Even worse, "10 pounds kilograms" is not nonsense. It is the standard way (except for the s on "pounds") to mean that you have some funny unit that is mass squared. Alpha gets it right, Google gets it wrong.
Alpha does not tell you when you don't understand your own question, though, I guess. ("You have asked a question that only makes sense if you know basic physics. Are you sure you know basic physics? (Y/N)")
The output cells of the retina use inputs from lots of primary detector cells (rods and cones) through several layers. They also do not fill space, but send slender processes around contacting neighbors.
Whether it's cooperative coordination or some sort of competition, it is exquisite in that this is not something that is obviously easy to coordinate (unlike cells growing in a sheet which tile space because they get in each others' way).
Oh, it doesn't say that we should, exactly. It just says that those who do will tend to be the ones whose alleles survive (if they do it right). And a lot of human behavior is weirdly inconsistent or illogical if not viewed through the lens of that being the primary goal. But it's more of a cautionary warning: if you actually care about this--and it seems like you do by your actions, so better think about it!--then you'd better do that.
That's enough, I think, to build a *rather justifiable* set of *partial ethics*, but it's not so clear to me that one can necessarily get to completeness on both sides unless one defines ethics as only what one can reach via this method.
Let me just expand, though, on the "it is thus" to "we ought to be thus" point. It is that a vast majority of humans like to stay alive, enjoy sex, are repulsed by incest, engage in genocide against competing groups in a resource-limited environment, and so on. These all point to us acting as though we want our alleles to survive. So the argument is this: by our actions, we can see that we are creatures who care that our alleles survive. (We may care about other things, too.) If we want our alleles to survive, then not *only* do we need to do these instinctive things, but in modern societies we also need to do blah-blah-blah (and not do this that and the other thing). Thus we move from an is to an ought via logical consistency.
This is about as justifiable as *anything* is when it comes to human behavior. One is not physically restricted to logically consistent acts, so there's always the, "And I do some other random thing instead!" option.
There's a rather large time window between when one can tell whether or not the result is viable, and when a success results in a developing organism with a sophisticated enough nervous system for any argument of ethics from symmetry or sympathy for discomfort or anything like that to apply.
So I don't really see the problem with treating the result as a test subject as long as one doesn't let development go on long enough so that you have a person in a meaningful sense.
There's a nice sort of evolutionary argument for reproductive fitness (keeping in mind all the complexities of the long run in a human society, not just the myopic let's-pretend-we're-bacteria-and-multiply thing), in that those who don't see the point won't leave offspring and those who do will; to the extent that seeing the point is influenced by genetics, it's sort of like a tautology.
This doesn't quite give the rules above directly, though; it's more like, "You're at best eternally irrelevant unless you contribute to the survival of your (alleles/species/whatever)."
If you start thinking about what it really means to do that in a society of humans, though, you recover a lot of the above rules.
So you can have a rather justifiable set of partial ethics if you really want them.
Re:My recollection differs from the book
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 1
One of the keys to developing tailored treatments is collecting sufficiently large data sets to allow the identification of distinct subpopulations. There's no particular reason why we couldn't have vast data sets right now, but a combination of privacy laws and reluctance of medical groups to allow scrutiny of the effectiveness of their procedures have made such data sets rather hard to collect. These data would be useful even in the absence of genetic (much less epigenetic) information; with such information it would only get better.
I agree that tailored drugs are a subject of intense research, though, even if the process of doing so is made harder than it ought to be.
My recollection differs from the book
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I looked into these things at various points when I was feeling bored. My recollection is that
- The placebo effect is a real effect, and can make you feel better, especially if you are more invested in the outcome (either financially (spend $$$$) or socially (there are doubters but you *know* it works); simply wanting to be better for health reasons is less useful).
- Homeopathy is useless except as a placebo (but one could argue that generating belief in homeopathy is the best way to deliver the placebo effect because you don't have to give the person anything but water).
- Chiropractors on average do not generate an improved outcome for their patients (possibly beyond a short initial time when the patient feels worked on) on *average*, but there exist some chiropractors who perform at well above chance on helping people with certain types of problem. It was unclear to me at the time whether this was due to the mechanical manipulations or to the placebo effect.
- Acupuncture has mixed success, but can have reliable if small-on-average effects on certain types of problem. I am pretty sure that there was a control group here, so this is above and beyond what one gets from the placebo effect.
- Herbal medicine runs the entire spectrum from harmful through better than established commercial drugs for some things. Knowing which is which is difficult if you listen to the people who like herbal medicine.
