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Some data to back it up:

includes renters, but national:
http://www.urban.org/urban-wir...
https://edit.urban.org/sites/d...

South Dakota:
http://www.southdakotadashboar...

DC:
http://www.dcfpi.org/1-13-05ho...

That's all I can find right now, but I'm pretty sure most people agree that this is the case.

Some data to back it up:

includes renters, but national:
http://www.urban.org/urban-wir...
https://edit.urban.org/sites/d...

South Dakota:
http://www.southdakotadashboar...

DC:
http://www.dcfpi.org/1-13-05ho...

That's all I can find right now, but I'm pretty sure most people agree that this is the case.

Well you watched Obama "fix" it and nothing changed for these poor people.

I'd say all we proved is that government is incapable of fixing anything.

I halfway agree in that I think the ACA did not do enough. Roughly 20 million people gained medical coverage of some kind. Given that a significant part of this study revealed healthcare as a contributing factor, I wouldn't be suprised if tens of thousands of lives were saved. The real problem is we need a single payer system like the rest of the developed world, where we would pay about half as much to insure everyone while getting superior medical outcomes. Even trump agrees.

This. The problem the ACA had wasn't Obama, the ACA ended up being almost nothing like what Obama wanted or proposed in the first place. The problem with the ACA is that the Republicans that controlled the house could not allow it to succeed. So it was sabotaged at every opportunity.

Well you watched Obama "fix" it and nothing changed for these poor people.

I'd say all we proved is that government is incapable of fixing anything.

I halfway agree in that I think the ACA did not do enough. Roughly 20 million people gained medical coverage of some kind. Given that a significant part of this study revealed healthcare as a contributing factor, I wouldn't be suprised if tens of thousands of lives were saved. The real problem is we need a single payer system like the rest of the developed world, where we would pay about half as much to insure everyone while getting superior medical outcomes. Even trump agrees.

I've run the numbers, including impacts on HUD-qualified households, on low-income households, on high-income households, on families, on single individuals, on single parents, and even on retirement. I even included a public aid system targeting children and naturalized Americans in low-income households, avoiding the known-unknown risk of handing out straight cash for welfare babies and gold-digging immigrants.

It's a trillion dollars cheaper than our current model, and completely remediates all defects in our current public aid system. It eliminates the HUD lottery; it gets food to the 50 million Americans who don't get to eat every day; it pushes everyone down to the bottom 5% above the Federal poverty line, and it creates stability in the lowest-possible-income individuals so as to support market solutions supplying food, shelter, and other basic needs.

There is no American who ends up worse off under this Universal Social Security plan. Not one. By extension, there is not one human being in the *world* who ends up worse off.

This statement â" unsupported by any citations, BTW

LMGTFY:

From The Economist:

Indeed, Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, has found that "increases in immigration and language diversity over the decade of the 1990s predicted decreases in neighborhood homicide rates in the late '90s and up to 2006." An eight-year study of violence in Chicago led Mr Sampson to conclude that Mexican immigrants are less prone to violence than native-born Americans, whites or black, of comparable age and socio-economic status. In recent years, El Paso, Texas has had the lowest murder rate of any American city with a population of 500,000 or more, despite sitting directly across the Rio Grande from Juarez, a Mexican city plagued with horrific gang violence. Other metropolitan magnets for new arrivals from south of the border, such as San Diego, San Antonio and Phoenix, are similarly pacific. "Cities of concentrated immigration are some of the safest places around," Mr Sampson observes.

These patterns are reflected, as one would expect, in data on incarceration rates. White men born in America are twice as likely to end up in prison as men born abroad, while American-born black men are many times more likely to land in jail than their immigrant counterparts.

Studies cited therein:

https://contexts.org/articles/...

http://www.urban.org/urban-wir...

http://migrationinformation.or...

is irrelevant to my point.

Right, because in a debate about crime and immigrants what could crime rates of said immigrants could possibly have to do with it?

Clearly you've run into information that contradicts your point, i.e. that crime rates would go down with less immigrants, and rather than revaluating your prejudice you double down on it. Brilliant.

an Israel-kind of wall stretching for 2000 miles would cost $6.4 bln

I don't know how Slate came up with that quote, but just the property rights have been estimated at several times that. It implies a cost of less than 60c per linear foot . If you ever stood next to the wall in Jerusalem you would know how ridiculously low that estimate is. Simply driving the segment of the wall to its final location would cost you that much in fuel, before we consider material and installation costs.

