Here's an idea: how about you tell us which things the administration said about the US deaths in Libya were actually true. Because that will take less time.
Let's just keep it simple: the entire story about a spontaneous demonstration and a mob angry about some video on YouTube was completely fabricated. They knew it wasn't true, and that's been obvious since the day it happened. Today's email dump makes it even more clear. Purposeful, deliberate lying about the death of an ambassador and other Americans, all in the name of tamping down some prospectively unpleasant buzz that wouldn't resonate with the "Al Qeda is on the run!" narrative. Of course you, just like everyone else, already know this. Have fun being a part of theatrics, but just remember that pretending it's not so doesn't make you come across as any more credible. It's kind of embarrassing, actually.
Except for people who care that Obama and his administration blatantly lied about what happened in the period right before an election. And we see that Hillary Clinton knew very well that what was being said by both State and White House spokesdroids (and by her, and the president himself) was pure fabricated BS meant to placate prospective voters. They deliberately lied about what happened so that those events wouldn't contradict the narrative that Obama was trying to sell in his re-election bid. The people who actually know this, and who claim they don't care, are desperately hoping that Clinton's complicity in spreading that lie won't remain on people's minds during this upcoming election.
Not at all. It summarizes a causal relationship. The disingenuous GP is the one that says, "Having little money is a case of having little money." He doesn't address the why, whereas I'm pointing out that it's the lack of specific action that causes the lack of desired results.
There are plenty of poor white people who are poor for their own cultural reasons. The fact that you think culture is the same as skin color shows what a confused person you are. Culture is about behavior, not pigment. Avoiding that reality is just more PC deflection on your part. Nice try. Well, not really.
Poverty is caused by lack of money.
No, it's not. Poverty is caused by not doing the things that make you prosperous. Certainly a kid born into a household where nobody does the things necessary to provide a prosperous environment is a victim indeed. The parents are the only ones responsible for that, period (yeah, yeah, we can make exceptions to that... women who are raped and never the less bear the child, and don't take advantage of endless opportunities to allow the child to be adopted into better circumstances, etc).
A kid born into a family where there is no culture of learning, or creativity, of movement towards the things that have lifted untold millions out of poverty... that kid is poor because of the culture into which she was born. Not because there is no prospect for a comfortable life in the world, but because those prospects are being squashed by the local culture. In some cases, that culture is no larger than the single parent. Or it might be the size of a multi-generational household. Or a whole city block. Or an entire nation-state. But it's cultural, pure and simple.
In order to avoid having to give up on your moral relativism and turn in your PC/SJW card, you'll pretend that you just read someone talking about skin color. The fact that you so reflexively resort to that perspective in order to avoid talking about the real problem is, ironically, a stellar display of either disingenuous, craven intellectual dishonesty (or just a juvenile lack of rhetorical skills) on your part, or the sign of someone who really hasn't thought this through.
Address these things and poverty is reduced
Ah, an "addressor" in our midst. Say what you, mean. Tear down people who have something so you can spread it around, right? No. Places like west Baltimore are saturated in lavish education spending, free or heavily subsidized transportation (and walkable blocks from places without even needing it), awash in grant money that's just looking for ways to turn abandoned properties into livable homes and viable businesses, and it's been run by people at the legislative and executive levels (since you're so obsessed with this) roughly the same color as those who live there. Health and legal expenses? Covered by taxpayer-funded medical care and legal clinics where you can hear the crickets chirping for lack of interest in use other than when someone's arrested for street crime.
We've been "addressing" those issues, lavishly, for decades. Miles away, there's prosperity. In that spot? People living in fear of the local street gangs and those squatting in abandoned homes and businesses. Why? Because the members of those gangs, the thugs who make that area intolerable as a place to live or run a business, have safe haven, culturally, in the households in which they were so passively raised. Ask the people who live there, and they'll tell you that's exactly the problem. "Addressing" that problem means (ready?) not tolerating the crime. And that means police presence and activity. But we're being told, by the president no less, that what's really needed is a less visible and active police force. And indeed, the police in that area have dialed it way back in the last few weeks... and surprise! The violence level, including murder on the street, has surged hugely.
Just what you look for when deciding where to build your next fire-proof retail store, right?
OK, so really the GP is saying that the only reason we have people in poverty is because we have other people who aren't in poverty. Which is nonsense.
Prosperity is not a fixed-size meal to be spread around. If it were, we'd all be living like paupers because the population has grown so much. Prosperity is created, and people of modest means create it all the time. Then they become the ones who are resented for no longer being impoverished. Too bad, they earned it. The fact that they are no longer impoverished is not what's keeping someone else from having a better life.
