February 28, 2006 by lonbud
Your Papers, Please.
Seven peace activists were arrested and charged with a federal misdemeanor for demonstrating without a permit in front of the White House yesterday.
Standing around, chanting maybe, handing out leaflets, carrying signs.
Lacking the requisite paperwork, they were summarily divested of their First Amendment rights by U.S. Park Police and remanded to police administration for processing. They were fined seventy-five dollars and released.
I wonder how many permitless demonstrators the Park Police would be willing to process at seventy-five bucks a head? To make it meaningful, however, demonstrators would eventually have to refuse to pay the fine, too.
We’ve seen what the gov’t does with the money.
Tam O’Tellico - March 13, 2006 @ 4:08 pm
From Rolling Stone:
The Katrina Blame Game
It’s astounding that a president who has reserved for himself nearly limitless powers in the exercise of his role as commander-in-chief to keep the nation safe – including, but not limited to, the right to authorize international assassinations, torture terror suspects, and suspend your fourth amendment rights – proved himself incapable of commanding even basic executive authority in response to Hurricane Katrina.
A man who has repeatedly claimed he would “move heaven and earth” to protect America, strummed a guitar as heaven and earth rose up to swallow New Orleans and kill more than 1,300 Americans. Our commander-in-chief then blamed his inaction on the limits of federalism and the inefficacy of “state and local authorities.”
But the snapshot of our all-powerful “unitary executive” in inaction offered by the GOP-only Katrina commission report reveals that — even without the creative legal counsel of John Yoo — Bush had all the executive authority he needed to direct a coordinated federal and military response. He just didn’t use it:
“Similar to military matters, the President is the commander-in-chief of federal disaster response . . .
The catastrophic nature of Katrina required early presidential involvement to direct federal agencies in a massive coordinated response. In practice, it takes presidential action to quickly deploy the logistical capability of the military to meet the tremendous food, shelter, and medical needs of large affected populations. Only the President appears able to promptly engage active duty military forces and achieve a unity of effort among all the federal agencies responding to a catastrophic disaster . . .
Comments such as those the President made about not expecting the levees to breach do not appear to be consistent with the advice and counsel one would expect to have been provided by a senior disaster professional. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to expect delays in recognizing the need for and then requesting DOD mission assignments may have been avoided if the President had been advised of the need for early presidential involvement . . .”
Now a question: Why would a president need to be “advised” of need for his early involvement? Any idiot catching a glimpse of Headline News on the eve of Katrina’s landfall would have been properly advised on the need to get involved.
Tam O’Tellico - March 13, 2006 @ 5:09 pm
Here’s some more cold hard truth from a soldier who uses the kind of direct language Michael appreciates:
During a late-September 2005 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, General Casey acknowledged that the Pentagon estimate of three Iraqi battalions last June had shrunk to one in September. That is less than six months ago. Yet Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, just recently said “Now there are over 100 [Iraqi] battalions in the field.”
“This is utter bullshit,” was [former special forces trainer]Stan Goff’s remark about the Pace claim “He must be counting the resistance among his forces. [Pace]and everyone else knows that the Iraqi forces, however many there are, are heavily cross-infiltrated.”
“To train 99 [battalions] since last September is a claim only the average American might swallow. The right question to ask is, where are they? Where are they headquartered, and where are they in operation? Claiming operations security doesn’t count, unless they believe they can hide 100 units of 600 people each in Iraq … from other Iraqis … who are often related to them.”
“It must suck for a career Marine to be used so blatantly as a PR flak. These guys have become accustomed to saying any damn thing, then counting on ignorance and apathy at home – along with hundreds of Democrats who need spine transplants – to get away with it. You can quote me on any of that.”
Tam O’Tellico - March 13, 2006 @ 6:06 pm
“I mentioned a line from George W. Bush’s speech; on March 17, 2003, he had declared to the Iraqis. “The day of your liberation is near.” Maher, sipping sweet tea, smirked again. “They’re going to burn the forest to kill the fox”, he said smiling.”
Quoted from: Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War by Anthony Shadid
If anyone really wants to understand how horribly we have underestimated the complications of this war, they need to read this book. In another chapter, Shadid tells the story of an 18 year-old Iraqi boy who, under pressure from the Americans, fingered a couple of insurgents.
Unfortunately, the young man was discovered and his fate fell to the only real law left in Iraq. Absent any other legitimate authority, the nation has reverted to tribal law, and punishment for this transgression fell under the law of the dead insurgents tribe.
Their family demanded that the family of the 18 year-old boy kill him, or face the retribution spelled-out under tribal law: The death of two members of the young man’s family for each of the dead insurgents.