As I said, the wall is a simplistic solution from the mind of a child. You actually want to stop illegal immigration? punish the employers. It was tried in the 80s and it worked wonders, which is exactly why it was repealed back then (incidentally that is how Canada does it. They essentially do not have an illegal immigration problem, and believe you me there is no wall between the USA and Canada. As it is it would be trivial for any of the 11 million illegal immigrants to cross the border into Canada). Facts are we have illegal immigration because business needs illegal immigrants.

NC is 36th by education attainment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

28 by some other metric
http://datacenter.kidscount.or...

8th here:
http://www.urban.org/urban-wir...

You are giving a single data point. Perhaps you should provide a data point further in the past to at least give a slope to your assertion? Here let me help. The effective tax rate on the top 1% has been falling since 1995 while for everyone else it is at a historic low. However it is important to keep in mind that the percent of wealth owned by that 1% has increased dramatically: the ratio of 50th to 99th wealth has gone from 0.024 in 1995 to 0.01 in 2013. In particular the 50% wealth level has DROPPED while the 99% wealth level has almost doubled.

What percentage of income do other people spend on directing support to charity?

10% is enshrined in the Christian Old Testament. Some Jews read this as a donation to a class of priest no longer in existence, but also acknowledge a 2.5% terumah or a general "as much as you are able." Some also seem to interpret these as necessarily paid in food and only by farmers. Islamic zakat is 2.5%.

In the US, private charitable giving (as declared on tax returns) averages $1200 per household, or about 1.7% (keeping in mind that mean is a terrible way to measure US economic data). These guys have much more complete data that suggests something like 2-4% being 'normal.' This is still a terrible measure, because bible-belt Southerners average close to 7%, while New Englanders average under 3% (source).

The more money people have, the less they tend to do for the poor.

According to your logic, the people who do the most for the poor are the poor, which is a paradox since they have little to no resources to begin with. And I'm not sure how we expect the most wealthy to give a greater percentage of their income when we're already taking a greater percentage of it through progressive taxation. But let's go to the numbers. According to the IRS's 2011 numbers, charitable giving is on a bell curve. Apparently, the most charitable are on the income extremes.

It's a shame the middle class won't band together and come after the rich, but those poor idiot fucks won't realize that they have a better chance to win the lottery than to actually work their way into the upper echelons of society

I know you mentioned the lottery in jest, but the poor actually are the ones spending a large percentage of their meager resources on state lottery tickets. Maybe government should get out of the business of suckering poor people into gambling.

It is unconstitutional in several ways...

I'll leave that one to the Supreme Court. So far, it hasn't really taken much of a thrashing.

...and these choices were made so to pass costs on to individuals, businesses, and the states

I'm not sure I understand this. Is there some entity that could bear costs that doesn't fall under one of the categories you listed above? I mean, ultimately individuals and businesses bear all of the costs of everything that costs anything.

It made Medicare even more unhealthy by dumping more people on it.

I think you mean Medicaid. And I'm not sure why you'd say that expanding Medicaid makes it unhealthier. The program is simply becoming larger and covering more people.

And there's still no move towards long term affordable health care or universal coverage, the two alleged goals of Obamacare.

There's a very good argument to be made that offering standardized, easily evaluated insurance products on an open exchange is an important step in keeping costs in check. Any system that moved us a step away from our unholy employer-based system would do that. Enabling consumers to choose from more than one option in something that resembles a market is a major step in the right direction, even if we didn't also kill off the employer-based option in the process.

As for it not moving toward universal coverage, I don't know how a multiple percentage point drop in the uninsurance rate isn't a move "towards" universal coverage. If the criticism is that the end result will not be universal coverage, that's true. But at a glance, it looks like results in that direction a pretty positive.

Can Students Have Too Much Tech?

"Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores," the economists wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower grades in younger children.

The distribution of first time offenders is almost perfectly evenly distributed.

I tried to find this, can you cite this at all? I spent about an hour searching. Seems like this could be a really interesting hobby project site.

It's just that a Black person who offends is treated so much more harshly than a White doing the same thing, that recidivism is almost guaranteed.

The longer the sentence the more likely one is to re-offend?

It's a "tough on crime" conspiracy by the Conservatives to strip the vote from all the Blacks.

This would only affect those who are 1) serving time 2) doing drugs. Since there isn't any language that applies to only certain skin tones, it applies to all inmates convicted of these crimes. Also, seems like a small voting block to be concerned about, [warning pdf]why wouldn't they go for the smaller ones first? Perhaps it has to do with money? See below.