- Commercial drugs usually (but not always) work well on average, but insufficient attention is paid to whether they give small benefits to everyone or large benefits to only a small subgroup, and they very often have long-term side effects that are insufficiently characterized. Using older products it therefore more safe than using new exciting ones.
But I'm afraid I don't have references for any of these vague recollections. Perhaps someone knows of studies to the contrary (or which support these tentative beliefs)?
There are too many factors that affect accuracy of projections for me to find the first graph compelling. The second is interesting; it suggests that there was about $70B more revenue from capital gains in 2000 than 1996; the deficit went down by about $230B over the same period. ($45B and $150B if we use 1999.) But then there was a 50% increase from 1995 to 1996, before the capital gains tax cut. It looks to me like the main thing is that the economy was doing well, partially sustainably and partially not. If you combine these with the Roth IRA numbers, it's a nice little boost for Clinton, but I simply don't see the support for a huge temporary revenue stream that made the difference between the $280B in his first years and the $20B-$130B in the later years. If you could find a total of $600B or so over the latter four years, I'd believe your argument. But the Roth IRA is well under 10% of that, and the capital gains is only about $40B/year off projections, and given the large 95-96 rise, it's doubtful that even that much can be attributed to the change.
I thought that the point of the article is that there are accounting gimmicks that the government uses and which are fundamentally dishonest. They're not unique to Clinton. The take-home message is not "Clinton lied!" but "Everyone lied!" and in terms of balancing the budget, Clinton *still* did relatively better than the Bushes before and after him. (The Republican-controlled congress deserves some of the credit during Clinton's years, though more through partisan pigheadedness than any great principled stand, sadly, given how quickly money was spent when Bush 2 got in.)
I think we have rather different perspectives on what the point of society is. I think the point is to improve the human condition. One improvement is to have freedom; another is to be materially comfortable. Often, single aspects of society will have multiple beneficial effects (e.g. freedom plus incentives to be productive tends to help with both points I made); sometimes there will be tradeoffs (caring for unproductive people, improving their conditions at the cost of our own). Specifically in response to all of your "letting people keep what they already have" argument--well, no, if you let people keep more money that can be inflationary (just like raising the minimum wage!), and if you take a smaller fraction of higher income brackets, the net effect is to make the poor poorer via inflation unless they can keep ahead of it via other economic means (e.g. being employed by the wealthy person with lower taxes). But in general, I do *not* assume that it is inappropriate for a society to do *some* redistribution of wealth. I think it's an empirical question as to what works better. And I do *not* think it's a reasonable argument that the poor aren't getting poorer because the reason the rich are getting richer is through their own hard work; as I've said before, simply identifying that the poor are not getting richer while the rich are has nothing to do with the causes. When we look at the causes, maybe we think they're justified, and maybe not, and certainly we should think that the government plays a role (the rich wouldn't get as much richer if they hadn't had the tax cut), and then one has to balance all these factors and decide whether society is doing its job well enough. One might decide that it's fine that there's such a disparity. One might decide that we actually do want society to put a minimum standard of living as a floor even for people who don't produce enough of value for others to want to give them that much. One thing that I don't quite understand from a logical perspective (though I do from a sociological one) is how people can on the one hand talk with passion about human rights--which presumably are only justified if humans have some sort of intrinsic value--and at the same time reject any sort of economic support as if they have no intrinsic value. I think that for the most part a relatively incentive-based system works a lot better and resu
I agree that the Roth IRA stuff is a little tangential, but I've now bothered to look up the numbers, and there were only $77B in Roth IRAs in 2000. Even taxed at the highest rate (40%) and with nobody contributing to new Roth accounts but only doing a one-time rollover, and with the remaining trillions in non-Roth IRAs never being converted, the income to the government was at most $50B or so spread over the previous two years--a factor, perhaps, but a modest one at best given the differences in deficits (>$200B over several years).
I had noticed that the "surplus" didn't actually decrease the debt (easy enough to do, if you look at the debt graph), but I appreciate the article pointing out why. Of course, that wasn't unique to Clinton, and it didn't matter for my point (or yours, as far as I know) that Clinton actually ran a surplus--the point, which remains true when one avoids accounting gimmicks, is that Clinton reduced the level of deficit spending over quite a number of years.
But, anyway, back to the question of whether Bush did anything to impact whether the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. First, the point that the poor got a larger fractional tax cut than the rich is not the right number to look at--it's the *fraction of income* not the *fraction of tax* that leads to a flattening or accentuation of wealth differences. From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/washington/08tax.html in 2004, the net wealth increase from the tax cuts was about 2% for middle-income people and about 4.5% for the top income bracket. At the same time, it is true that the tax code was more "progressive" afterwards than before when looking at the rates of taxation; it's just that we already barely tax middle-to-lower income folks so that we're out of room to make income more progressive (as opposed to tax levels) while still lowering taxes.
