sorry, the new slashdot lags so badly in epiphany that a simple typo correction can lead to a complete brain fart if you try to correct it. I never thought I'd say I miss D2.
Under the tutelage of his guest, Mullah Omar began to see his goal as more than the liberation of Afghanistan and he progressively signed on to the idea of a worldwide jihad against the United States.
Still, differences remained. "There was a closeness, but I would not go as far as saying bin Laden was the de facto defense minister," a Western diplomat said. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda were not one and the same."
Some of the evidence left behind in the Defense Ministry house indicated the gap between Mr. bin Laden, the guest under fire, and Mullah Omar, the beleaguered protector.
In an exchange of letters full of theological reasoning, Mr. bin Laden asked Mullah Omar not to turn him over to the Americans, and the Taliban leader granted his request.
But items left in the ministry building and houses occupied by Al Qaeda members showed that the Taliban government aided the terrorist network's operations inside Afghanistan.
Documents showed that Al Qaeda was closely integrated with the Taliban Ministry of Defense in the field. For instance, maps of front-line Taliban positions across the country were found in Al Qaeda houses, and neighbors said the men who lived in the houses regularly traveled to the front lines.
While not a direct link to a quote stating he was officially declared the defense minister (sorry, I don't have decade old news links bookmarked), this does give evidence pointing to the talk at that time of Osama being the Taliban's Defense Minister plus backs that up with the Ministry of Defense and Al Qaeda directly working together. I'm almost positive I read the original association in 1999 or 2000, before Clinton left office, but I could be wrong and it's possible it was in the first few months of the Bush years. It was definitely before 9/11.
Can you say reductio ad absurdum? Clearly believing the evidence that was presented by both parties for a half decade prior to re-engaging with Saddam on an argument virtually everyone in Congress approved of, is the same thing as believing there are lizard overlords.... Come on, Congress is mostly made up of lawyers, they're sharks, not lizards.
Going after terrorists - yes (9/11 terrorists or any others), but didn't the 9/11 ones mostly come from Saudi Arabia?
For better or worse, Saudi Arabia is generally cooperative with us, while the Taliban was completely uncooperative plus fully supported Al Qaeda (in fact, I seem to remember them naming Osama their Minister of Defense back in the late 90s/early 2000s prior to the attack, though there was some doubt about just how official the role was). Personally, I would have leaned on Saudi Arabia a lot harder for them to clean their act up since it is basically our influence alone that keeps the royal family in power... but there's little doubt that the Taliban, at a minimum, had no problems with having his terrorism training camps on their soil.
Libya's definitely for oil - Britain would have to be supporting her commonwealth member Zimbabwe if she really did these things for compassionate reasons (for example), but the Iraqi oil supply was divided up between non Iraqi oil companies in discussions and agreements between European countries and America months before the invasion - not something that adds to the argument that invading was for some bits of equipment that may at some stage have been parts of WMDs or simple regime change (an admission by Tony Blair in the Chilcot enquiry).
In hindsight, it's easy to say we didn't really need to intervene in Iraq... and that the intel that led us there was supremely fucked up. But Libya is so blatantly about oil, it's hard to pretend it is anything but as Europe has routinely turned a blind eye to despotic tyrrany virtually everywhere else in the world. On a side note, NATO's relevance died with the Soviet Bloc and it should have been dissolved then, there's no reason to turn a purely defensive response pact into an organization of aggressision regardless of how noble anyone thinks the purposes are.
Republicans, Democrats, Bush, Obama - even if there was once a noticeable difference it seems that now they're picking an the tiniest detail to disagree to make it seem as thought there's a difference between them
One word unites them all... authoritarianism, ie, the notion that government knows what is best for you and must tell you what to do. They are the sign that government, and particularly the executive branch, has grown far too powerful and has overstepped its purpose and bounds.
If you can defend Iraq, after all these years - you're beyond reason.
reread what I said... I supportedED Iraq based on the information at the time... and even then, I felt the nation building plan post-Saddam was the wrong way to go (and prior to being elected, one of the things that GWB ran on that I supported (and still support) is the US getting out of the business of nation building, making him just as much of a hypocrite on that issue as Obama is on Gitmo).
As you are if you think Obama is "left" of anything except far right.
Obama is an authoritarian collectivist in terms of political outlook, though he's been handcuffed from fully pursuing that vision, resulting in a governance more akin to authoritarian crony captialism. His desire to expand the government until it can solve any one of our woes is hardly a right-wing perspective, though the theocratic republicans that see government as a means to their personal salvation might share that outlook with him.
And yes, I'm a member of the far right based on the simplistic left/right scale, ending up somewhere between a conservative, classical liberal and libertarian. I see government as an evil, albiet a necessary one, so while we need a government, it should be as minimalistic as possible otherwise it tramples our freedom. I fully admit that I'm a bit of a radial in my political views, but most people tend to see themselves as a moderate/centrist regardless of where they really fall on their scales. If you can't acknowledge Obama as a leftist by virtue of his collectivist desires, maybe you need to reconsider where exactly the "middle" is.
But citing Saul Alinsky tells me that you're getting your talking points from talk radio pundits, and not doing anything other than partisan water-carrying.
Yeah, because there's no history of the left using Alinsky's tactics in US politics... that's what community organizing is all about. Scary part for the left, is the right has started to catch on and now we're beginning to play by the same rulebook. THAT is why the left is shitting itself over people like Andrew Breitbart, James O'keefe, etc.
As if there was more against Saddam than against Qaddafi! What a joke
Yes, there was a decade long campaign by Saddam to try to instigate the rest of the world, especially his neighbors into thinking his desires laid outside his own borders, including the invasion of Iraq. Qaddafi was most definitely a sponsor of terrorism in the 1980s, but after the fall of Saddam, he was practically falling over himself to prove he had no ambitions outside of his country, including voluntarily surrendering his WMD research. Qaddafi by 2011 was a tinpot dictator that was a threat to nobody but his own people, leaving the US with virtually no national interest in him. But if Qaddafi was so bad, why didn't we intervene in Iran during the uprising during Obama's term since he is a bigger threat internationally? Obama has tried to have it every which way, he's utterly inconsistent in all of his foreign policy, but the left just continues to make excuses for him rather than holding him to the same standard that they would hold a Republican to. THAT is hypocrisy.
But when that charge comes from someone who more or less supported the Bush administration or is in the Republican mainstream (or the more bellicose corners of the Tea Party) then its worse than hypocrisy. It's like shitting in your room and complaining that your brother isn't cleaning it fast enough.
As a member of the tea party movement (and I congratulate you on being smarter than the slashdotters who seem to think we're some top down monolithic organization because their favorite pundits say so) that supported the actions in Afghanistan (going after the terrorists that committed 9/11) and Iraq (we had more than enough UN authorization stating that Saddam wasn't acting according to his agreements, we did find WMDs despite the continuing memes, etc), but doesn't support the war in Libya (we have absolutely no interests there, if Europe wants to fight that war, they can without us... and yes, it is purely a war for oil or else Europe would be intervening in about half the countries around the world where despots are harming the citizens)...
It isn't hypocritical for me to mock Obama for not shutting down Obama. I'm just doing to him what every Democrat does to "family values Republicans" that fail to live up to their own values, pointing out their hypocrisy. See, Democrats are generally immune to charges of cheating on spouses and whatnot since they don't profess to support "family values" which is why Clinton constantly gets a pass. So, as someone that supported and continues to support Gitmo, I'm not the least bit hypocritical for pointing out that Obama fails to live up to his beliefs regardless of my opinions on that subject.