Researching incarceration by race, I began by looking for bias in sentencing (is it judges etc.) I learned a large part of the harshness revolves around crack cocaine sentencing guidelines. Police operate by going into areas of poverty and performing sweeps. If you have a prior the sentence increases, it's like a feedback loop. Different classes of people do different drugs. Whites, for example, are more likely to be Methamphetamine users. Sentencing has increased for across all races however there remains a gap.

It largely, in my opinion, seems more of a socioeconomic issue than anything. I'd say a stronger argument would be the breakdown of the nuclear family and poverty. See the link below for the Moynihan Report, which was done in 1965 and recently revisited.

The Black Family: Five Decades After the Moynihan Report. Although I encourage everyone to view the report, for the lazy here are some highlights.

Among the findings in “The Moynihan Report Revisited”:

• The statistics that so alarmed Moynihan have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well. Today, the share of white children born outside marriage is about the same as the share was for black children in Moynihan’s day. Meanwhile, the percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers has tripled, remaining far higher than the percentage of white children born to unmarried mothers.
• In 1960, 20 percent of black children lived with their mothers but not their fathers; by 2010, 53 percent of all black children lived in such families. The share of white children living with their mothers but not their fathers climbed to 20 percent in 2010, up from 6 percent in 1960.
• There has been a marked retreat from marriage. In 1960, just over one-half of all black women were married and living with their husbands, compared with over two-thirds of white and Hispanic women. By 2010, only one-quarter of black women, two-fifths of Hispanic women, and one-half of white women lived with their spouses.
• That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.

In addition there's also some related highlights from 50 years on the War on Poverty and

This was discussed on Fatwallet today, and most of the sensationalism was debunked quickly.

http://www.fatwallet.com/forum...

A few juicy tidbits:

More details: "An alarming 35 percent of people with credit files have debt in collections reported in these file s . This percentage is nearly identical to results from a 2004 analysis of credit bureau data by the Federal Reserve, which found that 36.5 percent of people with credit report s had debt in collections reported in their file s (Avery et al. 2004). Note that consumers themselves may not realize they have debt in collections. Some consumers report becoming aware of this debt only when they review their credit report (CFPB 2013)"

...and...

The actual source: http://www.urban.org/publicati...

Only 5.3% are currently past due on a bill. "5.3 percent of people with a credit file have a report of past due debt, indicating they are between 30 and 180 days late on a nonmortgage payment"

So most of the people have old debts which could be up to 7 years old.

So there you go. A lot of us have an outstanding medical bill on our credit reports, and we should check them more often.

This is political wisecrackery with no legitimate basis to back it up. Congress has been informed for over seven years that this is an untruth. (Here's an article in Businessweekfrom all the way back in 2007 citing a study done by the Urban Institute debunking this myth.

This information has been reported to Congress on both the floor and in committee hearings. (Sorry, at one point, I had an old printout of one report supporting this statement. I can't seem to locate it, either in paper form nor on Google.) Congressional leaders willingly refuse to accept this truth, simply because there is more to gain politically by not accepting it. (Huge amounts of money are circulated by lobbyists in support of political agendas influenced by this...opening up more H1B visas, for example.)

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and you're arguing that not enough people are being jailed? Poverty is causally linked to crime! Assault, rape, and robbery have been in decline for years, and prison sentences have been lengthening.

It should be a surprise to no one that statistics on the income level of incoming prisoners are heavily biased towards the lowest levels of income. Income statistics for released felons are even worse. We stigmatize prison to such a degree that it destroys people's ability to earn a living afterwards, and you wonder why we have a >60% recidivision rate. Our "corrections system" is fundamentally broken, and by all measures worsening. Isn't prison supposed to prevent people from returning to a life of crime?

I am appalled at your ignorance, and the idea of a higher incarceration rate is vile. If you have no human compassion, have at least the sense to see when a solution isn't working.

While in rare cases job security is a problematic issue due to incompetence

It is NOT rare. 90% of teachers are competent and conscientious. But about 1 in 10 needs to go, and 1 in 10 is not "rare". Nearly every kid will have one or more incompetent teachers during K-12. Both of my kids have had bad teachers. My daughters 7th grade science teacher spoke English so poorly that the kids could not understand her. So she assigned each student a chapter to teach. For the rest of the semester they taught each other, while the teacher sat in the back of the room and watched Youtube videos. Many parents complained about the situation, but that was several years ago, and she is still "teaching". It is absurd that someone like that continues to be employed at taxpayer expense.

There was a recent report that estimated that a bad teacher can cause $250k/year in economic damage when you consider the lost future earning potential of the ill educated students.