IMO, the only decent/moral solution is for a society in which things are more equitable. I'm not saying that a CEO shouldn't earn more than an employee, but 100X seems immoral.
So, impoverished people will suddenly start raising kids in two-parent households, or start teaching kids to read and think critically and have a work ethic... if we can only just limit what CEOs earn? If we can just tear down immoral prosperity, that will fix the broken household and neighborhood cultures that prevent prosperity from taking root in those places? Are you even listening to yourself?
How about CEOs that make 50X? Does that pass your moral standard? 49.5%? 49.4%? When exactly does a business owners or director's pay become "moral." What is the standard you're using? Do you really mean that morality is based on statistics, not on actual principles? You agree that the person who runs a company is worth more than a person who sweeps the floor at that company. Why? What MORAL grounds to you have for that distinction? Be specific. And then in one percent pay increments, start describing exactly when it's suddenly immoral.
Because once you nail that down, you'll see how you've just set yourself up to be the immoral one for making more money, yourself, than someone else does. By someone else's standards (if we use your model), you yourself pure evil for not being as poor as someone else. How DARE you live a lifestyle so rich that you can afford the time to sit around expressing opinions on the internet! Other people don't have that luxury, so you must be immorally prosperous. If you stop being that prosperous, that will finally other people to be prosperous, right?
Me on the other hand? I'm an island in a sea of indifference.
Which is fine until you're killed by someone who irrationally thinks you're responsible for their poverty. Or your home loses half its value because a change in the local demographics means an encroaching street crime problem. Indifference doesn't change the problem you'll have renegotiating your upside down mortgage. But that's fine, you're much too cool to worry about such stuff.
I don't understand why the fact that Black people kill Black people negates the fact that law enforcement is often racist. Can't both be true?
Yes, there can be racist cops, just like there are racist black people. That has nothing to do with the assertion that the DC police only went after this quadruple murderer because the killer is black and victims are white. DC police go after killers every day. Given the local demographic, most of the killers are black, just like most of their victims. The GP wants to imagine that the DC police don't ever go after killers of black victims, which is BS on the face of it.
What are you talking about? I'm not comparing the lower crime rates in Appalachia to the higher crime rates in west Baltimore. I'm addressing the GP's argument that it's the fact there are rich people in the world that we have poverty in those areas. The entire concept is laughable.
Reduce minority poverty, and minority crime will probably drop too. There are lots of ways to do that, but it takes a huge effort to do so.
So what do you propose? Use government power to force minority mothers to marry, and to force the fathers or children to stay at home, become educated, and care enough to raise children who will actually attend school? Are you saying that a kid who is born into a household with one young, under-educated parent is going to be starting out life with that disadvantage because other people aren't poor? Do you really think that places like Baltimore, which spend way above average per student on education, and have an endless parade of subsidies and programs to provide resources to people in poverty... just need to have the government do more than is already being done?
The problem is cultural. Persistent poverty in the worst parts of Appalachia, or in west Baltimore, don't exist because other people are prosperous. That entire meme is just SJW hand-wringing BS. Poorly disguised resentment of success that's trotted out to do anything to avoid addressing the cultural issues that are the actual problem in such places.
If you pick a black person and then pick a random victim, it's more likely the victim will be white than black, because there are more white people than black people.
Then why are there more murders committed by black people (against all sorts of victims) then would be accounted for by their percentage of the population? What is your point, exactly? Yes, there are more "white" people than "black" people in the general population. That's not what's being discussed. What's being discussed is the rate of crime coming out of specific demographics.
"After we found out he is a black man that allegedly killed a white family - oh, and their maid, I guess."
Well, sure. Because the SJWs are insisting that police do less to hunt down black guys who are responsible for the plague of murders the commit within their own demographic. Since, you know, it's racist and oppressive to attempt to arrest those guys.
So you're already attributing this to mental health problems? They guy worked for the company owned by the victim. This isn't a case where families like those of the victim (who pay the vast majority of the country's income taxes - well more than "their fair share" in terms of the income they make) somehow short-changed the guy who decided to murder them. The bad guy, in this case, decided to extort $40,000 in cash from his employer by holding the family hostage and torturing a ten year old boy until the cash was delivered by the employer's personal assistant.
Your whole "this is the fault of rich people" narrative is a bunch of SJW BS.
Naming an extraordinarily unusual retailer does not bolster your point.
Of course it does. It's AN example of what I'm talking about. There are plenty of retailers who pay entry-level employees more than minimum wage. Why? Because they want to keep them around - churn is expensive, even at the stock/clerk level. Flipping burgers isn't supposed to be a career. You're not supposed to do things like have babies while you're on your first, menial job.
