Unlike Kansas, California has been running a budget surplus for 4 years straight now. It now has a healthy "rainy day" fund and its financial situation is pretty much assured for the next 10 years or so.
No, it's not. Please, do check the BLS statistics - former "middle class" overwhelmingly moves only in the downward direction.
That's nonsense. None of these trends are "overwhelming", and the BLS statistics only account for median gross weekly income, a lousy measure of where people are "moving".
Meanwhile the income both for "middle class" and for pretty much everyone in 90% has stagnated.
It certainly has grown much less than it should, largely due to costly government mandates and taxes. Who do you think is going to pay, say, for ACA? Or new financial regulations? Or new corporate reporting requirements? Or new product safety standards? All of that comes out of everybody's salaries. And people in upper income brackets are much less affected by these because they are effectively regressive taxes.
Increasing wealth disparity in itself (emphasis intentional (#)) doesn't necessarily indicate mean that "more and more people are getting richer".... I'm replying to this in the same context that you stated it- i.e. without any qualifying context- so if what you meant was more nuanced, that's not what you actually said.
There is a "qualifying context": we are talking about the US. You quoted it. In the US and similar economies, increasing wealth goes along with increasing inequality.
You say that economics is not a zero-sum game, which is quite true; this implies that everyone benefits,
No, it doesn't mean that. It simply means that wins and losses don't balance out to zero overall, and that one man's gain isn't automatically another man's loss. Obviously, a lot of people get hurt by free markets; they just happen to be the people who ought to get hurt, like inefficient businesses, incompetent investors, and people who make their money through crony capitalism.
which seems to be the exact opposite of the fact that you think increasing wealth disparity is a good thing and synonymous with economic prosperity.
Nowhere did I say that "wealth disparity is synonymous with economic prosperity". Wealth disparity is simply an indicator that happens to grow along with economic prosperity in developed nations like the US. The causes and relationships are anything but simple.
Finally, the assumption that people at the bottom of the income scale aren't hurt by this is dubious. When those at the top have an increasingly large advantage, this is invariably going to be used to magnify and skew society and how it's run towards those same people.
Quite right. We call that skewing "rent seeking". Rent seeking isn't something that happens in a free market, it happens when you give government the power to intervene in the economy, for example, for the nominal purpose of "reducing inequality".
That's before we get to the social implications of what it would be like to live in such a society. (Hint; I would *not* like to live in Brazil with its high levels of crime massively exacerbated by income inequality).
Well, yes: Brazil is a developing country run by socialists. They came to power on the promise of addressing inequality and injustice, utterly failed, and have instead been running the economy into the ground. Brazil is 122 on the index of economic freedom ("mostly unfree"). Of course, it has high inequality and poverty, what do you expect?
Look, all things being equal, more economic equality (of outcome) is a nice thing. But when you try to achieve economic equality through government intervention, the outcomes are rent seeking, crony capitalism, and economic stagnation.
I believe people who believe in that kind of social engineering are applying some advanced math. They start with categorizing people based on overlapping criteria, such as sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. Based on these criteria, they classify people into "victims" and "oppressors". When people are both, they call that "intersectionality" and attempt to balance it out. Experts assign scores and weights. For example, white homosexual cis males have now apparently moved into the "oppressor" category.
I blame New Math and the attempts at teaching abstract set theory to budding sociologists for this.
The problem is, joblessness is not a behaviour but a circumstance.
There are plenty of jobs people could take and that are hard to fill, including skilled trades (electricians, carpenters, masons, plumbers), drivers, manual laborers, meat processing, nursing and others. People don't take those jobs because it's not rational for them to do so.
Bad economy is not the fault of those with no economic power but those with lots.
People get economic power primarily by producing and selling stuff other people want. So, any problems with the economy are clearly not due to people with economic power. They are due to people with political power.
Joe Bum or Joe Businessman... And who, then, requires more encouragement and penalization - in other words, regulation - and also deserves to pay for mitigating its negative effects?
"Joe Bum" chooses not to work not because he is lazy, but because government encourages him not to work and penalizes him if he does. That's not a moral failing of "Joe Bum", it's a moral failing of government and people like you who vote for that kind of government. And regulating "Joe Business" more is not going to improve things, because Joe Business isn't responsible for any of this.
This is just the "No True Scotsman" argument. Batshit crazy leftists have taken over the "progressive" movement, just like the batshit crazy feminists have taken over the feminist movement. I don't make up the news.