The typical American gets more out of SS and Medicare than they put in. Single men who don't pay an average of about $2000 a year in income tax are freeloaders at the federal level. So are single women who pay less than about $5000/yr and married couples who pay less than about $7500/yr. Take a look here for the info - that's the Urban Institute, not the Tea Party.

Next, the famously conservative Ezra Klein points out that the median taxpayer pays 13.9% of their income in federal tax and 11.3% in state and local. That's sourced here, where they point out this person makes about $42k/year. Now, since payroll taxes at the time the article talks about were 4.2% to SS and 1.45% to Medicare (from the employee's perspective), that means that they're paying 5.65% of their income as payroll tax, so the median taxpayer here is paying 8.25% of their income as federal income tax, meaning: $3465. This is muddied significantly by the fact that these figures represent all returns, not all individuals, so married couples' returns are mixed in with single people's returns, but since over half of people are women and quite a lot of those who aren't are married, it's pretty clear that a majority of people are getting a great deal from the federal tax system regardless of how they vote. Just because states don't hand out nearly as much free money (they can't print it) doesn't change that.

"a vast majority of people get considerably more out of Social Security and Medicare then they put in."

Citations needed.

http://www.bankrate.com/financing/retirement/social-security-benefits-vs-taxes/

"No matter how much you pay into the system, whether you earn the average wage over a lifetime ($43,100 in 2010 dollars) or if you're in a two-income household where one earns a high wage and the other earns an average wage, you get back substantially more than you pay in. But those on the high end of the wage scale pay proportionally more in taxes than the average wage earner, not surprisingly."

Also see page 1 of http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/social-security-medicare-benefits-over-lifetime.pdf

Except that Health Insurance is out of the price range of so many Americans - around 16%. That's 45 million people who have no coverage.

As for who provides it - government, or a private company they both have their faults. I'd rather it *were* provided by government, not some money grabbing corporation whose *only* concern is making money from my misfortune. They are a company after all and there to make a profit, not serve the needs of their clients. Sure they serve the needs of some of their clients, or they'd soon go out of business. But when they employ teams of lawyers and doctors to ensure they don't give the coverage I've bought and paid for, it just demonstrates how morally bankrupt such organisations are, and pushing up the price of healthcare in America beyond the reach of many of it's citizens. Please explain to me why healthcare costs twice what it does elsewhere in the first world, when the quality is arguable no better. Even the World Health Organisation said as much.

Despite asking this question several times on Slashdot, no one has come up with an answer.

It is debatable that American healthcare is better quality from other countries
And they aren't the only ones saying it either
Even the World Health Organisation says so

A very simply Google will demonstrate that American Healthcare is just as good as elsewhere, and yet costs twice as much as any where else.

Please explain this?

My source is here.

Note, I do know about the payroll tax and sales tax. You also left out local taxes. I don't agree with the GOP when they imply that the people that don't pay federal income taxes are evil. In fact, my blog has a scheduled post for Oct 2 that deals with this fallacy.

But my point is that that we already charge people tax penalties for not doing things. Not buying a home is one of the biggest examples.

In 1992 Clinton ran on a platform to lower taxes. In 2004 Senator Kerry said that he would repeal the Bush tax cuts for households with incomes over $200,000, but not the middle-class tax cuts, which he would make permanent. He also proposed a new refundable tax credit for higher education expenses, and changes to the estate tax. On balance, these provisions would reduce federal revenues by at least $425 billion over ten years. For businesses, Senator Kerry proposed a 5 percent (1.75 percentage point) reduction in corporate tax rates, financed by increasing the tax on US corporations that produce goods and services overseas for third-country markets and by the elimination of corporate tax loopholes. From http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/1000634_KerryPlan.pdf

So it's not quite a stark as you seem to think, but your knee reflex is working just fine.

The u.s. is like the decline of Rome. Most of the budget spent on the military to little gain.

The U.S. is in decline because a lot of people think the problem is overspending on the military. It's not. Don't get me wrong; yes there's lots of pork in the U.S. military budget which could be cut. But it doesn't comprise most of U.S. government spending, nor is it the cause of the U.S.'s budgetary woes. And a good part of the reason we're in the buget mess we're in now is because people like you who think that it is implement solutions which don't address the real problem.

U.S. military spending is actually one of the few parts of government spending which has been more or less steadily declining since WWII, both as a % of the budget and as a % of GDP. It started climbing after 9/11, but it's still close to the lowest it's been since WWII.

What's killing the budget (indeed, where most of the money is spent) are the social programs; specifically, medicare and medicaid. They're projected to grow so quickly that even if you stopped all military spending, dropped it to zero , all the money that saved would be eaten up by growth in medicare and medicaid within 20-25 years. In other words, in 20-25 years we would have no military, no military spending, and our budgetary problems would be the same as they are now.