Faced wirh such a Sophie’s choice, the father and brother of the young man took him into a field behind their home and shot him dead.
Unlike the stories told by this administration, this is not a work of fiction.
lonbud - March 13, 2006 @ 10:34 pm
This is a pointless debate. Michael is a social Darwinist. It’s every man for himself. If the society manages to elect enlightened humanists to lead, so be it. If it’s corrupt tools of the status quo, no matter at all. The strong and the smart and the karmically fortunate (not that he’d put it that way) will survive and prosper; the weak and the dumb and the karmically struggling will get what they deserve.
In a way, it’s an attractive perspective. As a strong, smart, and karmically fortunate actor I very much appreciate the way my own experience of the universe validates his view.
I don’t understand the failure to recognize the difference between smarts and shrewdness, nor the lack of concern for the environment and public health issues, nor the absence of an appreciation for the ways in which smart, strong, karmically fortunate people might form policies and institutions to protect the weak and the dumb at least as much — at the margins — as they reward their opposite.
The question now is where do we lie on the continuum between chaos and collective enlightenment?
Michael Herdegen - March 14, 2006 @ 12:51 am
The question now is where do we lie on the continuum between chaos and collective enlightenment?
Very far towards collective enlightenment. So far that further movement in that direction can only come from additional individual enlightenment.
Michael is a social Darwinist. It’s every man for himself.
Not at all, in fact just the opposite.
However, there is a limit to what society can do on behalf of “the weak and the dumb and the karmically struggling”. The rest is up to them.
For instance, if we were to give every drug addict $ 100,000 annually, it wouldn’t improve their lives one iota; they’d just die sooner.
Until they decide to get clean, all we can do for them is give them three hots and a cot, and a referral to a drug rehab programme.
Additional monies are useless.
THAT is why smart, strong, karmically fortunate people can’t form policies and institutions to protect the weak and the dumb at least as much, at the margins, as the strong and smart prosper.
The latter have far more capabilities, and capacity to take advantage of opportunities.
All we can do with the weak and the dumb is give them advice that they probably won’t take, a job cleaning something, and subsidized housing and food stamps.
Tam O’Tellico - March 14, 2006 @ 12:06 pm
L: The question now is where do we lie on the continuum between chaos and collective enlightenment?
Music of the Spheres
Imagine you lived at a time when it was commonly accepted that the earth was flat. Then imagine what a tectonic shift was necessary for it to become commonly accepted that the earth was a sphere. That shift required more than just new knowledge; it required that much of the world learn to think in another dimension. Needless to say, that didn’t happen overnight.
Today, we readily accept a spherical earth as fact, but many still credit Columbus with that discovery, just as he is credited with discovering the New World. In fact, he discovered neither – he was simply the beneficiary of the greatest public relations campaign in the history of the world.
A spherical earth was hardly news to learned ancient Greeks. Pythagoras and Aristotle both spoke about it, and Eratosthenes was able to closely calculate its diameter without benefit of a telescope or a calculator. By the first century, Pliny the Elder claimed that the question was no longer in dispute – at least among the intelligentsia.
It is also quite certain that ancient mariners knew this to be true, even if they didn’t do the math or the theorizing. All that was necessary was to observe a ship as it gradually disappeared over the horizon. The earth must curve, else there was no way to explain why the thin mast remained visible long after the bulky hull was nowhere in sight.
But not everyone agreed. For a number of theological reasons, the early Christian church was reluctant to acknowledge a spherical Earth. Augustine did not expressly state his view on the subject, but it can be easily discerned from this passage:
“…even should it be believed or demonstrated that the world is round or spherical in form, it does not follow that the part of the Earth opposite to us is not completely covered with water, or that any conjectured dry land there should be inhabited by men. For Scripture, which confirms the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, teaches not falsehood; and it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man.” (De Civitate Dei, 16.9)
This is the kind of argument someone resorts to when belief conflicts with logic, and Augustine seems quite content to rest on his belief.
It is hard to know what view the intelligentsia held in medieval times, but it is safe to assume common folk were still in the dark. And it is equally safe to assume the church was not about to enlighten them. At the time, the church was the sole repository for much of the world’s knowledge, knowledge which it jealously guarded.
But that was about to change, thanks to the quantum leap of Johannes Gutenberg.
The explosion of knowledge that occurred as a result of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, created a worldwide revolution that removed men from the church’s tyrannical control in many ways, particularly in the dissemination of knowledge. The effect of Gutenberg’s invention was at least as profound and liberating as the invention of the Internet.