Leaving aside the fact that your plan is to punish success, destroy incentive, and force people who are successful to hide their money... taxing "wealth" is such a capricious activity that it, even more than the current system, is essentially designed to be divisive. As it stands, the wealthy people pay the vast majority of the income taxes, and the poorer HALF of the country pays essentially no income tax at all. You're proposing that every year you take away some of a successful person's assets until they are as poor as the lower half, right? Or would you just keep taking some of everyone's assets, every year, until nobody has anything left?
Your goal, rather than doing any of the things that actually create prosperity, is to simply tear down anything successful in the name of resentment. Which also happens to kill the goose laying the golden tax revenue egg that currently pays the bills.
If it is fair to say the person using the roadway should pay it's cost because they get the benefit, it's fair to point out that 70-90% of the benefit is gotten by their employer.
Nonsense.
The employer personally uses the road to drive to his business. Done.
The employees use the road the same way. Done.
The business' customers also use the road the same way (when visiting that store). Done.
All of them spend a bit of time on the road, and pay taxes on the fuel they burn in order to pay for the service of having the road available to them.
When the business owner receives a shipment of new shoes, he's paying the freight company (or his supplier is, and passing that cost along in one way or another) to make that delivery. That's a different use of the road. Big rigs and busy commercial operators are (in most places) taxed differently because they are buying a different class of service from the city, county, state, or federal agency that maintains the road they're using. The business owner picks up a portion of that higher wear-and-tear cost by being a paying customer of the freight company that is being taxed based on their heavy vehicles/use.
Your world view, which includes the government being involved in the running of the shoe store and going over everyone's books to decide when a shoe sale is profitable so that the shoe store owner (who may actually lose money that year, even while his employees earn taxable income) can be capriciously taxed at a much higher rate as he drives his Hyundai the same 5 miles to work as his sales people, is just a thinly veiled dose of contempt for people who own businesses. The guy is already paying property taxes as he locates and operates his store, and countless other fees.
You want to use MORE tax dollars to keep a running tally on what percentage of the value of a road's use is reflected in the ebbing and flowing profitability of all of the businesses that might be located somewhere along or connected to a given municipality's various types of roads? Wow, it's a Progressive's wet dream! That would require enormous numbers of new bureaucrats, funded by whole new tax schemes, just to allow that to (badly) take place. All so that you punish the business owner, or his better-than-average sales person, for making more money than someone else at the end of exactly the same commute.
Even if your fantasy of "percentage of value" could EVER be calculated as millions of people and businesses use the roads in different ways on different days, what would be the point? I know: your point is that you don't like the idea of government being thought of as a service provider, you like it when they are directly involved in people's personal business decision making, as a forced partner in their budgeting and profit considerations. All of this in the service of what... trying to prop up the false picture of prosperity as a fixed pie, with the government's role being the arbiter of slice sizes in the name of Social Justice? Please. Your attempt to hide a confiscatory/redistributionist agenda behind a loopy road value formula based on impossibly intrusive and subjective measurements of personal achievement is just laughable. Or would be if it didn't represent such a toxic wider philosophy.
Then you are compensating for the guy who only does 90% of his miles in Oregon, but the car is registered outside of the state.
Who cares? Because if you do 20k miles across the state line, you're going to be paying $6,000 to the state for activity you didn't conduct there. I don't care if it's the opposite for some other guy. I would care that this year, presto, my disposable income just dropped by $6,000 for no good reason.
This tax, and the one it replaces, would charge people commuting to McDonalds equally with the owners of McDonalds even though the owners get somewhere between 70-90% of the economic benefit from that road use.
So? The government is providing a service: a way for both the owner and the employee (and the customers, and the vendors/contractors, and the police if they're needed, etc) to get to that restaurant. If you use that service (by driving on the road), you should pay some amount towards the maintenance of the road. Why someone is using the road should be absolutely none of your business, or the government's. Your notion that road taxes should be higher if you make more money than someone when you get where you're going is... preposterous.
What about two shoe salesmen who drive down the same road to the same store to go to work? One is a poor communicator, never takes a shower, and can never seem to handle more than one customer at a time. His co-worker has his act together, and customers respond well by buying more shoes. He makes three times the commission, which translates to a much better income. You're suggesting that he (the better shoe salesman) should be charged more to use the same road because he's not a lazy idiot. Smart? Productive? Eeeeevil! Quick, tax that evil person for being more productive! Utter foolishness, and I'd just laugh it off... but you just provided another case study in everything that's wrong with the lefty view of economics and prosperity.
Just like Radio Shack (self inflicted wounds). But Enron and Arthur Anderson were killed for real by courts, because of their conduct. Death sentences, basically, whether they were going to die of their own wounds eventually or not.
Parent and grandparent - tell that to the Marines. An Osprey had a "hard landing" (hah!) in Hawaii May 18. One Marine was killed and 21 hospitalized. There was a pall of black smoke rising from the "hard landing".