Don't blame me... just like the left, I learned it from Saul Alinsky:
RULE 4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity's very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)
RULE 6: "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." They'll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They're doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different that any other human being. We all avoid "un-fun" activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
If you put all of the FICA taxes and T-bills owned by the Social Security Administration towards what they're supposed to be going for, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, are doing collectively just fine right now, and will continue to be more-or-less just fine for decades.
In 1967, a Democratic Congress (247-187 House, 64-36 Senate) passed legislation (an amendment to the Social Security Act) that was signed by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, which declared that any government program running a surplus would transfer that surplus to the general fund with a promise that the general fund would repay the program in years that the program was running a deficit.
Those brand new Great Society entitlement programs had vastly exceeded their projections within two years and combined with the escalation in Vietnam meant that the US was going to be racking up huge deficits and the people in power wanted to paper over their mistakes so they could get re-elected (by not calling them mistakes and screwing over future generations, whom wouldn't be able to retaliate against some either already retired or dead politician in the future). In 1971, entitlement spending passed military spending, despite being in the middle of a war, and has vastly outgrown military spending ever since.
But by all means, blame Reagan and only Reagan even though as far back as the early 60s, he was warning us about the future insolvency of the entitlement system.
A multibillion dollar sports league, its players union and a fan are sitting around a table with a dozen cookies. The league takes 7, the players take 5. Both turn to the fan and say "you didn't make enough cookies, better make us more."
The fan is likely to tell both of them to fuck off. Only the ideologues lining up behind either group are going to side with one while disparaging the other, all while declaring that they alone speak for the fan.
Second, the single greatest expansion of federal government spending has been entitlements - namely, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Social spending eclipsed military spending in 1971 and has been skyrocketing since, but just stick to your talking point (oh, I know, now you'll fall back on "discretionary spending" while ignoring that Congress still has to approve social spending and can change it any time they wish). Oh, and nevermind all of the state and local social spending on to of that, ignoring that state military budgets are essentially nonexistant so military spending doesn't increase with it.
Third, you can take 100% of the WEALTH of the Forbes 400, at $1.54 trillion, and pay off last year's deficit spending. The tea party isn't just about cutting taxes, in fact, it's more about cutting spending than it is cutting taxes. Our spending levels are completely unsustainable and going into the future, we've got annual trillion dollar deficits are far as the eye can see before you even take into account the ENRON level fraud of the cost estimates of ObamaCare.
As for your Jefferson quote, most of the tea partiers would love an end to the Fed. It's the big government types that like it since it allows them to keep spending without actually being accountable for what they're doing, just like the decision to raid the Social Security Trust Fund in 1967 because the costs of the Great Society programs massively exceeded its estimates and Congress/LBJ wanted to pretend they didn't bankrupt us.
This is exactly what the government wants. By having a complicated tax code, they get direct political donations, they get high level jobs in the private sector after they leave office hiding the quid pro quo, etc. Corporations love it since it is a way to grant themselves exemptions and credits.
For the people that want the government to encourage or discourage certain types of behaviors through tax incentives, YOU TOO are part of the problem. Want a tax credit for green energy? Want a tax credit for child care? Want a tax credit for charitable donations? You're writing more loopholes into the tax code and complicating it, which allows people to play games to reduce their tax burden and if you're rich enough to afford the best tax specialists, you can really reduce your taxation.
How about a standard deduction, say $30k for everyone, adjusted for inflation in the future, and then apply a tax rate on anything over that amount (I prefer a flat tax, but a progressive tax would work if that's what others favor)? Further, I know it's crazy talk around here, but maybe we should get government out of the business of trying to be everything to everyone and reduce its scope so that there is no incentive to buy it in the first place...
Agreed, neither of the major parties give a rats ass about adhering to the Constitution. That's why it has been under a systemic assault for at least a solid century. You see, the Founding Fathers could have never known that our governmental needs may change in the future, so they didn't give us a way to grant government new power via an amendment process... ok, so they did, but, darn it, it's too hard to pass an amendment so we shouold just abandon the process entirely, ignoring the fact that it is deliberaltely difficult to pass an amendment, because while government is a necessary evil, it is still evil, and we should conisder the full ramifications of drastic changes to our core governing principles rather than changing them on a whim.
You seem to have missed the truth that 2 judges have ruled that the federal health care reform law in unconstitutional while 2 have ruled that it is constitutional
Clearly, in a reply to a post pondering that the debate of whether or not Obamacare is Unconstitutional has been overlooked, I should have gone into the rulings that confirmed it, right? If the default assumption is that it is perfectly Constitutional, then the news that two judges confirmed it is nothing of note, correct? Did I also not say that it would be on its way to the Supreme Court for review? Clearly, there is a debate going on BUT some people, by virtue of their choice of media outlets or intellectual laziness, haven't acknowledged that it may, indeed be Unconstitutional.
As a U.S. citizen who is looking forward to the Supreme Court striking down a law that forces citizens to buy over priced insurance policies from corrupt scum bag corporations I can also see that a single payer system would be good for the welfare of the entire nation, from individual citizens to all corporations excluding the scum bags currently ripping off citizens.
Hey, welcome to the strawman. You don't want to debate whether or not it is Constitutional, clearly your mind is made up since two judges ruled in your favor, so let's set up those evil corporations and how they harm the little people so we can argue how bad we need socialized medicine regardless of its Constitutionality so we can tear them apart instead. Want socialized medicine? Pass an amendment giving the federal government the power to do so. Alas, we get distract and deflect.
What's more interesting, is whether or not Justice Kagan will recuse herself since, as Solicitor General, she advised the Obama administration on the very bill that will be coming before the court, giving her a rather substantial conflict of interest.
So I have to ask, that super Koolaid you are drinking that blinds you from reality, is it a bum trip or a super high cause I wouldn't want a bum trip but if the fantasy world your living in is any fun perhaps it would be worthwhile to take a sip.
and now we resort to ridicule and personal attacks... classic tactic of attack the messenger if you can't defeat the message. yawn. Do you actually have any arguments to make or do you just have kneejerk reactions every time someone posts something that you don't want to think about? Hey, could it be that I'm encouraging you to stop YOUR koolaid politics? I mean, not that you drink the koolaid, you just always know what is best and I'm just dumb (and probably one of those evil, racist, ignorant teabaggers). After all, Colbert told you reality has a liberal bias.
Given this, and given the large scale similarities with the US Consititution, it does indeed seem as if any such system implemented in America would require section 8 of the US Constitution to be amended. Interesting how this is an issue that has seemingly been overlooked in the debate.
Lots of Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and tea partiers have been saying it is Unconstitutional (and have been going as far back as HillaryCare in the mid-90s, if not sooner if you want to get into the Medicare/Medicaid debate too). Two judges have ruled it to be Unconstitutional so far and it is making its way up to the Supreme Court for review. When confronted, then Speaker Pelosi and numerous other Democrats refused to acknowledge even the notion that it might be Unconstitutional and often resorted to condescension of constituents and reporters that dared to ask.