But the church was not quite ready to surrender its hold. We all know the story of Galileo and his struggle to promote his heliocentric hypothesis. For promoting an assumption that is now taken for granted by children, Galileo was forced to choose silence or death. But there is no holding back an idea whose time has come, and within a few centuries men were making models of a very different universe from that the church conceived.
Such transformations have become more frequent with time, though they are no less radical departures from what preceded them. Today, we may struggle to comprehend Einstein’s discovery of relativity, but we have no trouble understanding how this discovery has changed our world. All one need do is listen to the latest news about North Korea or Iran.
What separates these transformations from ordinary progress is that they are differences not in degree, but in kind. Marshall McLuhan, the philosopher some call the prophet of the electronic age, credited the popularization of the printing press with the appearance of a whole new species: Gutenberg Man.
We may well be living in the age of Internet Man. Who of us imagined only twenty years ago we would exchange information in this way?
These profound changes are frequently the result of simple insights by deep-thinkers we might characterize as being in tune with the Mystery of the Spheres, another idea of the ancient Greeks which married music and mathematics. In this view, there was a mystical harmony at work that regulated the workings of the universe.
These simple insights lead to great intellectual leaps of conceptualization. It might be said that these were leaps of faith as well, because these deep-thinkers were willing to face the consequences of going against the grain and daring to “think outside the box”.
Another of these deep-thinkers deserves mention in this universe of ideas ahead of their time. Two-thousand years ago, a simple desert prophet offered a philosophy so simple, and yet so elegant, men are still unable to grasp it, let alone comport their lives with its basic tenets. Today billions of people call themselves Christians, but fail to comprehend the radical nature of their faith.
We can debate the meaning of words, but any objective reading of the text makes it clear that the basic teachings of Jesus promote pacifism and socialism. In fact, the faith’s earliest adherents clearly practiced what can only be described as communism. These are radical ideas, then as now. But there is no denying that they are the most basic elements of a teaching so hard that Jesus referred to it as “taking up the cross”.
Because it is such a hard teaching, for many Christians the cross remains on Golgotha’s hill. All too often, they seem more interested in reward than in service. In the worst expressions of the faith, financial excess is seen as a sign of God’s blessing rather than an obligation to share that wealth. Such perversion stands Christ’s teaching on its head.
Granted, a life of service is difficult, but it is humanly possible. In our own times, we have witnessed the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. But it is all too obvious most of us are cut from lesser cloth. So what can we do to take up our cross and follow The Way?
We can begin by acknowledging that the Prince of Peace was serious about pacifism. As faithful Christians, we can insist that war is always to be avoided and resorted to only as an utterly last resort. We can challenge those who claim an ill-conceived pre-emption is an excuse to violate the most fundamental precept of the faith.
We can also insist that the obscene accumulation of unshared wealth is no man’s right. This is particularly so in a nation that claims the teachings of Christ as its moral underpinnings, that declares equal rights and opportunities of all its citizens. and that assumes the obligation to promote the general welfare. There is no place in such a nation for the kind of economic Darwinism that results in the inhumane treatment of persons under the guise of the “value-neutral” corporation. In short, we must demand an end to commerce conducted without conscience or regard for basic human dignity.
Yes, these are radical ideas, but they are the very heart of Christ’s teaching – now if only Christians truly believed and practiced that teaching. But if we are going to be Christians in anything but name only, we are going to have to make the leap of faith.
And make no mistake; it is a leap of faith. But, a leap of faith always precedes a new paradigm.
In this new paradigm, mankind will believe that peace is possible because to believe otherwise is to never know peace. In this new paradigm, mankind will believe economics is not a zero sum game because to believe otherwise is to inhabit a world where no amount of wealth can provide security. In this new paradigm, man will believe that the only way to peace and prosperity is through generosity.
Doubters will ridicule such ideas. They will say this is the stuff of dreams – and they are right. But not so long ago, it was the stuff of dreams that men would fly. Not so long ago it was the stuff of dreams that men would walk on the moon. Not so long ago, the Earth was flat.
Now we must get ourselves in tune with the music of the spheres.
©2006 Tom Cordle
Michael Herdegen - March 15, 2006 @ 11:05 am
Who believes that economics is “zero sum” ?
Besides Communists, of course.
In my comment in this thread of March 13th, at 3:12 pm, I show why such cannot be said of American society as a whole, although there are of course individuals in America who believe it.