Should also tell that to the service members who are killed or injured in (by comparison) quite frequent helicopter mis-haps? We're talking about crashes and hard landings in aircraft that have long, long histories of service. Shit happens when you're trying to land a big heavy machine with spinning rotors - happens with fixed-wing aircraft, too.
We are not talking about a single person, but a systematic attack on poor people
Really. How are poor people being attacked? Is it by giving them free education, if they'll only take advantage of it? Is it by giving them free health care, if they'll bother to show up? Is it by handing them "refunds" on income taxes they don't even pay, which are collected from somebody else?
the lack of social support
What? Social entitlement spending is the lion's share of our entire government budget. It's huge, and we're drowning in it. I know, if only we just spent even more, prosperity among poor people would suddenly erupt, right? Like, say, in Baltimore... where more is spent per student than in many top-achieving private schools. Hey, maybe it's not about social programs spending money! Maybe it's about the culture.
I understand if you are particularly patriotic and don't like people pointing out shortcomings in "your country", but your response is doing nothing to address the real problems, meaning if they do exist, you are doing your utmost to make sure they are never fixed.
What are you talking about? I'm pointing out exactly what the problem is: household culture. I live in a county that is pure melting pot. 20 years in a neighborhood where I was in one of only two "white" households for blocks in every direction. What do I observe? Across the street, a family living in subsidized housing. Multiple generations of unemployable, functionally illiterate people under one roof. The kids from that house attend exactly the same school system as the kids the next house over... who are children of African immigrants. That household came to the US with essentially nothing, including a very poor grasp of English. A few years later? Both parents busted their asses working two jobs until they were able to buy a couple of cars, buy a townhouse, and buff up their own language and business skills. Major work ethic. Now they work comfortable white collar jobs, and have purchased their third house in the neighborhood (so they're renting out two to other people).
So you stand those two households next to each other. They "look" the same, they both could be said to be in exactly the same economic condition ten or fifteen years ago. But one is living on the dole, getting free housing from the county, food stamps, and regular visits from social services while their kids have grown up to be petty criminals in and out of brushes with the law while dropping out of high school. The other family has overcome a language barrier, the lack of funds, serious social displacement, and whatever extra burden may be perceived as coming along with having dark African skin tones... and they are happy, prospering, and looking forward to their oldest daughter returning from a year of college in Paris. The difference? Attitude. 100% family culture. Giving a shit, personally.
So who "fixed" their situation? They did. Who is trying to "fix" the perpetually poor family next door? A parade of government services people, programs, and tens of thousands of other people's dollars, year in, year out. Do you REALLY think that that household is poor because other people are prosperous? Your BS about the "wealth gap" is just that: BS. The amount of prosperity isn't fixed, it's grown with effort by those who put in the effort. I did, though, enjoy your ironic judgement of me while you're lecturing me about judging others. Hilarious! Keep up the good entertainment.
There aren't that many high paying wage or wage that pay above 15$ an hour and there is already a fierce competition for them.
Companies cannot find enough people with even modest intellectual skills to hire (and retain) for even modestly skilled jobs with much better than minimum wages paid. Hell, there are landscaping companies around here who will pay $20/hour for anyone that will consistently show up to shovel. Costco hires even the most basic, unskilled shelf-stackers for well above minimum wage (closer to $19).
Are you one of those which think the poor are lazy ?
Actually, in many cases that's exactly the problem. But kids born in to families where doing the work needed to become a decent high school graduate is considered unimportant or too much trouble have lazy parents to thank for that - the kids themselves usually don't know better until it's already too late to form decent habits.
You need money for a proper education
No, no you don't. The taxpayers around you will pay for your education through high school. And if you've don't anything even close to working hard, you'll have the academic background needed to get anything from substantial subsidies to full scholarships in higher education. I worked while in college, to have money. Did you?
Frankly your kind of thought are so short sighted , you should get glasses for your brain.
You have no idea where prosperity comes from, apparently.
As it is in the US. But that doesn't mean that teenagers can be forced to actually attend, let alone to learn anything while they're there. Past a certain age, they can just walk away. The alternative would be to run bastions of learning as if they were literally prisons. The point is that in many cases the choice to ignore the opportunity to learn is just that: a choice. Dumb kids don't understand that choice, which is why parents matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Which lies?
Here's an idea: how about you tell us which things the administration said about the US deaths in Libya were actually true. Because that will take less time.