In an effort to try to get around the Constitutional argument, the Obama administration has tried to claim that it is a tax and not a penalty, while during "debate" Congressional Democrats argued that it was a penalty and not a tax. They've argued that it is interstate commerce because the effect of choosing NOT to participate in commerce is an act of commerce in itself. And if I hear one more person try to justify it under the "general welfare" clause when they clearly have no clue what the "general welfare" means (read both the Federalist and Anti-federalist papers, it meant the overall ability for government to maintain itself and function, not welfare in the modern notion), I think my head is going to explode.
People have their biases and they like to seek out information and sources that confirm rather than challenge their assertions and assumptions... those on the left whom limit themselves to only "friendly" sources, plus those that do seek out "enemy" sources but dismiss everything the opposition has to say anyway, might have had a hard time finding coherent arguments to why ObamaCare wasn't a good thing, well, other than the far left that cried that ObamaCare just didn't go far enough. Do a search on google for "obamacare unconstitutional" between Feb 1, 2009 and Sep 30, 2009 and you'll get 167k hits and that was still months before final passage. Remember the Democrats canceling their town halls so they wouldn't have to face angry constituents?
With online banking, everything is recorded and tied to the transaction for verification purposes. Most people want their vote done by secret balloting so that how they choose to vote can be tied directly to them. Any way of tying a vote to a person means that some abusive figure in their life (boss, spouse, parent, etc) can order them to vote a certain way "or else" and then verify that the vote was done according to the abuser's demands.
Once you lose the identifiying information from the transation, it's trivial to rig an electronic vote and you can't verify that your vote counted properly. That's why voting and banking are completely different beasts and why voting is a much harder problem to solve.
I'd consider the Brookings Institute or the Cato Institute on the opposite side as biased... I'm not saying that their studies are faulty since I haven't read them, just that I'd take anything they say with a mountain of salt.
Your first link was published in 1992 and was one of the thing my the 1995 annual report was out to debunk USING the data from your second link.
The third link, and I fully realize this is an ad hominem but I don't have time to go through the paper right now, comes from a source whose primary goal is to push the progressive agenda onto America and one of the ways they do that is through class warfare. That's like getting a paper on how non-white people suck from the KKK.
So do you have a source that actually has some credibility and isn't 1) already fully debunked or 2) doesn't come from a group with an agenda?
There's further evidence that being in the low-income bracket isn't, for a large majority of people, permanent. Less than 0.5 percent of the sample showed up in the bottom quintile every year from 1975 to 1991.3 Nearly a quarter of those in the bottom tier in 1975 moved up the next year and never again returned. More than three-quarters of the lowest 20 percent in 1975 made it into the top 40 percent of income earners for at least one year by 1991. In fact, the poor made the most dramatic gains in the income distribution. Those who started in the bottom quintile in 1975 had a $25,322 average gain in real income by 1991. In the top quintile, the increase was $3,974. In other words, the rich have gotten a little richer, but the poor have gotten much richer. (See Exhibit 5.)
The patterns are similar in other quintiles. Among the second poorest quintile in 1975, more than 70 percent had moved to a higher bracket by 1991--with 26 percent going all the way to the top tier. From the middle grouping, almost half of the income earners managed to make themselves better off. A third of the people in the second highest quintile made it to the highest fifth during these 17 years. All through the University of Michigan data, there's a consistent, powerful thrust toward the top of the income distribution.
Minimum wage is the floor other wages stand on. If it were taken away, wages would be completely controlled by the market, which may be a good thing for employers. What about those 5%? Their wages would undoubtedly fall, because the demand for unskilled labor will always be outstripped by the supply.
I used to manage a family restaurant, which is a typical place where you'll find minimum wage jobs for inexperienced people. Generally, that means either teenagers, whom have little dependence on that money since their parent(s) take care of their primary needs, or adults whom have a very poor work ethic and, thus, can't do any better for themselves. Adults and teenagers that show up regularly, on time and do their job while they are there get paid more than minimum wage because they become an asset.
Teenagers are extremely sensitive (ever have someone cry because you explained to them that they rang something up wrong?), don't understand that they can't just take a day off any time they want to especially with all of their co-workers at the same time, and they generally have an entitlement complex despite not having any experience or, frequently, even basic knowledge or ability to do simple tasks like make change (the lack of math education glares here) or mop a floor. On top of that, there are a ton of tasks that they aren't even allowed to do (operate any type of powered equipment, they can't use something like a stool or ladder, the hours they can work are very restrictive, etc). The state says I have to pay them $7.15 an hour, just like their adult counterparts without any of the restrictions and, whom likely have more knowledge and experience. I'd prefer to hire 2 teens at $5 each, but I'll hire one adult at $9 first (note that I'm paying the adult a premium for their experience), meaning the teenagers are being priced out of the workforce at the expense of the teenagers, the business and possibly the customers (two people servicing them rather than one).
Further, because minimum wage is likely to be paid to low skilled workers doing menial jobs that the rest of the economy is based on, any increase in the minimum wage cases an increase of base inflation in the market. As the minimum wage increases, teenagers earning disposable income make more money but the people making marginally above minimum wage that are likely to be adults don't get a corresponding wage increase, lowering their buying power as the cost of goods and services rise to meet the increased cost of the raised minimum wage.
On top of that, there is a huge black market built to avoid paying the minimum wage already. Lots of people get paid under the table, not just illegal aliens, to avoid paying taxes or the minimum wage anyway. That means the market already sees the minimum wage as an inefficiency and some people will be willing to break the law to circumvent it. Sure, some of those employers are looking to exploit their workers, but often, the workers are happy to take the job anyway or they wouldn't have agreed to take it in the first place.
Somewhere along the line, we got away from the thinking that the minimum wage should be the absolute bottom of the market and started thinking it should be enough money to raise a family on. That's flat out crazy since the majority of people making minimum wage aren't trying to raise a family on their minimum wage job, it's largely disposable income or income being earned by someone working part time in addition to their primary job... and further, it overlooks the inflationary effects of the minimum wage, causing the buying power of lower income adults to decrease, hurting them the most anyway.
Funny, since he never made that argument in any of his replies to me.
He outright states that corporations have a duty to waste money on job programs for unnecessary jobs at the expense of their profit - not obscene profits, any profit in general... and that corporations should only be able to profit after everyone, not only its employees, but everyone, in society has all of their needs met.
He further declined (and I got downmodded for asking, yay for "-1, I disagree") to reply as to when making a profit became a bad thing and why profits are bad in the first place. His problem is with anyone profiting in general, not with "abusive profits."
Nobody wants to be useless (well some do, but I all for bribing them not to steal - cheaper than jail).
Lots of people don't care if they are useless. Welfare (at least in the US) produces ongoing inter-generational dependency. Today's welfare recipients have a very high likelihood of producing tomorrow's welfare recipients while never actually getting off the dole themselves. And why would they when they get all of the creature comforts of the middle class without any of the work? There's simply no incentive, other than their own internal motivation, for them to leave the sytem.
I think you and I can agree greed is a fairly inherent trait to humanity. Everyone is motivated to get as much as they can for as little as possible... and that's a pretty strong motivation when you're completely subsidizing someone with everything they need to survive. The greed problem is center to the downfall of every collectivist society that has been attempted, because everyone expects everyone else to supply them with their needs. By not supplying those needs (at least to able bodied people, I have no problem helping the disabled), we incentivize them to at least support themselves while disincentivizing bad behaviors (having more kids than you can afford, dropping out of public school, getting drunk all the time, etc).