Meredtih Charpantier - March 15, 2006 @ 2:47 pm
Agent vs. Agency
we used to debate about in my social economy anthro class in college.
or are those poor, socially darwined- out-of-luck down-and-out ” losers” so deserving of their status indeed the Agents of their own destiny or are they in fact victims of the Agencies we have institutionalized in which the rulers of the game heavily load the dice in your favor if you come in swinging (your silver spoon that is), and load you with handicaps if you can’t come up with your green fare from the start.
Social Darwins have handily ignored the notion of the loaded deck and the following questions regarding the accident / luck of one’s birth as it is not an easy argument to carry out in a nonsectarian society, all together another story in bible belt America though of course.
pray the rosarie for a change of course.
Jeff Guinn - March 15, 2006 @ 3:22 pm
Tam:
Two-thousand years ago, a simple desert prophet offered a philosophy so simple, and yet so elegant, men are still unable to grasp it, let alone comport their lives with its basic tenets. Today billions of people call themselves Christians, but fail to comprehend the radical nature of their faith.
We can debate the meaning of words, but any objective reading of the text makes it clear that the basic teachings of Jesus promote pacifism and socialism.
Unfortunately, such God as there might be created humans whose minds are not blank slates (I’ll stay away from the Latin this time, so as not to provoke hissy pedantry from those who are unable to separate spelling from usage).
So while it is clear that Jesus’ teachings are both (except where they aren’t), the humans to which he addressed them are neither. Which is why pacifism is doomed from the start, and socialism ultimately results in either widespread poverty, murder, or, more likely, both.
In other words, Tom Cordle is guilty of thumb-sucking, self-contradictory, pablum. The earth never was flat, no matter what some believed. By the same token, human nature is not now, nor will it ever be, “in tune with the music of the spheres.”
Oh, BTW, as Mr. Herdegen noted above, only the truly ignorant, or unteachable, believe market economics to be zero sum.
Ms. Charpantier:
You would do well to learn about moral hazard.
No system involving humans will ever be devoid of differing circumstances. But no matter one’s circumstances, there are certain kinds of conduct most likely to improve one’s material lot in life, and others far less likely to reach that end.
Certain things we can’t change, but you leave the impression that we are mere victims to agency.
That is nonsense. Virtually anyone who graduates High School, avoids substance abuse and having children out of wedlock, and manages to show up on time, will lead a life that, materially speaking will be well beyond adequate. Further, if they manage to live within their means and put a little aside along the way, they will retire materially well provisioned.
No need to pray the rosary.
Just make, and follow through on, a few simple decisions.
Tam O’Tellico - March 15, 2006 @ 10:37 pm
My use of zero sum is shorthand for the capitalistic notion that in order for me to gain you or someone else must lose. It is most frequently expressed in the deliberately neutered phrase market share.
We can see market share at work now with the hideous rebirth of Standard Oil Company and the obscene profits of the oil giants. A tip of the hat to the genius who managed to sell the idea that combining Exxon and Mobil would create competition in the oil industry.
Here’s an idea of how corporate capitalism really works. Alaska has vast reserves of natural gas some of which is readily available as a by-product of oil production. It would be assumed that historically high prices for natural gas would make suppliers eager to supply it. Nope, in fact, the by-product gas is pumped back into the ground. Why?
There are lots of fancy smokescreens thrown up by oil execs, but brutally blunt Exxon CEO Lee Raymond let the alley cat out of the bag. Exxon blocked natural gas production, refused to build a pipeline and refused to supply natural gas to any of the several companies willing to build a pipeline. Several of these companies are now suing Exxon over this tyranny.
While poor older Americans are forced to choose between eating and heating, Lee Raymond is contemplating retirement. He might have to stick around a year or two, however, since he’s not sure he can survive in retirement having earned only $123,576,000 over the last five years. No, that is not a misprint.
Tam O’Tellico - March 15, 2006 @ 10:50 pm
March 13th, at 3:12 pm post in which Michael explains it all.
“Best get used to it – we’ll be running deficits until 2040, when 80% of the Boomers will have shuffled from the mortal coil.”
I’m still waiting for you to explain how we’re going to pull that off even with VooDoo Economics. Sooner or later, and most likely sooner, somebody’s going to start demanding we pay off our high-stakes gambling markers. And if you think we got geo-political problems with oil, wait till that happens.
The only way around that inevitable is to go all in – and that will mean dropping the big one on everyone we owe money to. Oh – now I get it, that was the plan all along!
Tam O’Tellico - March 15, 2006 @ 11:27 pm
M: I’ve lived on far less than $10K in Colorado, Kansas, and North Carolina.