That is arguably true for feminism, where critical theory and social justice movements took over feminism. That still doesn't alter the reality of it: that's what feminism is and means today. The fact that feminism used to have equality and liberalism as its goals doesn't change that.
As for the progressive movement, it has always been batshit crazy. Progressives used to support eugenics, racial segregation, trade barriers, and various forms of central planning. If anything, progressives have mellowed out a little: at least they aren't sterilizing, lobotomizing, or killing people anymore.
Hello from the UK. The last Labour government tried that. Actually they were obsessed with measurable metrics and installed them everywhere with severe penalties
Daemonik started comparisons between educational systems and then implicitly proposed measuring the quality of an educational system by how much money it spends. I consider that idiotic. If you are going to measure the quality of an educational system at all, you should do it by test scores, dropout rates, and graduation rates. Those are not useful metrics for managing public educational systems, but they can certainly tell us whether the California school system is generally delivering on its promises.
So, no, the world is vastly, vastly more complex than your excessively simplistic metrics. You think you have the solution, but trust me, you do not. It's been tried before and it failed.
I fully agree: the world is "vastly, vastly more complex than [these] excessively simplistic metrics". What you are recognizing there is an economic calculation problem. That is, a public educational system (i.e., a centrally planned educational system) requires vast amounts of information about the details of every locality, student, family, and subject to function. You still suffer from the delusion that this problem is solvable. A couple of centuries of experience have shown that it is not. Thanks for making my point for me.
(Note that many education rankings consider amount of funding or student/teacher ratios as part of the score; that really isn't valid, but even that doesn't rescue California's poor showing.)
No, the delusional ones are the nutjobs like yourself who look only at raw numbers - and miss that millions of good paying jobs (especially factory jobs) have vanished, to be replaced by minimum wage service jobs and McJobs.
The size of the manufacturing sector has steadily increased since 1947. The only thing that has significantly decreased is the share of manufacturing jobs. That's because we have added a lot of new jobs in other sectors. That shouldn't really be surprising either, since the percentage of college graduates has gone from about 5% in the 1950's to around 30% today. But in you and Bernie's world, apparently, we should all get free college degrees so that we can then work on assembly lines, right?
Just a quick grab at some examples tells me you at talking shit
If you think you can prove economic relationships by cherry-picking some examples, you are an idiot, and the four examples you cited don't even support your point, such as it is.
Then there is the problem of progressive policies attracting the down and outs. If your down and out in Kansas, moving to California seems like a win, win. I doubt that anyone who is down and out moves from California to Kansas.
Indeed. But that mechanism doesn't just operate at the level of moving from/to states, it operates at the level of everyday life decisions. If you subsidize alternative energy, you get more alternative energy. If you tax sugar or gasoline, people tend to consume less of it. If you subsidize joblessness and tax wages and earnings, you get more joblessness and less industry. Encouraging negative behaviors and penalizing positive behaviors is one of the major problems with progressive policies.
Because if you believe in magic fairies that is your business, not public policy.
Yet "believing in magic fairies" is much more public policy in Europe than in the US, as many European governments spend vast sums of public funds in order to pay for religion and churches, and to spread Christian values. Many European conservative parties are explicitly Christian, right down to their names.
Did you read the article? The only thing that article says is that Brownback couldn't cut education; it says nothing about educational outcomes. In terms of K-12 educational performance, Kansas does better than California, which has dropped to near the bottom of all states.
As for the fiscal situation, that depends a lot more than on whether the current budget is balanced. The fiscal situation of all US states is negative, the question is whether and what they are doing about it.
As for tax cuts in Kansas, cutting taxes without being able to cut spending is problematic. And while Brownback may have declared his tax cuts as a "real live experiment", the reality is that for tax cuts to have a beneficial effect takes many years, because the way tax cuts increase revenue is by people and businesses relocating (and Kansas isn't very attractive to begin with).
Finally, although I actually looked at The Atlantic article, its articles can generally be safely ignored: they are uninformed and misleading political hit pieces. You need to upgrade your reading.
Compared to the US, church attendance for example is much lower in Europe than the US.
You're cherry picking your statistics, and without much understanding of the non-religious functions of churches in different places.
In the US, presidential candidates fly their religious credentials high.
And they do the same in many European countries as well. In fact, many European countries have explicitly Christian parties. The UK is an anomaly and not representative of Europe in many ways.
Really, you need to get out of your insular and provincial views of European society, and you need to stop cherry-picking.
Bullshit. The size of the US manufacturing sector has grown steadily since 1947.
so there used to be a lot more of that sort of job instead of a few hours a week as a greeter at Walmart.