What motivates is seeing a path to a better place. At the moment, there is or soon will be more people than work, and we really should think of what we can do with that.
The betterment of humanity may motivate you, but it doesn't motivate most people. Most people don't really give a damn beyond their own circle - themselves, their family and friends and maybe their local community. You're just idealistically ignoring humanity.
So, let's talk about your whine about entitlement: it is a fact that most of the financial gains in the past 40 years have gone to the already rich, while the middle class is at best treading water. The top 1% own 90% of everything, and the income disparity is greater than in 1929. If we don't fix this, we will have a revolt of some sort, I guarantee it.
I'll concede that the wealthy have absolutely gotten wealthier, but I harshly reject your notion that the middle class has suffered for it. 40 years ago, home computers were unheard of, only the rich had air conditioning, people were still mowing their lawns by hand, a flight was a special event, etc. Today's middle class has most of the benefits that yesterday's elite had.
The problem is, the middle class, especially the lower middle class, is burdened with giving a lifestyle similar to their own to millions of people that don't even try to help themselves. In doing so, we disincentivize the middle class to put in any work, encouraging them through greed to just live off the public dole as well - just look at how duration times on unemployment consistently grow every time the maximum duration expands, people are glad to get paid to do nothing. And no, taxing the rich more won't help either - confiscating all of the assets of the Forbes 400 will net you a one time grab of $1.54 trillion, while we spend $865 billion annually on welfare just at the federal level (and countless more when you add in what the states and local governments contribute on top of it).
If you're interested in challenging your own world view, check out Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell, in particular, Chapter 5.
Now to the flip side - providing a base level of support no matter what removes a lot of the desperation from the poor and enables more risk taking - health care that you can't lose means that starting a company is less of a risk, and you don't have to stay at company X because you got thyroid cancer a while back.
That doesn't mean that we need to provide the healthcare for "free" as a society, we can simply mandate that pre-existing conditions can't disqualify you for insura
We're past the point where we have enough labor to get everything done, and we need to do something with the people we replace with machines.
There are new opportunities out there for them right now, even in the craptastic economy that we have. And if they can't find someone to hire them, they have every opportunity to create work for themselves. No, they might not have the knowledge, ability or money to, say, create a new microchip, but they can start painting houses, learn how to sew, mow lawns or become a mechanic. They may not be glory jobs that will earn you a fleet of sports cars (actually, if you end up being good at what you do, you just might get that fleet anyway), but they're good, honest jobs that will instill a sense of pride because you're providing for your family. I know a guy worth $2 million dollars that builds and sells sheds and 20 years ago, he didn't know how to operate a saw.
Realizing that you must either take care of yourself or starve is a massive incentive for you to get off your ass and find a way to make money... and once you start providing a service, even if you aren't making lots of profits yet, you start contributing TO society rather than simply leeching from it. The problem is, we've been conditioned to believe that we're entitled to everything we need to survive, that by our mere existence, society owes us a lifestyle regardless of the choices we make. And they aren't owed just the minimum to get by, people are taught demand everything the richest people get (which is why you get all the class warfare whining). Nevermind the guy putting in 80 hours a week to keep his business running, that guy is an asshole because he has more than us.
People are guaranteed the right to an education in the US. Millions of people throw it away every year and then they proceed to blame society for keeping them down. Meanwhile, people like you enable them, telling us we must coddle them or else face their wrath.
Everyone loves to tote Ben Franklin quotes around here... well, the one about trading essential liberty for temporary safety by giving up our rights to government when we get scared of a boogeyman, er, hey, wait, isn't that what you're doing? We must surrender our economic liberty to keep those desperate people from getting a job to support themselves. But actually, I was thinking of another one of his quotes:
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not taking them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
YEAH! Things were so much better back before the invention of the cotton gin, where slaves toiled in the field all day... and hey, lots not forget how good we had it when everyone had to farm their own land, toiling behind the horse or ox with the plow all day to feed their family. Those were the days... everyone was employed. We really had it made back then. Too bad technology had to come along, automating those processes and freeing people up to work on other things.
Then these computers we're typing on... it's too bad all of those manual computors lost their jobs calculating tables. I mean, just think of where we'd be if computers had never been invented. Just how many more people could have jobs today?
Come on, technology obsoletes jobs, making us all more efficient, raising our quality of life and enabling us to move onto better things. People can adapt or they can fall by the wayside. Whining about it won't stop the course of technological evolution.
Hey, look at that, you picked the tipping point, just before the rest of the world finally catching back up as the epitome of union success! By golly, if only everyone had unions, we could operate as efficiently as the government does since that's the primary home of unions today. Oh, wait, all of the governments are going bankrupt too!
And I don't believe there is rioting in France and the UK because the "welfare states" are "unsustainable". It's because the citizens are starting to figure out that they being asked to sacrifice in order to make sure banks can be made whole to the tune of 100 cents on the dollar for losses incurred by their bad decisions.
So, governments not being able to pay their citizens promised benefits is a factor of the banks losing money? Nope, it's all those evil banks, right? Wait, who sets the rules that the banks can operate under in the first place? Oh yeah, the governments.
The riots over there are part of the same frustration with the class warfare being perpetrated by the rich that is starting to manifest itself here in the States in the unfocused rage of the Tea Party.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's part of the frustration caused by the people constantly agitating a mentality that society owes them everything they could possibly ever want in life without the need to actually go out and obtain it for themselves. What does it matter how much some rich guy makes? The poor have every opportunity to rise but they choose to hold themselves down - they refuse to educate themselves, they think they're owed vast sums of money and can shortcut their way to it so they make stupid moves that hurt them in the long run, they have kids they can't afford, etc... yet they blame everyone else for their choices. It's hard to succeed when you're busy blaming everyone else for your own failures.
As for the "unfocused rage" of the tea parties, clearly, you know little about the tea party movement other than what your talking heads told you to think about them...
Consider that for a moment. Consider also that when unions were the strongest so was the US economy. When unions were the strongest we had the largest, healthiest middle class. When unions were the strongest, we had the greatest drop in poverty.
The period where the rest of the first world was busy blowing up each others manufacturing capability while the industries of the US and Canada remained safely separated by large oceans? Yeah, that was the unions creating prosperity and not the fact that we were exporting stuff all over the world. Over time, as the rest of the first world restabilized, those unions then killed the goose that laid the golden egg, demanding ever increasing amounts until their jobs started leaving and their businesses became unsustainable under ridiculous compensation packages.
The countries that are doing best in the world right now have strong labor movements and very pro-labor policies. I'm not talking about places like China where you've got a handful of people who are doing much better and almost everyone is still working for three bucks a day, but places like Germany and other European countries that have huge trade surpluses because they have pro-labor policies, union membership and most of all, universal health care. Not to mention free education.
Which countries other than Germany in Europe are thriving? Was it Greece, where they're rioting? France, where they're rioting? Britain, where they're rioting? Oh yeah, and aren't a lot of those countries starting to look to reduce their welfare states since they aren't sustainable, which is the root cause of the rioting?
Slashdot Mirror
sorry, the new slashdot lags so badly in epiphany that a simple typo correction can lead to a complete brain fart if you try to correct it. I never thought I'd say I miss D2.