I don't think we actually disagree about debt all that much. People at all income levels go into debt to buy nonessential items, and that always makes it harder to build long-term wealth. To some extent, these are errors in judgment--and to some extent, therefore, saying that if you make these errors you will be in bad shape is a fair way to discourage these sorts of errors. But it is still of concern that people *do* make these sorts of errors and do so on a sufficiently large scale to hobble the entire economy.
The whole economic system is a human construct. People create a certain quantity of goods and services, and they also are entitled (via their income) to some fraction of those goods and services. Surely you are not saying that one cannot distribute the fraction unequally (perhaps "fairly" but unequally), and then from that starting point make it even more unequal. Of course one can do that! The key question is does that *actually* happen, and if so is the decrease in the fraction more than offset by an inexorably linked increase in the total created goods and services (inexorably because the increase comes from the incentive to increase one's own fraction).
Here's an example of such a policy: the minimum wage. The evidence that I can find: http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/IBR/2008/fall/article1.html suggests that modest increases in the minimum wage do not influence employment numbers. Thus, within modest limits at least, altering the minimum wage is a way to influence the fraction of economic output given to various groups. Republicans blocked minimum wage increases until the Democrats had too great of control over Congress. See http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth
You have some interesting points to make about the deficit, but unfortunately the dates of the capital gains tax bill (1997) and the creation of Roth IRAs (1998) don't match any significant change in what's going on in the budget (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/3015540/US-Budget-Deficit-or-Surplus-1960present where the decrease in the budget deficit was remarkably linear over Clinton's eight years).
Unless you have compelling quantitative data that supports the importance of these revenue streams (not offset by something else), it looks to me like you're wrong that these were major factors.
It is true that Clinton got a nice dividend from the end of the Cold War. There is, to say the least, considerable controversy over whether the spending in the War on Terror was necessary or even useful (and whether it even makes sense to call it a war). So I don't think the Presidents can entirely escape from responsibility for government spending, even if happenstance plays a part.
Before I go to the trouble of tracking down difficult-to-find data, I want to get some indication that it might actually satisfy you. So far you have appealed to individual choice to "refute" a point about human nature ("you don't have to go into debt"--well, yes, true, and you don't have to eat more than will barely avoid starvation, nor do you have to keep warm and/or cool, etc.), and you have also accepted, as far as I can tell, that the natural state of affairs is for wealthy people to have better investment and income-growth opportunities than poor people--and then somehow seem to think that this isn't relevant to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
The natural state of affairs, given the long human history of kings and wealthy merchant houses and so on, seems to be for the rich to get richer and stay very rich indeed (until some calamity or revolution) and for the poor to stay about the same. The great feat of the 20th century was to create a large "middle class" that defied this historic trend.
What Bush has done to encourage enhanced income disparity is (1) to lower taxes at the top end, allowing the natural aggregation of wealth to proceed faster; (2) to pay less attention to environmental and labor and similar issues so that companies can profit through activities that make many people's lives a little worse; (3) spend prolifically in ways that do not help the economy; and (4) allow the debt/credit situation to get entirely out of hand with the relative burden falling more heavily on the debtors than the creditors.
Let me repeat: accumulation of wealth is the *natural state of affairs*. Any argument that simply says that something is natural, a choice, or whatever, is *irrelevant* to the point about the rich getting richer and the poor not getting richer. Maybe the poor do things that make you think they should stay poor--but then you should agree that the disparity exists and is widening and say that that's the way things should be.
Now, I'll find quantitative data to back up bits of my argument as you request, but only if you specify what sort of thing you think is relevant to the argument. ("If we get this piece of data and it says this, it's good evidence for my position; and if it says that, it's good evidence for yours.")
Selectively giving opportunities to the rich while being in an environment of easy access to credit is a good way to make the baseline wealth of everyone go down, while giving only the rich a way to get out of it.
Debt is a conscious choice, but it is the kind of choice that you can assume that many people will make, especially if you are poor and something unexpected happens and it's easy to gain access to it.
What exactly do you believe that Clinton did with the budget that caused a temporary increase in revenue?
And I *did* provide numbers--specifically, I provided a link to the census data on income distributions. If you'd looked, you'd have seen that the bottom 10% or so has stayed pretty much flat in buying power over the past 15 years, while the top 10% has enjoyed a nice increase. The poor aren't getting poorer, but they're getting *relatively* poorer; or, alternatively, they haven't been sharing in the economic growth of the country/world.
