobs available.
Having the ability for flexibility does save jobs.
The union shops are not able to do that though. It's all or nothing for those folks. The unions has to allow lay offs but it won't agree to across the board reduction in either wages or hours. So the layoffs are much higher there.
I wonder if unions in Europe are as inviolate as the government protected unions in the USA?
Having the ability for flexibility does save jobs.
The union shops are not able to do that though. It's all or nothing for those folks. The unions has to allow lay offs but it won't agree to across the board reduction in either wages or hours. So the layoffs are much higher there.
I wonder if unions in Europe are as inviolate as the government protected unions in the USA?
antagon
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that's a good point about the small businesses, Foxfyre. in building, the hours-to-production thing is harder to manage. because projects require specialties, and are best conducted by the same crew, it is detrimental to try to spread the pain so much. it would be easier at a production or distribution warehouse.
construction was hit the hardest by this deal, i'd say. judging from the chamber and the ads running since late last year, about half of the little firms in my neck of the... desert... folded up altogether. that's all or nothing, too. i've always been a cash-based guy and run a cash-based biz. lots of the credit based businesses in small contracting with their fancy newer-than-the-nineties fleets were the ones which vanished. nobody is going to repo my '86 F600 dumper. lots of these guys were relying on revolvers and lines from their bank or credit cards to finance their work. some of that credit was liened on their homes!
now that i'm doing my rounds again trying to pick things back up myself, i'm finding a lot of contractors who stopped and vanished half-way through a job, and even more of the former employee types who did the same on small jobs. no shortage of work.
the long-term labor contracts with the unions are a joke. i'll be damned if i've got to predict how many hours i'll spend building corvettes in 2014, then sign a contract to guarantee them. not all unions have the nutsack that firmly gripped, and i really dont know how they get down in other countries. look at brit airways and their mess with the cabin-crew union, though. they should have tomatoes tossed at them for striking in a time when people are desperately trying to get jobs.
construction was hit the hardest by this deal, i'd say. judging from the chamber and the ads running since late last year, about half of the little firms in my neck of the... desert... folded up altogether. that's all or nothing, too. i've always been a cash-based guy and run a cash-based biz. lots of the credit based businesses in small contracting with their fancy newer-than-the-nineties fleets were the ones which vanished. nobody is going to repo my '86 F600 dumper. lots of these guys were relying on revolvers and lines from their bank or credit cards to finance their work. some of that credit was liened on their homes!
now that i'm doing my rounds again trying to pick things back up myself, i'm finding a lot of contractors who stopped and vanished half-way through a job, and even more of the former employee types who did the same on small jobs. no shortage of work.
the long-term labor contracts with the unions are a joke. i'll be damned if i've got to predict how many hours i'll spend building corvettes in 2014, then sign a contract to guarantee them. not all unions have the nutsack that firmly gripped, and i really dont know how they get down in other countries. look at brit airways and their mess with the cabin-crew union, though. they should have tomatoes tossed at them for striking in a time when people are desperately trying to get jobs.
Well it's only the ones who are managing to survive who are able to do any job sharing. But even on the more technical stuff where skilled labor comes in, some are managing to do it unless they're on a contract where they pay a penalty if they don't meet their target date or something. In that case, of course they have to work the full crew with overtime if necessasry to complete the task. But we're a pretty small state and folks know folks and there's some pretty amazing give and take to help each other out.
Still just like you're saying, so many of the little guys have just given up and a lot of the bigger guys are former shells of themselves. Or probably there are others like Hubby and myself who chose to shut down so that others could survive. We're staying sufficiently intact that if things improve later on, and we're inclined to do so, we can accept work again but for now we're retired.
All over town though we see construction projects that were started and then abandoned. Some are framed in, a few had even started the finish work, and then everything just stopped. Either they couldn't borrow the money to finish or the owners couldn't continue to pay them. Some of the landscaping and maintenance businesses are having a really lean summer and operating at half or quarter strength.
So now we have folks who used to be middle class that are feeling pretty low income.
I wonder if those demographics included in the OP will look a lot different if that poll is repeated this summer?
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