The first step in fixing a problem is to correctly identify what is causing it. The Congressional Budget Office hires a lot of really smart people to do nothing but identify the causes of the budget problems, and publishes a nifty report on it about every 2 years. Please go read it. Put aside any moralistic preconceptions you may have about which parts of the budget are good or bad. Look at it purely from an accounting standpoint - which parts are decreasing and which parts are ballooning out of control? The parts that are ballooning out of control are what we need to address to fix the problem, the parts that are decreasing are a much lower priority.

Yes, it's been said on /. a million times before: end the freakin' wars. Stop the runaway military spending. It's that simple.

No it's not that simple. I wish the people saying this would go to the Congressional Budget Office web site and actually try reading some of the budget projections instead of parroting some line which happens to fit their worldview.

In a nutshell, U.S. military spending has more or less been steadily declining as a percentage of the GDP and percentage of the budget, up until 9/11. After 9/11 it started to tick upwards, but is still near the lowest it's been since WWII. It's actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been getting smaller over the last 50 years.

What's killing the budget are the social programs. Specifically Medicare/Medicaid, though Social Security rears its head every now and then. Medicare and Medicaid are projected to grow so much and so quickly that if we completely eliminated all military spending - dropped it to zero - within about 20-25 years the growth in Medicare/Medicaid will have consumed all of the savings.

This isn't a conservative problem, this isn't a liberal problem. It's a straight-up accounting/math problem, and I know most of the folks here are pretty good at math. Put aside any preconceptions you may have. Go read the the CBO report on the budget. See for yourself where the problems in the budget are.

The problem is that you can't cut taxes and have an out of control military budget. You get one or the other, not both.

Please do some research before parroting things you hear. Military spending is actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been decreasing over the last 50 years (up until 9/11 when it started picking up again).

What's breaking the budget is growth in mandatory spending, primarily medicare and medicaid. At current growth rates, you could drop military spending to zero and all the savings from that would be consumed by growth in medicare and medicaid within about 20 years.

Here's another graph which shows the relative size and growth of all the major budget components so you can see and compare what's been going on with each historically. It's from the Urban Institute if you want to read more (the CBO budget outlooks are good too). You'll note that military spending is the component which is shrinking the most, while medicare/medicaid is the component which is growing the most.

The problem is that you can't cut taxes and have an out of control military budget. You get one or the other, not both.

Please do some research before parroting things you hear. Military spending is actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been decreasing over the last 50 years (up until 9/11 when it started picking up again).

What's breaking the budget is growth in mandatory spending, primarily medicare and medicaid. At current growth rates, you could drop military spending to zero and all the savings from that would be consumed by growth in medicare and medicaid within about 20 years.

Here's another graph which shows the relative size and growth of all the major budget components so you can see and compare what's been going on with each historically. It's from the Urban Institute if you want to read more (the CBO budget outlooks are good too). You'll note that military spending is the component which is shrinking the most, while medicare/medicaid is the component which is growing the most.

No other non-profit gets to exempt non-business land like churches do.

Property taxes -- and whether churches or other property are exempt from them -- are generally matters of state and local law, and vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In jurisdictions where some church property are exempt from property taxes, other charities are generally also exempt under similar terms.

The most common rule for property tax exemption for nonprofits, including churches, seems to be that the property must be owned by a non-profit educational, charitable, or, in some jurisdictions, healthcare entity, and must be used exclusively for exempt purposes.

See, e.g., here, in the first paragraph under "Chapter Findings/Part I: Framework and Structure".

The league of crazies I speak of are the birthers, etc., who despite being shown all valid evidence to the contrary continue to propagate myths about death panels and "pulling the plug on grandma" and so forth;

No, the league of crazies that you spoke of were those who think that the current Health Care bill is unconstitutional. Your previous comment said nothing about birthers.

However, if you were to say that it was unconstitutional, you would be advocating the birther position on the matter, and they are easily the majority of people I've seen expressing that opinion. Generalization, yes. Unfounded? No.

Do you believe in free association? If so, how do you justify a mandate that people do business with health insurance companies?

I do, but I believe more in the right of a human being to healthcare regardless of income. In any other civilized nation (G8, G20, etc.), it is just that: a right. It doesn't much matter who you associate with if you've been allowed to die.

Do you believe in freedom of religion? If so, what about people whom have a religious objection to doing business with health insurance companies? If I raise a religious or moral objection is the Government going to accept my word or get into the business of determining whether or not my faith is genuine?