Other than those numbers, I'm not sure what you want to see.
From seeing him speak and answer questions, I think he's one of the very rare people who combine the two. Whether it will be enough is another question, of course.
Of course it's far from a sure thing, but I'm not sure how one could get much closer to a sure thing (and pick an actual person instead of an idealization of one).
First, there are a variety of lots-of-money-only ways to increase wealth, including preferred stock, invitation-only venture capital groups, companies with shares with values in the many thousands of dollars (e.g. Berkshire Hathaway), tactics that require a large investment to engage in such as overseas investing and taking full advantage of tax credits/shelters/whatever; and then, of course, the more money one has the more effectively one can attempt to start a new business or make improvements on an existing process since one can start at a larger, more efficient scale.
Most people are in debt, so they're actually getting poorer over time all else being equal (which it is not--they presumably have other sources of income!). I've had a rather hard time finding detailed statistics, but http://www.directlendingsolutions.com/2007-consumer-statistics.htm gives an overview.
As far as whether the poor are actually getting poorer, they seem to be getting relatively poorer, i.e., not keeping up with economic growth while the higher income brackets are pulling away from them, according to http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf
But, anyway, whether the poor get poorer depends on the structure and availability of options to go into debt as well as the inflation rate.
It's easy to take from the poor and give to the rich. You just devise an economic system where return on investment scales increasingly with investment (so that you earn a better rate on an investment of, say, $10M, than one of, say, $1k), don't apply other factors that more than compensate, and let the process run on its own.
You don't have to work very hard to get this to happen because of economies of scale. All you have to do, really, is not get in the way too much.
The rich get richer, and the poor get--well, that depends on the overall economy and the scale of the investment return imbalance. They could get richer or poorer. Lately it's been "poorer".
Steven Chu is an expert on the technical side. He also runs LBL, so he knows how to make decisions. Why get two people when you can get one who can do both?
Also, Steven Chu is probably smarter than you. Nobel Prize winners aren't *necessarily*, but in this case, Chu is a very, very sharp guy.
This is true--you don't need to become a nationally dominant party in one election cycle, just a dominant party in some unit of elected government where majority-voting is in effect.
Why would I want to give money to charity if you might be selfish and refuse, because you might think that you can count on my good-heartedness to produce a stable, enriching society without you having to help out at all?
The core problem that societies have always faced is how to avoid free riders that suck resources and productivity.
One type of free rider is the lazy welfare recipient. To avoid this type of free riding, the society can let people starve if they don't work.
But another type of free rider is the free-market individualist who takes advantage of education and health and other services rendered elsewhere to deliver to him high-quality employees. To avoid this type of free riding, the society can neglect to educate its people and make the employers do it.
Governments tend to shift the burdens imposed by free riders from the second type to the first: states taking money for education and infrastructure ensures a more level playing field where no party can take huge advantage of the educational or infrastructure altruism of another. A strong society needs to keep both types of free rider under control.
If the Republicans lost really, really badly in the current election, the party might split; you might be able to pull a libertarian-like party out of it.
The problem with the 5% mark is that even though the government now has to pay attention to you legally, the voters who voted for you have been penalized by having their votes not count. And by the time you get to 5%, there are a lot of states in play, and a lot of angry voters who think that they got the greater of two evils because they took their votes away from the lesser to the third party.
So you have to do it in one fell swoop. (See what happened with the Whigs....)
If you've worked very hard and are sympathetic to others who would work very hard if they had better chances to improve themselves, and don't mind too much that some people who won't work hard will also be helped, and don't want to have to take the time to carefully manage the transfer of wealth and sympathy to good outcomes, you might want to delegate the role of producing an opportunity-filled society via improving its members to government.
If you've worked very hard, you might be annoyed that your money is being used to degrade the lives and productivity of people who could be helped instead.
If you've worked very hard, you might prefer to not work very hard to defend yourself as well; you might think it more convenient if the task of defense was outsourced and few people had the means to seriously threaten you.
There are problems with all of these positions, of course, but it's not overtly silly to work very hard and hold liberal (in the U.S. sense) values.
Slashdot Mirror
10 lbs*kg does make sense if you have a unit of mass squared. A unit of self-gravitation would have that.
Even worse, "10 pounds kilograms" is not nonsense. It is the standard way (except for the s on "pounds") to mean that you have some funny unit that is mass squared. Alpha gets it right, Google gets it wrong.