Let's just keep it simple: the entire story about a spontaneous demonstration and a mob angry about some video on YouTube was completely fabricated. They knew it wasn't true, and that's been obvious since the day it happened. Today's email dump makes it even more clear. Purposeful, deliberate lying about the death of an ambassador and other Americans, all in the name of tamping down some prospectively unpleasant buzz that wouldn't resonate with the "Al Qeda is on the run!" narrative. Of course you, just like everyone else, already know this. Have fun being a part of theatrics, but just remember that pretending it's not so doesn't make you come across as any more credible. It's kind of embarrassing, actually.
nobody gives a shit about Benghazi
Except for people who care that Obama and his administration blatantly lied about what happened in the period right before an election. And we see that Hillary Clinton knew very well that what was being said by both State and White House spokesdroids (and by her, and the president himself) was pure fabricated BS meant to placate prospective voters. They deliberately lied about what happened so that those events wouldn't contradict the narrative that Obama was trying to sell in his re-election bid. The people who actually know this, and who claim they don't care, are desperately hoping that Clinton's complicity in spreading that lie won't remain on people's minds during this upcoming election.
This is just a tautology
Not at all. It summarizes a causal relationship. The disingenuous GP is the one that says, "Having little money is a case of having little money." He doesn't address the why, whereas I'm pointing out that it's the lack of specific action that causes the lack of desired results.
"Cultural issues" my ass, white boy.
There are plenty of poor white people who are poor for their own cultural reasons. The fact that you think culture is the same as skin color shows what a confused person you are. Culture is about behavior, not pigment. Avoiding that reality is just more PC deflection on your part. Nice try. Well, not really.
Poverty is caused by lack of money.
No, it's not. Poverty is caused by not doing the things that make you prosperous. Certainly a kid born into a household where nobody does the things necessary to provide a prosperous environment is a victim indeed. The parents are the only ones responsible for that, period (yeah, yeah, we can make exceptions to that ... women who are raped and never the less bear the child, and don't take advantage of endless opportunities to allow the child to be adopted into better circumstances, etc).
... that kid is poor because of the culture into which she was born. Not because there is no prospect for a comfortable life in the world, but because those prospects are being squashed by the local culture. In some cases, that culture is no larger than the single parent. Or it might be the size of a multi-generational household. Or a whole city block. Or an entire nation-state. But it's cultural, pure and simple.
A kid born into a family where there is no culture of learning, or creativity, of movement towards the things that have lifted untold millions out of poverty
In order to avoid having to give up on your moral relativism and turn in your PC/SJW card, you'll pretend that you just read someone talking about skin color. The fact that you so reflexively resort to that perspective in order to avoid talking about the real problem is, ironically, a stellar display of either disingenuous, craven intellectual dishonesty (or just a juvenile lack of rhetorical skills) on your part, or the sign of someone who really hasn't thought this through.
Address these things and poverty is reduced
Ah, an "addressor" in our midst. Say what you, mean. Tear down people who have something so you can spread it around, right? No. Places like west Baltimore are saturated in lavish education spending, free or heavily subsidized transportation (and walkable blocks from places without even needing it), awash in grant money that's just looking for ways to turn abandoned properties into livable homes and viable businesses, and it's been run by people at the legislative and executive levels (since you're so obsessed with this) roughly the same color as those who live there. Health and legal expenses? Covered by taxpayer-funded medical care and legal clinics where you can hear the crickets chirping for lack of interest in use other than when someone's arrested for street crime.
... and surprise! The violence level, including murder on the street, has surged hugely.
We've been "addressing" those issues, lavishly, for decades. Miles away, there's prosperity. In that spot? People living in fear of the local street gangs and those squatting in abandoned homes and businesses. Why? Because the members of those gangs, the thugs who make that area intolerable as a place to live or run a business, have safe haven, culturally, in the households in which they were so passively raised. Ask the people who live there, and they'll tell you that's exactly the problem. "Addressing" that problem means (ready?) not tolerating the crime. And that means police presence and activity. But we're being told, by the president no less, that what's really needed is a less visible and active police force. And indeed, the police in that area have dialed it way back in the last few weeks
Just what you look for when deciding where to build your next fire-proof retail store, right?
OK, so really the GP is saying that the only reason we have people in poverty is because we have other people who aren't in poverty. Which is nonsense.
Prosperity is not a fixed-size meal to be spread around. If it were, we'd all be living like paupers because the population has grown so much. Prosperity is created, and people of modest means create it all the time. Then they become the ones who are resented for no longer being impoverished. Too bad, they earned it. The fact that they are no longer impoverished is not what's keeping someone else from having a better life.
IMO, the only decent/moral solution is for a society in which things are more equitable. I'm not saying that a CEO shouldn't earn more than an employee, but 100X seems immoral.