I believe that religion is a net negative force in the world, and that as a practice, religious-belief exceptions have a lot of grief to answer for. If your religious belief forbids such a system from coming into being, why is my belief that everyone ought to be granted the right to healthcare not equally as enforceable? I understand that you're talking about individual versus collective here, but when concern for the individual's beliefs preclude the collective from benefiting itself, something has to give. And I believe that the qualms of a few are not justification for the death of 18,000 people a year. And I also believe that the most common (Judeo-Christian) religions, at least, advocate giving of yourself to help your neighbor--so pay into the pool.

Do you believe that you have the right to be secure in your papers and effects? If so, how is it Uncle Sam's business whether or not I have health insurance?

How is it his business that you have car insurance? Whereas car insurance protects other people from your potential inability to pay should you injure them, health insurance in addition to protecting you, as above, protects the hospital and the doctors from your inability to pay.

but it's in line with the mandate to insurance companies that they have to cover you.

That could be imposed without an individual mandate. If the Democrats had sought to end the pre-existing condition practice without attaching it to the rest of this "reform" they could have passed it months ago with supermajorities in both houses of Congress. There's bipartisan support for reining in the most egregious practices of the insurance industry.

There *is* wide popular support, but did you not read what I first wrote about this? There MUST be a mandate that everyone is covered, or else people game the system and only buy insurance when they get sick. This means that the risk pool turns sour and premiums skyrocket until you're paying full hospital prices at the time of service. The mandate has to be there to prevent this, whether it's individual or employer-based. It happened that the least preferable of the two came out of the debate, but it's better than nothing and it's scarcely a price to pay for getting rid of the PEC abuses. Either have a mandate and no more PECs, or neither. That's how the economics of it work out.

You might also consider the costs that the states are going to in

I'd like to look at whatever statistics you're using.

In my understanding, the center cities in the North are substantially worse in all public health indicators than Cuba. I know the infant mortality and life expectancy in The Bronx, NY is worse than Cuba.

In fact, Fidel Castro invited a dozen Americans to attend Cuban medical school, and they did. One guy came from The Bronx. A doctor from the New England Journal of Medicine visited their school, and reported favorably on it. Castro also offered to send Cuban doctors to underserved areas of the U.S., but Bush turned him down.

U.S. health care for the poor really is terrible. It's like being in the third world. 22,000 people died in 2006 because they didn't have health insurance, according to the Urban Institute. http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411588_uninsured_dying.pdf

Don't believe me. Don't believe Michael Moore. Try to get health care for somebody who can't afford it. Call up a hospital, or try to get Medicaid. Go to a hospital emergency room and talk to the people waiting there.

For the middle class, the problem is not that you won't be able to get health care, but that you'll get a serious disease and it will drive you bankrupt. Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren said that under all the current proposals, you'll still go bankrupt.

Generational Welfare and Career Welfare is a large enough portion of the welfare rolls that it constitutes a serious problem.

http://www.urban.org/publications/900288.html

The information is about a decade old, but it's the most comprehensive I could find on short notice.

Here's a backup article that supports the claim that the job market prospects in science suck and not worthy of consideration. I regret having taking a physics degree when most employers outside of university don't consider it an asset compared to the business program degrees. http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411562_Salzman_Science.pdf

Upward mobility in the US is significantly worse than much of Europe for example and the American dream of "work hard and become rich" is just that, a dream.

It's more than just a dream. My parents were low income yet my two sisters and I went to college. My older sister and I went into the military then when we got out we both attended college. She is now a nurse. My younger sister got financial aid and worked her way through college. She got her BA then her Masters and now runs her own accounting firm. She also owns some rental property. From a low income my older sister now enjoys a medium income while the younger one enjoys a higher medium if not upper income.

Are we economically or socially equal if because of my inheritance I never have to work and simply live off the interest you and others pay me to "borrow" money so you can buy a home? Do you have the same opportunity I do?

You're equating outcome with opportunity, but yes people can move from a low income to a high income in the US. See both of my sisters.

But it still has less impact on normal people's lives than who their parents were.