Alpha does not tell you when you don't understand your own question, though, I guess. ("You have asked a question that only makes sense if you know basic physics. Are you sure you know basic physics? (Y/N)")
The output cells of the retina use inputs from lots of primary detector cells (rods and cones) through several layers. They also do not fill space, but send slender processes around contacting neighbors.
Whether it's cooperative coordination or some sort of competition, it is exquisite in that this is not something that is obviously easy to coordinate (unlike cells growing in a sheet which tile space because they get in each others' way).
Oh, it doesn't say that we should, exactly. It just says that those who do will tend to be the ones whose alleles survive (if they do it right). And a lot of human behavior is weirdly inconsistent or illogical if not viewed through the lens of that being the primary goal. But it's more of a cautionary warning: if you actually care about this--and it seems like you do by your actions, so better think about it!--then you'd better do that.
That's enough, I think, to build a *rather justifiable* set of *partial ethics*, but it's not so clear to me that one can necessarily get to completeness on both sides unless one defines ethics as only what one can reach via this method.
Let me just expand, though, on the "it is thus" to "we ought to be thus" point. It is that a vast majority of humans like to stay alive, enjoy sex, are repulsed by incest, engage in genocide against competing groups in a resource-limited environment, and so on. These all point to us acting as though we want our alleles to survive. So the argument is this: by our actions, we can see that we are creatures who care that our alleles survive. (We may care about other things, too.) If we want our alleles to survive, then not *only* do we need to do these instinctive things, but in modern societies we also need to do blah-blah-blah (and not do this that and the other thing). Thus we move from an is to an ought via logical consistency.
This is about as justifiable as *anything* is when it comes to human behavior. One is not physically restricted to logically consistent acts, so there's always the, "And I do some other random thing instead!" option.
So by your arguments it would be fine as long as we didn't allow people to clone themselves.
There's a rather large time window between when one can tell whether or not the result is viable, and when a success results in a developing organism with a sophisticated enough nervous system for any argument of ethics from symmetry or sympathy for discomfort or anything like that to apply.
So I don't really see the problem with treating the result as a test subject as long as one doesn't let development go on long enough so that you have a person in a meaningful sense.
There's a nice sort of evolutionary argument for reproductive fitness (keeping in mind all the complexities of the long run in a human society, not just the myopic let's-pretend-we're-bacteria-and-multiply thing), in that those who don't see the point won't leave offspring and those who do will; to the extent that seeing the point is influenced by genetics, it's sort of like a tautology.
This doesn't quite give the rules above directly, though; it's more like, "You're at best eternally irrelevant unless you contribute to the survival of your (alleles/species/whatever)."
If you start thinking about what it really means to do that in a society of humans, though, you recover a lot of the above rules.
So you can have a rather justifiable set of partial ethics if you really want them.
One of the keys to developing tailored treatments is collecting sufficiently large data sets to allow the identification of distinct subpopulations. There's no particular reason why we couldn't have vast data sets right now, but a combination of privacy laws and reluctance of medical groups to allow scrutiny of the effectiveness of their procedures have made such data sets rather hard to collect. These data would be useful even in the absence of genetic (much less epigenetic) information; with such information it would only get better.
I agree that tailored drugs are a subject of intense research, though, even if the process of doing so is made harder than it ought to be.
I looked into these things at various points when I was feeling bored. My recollection is that
- The placebo effect is a real effect, and can make you feel better, especially if you are more invested in the outcome (either financially (spend $$$$) or socially (there are doubters but you *know* it works); simply wanting to be better for health reasons is less useful).
- Homeopathy is useless except as a placebo (but one could argue that generating belief in homeopathy is the best way to deliver the placebo effect because you don't have to give the person anything but water).
- Chiropractors on average do not generate an improved outcome for their patients (possibly beyond a short initial time when the patient feels worked on) on *average*, but there exist some chiropractors who perform at well above chance on helping people with certain types of problem. It was unclear to me at the time whether this was due to the mechanical manipulations or to the placebo effect.
- Acupuncture has mixed success, but can have reliable if small-on-average effects on certain types of problem. I am pretty sure that there was a control group here, so this is above and beyond what one gets from the placebo effect.
- Herbal medicine runs the entire spectrum from harmful through better than established commercial drugs for some things. Knowing which is which is difficult if you listen to the people who like herbal medicine.
- Commercial drugs usually (but not always) work well on average, but insufficient attention is paid to whether they give small benefits to everyone or large benefits to only a small subgroup, and they very often have long-term side effects that are insufficiently characterized. Using older products it therefore more safe than using new exciting ones.