So, impoverished people will suddenly start raising kids in two-parent households, or start teaching kids to read and think critically and have a work ethic ... if we can only just limit what CEOs earn? If we can just tear down immoral prosperity, that will fix the broken household and neighborhood cultures that prevent prosperity from taking root in those places? Are you even listening to yourself?
How about CEOs that make 50X? Does that pass your moral standard? 49.5%? 49.4%? When exactly does a business owners or director's pay become "moral." What is the standard you're using? Do you really mean that morality is based on statistics, not on actual principles? You agree that the person who runs a company is worth more than a person who sweeps the floor at that company. Why? What MORAL grounds to you have for that distinction? Be specific. And then in one percent pay increments, start describing exactly when it's suddenly immoral.
Because once you nail that down, you'll see how you've just set yourself up to be the immoral one for making more money, yourself, than someone else does. By someone else's standards (if we use your model), you yourself pure evil for not being as poor as someone else. How DARE you live a lifestyle so rich that you can afford the time to sit around expressing opinions on the internet! Other people don't have that luxury, so you must be immorally prosperous. If you stop being that prosperous, that will finally other people to be prosperous, right?
Yeah, right.
Me on the other hand? I'm an island in a sea of indifference.
Which is fine until you're killed by someone who irrationally thinks you're responsible for their poverty. Or your home loses half its value because a change in the local demographics means an encroaching street crime problem. Indifference doesn't change the problem you'll have renegotiating your upside down mortgage. But that's fine, you're much too cool to worry about such stuff.
I don't understand why the fact that Black people kill Black people negates the fact that law enforcement is often racist. Can't both be true?
Yes, there can be racist cops, just like there are racist black people. That has nothing to do with the assertion that the DC police only went after this quadruple murderer because the killer is black and victims are white. DC police go after killers every day. Given the local demographic, most of the killers are black, just like most of their victims. The GP wants to imagine that the DC police don't ever go after killers of black victims, which is BS on the face of it.
What are you talking about? I'm not comparing the lower crime rates in Appalachia to the higher crime rates in west Baltimore. I'm addressing the GP's argument that it's the fact there are rich people in the world that we have poverty in those areas. The entire concept is laughable.
Reduce minority poverty, and minority crime will probably drop too. There are lots of ways to do that, but it takes a huge effort to do so.
So what do you propose? Use government power to force minority mothers to marry, and to force the fathers or children to stay at home, become educated, and care enough to raise children who will actually attend school? Are you saying that a kid who is born into a household with one young, under-educated parent is going to be starting out life with that disadvantage because other people aren't poor? Do you really think that places like Baltimore, which spend way above average per student on education, and have an endless parade of subsidies and programs to provide resources to people in poverty ... just need to have the government do more than is already being done?
The problem is cultural. Persistent poverty in the worst parts of Appalachia, or in west Baltimore, don't exist because other people are prosperous. That entire meme is just SJW hand-wringing BS. Poorly disguised resentment of success that's trotted out to do anything to avoid addressing the cultural issues that are the actual problem in such places.
If you pick a black person and then pick a random victim, it's more likely the victim will be white than black, because there are more white people than black people.
Then why are there more murders committed by black people (against all sorts of victims) then would be accounted for by their percentage of the population? What is your point, exactly? Yes, there are more "white" people than "black" people in the general population. That's not what's being discussed. What's being discussed is the rate of crime coming out of specific demographics.
"After we found out he is a black man that allegedly killed a white family - oh, and their maid, I guess."
Well, sure. Because the SJWs are insisting that police do less to hunt down black guys who are responsible for the plague of murders the commit within their own demographic. Since, you know, it's racist and oppressive to attempt to arrest those guys.
So you're already attributing this to mental health problems? They guy worked for the company owned by the victim. This isn't a case where families like those of the victim (who pay the vast majority of the country's income taxes - well more than "their fair share" in terms of the income they make) somehow short-changed the guy who decided to murder them. The bad guy, in this case, decided to extort $40,000 in cash from his employer by holding the family hostage and torturing a ten year old boy until the cash was delivered by the employer's personal assistant.
Your whole "this is the fault of rich people" narrative is a bunch of SJW BS.
Because there are more whites than blacks you fucking piece of shit.
Do the math before you get so riled up, Mr. Coward. The numbers aren't even close to the population ratio, demographically.
Old enough to have discussed the substance of the matter, instead of tossing out vapid ad hominem - something about which you're confused, it seems.
Naming an extraordinarily unusual retailer does not bolster your point.
Of course it does. It's AN example of what I'm talking about. There are plenty of retailers who pay entry-level employees more than minimum wage. Why? Because they want to keep them around - churn is expensive, even at the stock/clerk level. Flipping burgers isn't supposed to be a career. You're not supposed to do things like have babies while you're on your first, menial job.