Under the tutelage of his guest, Mullah Omar began to see his goal as more than the liberation of Afghanistan and he progressively signed on to the idea of a worldwide jihad against the United States.
Still, differences remained. "There was a closeness, but I would not go as far as saying bin Laden was the de facto defense minister," a Western diplomat said. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda were not one and the same."
Some of the evidence left behind in the Defense Ministry house indicated the gap between Mr. bin Laden, the guest under fire, and Mullah Omar, the beleaguered protector.
In an exchange of letters full of theological reasoning, Mr. bin Laden asked Mullah Omar not to turn him over to the Americans, and the Taliban leader granted his request.
But items left in the ministry building and houses occupied by Al Qaeda members showed that the Taliban government aided the terrorist network's operations inside Afghanistan.
Documents showed that Al Qaeda was closely integrated with the Taliban Ministry of Defense in the field. For instance, maps of front-line Taliban positions across the country were found in Al Qaeda houses, and neighbors said the men who lived in the houses regularly traveled to the front lines.
While not a direct link to a quote stating he was officially declared the defense minister (sorry, I don't have decade old news links bookmarked), this does give evidence pointing to the talk at that time of Osama being the Taliban's Defense Minister plus backs that up with the Ministry of Defense and Al Qaeda directly working together. I'm almost positive I read the original association in 1999 or 2000, before Clinton left office, but I could be wrong and it's possible it was in the first few months of the Bush years. It was definitely before 9/11.
Can you say reductio ad absurdum? Clearly believing the evidence that was presented by both parties for a half decade prior to re-engaging with Saddam on an argument virtually everyone in Congress approved of, is the same thing as believing there are lizard overlords.... Come on, Congress is mostly made up of lawyers, they're sharks, not lizards.
Going after terrorists - yes (9/11 terrorists or any others), but didn't the 9/11 ones mostly come from Saudi Arabia?
For better or worse, Saudi Arabia is generally cooperative with us, while the Taliban was completely uncooperative plus fully supported Al Qaeda (in fact, I seem to remember them naming Osama their Minister of Defense back in the late 90s/early 2000s prior to the attack, though there was some doubt about just how official the role was). Personally, I would have leaned on Saudi Arabia a lot harder for them to clean their act up since it is basically our influence alone that keeps the royal family in power... but there's little doubt that the Taliban, at a minimum, had no problems with having his terrorism training camps on their soil.
Libya's definitely for oil - Britain would have to be supporting her commonwealth member Zimbabwe if she really did these things for compassionate reasons (for example), but the Iraqi oil supply was divided up between non Iraqi oil companies in discussions and agreements between European countries and America months before the invasion - not something that adds to the argument that invading was for some bits of equipment that may at some stage have been parts of WMDs or simple regime change (an admission by Tony Blair in the Chilcot enquiry).
In hindsight, it's easy to say we didn't really need to intervene in Iraq... and that the intel that led us there was supremely fucked up. But Libya is so blatantly about oil, it's hard to pretend it is anything but as Europe has routinely turned a blind eye to despotic tyrrany virtually everywhere else in the world. On a side note, NATO's relevance died with the Soviet Bloc and it should have been dissolved then, there's no reason to turn a purely defensive response pact into an organization of aggressision regardless of how noble anyone thinks the purposes are.
Republicans, Democrats, Bush, Obama - even if there was once a noticeable difference it seems that now they're picking an the tiniest detail to disagree to make it seem as thought there's a difference between them
One word unites them all... authoritarianism, ie, the notion that government knows what is best for you and must tell you what to do. They are the sign that government, and particularly the executive branch, has grown far too powerful and has overstepped its purpose and bounds.
If you can defend Iraq, after all these years - you're beyond reason.
reread what I said... I supportedED Iraq based on the information at the time... and even then, I felt the nation building plan post-Saddam was the wrong way to go (and prior to being elected, one of the things that GWB ran on that I supported (and still support) is the US getting out of the business of nation building, making him just as much of a hypocrite on that issue as Obama is on Gitmo).
As you are if you think Obama is "left" of anything except far right.
Obama is an authoritarian collectivist in terms of political outlook, though he's been handcuffed from fully pursuing that vision, resulting in a governance more akin to authoritarian crony captialism. His desire to expand the government until it can solve any one of our woes is hardly a right-wing perspective, though the theocratic republicans that see government as a means to their personal salvation might share that outlook with him.
And yes, I'm a member of the far right based on the simplistic left/right scale, ending up somewhere between a conservative, classical liberal and libertarian. I see government as an evil, albiet a necessary one, so while we need a government, it should be as minimalistic as possible otherwise it tramples our freedom. I fully admit that I'm a bit of a radial in my political views, but most people tend to see themselves as a moderate/centrist regardless of where they really fall on their scales. If you can't acknowledge Obama as a leftist by virtue of his collectivist desires, maybe you need to reconsider where exactly the "middle" is.
But citing Saul Alinsky tells me that you're getting your talking points from talk radio pundits, and not doing anything other than partisan water-carrying.
Yeah, because there's no history of the left using Alinsky's tactics in US politics... that's what community organizing is all about. Scary part for the left, is the right has started to catch on and now we're beginning to play by the same rulebook. THAT is why the left is shitting itself over people like Andrew Breitbart, James O'keefe, etc.
As if there was more against Saddam than against Qaddafi! What a joke
Yes, there was a decade long campaign by Saddam to try to instigate the rest of the world, especially his neighbors into thinking his desires laid outside his own borders, including the invasion of Iraq. Qaddafi was most definitely a sponsor of terrorism in the 1980s, but after the fall of Saddam, he was practically falling over himself to prove he had no ambitions outside of his country, including voluntarily surrendering his WMD research. Qaddafi by 2011 was a tinpot dictator that was a threat to nobody but his own people, leaving the US with virtually no national interest in him. But if Qaddafi was so bad, why didn't we intervene in Iran during the uprising during Obama's term since he is a bigger threat internationally? Obama has tried to have it every which way, he's utterly inconsistent in all of his foreign policy, but the left just continues to make excuses for him rather than holding him to the same standard that they would hold a Republican to. THAT is hypocrisy.
But when that charge comes from someone who more or less supported the Bush administration or is in the Republican mainstream (or the more bellicose corners of the Tea Party) then its worse than hypocrisy. It's like shitting in your room and complaining that your brother isn't cleaning it fast enough.
As a member of the tea party movement (and I congratulate you on being smarter than the slashdotters who seem to think we're some top down monolithic organization because their favorite pundits say so) that supported the actions in Afghanistan (going after the terrorists that committed 9/11) and Iraq (we had more than enough UN authorization stating that Saddam wasn't acting according to his agreements, we did find WMDs despite the continuing memes, etc), but doesn't support the war in Libya (we have absolutely no interests there, if Europe wants to fight that war, they can without us... and yes, it is purely a war for oil or else Europe would be intervening in about half the countries around the world where despots are harming the citizens)...
It isn't hypocritical for me to mock Obama for not shutting down Obama. I'm just doing to him what every Democrat does to "family values Republicans" that fail to live up to their own values, pointing out their hypocrisy. See, Democrats are generally immune to charges of cheating on spouses and whatnot since they don't profess to support "family values" which is why Clinton constantly gets a pass. So, as someone that supported and continues to support Gitmo, I'm not the least bit hypocritical for pointing out that Obama fails to live up to his beliefs regardless of my opinions on that subject.