Again, bullshit. The people who have moved out of manufacturing have generally moved into better jobs, resulting in increased wealth and increased income inequality (that's the "vanishing middle class").
And it should hardly be surprising that this happened either. In 1947, college graduation rates were somewhere around 5%, today they are nearly 30%. That means that a huge number of people whose only job options were mind numbing, menial work on assembly lines now have university degrees and demand better jobs that "manufacturing jobs".
Apparently, in your imaginary ideal world, we all get free college degrees courtesy of the government and then, after graduation, get good manufacturing jobs assembling iPhones. Thanks, but no thanks.
California is in deep trouble long term due to its high unfunded pension liabilities and other obligations. Several cities in the state are also in serious trouble. Even if California's small budget surplus were real, it wouldn't seriously address these issues. To the degree that the Californian budget situation has improved over the last few years, it's due to tax hikes and a windfall from the stock market; those aren't going to last.
What are considered the better 'progressive' places in the US today? ie Not attached to religion, tolerates people who are different, tech-savvy, forward thinking etc?
I have no idea why you would want people to be "not attached to religion" or why you think this is a big issue. The US is about middle of the road in religiosity and Christianity compared to Europe. Americans generally have a live-and-let-live attitude. That's true even for Mormons, Baptists, and Catholics (the most intolerant people I have found are the "progressive, forward-thinking" types). So, my main recommendation would be to give red states and smaller towns serious consideration.
San Francisco really isn't worse in terms of homelessness and social problems from many other large cities in the US and Europe. What is so striking about it is simply the contrast to what it used to be like. So, if you like your typical "progressive, forward thinking" place and can afford it, SF may well be the place for you.
Tell that garbage to the residents of Flint Michigan, you might get a dose of reality rather than you usual Fox news fantasy.
The residents of Flint Michigan? People who were robbed blind by their local government? Who were poisoned by their local water monopoly, their city government, their state government, and their state regulatory agencies? The people who were the victims of vindictive infighting between different government departments? The people who are unable to sue the responsible government workers or the state for damages because of qualified immunity?
Yeah, I think they would be happy with lower taxes, lower fees, and the option to buy from sources that aren't going to poison them.
The state of any democracy is a combination of both liberal and conservative policies
The state of many cities and some states, however, is not a combination of both liberal and conservative policies, since they have been in the hands of Democrats and progressives for decades. So we can look at places like San Francisco and California to see what the long term effect of Democratic progressive government is. And what we find is that these governments simply fail to deliver on their promises.
This is just an illustration. Economic studies have shown again and again that more economic freedom and smaller government translate into increased growth and wealth.
Well, I don't know why Brownback is liked or not liked, and fiscal conservatism isn't necessarily politically popular because it causes short term pain even if it helps long term growth. Statistically, Kansas does better in terms of educational outcomes and fiscal situation. In terms of happiness, economic growth, and per capita GDP, they also seem comparable. I suggest looking up the statistics.
Unlike Kansas, California really is at some risk of collapse, with its dire fiscal situation and failing education system.
Slashdot Mirror
Wishful thinking: http://www.ktvu.com/news/77148...
Not if you look at educational outcomes. In fact, no public school teachers may well be a much better state of affairs.
That's nonsense. None of these trends are "overwhelming", and the BLS statistics only account for median gross weekly income, a lousy measure of where people are "moving".
It certainly has grown much less than it should, largely due to costly government mandates and taxes. Who do you think is going to pay, say, for ACA? Or new financial regulations? Or new corporate reporting requirements? Or new product safety standards? All of that comes out of everybody's salaries. And people in upper income brackets are much less affected by these because they are effectively regressive taxes.
Yes, thanks to people with your kind of politics.
There is a "qualifying context": we are talking about the US. You quoted it. In the US and similar economies, increasing wealth goes along with increasing inequality.
No, it doesn't mean that. It simply means that wins and losses don't balance out to zero overall, and that one man's gain isn't automatically another man's loss. Obviously, a lot of people get hurt by free markets; they just happen to be the people who ought to get hurt, like inefficient businesses, incompetent investors, and people who make their money through crony capitalism.
Nowhere did I say that "wealth disparity is synonymous with economic prosperity". Wealth disparity is simply an indicator that happens to grow along with economic prosperity in developed nations like the US. The causes and relationships are anything but simple.