But I'm afraid I don't have references for any of these vague recollections. Perhaps someone knows of studies to the contrary (or which support these tentative beliefs)?
There are too many factors that affect accuracy of projections for me to find the first graph compelling. The second is interesting; it suggests that there was about $70B more revenue from capital gains in 2000 than 1996; the deficit went down by about $230B over the same period. ($45B and $150B if we use 1999.) But then there was a 50% increase from 1995 to 1996, before the capital gains tax cut. It looks to me like the main thing is that the economy was doing well, partially sustainably and partially not. If you combine these with the Roth IRA numbers, it's a nice little boost for Clinton, but I simply don't see the support for a huge temporary revenue stream that made the difference between the $280B in his first years and the $20B-$130B in the later years. If you could find a total of $600B or so over the latter four years, I'd believe your argument. But the Roth IRA is well under 10% of that, and the capital gains is only about $40B/year off projections, and given the large 95-96 rise, it's doubtful that even that much can be attributed to the change.
I thought that the point of the article is that there are accounting gimmicks that the government uses and which are fundamentally dishonest. They're not unique to Clinton. The take-home message is not "Clinton lied!" but "Everyone lied!" and in terms of balancing the budget, Clinton *still* did relatively better than the Bushes before and after him. (The Republican-controlled congress deserves some of the credit during Clinton's years, though more through partisan pigheadedness than any great principled stand, sadly, given how quickly money was spent when Bush 2 got in.)
I think we have rather different perspectives on what the point of society is. I think the point is to improve the human condition. One improvement is to have freedom; another is to be materially comfortable. Often, single aspects of society will have multiple beneficial effects (e.g. freedom plus incentives to be productive tends to help with both points I made); sometimes there will be tradeoffs (caring for unproductive people, improving their conditions at the cost of our own). Specifically in response to all of your "letting people keep what they already have" argument--well, no, if you let people keep more money that can be inflationary (just like raising the minimum wage!), and if you take a smaller fraction of higher income brackets, the net effect is to make the poor poorer via inflation unless they can keep ahead of it via other economic means (e.g. being employed by the wealthy person with lower taxes). But in general, I do *not* assume that it is inappropriate for a society to do *some* redistribution of wealth. I think it's an empirical question as to what works better. And I do *not* think it's a reasonable argument that the poor aren't getting poorer because the reason the rich are getting richer is through their own hard work; as I've said before, simply identifying that the poor are not getting richer while the rich are has nothing to do with the causes. When we look at the causes, maybe we think they're justified, and maybe not, and certainly we should think that the government plays a role (the rich wouldn't get as much richer if they hadn't had the tax cut), and then one has to balance all these factors and decide whether society is doing its job well enough. One might decide that it's fine that there's such a disparity. One might decide that we actually do want society to put a minimum standard of living as a floor even for people who don't produce enough of value for others to want to give them that much. One thing that I don't quite understand from a logical perspective (though I do from a sociological one) is how people can on the one hand talk with passion about human rights--which presumably are only justified if humans have some sort of intrinsic value--and at the same time reject any sort of economic support as if they have no intrinsic value. I think that for the most part a relatively incentive-based system works a lot better and resu
I agree that the Roth IRA stuff is a little tangential, but I've now bothered to look up the numbers, and there were only $77B in Roth IRAs in 2000. Even taxed at the highest rate (40%) and with nobody contributing to new Roth accounts but only doing a one-time rollover, and with the remaining trillions in non-Roth IRAs never being converted, the income to the government was at most $50B or so spread over the previous two years--a factor, perhaps, but a modest one at best given the differences in deficits (>$200B over several years).
Roth IRA data: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2893/is_4_23/ai_n6171206
Honest deficit data: http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/32
I had noticed that the "surplus" didn't actually decrease the debt (easy enough to do, if you look at the debt graph), but I appreciate the article pointing out why. Of course, that wasn't unique to Clinton, and it didn't matter for my point (or yours, as far as I know) that Clinton actually ran a surplus--the point, which remains true when one avoids accounting gimmicks, is that Clinton reduced the level of deficit spending over quite a number of years.
But, anyway, back to the question of whether Bush did anything to impact whether the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. First, the point that the poor got a larger fractional tax cut than the rich is not the right number to look at--it's the *fraction of income* not the *fraction of tax* that leads to a flattening or accentuation of wealth differences. From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/washington/08tax.html in 2004, the net wealth increase from the tax cuts was about 2% for middle-income people and about 4.5% for the top income bracket. At the same time, it is true that the tax code was more "progressive" afterwards than before when looking at the rates of taxation; it's just that we already barely tax middle-to-lower income folks so that we're out of room to make income more progressive (as opposed to tax levels) while still lowering taxes.