Don't blame me... just like the left, I learned it from Saul Alinsky:
RULE 4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity's very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)
RULE 6: "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." They'll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They're doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different that any other human being. We all avoid "un-fun" activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
If you put all of the FICA taxes and T-bills owned by the Social Security Administration towards what they're supposed to be going for, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, are doing collectively just fine right now, and will continue to be more-or-less just fine for decades.
In 1967, a Democratic Congress (247-187 House, 64-36 Senate) passed legislation (an amendment to the Social Security Act) that was signed by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, which declared that any government program running a surplus would transfer that surplus to the general fund with a promise that the general fund would repay the program in years that the program was running a deficit.
Those brand new Great Society entitlement programs had vastly exceeded their projections within two years and combined with the escalation in Vietnam meant that the US was going to be racking up huge deficits and the people in power wanted to paper over their mistakes so they could get re-elected (by not calling them mistakes and screwing over future generations, whom wouldn't be able to retaliate against some either already retired or dead politician in the future). In 1971, entitlement spending passed military spending, despite being in the middle of a war, and has vastly outgrown military spending ever since.
But by all means, blame Reagan and only Reagan even though as far back as the early 60s, he was warning us about the future insolvency of the entitlement system.
A multibillion dollar sports league, its players union and a fan are sitting around a table with a dozen cookies. The league takes 7, the players take 5. Both turn to the fan and say "you didn't make enough cookies, better make us more."
The fan is likely to tell both of them to fuck off. Only the ideologues lining up behind either group are going to side with one while disparaging the other, all while declaring that they alone speak for the fan.
Exactly where do you get your information about the tea party movement? Because just about everything you say is wrong.
First, Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
Second, the single greatest expansion of federal government spending has been entitlements - namely, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Social spending eclipsed military spending in 1971 and has been skyrocketing since, but just stick to your talking point (oh, I know, now you'll fall back on "discretionary spending" while ignoring that Congress still has to approve social spending and can change it any time they wish). Oh, and nevermind all of the state and local social spending on to of that, ignoring that state military budgets are essentially nonexistant so military spending doesn't increase with it.
Third, you can take 100% of the WEALTH of the Forbes 400, at $1.54 trillion, and pay off last year's deficit spending. The tea party isn't just about cutting taxes, in fact, it's more about cutting spending than it is cutting taxes. Our spending levels are completely unsustainable and going into the future, we've got annual trillion dollar deficits are far as the eye can see before you even take into account the ENRON level fraud of the cost estimates of ObamaCare.
As for your Jefferson quote, most of the tea partiers would love an end to the Fed. It's the big government types that like it since it allows them to keep spending without actually being accountable for what they're doing, just like the decision to raid the Social Security Trust Fund in 1967 because the costs of the Great Society programs massively exceeded its estimates and Congress/LBJ wanted to pretend they didn't bankrupt us.
This is exactly what the government wants. By having a complicated tax code, they get direct political donations, they get high level jobs in the private sector after they leave office hiding the quid pro quo, etc. Corporations love it since it is a way to grant themselves exemptions and credits.
For the people that want the government to encourage or discourage certain types of behaviors through tax incentives, YOU TOO are part of the problem. Want a tax credit for green energy? Want a tax credit for child care? Want a tax credit for charitable donations? You're writing more loopholes into the tax code and complicating it, which allows people to play games to reduce their tax burden and if you're rich enough to afford the best tax specialists, you can really reduce your taxation.
How about a standard deduction, say $30k for everyone, adjusted for inflation in the future, and then apply a tax rate on anything over that amount (I prefer a flat tax, but a progressive tax would work if that's what others favor)? Further, I know it's crazy talk around here, but maybe we should get government out of the business of trying to be everything to everyone and reduce its scope so that there is no incentive to buy it in the first place...
Agreed, neither of the major parties give a rats ass about adhering to the Constitution. That's why it has been under a systemic assault for at least a solid century. You see, the Founding Fathers could have never known that our governmental needs may change in the future, so they didn't give us a way to grant government new power via an amendment process... ok, so they did, but, darn it, it's too hard to pass an amendment so we shouold just abandon the process entirely, ignoring the fact that it is deliberaltely difficult to pass an amendment, because while government is a necessary evil, it is still evil, and we should conisder the full ramifications of drastic changes to our core governing principles rather than changing them on a whim.
You seem to have missed the truth that 2 judges have ruled that the federal health care reform law in unconstitutional while 2 have ruled that it is constitutional
Clearly, in a reply to a post pondering that the debate of whether or not Obamacare is Unconstitutional has been overlooked, I should have gone into the rulings that confirmed it, right? If the default assumption is that it is perfectly Constitutional, then the news that two judges confirmed it is nothing of note, correct? Did I also not say that it would be on its way to the Supreme Court for review? Clearly, there is a debate going on BUT some people, by virtue of their choice of media outlets or intellectual laziness, haven't acknowledged that it may, indeed be Unconstitutional.
As a U.S. citizen who is looking forward to the Supreme Court striking down a law that forces citizens to buy over priced insurance policies from corrupt scum bag corporations I can also see that a single payer system would be good for the welfare of the entire nation, from individual citizens to all corporations excluding the scum bags currently ripping off citizens.
Hey, welcome to the strawman. You don't want to debate whether or not it is Constitutional, clearly your mind is made up since two judges ruled in your favor, so let's set up those evil corporations and how they harm the little people so we can argue how bad we need socialized medicine regardless of its Constitutionality so we can tear them apart instead. Want socialized medicine? Pass an amendment giving the federal government the power to do so. Alas, we get distract and deflect.
What's more interesting, is whether or not Justice Kagan will recuse herself since, as Solicitor General, she advised the Obama administration on the very bill that will be coming before the court, giving her a rather substantial conflict of interest.
So I have to ask, that super Koolaid you are drinking that blinds you from reality, is it a bum trip or a super high cause I wouldn't want a bum trip but if the fantasy world your living in is any fun perhaps it would be worthwhile to take a sip.
and now we resort to ridicule and personal attacks... classic tactic of attack the messenger if you can't defeat the message. yawn. Do you actually have any arguments to make or do you just have kneejerk reactions every time someone posts something that you don't want to think about? Hey, could it be that I'm encouraging you to stop YOUR koolaid politics? I mean, not that you drink the koolaid, you just always know what is best and I'm just dumb (and probably one of those evil, racist, ignorant teabaggers). After all, Colbert told you reality has a liberal bias.
Given this, and given the large scale similarities with the US Consititution, it does indeed seem as if any such system implemented in America would require section 8 of the US Constitution to be amended. Interesting how this is an issue that has seemingly been overlooked in the debate.
Lots of Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and tea partiers have been saying it is Unconstitutional (and have been going as far back as HillaryCare in the mid-90s, if not sooner if you want to get into the Medicare/Medicaid debate too). Two judges have ruled it to be Unconstitutional so far and it is making its way up to the Supreme Court for review. When confronted, then Speaker Pelosi and numerous other Democrats refused to acknowledge even the notion that it might be Unconstitutional and often resorted to condescension of constituents and reporters that dared to ask.