Quite right. We call that skewing "rent seeking". Rent seeking isn't something that happens in a free market, it happens when you give government the power to intervene in the economy, for example, for the nominal purpose of "reducing inequality".
Well, yes: Brazil is a developing country run by socialists. They came to power on the promise of addressing inequality and injustice, utterly failed, and have instead been running the economy into the ground. Brazil is 122 on the index of economic freedom ("mostly unfree"). Of course, it has high inequality and poverty, what do you expect?
Look, all things being equal, more economic equality (of outcome) is a nice thing. But when you try to achieve economic equality through government intervention, the outcomes are rent seeking, crony capitalism, and economic stagnation.
I believe people who believe in that kind of social engineering are applying some advanced math. They start with categorizing people based on overlapping criteria, such as sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. Based on these criteria, they classify people into "victims" and "oppressors". When people are both, they call that "intersectionality" and attempt to balance it out. Experts assign scores and weights. For example, white homosexual cis males have now apparently moved into the "oppressor" category.
I blame New Math and the attempts at teaching abstract set theory to budding sociologists for this.
There are plenty of jobs people could take and that are hard to fill, including skilled trades (electricians, carpenters, masons, plumbers), drivers, manual laborers, meat processing, nursing and others. People don't take those jobs because it's not rational for them to do so.
People get economic power primarily by producing and selling stuff other people want. So, any problems with the economy are clearly not due to people with economic power. They are due to people with political power.
"Joe Bum" chooses not to work not because he is lazy, but because government encourages him not to work and penalizes him if he does. That's not a moral failing of "Joe Bum", it's a moral failing of government and people like you who vote for that kind of government. And regulating "Joe Business" more is not going to improve things, because Joe Business isn't responsible for any of this.
Really? Like where?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
AFAIK, the US has some of the strongest restrictions on involuntary commitment in the world.
Did they ever teach basic economics?
That is arguably true for feminism, where critical theory and social justice movements took over feminism. That still doesn't alter the reality of it: that's what feminism is and means today. The fact that feminism used to have equality and liberalism as its goals doesn't change that.
As for the progressive movement, it has always been batshit crazy. Progressives used to support eugenics, racial segregation, trade barriers, and various forms of central planning. If anything, progressives have mellowed out a little: at least they aren't sterilizing, lobotomizing, or killing people anymore.
You do if you're government subsidized and need to make your political masters happy:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/3...
You can already experience 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Man ("Hey, Harvard, wanna network?"), Walking in NYC as a Homosexual! ("Pants a little too tight homie"), 10 HRS Walking While Black in NYC ("Call me Cruella, I like my black on white."), and 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Puppy ("Come back to my house, I got some good meat for you."). FYI, the puppy experienced by far the most numerous and most vile forms of verbal harassment, plus "numerous winks, unsolicited tummy rubs, and non-consensual tug-of-war games."
Yet, when the economic windfalls of the welfare state fail to rain down, people move back:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/so...
Daemonik started comparisons between educational systems and then implicitly proposed measuring the quality of an educational system by how much money it spends. I consider that idiotic. If you are going to measure the quality of an educational system at all, you should do it by test scores, dropout rates, and graduation rates. Those are not useful metrics for managing public educational systems, but they can certainly tell us whether the California school system is generally delivering on its promises.
I fully agree: the world is "vastly, vastly more complex than [these] excessively simplistic metrics". What you are recognizing there is an economic calculation problem. That is, a public educational system (i.e., a centrally planned educational system) requires vast amounts of information about the details of every locality, student, family, and subject to function. You still suffer from the delusion that this problem is solvable. A couple of centuries of experience have shown that it is not. Thanks for making my point for me.
I already have, but here we go again:
http://mercatus.org/statefisca...
https://wallethub.com/edu/stat...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
(Note that many education rankings consider amount of funding or student/teacher ratios as part of the score; that really isn't valid, but even that doesn't rescue California's poor showing.)
The size of the manufacturing sector has steadily increased since 1947. The only thing that has significantly decreased is the share of manufacturing jobs. That's because we have added a lot of new jobs in other sectors. That shouldn't really be surprising either, since the percentage of college graduates has gone from about 5% in the 1950's to around 30% today. But in you and Bernie's world, apparently, we should all get free college degrees so that we can then work on assembly lines, right?
http://bfy.tw/5C3g
http://www.heritage.org/resear...
http://journalistsresource.org...
If you think you can prove economic relationships by cherry-picking some examples, you are an idiot, and the four examples you cited don't even support your point, such as it is.