I don't think we actually disagree about debt all that much. People at all income levels go into debt to buy nonessential items, and that always makes it harder to build long-term wealth. To some extent, these are errors in judgment--and to some extent, therefore, saying that if you make these errors you will be in bad shape is a fair way to discourage these sorts of errors. But it is still of concern that people *do* make these sorts of errors and do so on a sufficiently large scale to hobble the entire economy.
The whole economic system is a human construct. People create a certain quantity of goods and services, and they also are entitled (via their income) to some fraction of those goods and services. Surely you are not saying that one cannot distribute the fraction unequally (perhaps "fairly" but unequally), and then from that starting point make it even more unequal. Of course one can do that! The key question is does that *actually* happen, and if so is the decrease in the fraction more than offset by an inexorably linked increase in the total created goods and services (inexorably because the increase comes from the incentive to increase one's own fraction).
Here's an example of such a policy: the minimum wage. The evidence that I can find: http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/IBR/2008/fall/article1.html suggests that modest increases in the minimum wage do not influence employment numbers. Thus, within modest limits at least, altering the minimum wage is a way to influence the fraction of economic output given to various groups. Republicans blocked minimum wage increases until the Democrats had too great of control over Congress. See http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth
You have some interesting points to make about the deficit, but unfortunately the dates of the capital gains tax bill (1997) and the creation of Roth IRAs (1998) don't match any significant change in what's going on in the budget (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/3015540/US-Budget-Deficit-or-Surplus-1960present where the decrease in the budget deficit was remarkably linear over Clinton's eight years).
Unless you have compelling quantitative data that supports the importance of these revenue streams (not offset by something else), it looks to me like you're wrong that these were major factors.
It is true that Clinton got a nice dividend from the end of the Cold War. There is, to say the least, considerable controversy over whether the spending in the War on Terror was necessary or even useful (and whether it even makes sense to call it a war). So I don't think the Presidents can entirely escape from responsibility for government spending, even if happenstance plays a part.
Before I go to the trouble of tracking down difficult-to-find data, I want to get some indication that it might actually satisfy you. So far you have appealed to individual choice to "refute" a point about human nature ("you don't have to go into debt"--well, yes, true, and you don't have to eat more than will barely avoid starvation, nor do you have to keep warm and/or cool, etc.), and you have also accepted, as far as I can tell, that the natural state of affairs is for wealthy people to have better investment and income-growth opportunities than poor people--and then somehow seem to think that this isn't relevant to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
The natural state of affairs, given the long human history of kings and wealthy merchant houses and so on, seems to be for the rich to get richer and stay very rich indeed (until some calamity or revolution) and for the poor to stay about the same. The great feat of the 20th century was to create a large "middle class" that defied this historic trend.
What Bush has done to encourage enhanced income disparity is (1) to lower taxes at the top end, allowing the natural aggregation of wealth to proceed faster; (2) to pay less attention to environmental and labor and similar issues so that companies can profit through activities that make many people's lives a little worse; (3) spend prolifically in ways that do not help the economy; and (4) allow the debt/credit situation to get entirely out of hand with the relative burden falling more heavily on the debtors than the creditors.
Let me repeat: accumulation of wealth is the *natural state of affairs*. Any argument that simply says that something is natural, a choice, or whatever, is *irrelevant* to the point about the rich getting richer and the poor not getting richer. Maybe the poor do things that make you think they should stay poor--but then you should agree that the disparity exists and is widening and say that that's the way things should be.
Now, I'll find quantitative data to back up bits of my argument as you request, but only if you specify what sort of thing you think is relevant to the argument. ("If we get this piece of data and it says this, it's good evidence for my position; and if it says that, it's good evidence for yours.")
Selectively giving opportunities to the rich while being in an environment of easy access to credit is a good way to make the baseline wealth of everyone go down, while giving only the rich a way to get out of it.
Debt is a conscious choice, but it is the kind of choice that you can assume that many people will make, especially if you are poor and something unexpected happens and it's easy to gain access to it.
What exactly do you believe that Clinton did with the budget that caused a temporary increase in revenue?
And I *did* provide numbers--specifically, I provided a link to the census data on income distributions. If you'd looked, you'd have seen that the bottom 10% or so has stayed pretty much flat in buying power over the past 15 years, while the top 10% has enjoyed a nice increase. The poor aren't getting poorer, but they're getting *relatively* poorer; or, alternatively, they haven't been sharing in the economic growth of the country/world.