Yeah, let’s see, that would be at Fort Carson, Fort Leavenworth and Fort Bragg, right? Either that or you were a college kid living at home with your parents. Or maybe you talking about now, and you’re saying you’ve figured out how to get by on $10,000 a year and still somehow manage to pay that $2000 a month premiun for health insurance. And I thought you were a numbers guy – do the math!
And of course you managed to arrive at your high station in life just like Phil Gramm and Clarence Thomas, without ever having to lower yourself to public schools or public transportation or govt loans or grants for your education. Yep, you just made a couple of simple choices and didn’t do crack or crystal meth, and it all just fell perfectly in place for you. What a crock of shit, and the worst thing is you actually believe it.
M: Tennessee isn’t low-rent – places like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, northwestern Ohio, and most of Texas are.
And while you in your infinite wisdom were making all the right choices, I was fool enough to choose the one and only state in this part of the country where I couldn’t afford to live like a king on $10,000 a year. I’m surrounded by all these cheap places to live like Florida that I could have chosen instead – stupid me.
Wait a minute – I lived in Florida from 1975-1999, and I remember it being pretty damned expensive – and that was before insurance rates went to the moon after all the hurricanes. Michael, if you think Florida’s a cheap place to live, it’s only because you’ve never lived anywhere but a military base. Either that or you memory is failing along with your reason.
Michael Herdegen - March 16, 2006 @ 4:14 am
Tam:
It’s difficult to know whether you’re being deliberately insulting, or are merely indulging in your favored pastime of leaping to assumptions without attempting to verify them.
What is clear is that you need to work on your reading comprehension, and that you’ve never lived on the Space Coast of Florida, nor near Pensacola.
Since you think that Florida is “expensive”, my guess is that you never left Miami.
Now, watch closely, since this will help you in other areas of your life:
I’ve made an assumption, that you must have lived exclusively in South Florida, since you don’t know that Northern Florida is very low-cost. (Except for Orlando).
Now, I ask a question, to see if that’s so:
“Where in Florida did you live ?”
See how that’s done ?
Jeff Guinn - March 16, 2006 @ 5:09 am
Tam:
My use of zero sum is shorthand for the capitalistic notion that in order for me to gain you or someone else must lose. It is most frequently expressed in the deliberately neutered phrase market share.
You need to watch slinging around aspersions that someone else’s reason has failed, as the quote above is the most reason devoid stretch of text I have come across in some time.
Capitalism, more than anything else, has put paid to the notion of “zero sum,” precisely the opposite of your assertion.
BTW, I have lived in Pensacola. My mom lives in Boca Raton. There is a world of difference in the cost of living between the two places that puts the lie to the gross generalization “I lived in Florida.”
Tam O’Tellico - March 16, 2006 @ 7:38 am
Michael, you are now reduced to telling me what city I should have chosen rather than what state. It’s bad enough to claim that Tennessee is more expensive than NC, clearly false, but now you’re claiming Pensacola is cheaper than Tellico Plains? How far you’ve fallen.
BTW, Pensacola – isn’t that another military base? I assure you, that is the only place in Pensacola you can live well for $10,000 a year. Or maybe you’re thinking of some quaint little shack similar to the Unabomber’s old place.
As for the Space Coast, it hasn’t been a cheap place to live and hasn’t been since the very first astronauts were proving they had the right stuff. And you think I’m lost in the Sixties?
The problem is not where I choose to live, but your assertion that
“most of them had comfortable lives, since $ 10,000 annually is an adequate income in much of the South, excluding only the largest urban areas.”
That assertion is ridiculous, and you know it – just as you know the first thing to go is health insurance.
My advice? When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Otherwise, you will only continue an argument that is patently absurd.
Tam O’Tellico - March 16, 2006 @ 7:54 am
Jim: “Capitalism, more than anything else, has put paid to the notion of “zero sum,” precisely the opposite of your assertion.”
Whatever you were trying to say, I’m afraid I missed it completely. Must be all those meals I missed trying to get by on $10,000 a year.
If you’re suggesting that old Trickle-Down saw “a rising tide lifts all boats”, you couldn’t be more wrong. Given the numbers generated by the pernicious permutation of TDE we’ve witnessed since the advent of Reaganomics, that old adage is definitely in it’s dotage. Since you must have missed the statistics, I must repeat them for your benefit:
“A recent article in The Financial Times reports on a study by the American economist Robert J. Gordon, who finds “little long-term change in workers’ share of US income over the past half century.” Middle-ranking Americans are being squeezed, he says, because the top ten percent of earners have captured almost half the total income gains in the past four decades and the top one percent have gained the most of all – “more in fact, than all the bottom 50 percent.”