Indeed. But that mechanism doesn't just operate at the level of moving from/to states, it operates at the level of everyday life decisions. If you subsidize alternative energy, you get more alternative energy. If you tax sugar or gasoline, people tend to consume less of it. If you subsidize joblessness and tax wages and earnings, you get more joblessness and less industry. Encouraging negative behaviors and penalizing positive behaviors is one of the major problems with progressive policies.
Yet "believing in magic fairies" is much more public policy in Europe than in the US, as many European governments spend vast sums of public funds in order to pay for religion and churches, and to spread Christian values. Many European conservative parties are explicitly Christian, right down to their names.
Did you read the article? The only thing that article says is that Brownback couldn't cut education; it says nothing about educational outcomes. In terms of K-12 educational performance, Kansas does better than California, which has dropped to near the bottom of all states.
As for the fiscal situation, that depends a lot more than on whether the current budget is balanced. The fiscal situation of all US states is negative, the question is whether and what they are doing about it.
As for tax cuts in Kansas, cutting taxes without being able to cut spending is problematic. And while Brownback may have declared his tax cuts as a "real live experiment", the reality is that for tax cuts to have a beneficial effect takes many years, because the way tax cuts increase revenue is by people and businesses relocating (and Kansas isn't very attractive to begin with).
Finally, although I actually looked at The Atlantic article, its articles can generally be safely ignored: they are uninformed and misleading political hit pieces. You need to upgrade your reading.
You're cherry picking your statistics, and without much understanding of the non-religious functions of churches in different places.
And they do the same in many European countries as well. In fact, many European countries have explicitly Christian parties. The UK is an anomaly and not representative of Europe in many ways.
Really, you need to get out of your insular and provincial views of European society, and you need to stop cherry-picking.
Bullshit. The size of the US manufacturing sector has grown steadily since 1947.
Again, bullshit. The people who have moved out of manufacturing have generally moved into better jobs, resulting in increased wealth and increased income inequality (that's the "vanishing middle class").
And it should hardly be surprising that this happened either. In 1947, college graduation rates were somewhere around 5%, today they are nearly 30%. That means that a huge number of people whose only job options were mind numbing, menial work on assembly lines now have university degrees and demand better jobs that "manufacturing jobs".
Apparently, in your imaginary ideal world, we all get free college degrees courtesy of the government and then, after graduation, get good manufacturing jobs assembling iPhones. Thanks, but no thanks.
California is in deep trouble long term due to its high unfunded pension liabilities and other obligations. Several cities in the state are also in serious trouble. Even if California's small budget surplus were real, it wouldn't seriously address these issues. To the degree that the Californian budget situation has improved over the last few years, it's due to tax hikes and a windfall from the stock market; those aren't going to last.
I have no idea why you would want people to be "not attached to religion" or why you think this is a big issue. The US is about middle of the road in religiosity and Christianity compared to Europe. Americans generally have a live-and-let-live attitude. That's true even for Mormons, Baptists, and Catholics (the most intolerant people I have found are the "progressive, forward-thinking" types). So, my main recommendation would be to give red states and smaller towns serious consideration.
San Francisco really isn't worse in terms of homelessness and social problems from many other large cities in the US and Europe. What is so striking about it is simply the contrast to what it used to be like. So, if you like your typical "progressive, forward thinking" place and can afford it, SF may well be the place for you.
The residents of Flint Michigan? People who were robbed blind by their local government? Who were poisoned by their local water monopoly, their city government, their state government, and their state regulatory agencies? The people who were the victims of vindictive infighting between different government departments? The people who are unable to sue the responsible government workers or the state for damages because of qualified immunity?
Yeah, I think they would be happy with lower taxes, lower fees, and the option to buy from sources that aren't going to poison them.
The state of many cities and some states, however, is not a combination of both liberal and conservative policies, since they have been in the hands of Democrats and progressives for decades. So we can look at places like San Francisco and California to see what the long term effect of Democratic progressive government is. And what we find is that these governments simply fail to deliver on their promises.
This is just an illustration. Economic studies have shown again and again that more economic freedom and smaller government translate into increased growth and wealth.
Well, I don't know why Brownback is liked or not liked, and fiscal conservatism isn't necessarily politically popular because it causes short term pain even if it helps long term growth. Statistically, Kansas does better in terms of educational outcomes and fiscal situation. In terms of happiness, economic growth, and per capita GDP, they also seem comparable. I suggest looking up the statistics.
Unlike Kansas, California really is at some risk of collapse, with its dire fiscal situation and failing education system.