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Not if their budget included $400 of free spending and they suddenly became infatuated with tablets which cost $340.

Besides, "Fewer" implies "less labor required," which implies unemployment. Combine that with consumers not having the dollars to spend on new products, and you have no way to create new jobs to use these unemployed--not until we find a way to use less labor to make tablets, unemploying some of those people, in which case now you have the two groups competing for what meager employment remains.

You might think (I did, for about 2.7 seconds; apparently it took that long to copy the data into classical memory) that the more efficient processes mean we can make more things more cheaply, and so we can re-employ more people. That's only sort-of true. If we find a way to use less labor to make electronics and thus unemploy them along with the now-unemployed half-the-people-who-used-to-make-Crocs, we can make *more* electronics by re-employing the same number of people who just lost their tablet-making jobs. That's because we can only pay that many people's wages. At the same time, electronics cost less: if we pay them less, they can still buy as much crap; that, in turn, means we can employ more of them, as long as their wages are lower.

It's sort-of true in the sense that it's true in a specific sort of sense: it's true we can employ more people when productivity increases, if we pay them less in buying-power terms. If we give them a wage that follows inflation--one that follows the total income divided by the total productivity, and multiplies their previous wage by the ratio of that value now to that value before--then we can only employ exactly as many as we unemployed.

The higher price per labor-hour reduces employment. High wages reduce employment. The negative effects of low wages are the reasoning behind minimum wage; and the systems which obsolete the system of minimum wage were not viable until recently. It's time to move on, time to get away from a system that raises labor costs and expands unemployment.

But the rising cost of higher education is largely due to all of the money being thrown at it from the government in the form of grants (a little) and much more so loan guarantees.

I don't really care to discuss it right now, but something should be done here.

Don't know much about decreasing upward mobility.... people still move between brackets plenty - up and down.

Nope. The American Dream is dying. It used to be that a hard-working average citizen could earn enough for comfortable middle-class life and easy retirement. Not anymore. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States and http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/01/the_economist_o.html for stats, for example. Point is, it's not getting any better.

There is no social mobility in America anymore.

http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/01/the_economist_o.html

and, from here: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html

The key findings relating to intergenerational mobility include the following:

*Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.
*Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent.
*Education, race, health and state of residence are four key channels by which economic status is transmitted from parent to child.
*African American children who are born in the bottom quartile are nearly twice as likely to remain there as adults than are white children whose parents had identical incomes, and are four times less likely to attain the top quartile.
*The difference in mobility for blacks and whites persists even after controlling for a host of parental background factors, children’s education and health, as well as whether the household was female-headed or receiving public assistance.
*After controlling for a host of parental background variables, upward mobility varied by region of origin, and is highest (in percentage terms) for those who grew up in the South Atlantic and East South Central regions, and lowest for those raised in the West South Central and Mountain regions.
*By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

Key findings relating to short-run, year-to-year income movements include the following:

*The overall volatility of household income increased significantly between 1990-91 and 1997-98 and again in 2003-04.
*Since 1990-91, there has been an increase in the share of households who experienced significant downward short-term mobility. The share that saw their incomes decline by $20,000 or more (in real terms) rose from 13.0 percent in 1990-91 to 14.8 percent in 1997-98 to 16.6 percent in 2003-04.
*The middle class is experiencing more insecurity of income, while the top decile is experiencing less. From 1997-98 to 2003-04, the increase in downward short-term mobility was driven by the experiences of middle-class households (those earning between $34,510 and $89,300 in 2004 dollars). Households in the top quintile saw no increase in downward short-term mobility, and households in the top decile ($122,880 and up) saw a reduction in the frequency of large negative income shocks.
*For the middle class, an increase in income volatility has led to an increase in the frequency of large negative income shocks, which may be expected to translate to an increase in financial distress.
*The median household was no more upwardly mobile in 2003-04, a year when GDP grew strongly, than it was it was during the recession of 1990-91.

All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress.

The interesting thing about bias discussions is that you have to consider the baseline of comparison. That is, how do you determine what counts as "bias?" Are you (or the paper, rather...but you seem to be endorsing the study by proxy) really suggesting that the average member of Congress somehow represents "true" America? Should the average member of Congress really be considered the "unbiased" starting point?

Instead, I would posit that the average member of Congress represents the voting populace, not all Americans. For instance, this paper (PDF) finds that older voters routinely favor the older candidate. If we look at U.S. census data (PDF) of voters, we see that the voting populace tends to be older (58% are 45 or older). Demographically, this population tends to be conservative, both socially and fiscally. Consequently, it is plausible that the average member of Congress is more conservative than the average American of legal voting age.

Thus, if we accept the premise that the liberal/conservative make-up of members of Congress is more representative of the voting populace than the U.S. as a whole, we can conclude that the media organizations may have more of a liberal bias than the average voter, but not necessarily the average American. Personally, I believe that this premise is still too generous. Given the necessity of Congress critters having close ties to business (CEOs write bigger donation checks than grocery store cashiers), I would suggest that members of Congress are more conservative than the voting populace. If this is true, it exacerbates the flaws of the original study even more so, as it shows that their baseline is significantly more conservative than the average American.

Here is an interesting critique of some other problems with the paper.

The media is much too diversified and there is much too much money at stake for the fairness doctrine to have any effect. IN any case, the so-called liberal media is already careful. For instance, today when NPR had a story about Obama, they made sure to reference the previous days story about McCain. Rush is free is denigrate women and minorities, abuse drugs while making fun of other with the same problem and promote hate and incite violence in general, but somehow the media is still considered liberal.

>while our pet interest might be in technology, we can't let that drive our vote. It's an important issue category, but it's only one of many and on many other counts these people may be doing quite a poor job.

Absolutely. George Allen's background on racial issues. George Allen and free speech. On that last incident, Allen tried to blame the blogger for getting choked and slammed to the floor.

Every time I see this argument, they leave out every mention of the fact that the wire taps happen when there's a known terrorist on the end of the line.

The problem is that this is NOT a known fact. This is a claim often repeated by the administration, but the facts of the program are mostly classified and have never been made public. The fact that the very existance of this program contradicts previous statements by the President, makes me less willing to take his current statements as fact.

It would seem that if this particular claim was true, there would be no need to ignore FISA. Since FISA is being circumvented, it seems unlikely that the claims of the Administration are any more true now than they were when they were claiming that the program didn't exist in the first place. The Executive branch may well have a duty to deny/misrepresent the extent of the program, but it is ultimately up the courts to decide if the program violates the law.

Why is that? Afraid to mention that because it weakens your argument?

Well, for all the same reasons you didn't point out the the Executive is likely tapping all communications (of everyone within reach) and all electronic records and letting the NSA attempt to filter something useful out of it. Because repeating unsubstantiated claims which weaken your position is not a wise debating tactic.