Leaving aside the fact that your plan is to punish success, destroy incentive, and force people who are successful to hide their money ... taxing "wealth" is such a capricious activity that it, even more than the current system, is essentially designed to be divisive. As it stands, the wealthy people pay the vast majority of the income taxes, and the poorer HALF of the country pays essentially no income tax at all. You're proposing that every year you take away some of a successful person's assets until they are as poor as the lower half, right? Or would you just keep taking some of everyone's assets, every year, until nobody has anything left?
Your goal, rather than doing any of the things that actually create prosperity, is to simply tear down anything successful in the name of resentment. Which also happens to kill the goose laying the golden tax revenue egg that currently pays the bills.
If it is fair to say the person using the roadway should pay it's cost because they get the benefit, it's fair to point out that 70-90% of the benefit is gotten by their employer.
Nonsense.
... trying to prop up the false picture of prosperity as a fixed pie, with the government's role being the arbiter of slice sizes in the name of Social Justice? Please. Your attempt to hide a confiscatory/redistributionist agenda behind a loopy road value formula based on impossibly intrusive and subjective measurements of personal achievement is just laughable. Or would be if it didn't represent such a toxic wider philosophy.
The employer personally uses the road to drive to his business. Done.
The employees use the road the same way. Done.
The business' customers also use the road the same way (when visiting that store). Done.
All of them spend a bit of time on the road, and pay taxes on the fuel they burn in order to pay for the service of having the road available to them.
When the business owner receives a shipment of new shoes, he's paying the freight company (or his supplier is, and passing that cost along in one way or another) to make that delivery. That's a different use of the road. Big rigs and busy commercial operators are (in most places) taxed differently because they are buying a different class of service from the city, county, state, or federal agency that maintains the road they're using. The business owner picks up a portion of that higher wear-and-tear cost by being a paying customer of the freight company that is being taxed based on their heavy vehicles/use.
Your world view, which includes the government being involved in the running of the shoe store and going over everyone's books to decide when a shoe sale is profitable so that the shoe store owner (who may actually lose money that year, even while his employees earn taxable income) can be capriciously taxed at a much higher rate as he drives his Hyundai the same 5 miles to work as his sales people, is just a thinly veiled dose of contempt for people who own businesses. The guy is already paying property taxes as he locates and operates his store, and countless other fees.
You want to use MORE tax dollars to keep a running tally on what percentage of the value of a road's use is reflected in the ebbing and flowing profitability of all of the businesses that might be located somewhere along or connected to a given municipality's various types of roads? Wow, it's a Progressive's wet dream! That would require enormous numbers of new bureaucrats, funded by whole new tax schemes, just to allow that to (badly) take place. All so that you punish the business owner, or his better-than-average sales person, for making more money than someone else at the end of exactly the same commute.
Even if your fantasy of "percentage of value" could EVER be calculated as millions of people and businesses use the roads in different ways on different days, what would be the point? I know: your point is that you don't like the idea of government being thought of as a service provider, you like it when they are directly involved in people's personal business decision making, as a forced partner in their budgeting and profit considerations. All of this in the service of what
Then you are compensating for the guy who only does 90% of his miles in Oregon, but the car is registered outside of the state.
Who cares? Because if you do 20k miles across the state line, you're going to be paying $6,000 to the state for activity you didn't conduct there. I don't care if it's the opposite for some other guy. I would care that this year, presto, my disposable income just dropped by $6,000 for no good reason.
This tax, and the one it replaces, would charge people commuting to McDonalds equally with the owners of McDonalds even though the owners get somewhere between 70-90% of the economic benefit from that road use.
So? The government is providing a service: a way for both the owner and the employee (and the customers, and the vendors/contractors, and the police if they're needed, etc) to get to that restaurant. If you use that service (by driving on the road), you should pay some amount towards the maintenance of the road. Why someone is using the road should be absolutely none of your business, or the government's. Your notion that road taxes should be higher if you make more money than someone when you get where you're going is ... preposterous.
... but you just provided another case study in everything that's wrong with the lefty view of economics and prosperity.
What about two shoe salesmen who drive down the same road to the same store to go to work? One is a poor communicator, never takes a shower, and can never seem to handle more than one customer at a time. His co-worker has his act together, and customers respond well by buying more shoes. He makes three times the commission, which translates to a much better income. You're suggesting that he (the better shoe salesman) should be charged more to use the same road because he's not a lazy idiot. Smart? Productive? Eeeeevil! Quick, tax that evil person for being more productive! Utter foolishness, and I'd just laugh it off
if they are taxing mileage, why don't they just look at your odometer instead of needing to install a GPS to track everywhere you go?
What if you put 90% of the year's miles on while doing a road trip that takes you out of Oregon?