In an effort to try to get around the Constitutional argument, the Obama administration has tried to claim that it is a tax and not a penalty, while during "debate" Congressional Democrats argued that it was a penalty and not a tax. They've argued that it is interstate commerce because the effect of choosing NOT to participate in commerce is an act of commerce in itself. And if I hear one more person try to justify it under the "general welfare" clause when they clearly have no clue what the "general welfare" means (read both the Federalist and Anti-federalist papers, it meant the overall ability for government to maintain itself and function, not welfare in the modern notion), I think my head is going to explode.
People have their biases and they like to seek out information and sources that confirm rather than challenge their assertions and assumptions... those on the left whom limit themselves to only "friendly" sources, plus those that do seek out "enemy" sources but dismiss everything the opposition has to say anyway, might have had a hard time finding coherent arguments to why ObamaCare wasn't a good thing, well, other than the far left that cried that ObamaCare just didn't go far enough. Do a search on google for "obamacare unconstitutional" between Feb 1, 2009 and Sep 30, 2009 and you'll get 167k hits and that was still months before final passage. Remember the Democrats canceling their town halls so they wouldn't have to face angry constituents?
With online banking, everything is recorded and tied to the transaction for verification purposes. Most people want their vote done by secret balloting so that how they choose to vote can be tied directly to them. Any way of tying a vote to a person means that some abusive figure in their life (boss, spouse, parent, etc) can order them to vote a certain way "or else" and then verify that the vote was done according to the abuser's demands.
Once you lose the identifiying information from the transation, it's trivial to rig an electronic vote and you can't verify that your vote counted properly. That's why voting and banking are completely different beasts and why voting is a much harder problem to solve.
I'd consider the Brookings Institute or the Cato Institute on the opposite side as biased... I'm not saying that their studies are faulty since I haven't read them, just that I'd take anything they say with a mountain of salt.
Your first link was published in 1992 and was one of the thing my the 1995 annual report was out to debunk USING the data from your second link.
The third link, and I fully realize this is an ad hominem but I don't have time to go through the paper right now, comes from a source whose primary goal is to push the progressive agenda onto America and one of the ways they do that is through class warfare. That's like getting a paper on how non-white people suck from the KKK.
So do you have a source that actually has some credibility and isn't 1) already fully debunked or 2) doesn't come from a group with an agenda?
Do you have an actual source for these "statistics" or is it something we're just supposed to accept on face value as "common knowledge?"
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas 1995 Annual Report debunked this very notion, which is based on a faulty interpretation of census data.
There's further evidence that being in the low-income bracket isn't, for a large majority of people, permanent. Less than 0.5 percent of the sample showed up in the bottom quintile every year from 1975 to 1991.3 Nearly a quarter of those in the bottom tier in 1975 moved up the next year and never again returned. More than three-quarters of the lowest 20 percent in 1975 made it into the top 40 percent of income earners for at least one year by 1991. In fact, the poor made the most dramatic gains in the income distribution. Those who started in the bottom quintile in 1975 had a $25,322 average gain in real income by 1991. In the top quintile, the increase was $3,974. In other words, the rich have gotten a little richer, but the poor have gotten much richer. (See Exhibit 5.)
The patterns are similar in other quintiles. Among the second poorest quintile in 1975, more than 70 percent had moved to a higher bracket by 1991--with 26 percent going all the way to the top tier. From the middle grouping, almost half of the income earners managed to make themselves better off. A third of the people in the second highest quintile made it to the highest fifth during these 17 years. All through the University of Michigan data, there's a consistent, powerful thrust toward the top of the income distribution.
Minimum wage is the floor other wages stand on. If it were taken away, wages would be completely controlled by the market, which may be a good thing for employers. What about those 5%? Their wages would undoubtedly fall, because the demand for unskilled labor will always be outstripped by the supply.
I used to manage a family restaurant, which is a typical place where you'll find minimum wage jobs for inexperienced people. Generally, that means either teenagers, whom have little dependence on that money since their parent(s) take care of their primary needs, or adults whom have a very poor work ethic and, thus, can't do any better for themselves. Adults and teenagers that show up regularly, on time and do their job while they are there get paid more than minimum wage because they become an asset.
Teenagers are extremely sensitive (ever have someone cry because you explained to them that they rang something up wrong?), don't understand that they can't just take a day off any time they want to especially with all of their co-workers at the same time, and they generally have an entitlement complex despite not having any experience or, frequently, even basic knowledge or ability to do simple tasks like make change (the lack of math education glares here) or mop a floor. On top of that, there are a ton of tasks that they aren't even allowed to do (operate any type of powered equipment, they can't use something like a stool or ladder, the hours they can work are very restrictive, etc). The state says I have to pay them $7.15 an hour, just like their adult counterparts without any of the restrictions and, whom likely have more knowledge and experience. I'd prefer to hire 2 teens at $5 each, but I'll hire one adult at $9 first (note that I'm paying the adult a premium for their experience), meaning the teenagers are being priced out of the workforce at the expense of the teenagers, the business and possibly the customers (two people servicing them rather than one).
Further, because minimum wage is likely to be paid to low skilled workers doing menial jobs that the rest of the economy is based on, any increase in the minimum wage cases an increase of base inflation in the market. As the minimum wage increases, teenagers earning disposable income make more money but the people making marginally above minimum wage that are likely to be adults don't get a corresponding wage increase, lowering their buying power as the cost of goods and services rise to meet the increased cost of the raised minimum wage.
On top of that, there is a huge black market built to avoid paying the minimum wage already. Lots of people get paid under the table, not just illegal aliens, to avoid paying taxes or the minimum wage anyway. That means the market already sees the minimum wage as an inefficiency and some people will be willing to break the law to circumvent it. Sure, some of those employers are looking to exploit their workers, but often, the workers are happy to take the job anyway or they wouldn't have agreed to take it in the first place.
Somewhere along the line, we got away from the thinking that the minimum wage should be the absolute bottom of the market and started thinking it should be enough money to raise a family on. That's flat out crazy since the majority of people making minimum wage aren't trying to raise a family on their minimum wage job, it's largely disposable income or income being earned by someone working part time in addition to their primary job... and further, it overlooks the inflationary effects of the minimum wage, causing the buying power of lower income adults to decrease, hurting them the most anyway.
Funny, since he never made that argument in any of his replies to me.
He outright states that corporations have a duty to waste money on job programs for unnecessary jobs at the expense of their profit - not obscene profits, any profit in general... and that corporations should only be able to profit after everyone, not only its employees, but everyone, in society has all of their needs met.
He further declined (and I got downmodded for asking, yay for "-1, I disagree") to reply as to when making a profit became a bad thing and why profits are bad in the first place. His problem is with anyone profiting in general, not with "abusive profits."
Nobody wants to be useless (well some do, but I all for bribing them not to steal - cheaper than jail).
Lots of people don't care if they are useless. Welfare (at least in the US) produces ongoing inter-generational dependency. Today's welfare recipients have a very high likelihood of producing tomorrow's welfare recipients while never actually getting off the dole themselves. And why would they when they get all of the creature comforts of the middle class without any of the work? There's simply no incentive, other than their own internal motivation, for them to leave the sytem.
I think you and I can agree greed is a fairly inherent trait to humanity. Everyone is motivated to get as much as they can for as little as possible... and that's a pretty strong motivation when you're completely subsidizing someone with everything they need to survive. The greed problem is center to the downfall of every collectivist society that has been attempted, because everyone expects everyone else to supply them with their needs. By not supplying those needs (at least to able bodied people, I have no problem helping the disabled), we incentivize them to at least support themselves while disincentivizing bad behaviors (having more kids than you can afford, dropping out of public school, getting drunk all the time, etc).