As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was thirty fold. Now it is seventy-five fold. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker.”
Clearly, a rising tide lifts all yachts. But there is a storm brewing on the horizon that threatens even the big boats, and we will soon suffer a tempest in this Teapot Dome.
Meanwhile, small craft warnings are out for the rest of us.
Tam O’Tellico - March 16, 2006 @ 9:03 am
BTW: “Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker.”
“[Mobil/Exxon CEO] Lee Raymond is contemplating retirement. He might have to stick around a year or two, however, since he’s not sure he can survive in retirement having earned only $123,576,000 over the last five years. No, that is not a misprint.”
Maybe you should tell Lee how cheap it is to live in Pensacola.
Tam O’Tellico - March 16, 2006 @ 9:10 am
PS: My math may be a little fuzzy, but at $10,000 a year, it looks like Lee could live quite comfortably for 12,358 years.
Jeff Guinn - March 16, 2006 @ 1:33 pm
Tam:
If you’re suggesting that old Trickle-Down saw “a rising tide lifts all boats”, you couldn’t be more wrong.
No, by not a zero-sum game, I mean precisely what I say: a market economy is not a zero-sum game. It is only through the inclusion of irrlevant factoids that you are able to reach any other conclusion.
Additionally, aside from the moral outrage you feel about CEO compensation, you have completely failed to make any case that workers on average would be any better off at a lower ratio.
Finally, you have latched tenaciously onto that $10,000 without really considering it. Keep in mind that someone working 40 hrs/week, 50 weeks/year at the minimum wage earns $11,000.
Which means that $10,000 isn’t a realistic figure for anyone who follows the several astonishingly simple and self evident rules I listed above.
So far your argument has been far more emotional, and morally outraged, than analytical.
Tam O’Tellico - March 16, 2006 @ 3:38 pm
Jeff: Which means that $10,000 isn’t a realistic figure for anyone who follows the several astonishingly simple and self evident rules I listed above.
Again, I think you’re not following the thread, the $10,000 figure isn’t mine, it’s Michael’s. I know it’s absurd, you know it’s absurd, and Michael knows its absurd. I suspect he threw out a number in a fit of pique and now is too embarassed to admit it.
Sort of like, we can win the war in Iraq with 100,000 troops.
Tam O’Tellico - March 16, 2006 @ 3:43 pm
Jeff: So far your argument has been far more emotional, and morally outraged, than analytical.
Well, they fact that you can’t get morally outraged by the fact that one man makes $123,576,000 over the last five years while the poor people who must use his products must choose between eating and heating says more than I care to know about your sensitivity.
Ditto for the fact that you think one man earning that amount of money is an “irrlevant factoid”. No wonder you guys can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.
Tam O’Tellico - March 16, 2006 @ 11:19 pm
Morons Mock Michael’s Monetary Method
Okay, I confess, Michael is absolutely right – my lack of success in life is due entirely to the fact that I’m a lazy-assed bastard who doesn’t know how Free Market economics works. If only I would stop letting morality get in my way, I could succeed just like all the people below who sure do know how to work the system.
Then again, I still need you apologists for wretched excess to explain why so many self-made Republican conservatives can’t seem to get by on Michael’s mythical $10,000.
Take Clarence Thomas protege Claude Allen, the guy who stole from Target. We haven’t seen anything like this since Spiro T. Agnew. Apparently, Allen couldn’t get by on a measly $150,000 a year. I bet he wishes he had moved to Pensacola. I’m even more certain the Bushman wishes he had.
Of course, Mr. Allen is a troubled soul whose crime isn’t really about money but reflects some deep-seated psychological problem, otherwise he’d set his thieving sights a whole lot higher.
He should be more like Duke Cunningham, who couldn’t manage even with his Congressional salary and all the free dinners and trips provided by military-industrial complex fat cats. But there is good news – it looks like the Dukester will be getting by on a lot less than $10,000 a year for awhile.
Here’s a partial list of others who know how this free market system works. Of course, they’re aberrations, so I apologize ahead of time for troubling Jeff with “irrlevant factoids”:
Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Michael Scanlon, David Safavian, Ralph Reed, Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, Richard Scrushy, Steve Rosen, Adam Kidan, John Rowland, Dana Rohrabacher, Keith Weismann, Larry Franklin, J. Steven Griles, Katherine Harris, Tom Feeney, Dalton Tanonaka, Bob Kjellander, Lee Daniels, Mitch Daniels, Adam Taff, – I’m tired, for more, go here:
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/gopscorecard.htm .
You gotta admire these guys, they sure know how to work the system. And besides, they put the party in Republican Party.