Other than those numbers, I'm not sure what you want to see.
From seeing him speak and answer questions, I think he's one of the very rare people who combine the two. Whether it will be enough is another question, of course.
Of course it's far from a sure thing, but I'm not sure how one could get much closer to a sure thing (and pick an actual person instead of an idealization of one).
First, there are a variety of lots-of-money-only ways to increase wealth, including preferred stock, invitation-only venture capital groups, companies with shares with values in the many thousands of dollars (e.g. Berkshire Hathaway), tactics that require a large investment to engage in such as overseas investing and taking full advantage of tax credits/shelters/whatever; and then, of course, the more money one has the more effectively one can attempt to start a new business or make improvements on an existing process since one can start at a larger, more efficient scale.
Most people are in debt, so they're actually getting poorer over time all else being equal (which it is not--they presumably have other sources of income!). I've had a rather hard time finding detailed statistics, but http://www.directlendingsolutions.com/2007-consumer-statistics.htm gives an overview.
As far as whether the poor are actually getting poorer, they seem to be getting relatively poorer, i.e., not keeping up with economic growth while the higher income brackets are pulling away from them, according to http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf
But, anyway, whether the poor get poorer depends on the structure and availability of options to go into debt as well as the inflation rate.
It's easy to take from the poor and give to the rich. You just devise an economic system where return on investment scales increasingly with investment (so that you earn a better rate on an investment of, say, $10M, than one of, say, $1k), don't apply other factors that more than compensate, and let the process run on its own.
You don't have to work very hard to get this to happen because of economies of scale. All you have to do, really, is not get in the way too much.
The rich get richer, and the poor get--well, that depends on the overall economy and the scale of the investment return imbalance. They could get richer or poorer. Lately it's been "poorer".
Steven Chu is an expert on the technical side. He also runs LBL, so he knows how to make decisions. Why get two people when you can get one who can do both?
Also, Steven Chu is probably smarter than you. Nobel Prize winners aren't *necessarily*, but in this case, Chu is a very, very sharp guy.
Yeah, actually, I'd have him design a bridge--he'd get up to speed quickly enough, and figure out what he needed to know in order to do a good job.
But the real point is that he's running a National Lab. Which means that "Steven Chu is a great physicist AND a proven administrator".
Running a national lab requires a good deal of political acumen. He's also running a green energy initiative at LBL. He seems pretty qualified to me.
My main concern is that he might do more good at LBL than at Washington.
This is true--you don't need to become a nationally dominant party in one election cycle, just a dominant party in some unit of elected government where majority-voting is in effect.
Why would I want to give money to charity if you might be selfish and refuse, because you might think that you can count on my good-heartedness to produce a stable, enriching society without you having to help out at all?
The core problem that societies have always faced is how to avoid free riders that suck resources and productivity.
One type of free rider is the lazy welfare recipient. To avoid this type of free riding, the society can let people starve if they don't work.
But another type of free rider is the free-market individualist who takes advantage of education and health and other services rendered elsewhere to deliver to him high-quality employees. To avoid this type of free riding, the society can neglect to educate its people and make the employers do it.
Governments tend to shift the burdens imposed by free riders from the second type to the first: states taking money for education and infrastructure ensures a more level playing field where no party can take huge advantage of the educational or infrastructure altruism of another. A strong society needs to keep both types of free rider under control.
If the Republicans lost really, really badly in the current election, the party might split; you might be able to pull a libertarian-like party out of it.
The problem with the 5% mark is that even though the government now has to pay attention to you legally, the voters who voted for you have been penalized by having their votes not count. And by the time you get to 5%, there are a lot of states in play, and a lot of angry voters who think that they got the greater of two evils because they took their votes away from the lesser to the third party.
So you have to do it in one fell swoop. (See what happened with the Whigs....)
If you've worked very hard and are sympathetic to others who would work very hard if they had better chances to improve themselves, and don't mind too much that some people who won't work hard will also be helped, and don't want to have to take the time to carefully manage the transfer of wealth and sympathy to good outcomes, you might want to delegate the role of producing an opportunity-filled society via improving its members to government.
If you've worked very hard, you might be annoyed that your money is being used to degrade the lives and productivity of people who could be helped instead.
If you've worked very hard, you might prefer to not work very hard to defend yourself as well; you might think it more convenient if the task of defense was outsourced and few people had the means to seriously threaten you.
There are problems with all of these positions, of course, but it's not overtly silly to work very hard and hold liberal (in the U.S. sense) values.