What motivates is seeing a path to a better place. At the moment, there is or soon will be more people than work, and we really should think of what we can do with that.
The betterment of humanity may motivate you, but it doesn't motivate most people. Most people don't really give a damn beyond their own circle - themselves, their family and friends and maybe their local community. You're just idealistically ignoring humanity.
So, let's talk about your whine about entitlement: it is a fact that most of the financial gains in the past 40 years have gone to the already rich, while the middle class is at best treading water. The top 1% own 90% of everything, and the income disparity is greater than in 1929. If we don't fix this, we will have a revolt of some sort, I guarantee it.
I'll concede that the wealthy have absolutely gotten wealthier, but I harshly reject your notion that the middle class has suffered for it. 40 years ago, home computers were unheard of, only the rich had air conditioning, people were still mowing their lawns by hand, a flight was a special event, etc. Today's middle class has most of the benefits that yesterday's elite had.
The problem is, the middle class, especially the lower middle class, is burdened with giving a lifestyle similar to their own to millions of people that don't even try to help themselves. In doing so, we disincentivize the middle class to put in any work, encouraging them through greed to just live off the public dole as well - just look at how duration times on unemployment consistently grow every time the maximum duration expands, people are glad to get paid to do nothing. And no, taxing the rich more won't help either - confiscating all of the assets of the Forbes 400 will net you a one time grab of $1.54 trillion, while we spend $865 billion annually on welfare just at the federal level (and countless more when you add in what the states and local governments contribute on top of it).
If you're interested in challenging your own world view, check out Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell, in particular, Chapter 5.
Now to the flip side - providing a base level of support no matter what removes a lot of the desperation from the poor and enables more risk taking - health care that you can't lose means that starting a company is less of a risk, and you don't have to stay at company X because you got thyroid cancer a while back.
That doesn't mean that we need to provide the healthcare for "free" as a society, we can simply mandate that pre-existing conditions can't disqualify you for insura
We're past the point where we have enough labor to get everything done, and we need to do something with the people we replace with machines.
There are new opportunities out there for them right now, even in the craptastic economy that we have. And if they can't find someone to hire them, they have every opportunity to create work for themselves. No, they might not have the knowledge, ability or money to, say, create a new microchip, but they can start painting houses, learn how to sew, mow lawns or become a mechanic. They may not be glory jobs that will earn you a fleet of sports cars (actually, if you end up being good at what you do, you just might get that fleet anyway), but they're good, honest jobs that will instill a sense of pride because you're providing for your family. I know a guy worth $2 million dollars that builds and sells sheds and 20 years ago, he didn't know how to operate a saw.
Realizing that you must either take care of yourself or starve is a massive incentive for you to get off your ass and find a way to make money... and once you start providing a service, even if you aren't making lots of profits yet, you start contributing TO society rather than simply leeching from it. The problem is, we've been conditioned to believe that we're entitled to everything we need to survive, that by our mere existence, society owes us a lifestyle regardless of the choices we make. And they aren't owed just the minimum to get by, people are taught demand everything the richest people get (which is why you get all the class warfare whining). Nevermind the guy putting in 80 hours a week to keep his business running, that guy is an asshole because he has more than us.
People are guaranteed the right to an education in the US. Millions of people throw it away every year and then they proceed to blame society for keeping them down. Meanwhile, people like you enable them, telling us we must coddle them or else face their wrath.
Everyone loves to tote Ben Franklin quotes around here... well, the one about trading essential liberty for temporary safety by giving up our rights to government when we get scared of a boogeyman, er, hey, wait, isn't that what you're doing? We must surrender our economic liberty to keep those desperate people from getting a job to support themselves. But actually, I was thinking of another one of his quotes:
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not taking them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
YEAH! Things were so much better back before the invention of the cotton gin, where slaves toiled in the field all day... and hey, lots not forget how good we had it when everyone had to farm their own land, toiling behind the horse or ox with the plow all day to feed their family. Those were the days... everyone was employed. We really had it made back then. Too bad technology had to come along, automating those processes and freeing people up to work on other things.
Then these computers we're typing on... it's too bad all of those manual computors lost their jobs calculating tables. I mean, just think of where we'd be if computers had never been invented. Just how many more people could have jobs today?
Come on, technology obsoletes jobs, making us all more efficient, raising our quality of life and enabling us to move onto better things. People can adapt or they can fall by the wayside. Whining about it won't stop the course of technological evolution.
You mean the 60's?
Hey, look at that, you picked the tipping point, just before the rest of the world finally catching back up as the epitome of union success! By golly, if only everyone had unions, we could operate as efficiently as the government does since that's the primary home of unions today. Oh, wait, all of the governments are going bankrupt too!
And I don't believe there is rioting in France and the UK because the "welfare states" are "unsustainable". It's because the citizens are starting to figure out that they being asked to sacrifice in order to make sure banks can be made whole to the tune of 100 cents on the dollar for losses incurred by their bad decisions.
So, governments not being able to pay their citizens promised benefits is a factor of the banks losing money? Nope, it's all those evil banks, right? Wait, who sets the rules that the banks can operate under in the first place? Oh yeah, the governments.
The riots over there are part of the same frustration with the class warfare being perpetrated by the rich that is starting to manifest itself here in the States in the unfocused rage of the Tea Party.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's part of the frustration caused by the people constantly agitating a mentality that society owes them everything they could possibly ever want in life without the need to actually go out and obtain it for themselves. What does it matter how much some rich guy makes? The poor have every opportunity to rise but they choose to hold themselves down - they refuse to educate themselves, they think they're owed vast sums of money and can shortcut their way to it so they make stupid moves that hurt them in the long run, they have kids they can't afford, etc... yet they blame everyone else for their choices. It's hard to succeed when you're busy blaming everyone else for your own failures.
As for the "unfocused rage" of the tea parties, clearly, you know little about the tea party movement other than what your talking heads told you to think about them...
Consider that for a moment. Consider also that when unions were the strongest so was the US economy. When unions were the strongest we had the largest, healthiest middle class. When unions were the strongest, we had the greatest drop in poverty.
The period where the rest of the first world was busy blowing up each others manufacturing capability while the industries of the US and Canada remained safely separated by large oceans? Yeah, that was the unions creating prosperity and not the fact that we were exporting stuff all over the world. Over time, as the rest of the first world restabilized, those unions then killed the goose that laid the golden egg, demanding ever increasing amounts until their jobs started leaving and their businesses became unsustainable under ridiculous compensation packages.
The countries that are doing best in the world right now have strong labor movements and very pro-labor policies. I'm not talking about places like China where you've got a handful of people who are doing much better and almost everyone is still working for three bucks a day, but places like Germany and other European countries that have huge trade surpluses because they have pro-labor policies, union membership and most of all, universal health care. Not to mention free education.
Which countries other than Germany in Europe are thriving? Was it Greece, where they're rioting? France, where they're rioting? Britain, where they're rioting? Oh yeah, and aren't a lot of those countries starting to look to reduce their welfare states since they aren't sustainable, which is the root cause of the rioting?
Yeah, just look at how cheaply the prison system is run!