Jeff Guinn - March 17, 2006 @ 5:04 am
Tam:
Mr. Herdegen’s figure was notional; as I demonstrated, it is below what even the lowest paid full-time worker earns. In any event, you have neglected his central point: that even someone earning as little as $10,000 a year can live a materially adequate life. Luxurious? No. Well fed, sheltered, and clothed? Absolutely, and at a level beyond what most of the rest of the world enjoys. You are the one not following the thread.
You have made an assertion that market economics is a zero-sum game, and followed it up with nothing.
You express moral outrage at executive compensation, yet without offering any alternative, or even wondering whether such compensation might be a net moral good — after all, it is possible that penalizing success might make everyone poorer.
And, finally, you end with a string of anecdotals that amount to nothing more than a diatribe, never mind that such anectdotals could be found within any political grouping you could possibly mention, making their contribution to the discussion worthless.
You have completely failed to analytically address any argument I, or Mr. Herdegen, raised.
Tam O’Tellico - March 17, 2006 @ 11:43 am
Jeff: “You have completely failed to analytically address any argument I, or Mr. Herdegen, raised.”
Well, of course, that assertion is itself an opinion.
If you are going to presume to take me to the intellectual woodshed, then at least have the decency to stick with the subject at hand. The bone of contention at this moment is Michael’s simple declarative statement:
M: “$10,000 annually is an adequate income in much of the South, excluding only the largest urban areas.”
I challenged him on that assertion and offered as proof the evidence of my own experience, since I am presently living in a small, rural community in the South. I offered several examples of local costs that proved conclusively that his bold assertion was not only false, but ludicrous.
Since by definition we must agree that Tennessee is in the South and that Tellico Plains is a small town (pop. 900), that should have been the end of the discussion. Aw contrary, as we say in small towns in the South.
When confronted with the obvious truth, Michael refused to admit that he had engaged in hyperbole. That could be easily forgiven; we are all guilty of that in an informal debate. But instead, Michael, who prides himself on his wise choices, chose to meet my objection with a second even more ridiculously absurd assertion.
M: “Tennessee isn’t low-rent. Places like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, northwestern Ohio, and most of Texas are.”
That assertion is so demonstrably false, I needed only to mention Florida to put it to the lie. Again, rather than own up to a flawed argument, Michael chose to engage in a diversion about cities. I have no interest in wasting my time with a statistical analysis of the cost of living in Tellico Plains vs. Pensacola. If Michael the number-lover wants to do so, let him, but that proof will have to be on him.
As should all proofs, in this instance. Since Michael proffered these wildly ridiculous assertions, the burden of proof is on him, not me. He offers none as there is none.
Show me your proof or admit error and move on.
Jeff Guinn - March 17, 2006 @ 1:55 pm
Tam:
Adequate for what?
I assert that one can be adequately sheltered, clothed, and fed on minimum wage earned 50 weeks per year — I added a little analysis to Mr. Herdegen’s notional number.
As for “low rent,” that is a relative term. The places Mr. Herdegen cited are in fact very low rent compared to, say, San Diego. Unless you are willing to toss the very essence of the terms low and high out the window, the obvious truth is that Mr. Herdegen’s usage was completely rigorous.
To that we will add your bald, unsubstantiated, assertion that market economics is a zero sum game.
That is in addition to your false dichotomy, which you also dodged. Comparing Castro’s Cuba v. Batista’s is a false dichotomy, because it excludes what would have happened in the absence of Communism in Cuba. The far more appropriate comparison would be against things otherwise much more alike — Communist Germany v. Capitalist Germany, or Communist Korea v. Capitalist Korea.
You rant very well, but your analytical rigor could use some work.
Tam O’Tellico - March 17, 2006 @ 5:11 pm
Jeff: “You rant very well, but your analytical rigor could use some work.”
Such generosity overwhelms me, considering the source. Now we can both consider ourselves damned with faint praise.
Jeff: “I assert that one can be adequately sheltered, clothed, and fed on minimum wage earned 50 weeks per year.”
Assert on, big boy, but that leaves you and Mr. M in the same leaky boat and up shit-creek without a paddle, save that you have reduced his “comfortable” to your “adequate”. Nice dodge, but unless you define adequate as the next step removed from starvation, your assertion remains only that. Of course, the poor starving bastards can always eat cake, right?
In any case, I think it’s safe to assume neither you nor M would find such an existence “comfortable” or “adequate”.