Only if they let it hold them back. Most people can get financial aid in the US, or work part tyme while attending college. As I said earlier I went into the military, to save money to go to college. I wanted to be a Computer Engineer, so I enlisted in the Army and saved money to attend college after getting out. If I had been smart I also would have taken college classes while in the Army, they will pay some of your tuition. With all of your expenses paid, most people should be able to save money to take classes. I recall one Sargent in my unit, it took him 8 years but he finally earned his BA degree. And the day he got it was the happiest day I ever saw him. He could have gotten out and got a job earning a lot more money than he made in the Army, but he stayed in wanting to retire from the Army. He said something to the effect that only in America could someone go from growing up poor to being able to make a lot of money. Oh, also the military will help someone married buy a home, that's how my parents bought their home. My dad was in the Air Force, from which he retired, and they made it easy for my parents to qualify for a mortgage. Having said that, if there were one thing I could do to change how it works now what I'd do is have the military, er government, pay for one year of college for every year someone served in the military. Then I'd expand it to include civil services like the Voluntary International Service Assignments, VISA. Or the Peace Corp, which was based on VISA. The Forestry Service could start one where youth can work in the forests, I think there was one once.

"Extreme capitalism" refers to an economy where privately controlled industry is so much greater of a force than either socialism or communist cells, such that it causes the wealth to consistently consolidate into the hands of people who inherit wealth.

Ok, thanks for sharing what you mean by "extreme capitalism". However studies show the US has a high rate of mobility. While the discrepancy between what the top 10% and the bottom 50%, or whatever, has in income and wealth has widened even those at the bottom still have an easier life than just 100 years ago. Everyone is getting wealthier though the top is getting more, which I have no problem with.

Apparently you believe that paying taxes entitles you to judge the lives of others. From their perspective life may look rich and varied -- and life may look more rich and varied to those who do not just perceive worth in purely financial terms.

But for most of these people (especially those who reproduce while on welfare), they stay a drain permanently, so they are indeed "worthless" or worse.

People cannot stay on welfare for more than five years in most cases, following the welfare reform of the mid-1990s. Rants that treat welfare as it was 15 years ago make little sense.

If you think these people are so wonderful, why aren't you donating your entire income to them so they can continue with their unproductive lives?

You create a false dichotomy by saying that I either have to agree you with about "these people" (which people?) or want to donate my entire income to "them." If you read my grandparent post, you'll note that I pointed out some of the historical and other problems of the great-grandparent post.

I think what is really scary is the lifetime chance of incarceration for black men which this place: http://www.urban.org/publications/410405.html puts at 28% (versus 7% for white males).

BTW, thanks for bringing this up.

You obviously have no idea how many taxes are laid on petroleum products here. Gasoline is still relatively cheap because we drill and refine most of it here.

You're making the assumption that wages have kept pace with inflation. They haven't.

Did you mean that wage growth has exceeded inflation? On occasion, especially in the last few years, they haven't. Over the long term, though, wages have far exceeded most measures of inflation. This is why there is a debate about whether to weight future Social Security benefits on inflation rather than on wages, as it currently is (see this, for example).

I respectfully disagree with you on many issues I'm sure, but that's better than you disagreeing with yourself (and trying to make a political party out of that idea).

No problem there, I've met very many intelligent, articulate conservatives quite capable of having a respectful debate. Thus far, you certainly seem to fall into that category. I don't expect that the whole world would agree with me, that would be terribly boring.

Without health coverage does not mean without health care. Another interpretation of that statistic is that 40 million people think that they can manage their own health better than someone else managing it for them.

True, or that they are too young for anything to happen, or...

However, I would imagine that, if we did a survey of those people, we would find that at least the majority would have health coverage if they could afford it, and because they cannot, live without checkups, diagnostic screenings, and other basic health care services.

Some further information on this point:

"The proportion of children who were uninsured did not change, remaining at 11.6 percent of all children, or 8.5 million, in 2002."

Source: United States Census Bureau report. (PDF)

Children, of course, did not make that choice.

So far as adults?

"Even having to pay very small contributions to health insurance policies can deter workers from joining. In fact, about 20 percent of all uninsured people live in families where a worker has declined employer-sponsored insurance coverage, with two-thirds citing cost as the culprit. For many, the decision to purchase health insurance must compete with the need for food and housing."

Source: Urban Institute research paper.

You might be right in a few cases, but in the majority, cost of insurance is just not payable. Of course, those who cannot insurance can also not afford to pay directly for care. Therefore, lack of health insurance does, at least in a very significant number of cases, bear a causal relationship to a lack of health care. (Except in an emergency situation, where care must be provided regardless of ability to pay. Even in these circumstances, however, followup care is often inadequate.)

But there was substance there, consider:

I will indeed.

* no gay marriage

Not a substantive issue at all. It's one that raises the hair on a lot of people's necks, but no one's shown how government belongs involved in the issue in the first place. Also, he knew well that the proposed Constitutional amendment against gay marriage didn't have anywhere near the kind of support it needed in order to pass, that was pure window-dressing.