Just like Radio Shack (self inflicted wounds). But Enron and Arthur Anderson were killed for real by courts, because of their conduct. Death sentences, basically, whether they were going to die of their own wounds eventually or not.
Parent and grandparent - tell that to the Marines. An Osprey had a "hard landing" (hah!) in Hawaii May 18. One Marine was killed and 21 hospitalized. There was a pall of black smoke rising from the "hard landing".
Should also tell that to the service members who are killed or injured in (by comparison) quite frequent helicopter mis-haps? We're talking about crashes and hard landings in aircraft that have long, long histories of service. Shit happens when you're trying to land a big heavy machine with spinning rotors - happens with fixed-wing aircraft, too.
We are not talking about a single person, but a systematic attack on poor people
Really. How are poor people being attacked? Is it by giving them free education, if they'll only take advantage of it? Is it by giving them free health care, if they'll bother to show up? Is it by handing them "refunds" on income taxes they don't even pay, which are collected from somebody else?
the lack of social support
What? Social entitlement spending is the lion's share of our entire government budget. It's huge, and we're drowning in it. I know, if only we just spent even more, prosperity among poor people would suddenly erupt, right? Like, say, in Baltimore ... where more is spent per student than in many top-achieving private schools. Hey, maybe it's not about social programs spending money! Maybe it's about the culture.
I understand if you are particularly patriotic and don't like people pointing out shortcomings in "your country", but your response is doing nothing to address the real problems, meaning if they do exist, you are doing your utmost to make sure they are never fixed.
What are you talking about? I'm pointing out exactly what the problem is: household culture. I live in a county that is pure melting pot. 20 years in a neighborhood where I was in one of only two "white" households for blocks in every direction. What do I observe? Across the street, a family living in subsidized housing. Multiple generations of unemployable, functionally illiterate people under one roof. The kids from that house attend exactly the same school system as the kids the next house over ... who are children of African immigrants. That household came to the US with essentially nothing, including a very poor grasp of English. A few years later? Both parents busted their asses working two jobs until they were able to buy a couple of cars, buy a townhouse, and buff up their own language and business skills. Major work ethic. Now they work comfortable white collar jobs, and have purchased their third house in the neighborhood (so they're renting out two to other people).
... and they are happy, prospering, and looking forward to their oldest daughter returning from a year of college in Paris. The difference? Attitude. 100% family culture. Giving a shit, personally.
So you stand those two households next to each other. They "look" the same, they both could be said to be in exactly the same economic condition ten or fifteen years ago. But one is living on the dole, getting free housing from the county, food stamps, and regular visits from social services while their kids have grown up to be petty criminals in and out of brushes with the law while dropping out of high school. The other family has overcome a language barrier, the lack of funds, serious social displacement, and whatever extra burden may be perceived as coming along with having dark African skin tones
So who "fixed" their situation? They did. Who is trying to "fix" the perpetually poor family next door? A parade of government services people, programs, and tens of thousands of other people's dollars, year in, year out. Do you REALLY think that that household is poor because other people are prosperous? Your BS about the "wealth gap" is just that: BS. The amount of prosperity isn't fixed, it's grown with effort by those who put in the effort. I did, though, enjoy your ironic judgement of me while you're lecturing me about judging others. Hilarious! Keep up the good entertainment.
There aren't that many high paying wage or wage that pay above 15$ an hour and there is already a fierce competition for them.
Companies cannot find enough people with even modest intellectual skills to hire (and retain) for even modestly skilled jobs with much better than minimum wages paid. Hell, there are landscaping companies around here who will pay $20/hour for anyone that will consistently show up to shovel. Costco hires even the most basic, unskilled shelf-stackers for well above minimum wage (closer to $19).
Are you one of those which think the poor are lazy ?
Actually, in many cases that's exactly the problem. But kids born in to families where doing the work needed to become a decent high school graduate is considered unimportant or too much trouble have lazy parents to thank for that - the kids themselves usually don't know better until it's already too late to form decent habits.
You need money for a proper education
No, no you don't. The taxpayers around you will pay for your education through high school. And if you've don't anything even close to working hard, you'll have the academic background needed to get anything from substantial subsidies to full scholarships in higher education. I worked while in college, to have money. Did you?
Frankly your kind of thought are so short sighted , you should get glasses for your brain.
You have no idea where prosperity comes from, apparently.
(High-)School is mandatory and free here.
As it is in the US. But that doesn't mean that teenagers can be forced to actually attend, let alone to learn anything while they're there. Past a certain age, they can just walk away. The alternative would be to run bastions of learning as if they were literally prisons. The point is that in many cases the choice to ignore the opportunity to learn is just that: a choice. Dumb kids don't understand that choice, which is why parents matter.