I have yet to hear any objection to gay marriage on non-religious grounds. Pursuant to the separation of church and state, religious reasons are not and cannot be a rationale for government prohibition of an activity. (I presume this to be well-known, I'll cite sources upon request.) The only other argument I've heard is that it's "not natural"-and by that rationale, we should ban cars.

* continue with war in Iraq on course

Certainly no denying that this was an issue of substance, but I would've been far more comfortable had the failures of intelligence, etc., been more thoroughly addressed by Bush, instead of glossed over with "Well he wasn't a very nice guy anyway, so it's alright in the end."

* hold Iraqi elections soon

Fair enough, but I never heard Kerry be against that one, so I'm not sure how Bush "won on" that issue-to my knowledge, it was never in dispute. If I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me. As to the fact that the elections were held on time, and went off overall quite well, I'm thrilled to see it, and I certainly hope that Iraq can stay on that course.

The federal government rarely has jurisdiction over crimes which have traditionally been prosecuted locally. Generally, there has to be an interstate or international dimension to the offense.

Federal drug prosecutions are almost entirely focused on the drug trade. In 2001 prison sentences for federal drug offenses looked like this:

Drug Trafficking 21,265, Other drug felonies, 1,648, Possession 276

I would take the odds that non-violent drug offenders in the federal system were resident in D.C. or in the handful of other places where the feds do have local police power, a military base, an Indian reservation.

It is unlikely that you will ever be charged with possession in the federal system, and unlikelier still that you will serve time. In 2001, 289 were found not guilty, 476 received probation only, over 100 were simply fined or had their sentenced suspended. Defendants in criminal cases terminating in U.S. District Court, fiscal year 2001

Having said all that. There really is a lot more to "community" than socializing, in meatspace, that is. And the benefits to getting involved in community in meatspace can be incredible. Disclaimer: I say this at a point in my life that I have no personal contact and knowledge of, but merely one of observation and conversation. It is my goal to get involved in an organization or program in the near future working with "community building". My dad has been doing this most of his life, and has some incredible stories to tell me regarding work he has been involved in, or seen happen by others doing similar work (and what he is doing right now).

*BZZT* Wrong, but thanks for playing. Numbers AND rates for violent crime among youth have dropped:

http://www.urban.org/crime/module/butts/youth-crim e-drop.html.

Pay particular attention to the section "Arrest rates":

Studies of changes in juvenile crime should always consider the possibility that fluctuations in the juvenile population may be responsible for trends seen in the number of arrests reported by law enforcement.

This was not the case during the recent crime drop. Even controlling for changes in the population, the rate of decline in juvenile arrests outpaced that of other age groups.

Aging demographics.

At some point, someone is going to have to pay for a lot of domestic servants.

The earliest boomers, like Clinton and cohort, caught the real estate boom of the 1970s. I put the catastrophe point for birth year in the early 1950s, possibly as early as 1950 as speculation from the GI generation anticipated the demand from boomers. Swelling real estate values combined with inflation-depressed real wages in the 1970s and scarcity of entry-level jobs to make being born before 1950 a very shrewd business move (fixed mortgate rates hit 19 percent in 1981 and being a fresh-out of college system level programmer for a major computer company paid around $17,000 in the late 70s.).

The earliest boomers caught this wave, built by their younger siblings, but the largest beneficiaries of all the "eat the boomers" hysteria were the GI generation real estate speculators that liquidated the savings and loan system. The largest wealth transfer in history is now occuring as dying GIs naturally favor their shrewd eldest children among the boomers. After all, they did demonstrated the business savvy, depth of character and wisdom to be born before the 50s.

This means the Clinton/Gore cohort are going to have a big gob of money as they approach retirement.

As they near retirement, these the earliest of boomers will be more and more interested in domestic servants. Whether they'll be able to put up with a mere machine rather than a living, breathing human to dominate is the real question. They did, after all, develop a taste for bossing around huge numbers of boomers who seemed to need it so much (so screwed up they couldn't land a job that could pay for a house and a family -- birth control pills and abortions were far more affordable, the way the GIs and earliest boomers did.

I don't have Sony's market research division at hand.

So, perhaps the Japanese are playing a game of offering strange toys like this "massage/errand boy" robot as a means of feeling out how much of the earliest boomer/GI-legacy gold mine they can grab with machine lackies.

The Japanese need pervasive automation even more than the aging US population because the Japanese are less willing to import labor from other nations. Grabbing the gold with these expensive toys may be the way they finance real automation technology that they desparately need.