But if you’d like to test your theory, I can arrange for housing for the two of you in a vacant pig barn up the road – pig-farming ain’t what it used to be around these parts since the Muslims started movin’ in. What’s that you say – there’s no Muslims around here? Then why do they keep flashing those weird-ass multi-colored terrorist alerts on my TV all the time?
You may not be overly fond of the pig barn, but you won’t be able to afford decent housing, which starts about $400 a month – that’s if you can find it, since rentals are all but impossible to find around here. Anyways, $400 a month would take damn near half your projected income – so that’s out of the question.
There is one fairly flat piece of ground next to the barn. If you was to dig out most of the bigger rocks, you might could get yourself in a garden and plant a few vegetables. ‘Course, you’d have to hold off for a few months till the beans and taters got in, before you could eat. Hell, that’s all right – I got a sneakin’ suspicion you boys got a little savin’s hanging around your bellies anyway.
If you needed some cash, I would certainly pay to see you two put your backs to a hoe or muck out a barn – and I’ll bet there’s a bunch of folks around here who’d join me after hearing you city-boys tell ‘em how cheap it is to get by in the small town South while paying $2.50 a gallon for gas so poor ol’ Lee Raymond can afford to retire.
Just these few wise choices followed through would give you at least a fighting chance to pull off your monetary miracle.
I trust you won’t think me rude if this is my last post on this subject, since only a fool would continue to argue about something so obviously foolish.
Jeff Guinn - March 18, 2006 @ 5:02 am
Tam:
Only a fool would say something like “capitalism is a zero sum game.”
Or mistake the term “low” for an absolute quantity.
Or assume that “around here” is everywhere.
Or presume that the absolute minimum amount of money (even before taking EITC into account) that one can make in a year — with two weeks off — is representative of the larger economy, or that such a person will remain at that income level for very long.
Just a few years ago, I had to get by on $12 per hour. Seems a princely sum, right? It was also the going rate for a job requiring nothing more than a high school education.
Oh, and one other thing. While you are ranting about CEO compensation, how about deciding those CEOs are all worth, say, 5 times the average salary. Then distribute the remainder across the entire economy. Unless that is going to make even as much as a penny’s differnce in a gallon of gas — which it won’t — then your rant is irrelevant to “paying $2.50 a gallon for gas so poor ol’ Lee Raymond can afford to retire.”
Like I said — you need to work on your analytical rigor.
Which seems to be the problem with the angry left — emotion far too often comes at the expense of making sense.
Tam O’Tellico - March 18, 2006 @ 8:32 am
Let’s see how many ways Jeff can be hoisted on his won petard*:
*The French used petard, “a loud discharge of intestinal gas,” for a kind of infernal engine for blasting through the gates of a city. “To be hoist by one’s own petard,” a now proverbial phrase apparently originating with Shakespeare’s Hamlet (around 1604) not long after the word entered English (around 1598), means “to blow oneself up with one’s own bomb, be undone by one’s own devices.”
Jeff: “Just a few years ago, I had to get by on $12 per hour.”
If my my angry left math is correct, that would work out to about $25,000 a year which you admit you “had to get by on”. So what was your problem? That’s 2 1/2 times the mythical $10,000 a year you and MrM claim is “comfortable” and “adequate”.
Jeff: “Then distribute the remainder across the entire economy. Unless that is going to make even as much as a penny’s differnce in a gallon of gas — which it won’t — then your rant is irrelevant to “paying $2.50 a gallon”
Income redistribution may or may not change the price of gasoline, but it is patently obvious it would affect people’s ability to pay for it, so in relative terms, it would be cheaper. But leaving relativity aside, it’s even possible that if CEO Lee Raymond and his corporate cohorts were making only five times minimum wage, the price of gasoline and a lot of other products might very well come down.
If you can’t even do basic math, stop lecturing me about economics.
But a fairer system of income distribution would serve a much larger purpose: it could make people far more inclined to believe in an economic system which a growing number of citizens believes is more and more skewed toward the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. That is proverbial zero-sum economics.
The root of the problem is not teeming masses of lazy dolts, my king, but teeming masses of dispirited workers who see declining real wages and the gutting of healthcare and pension benefits under the guise of competitiveness, competitiveness which only seems to benefit the big boys.
My argument will fall on deaf ears, of course, because guys like you and MrM and Lee truly believe you earned it all, and that the poor are all poor because they deserve to be poor. That’s an all-too convenient self-deception which allows you to justify your greed.
Your sad and tired argument reminds me of the old saw: If all the money were divided up equally, within ten years the same people would end up rich again. I have yet to meet anyone who offers that ridiculous propostion who is willing to put his money where his mouth is.
Jeff Guinn - March 18, 2006 @ 9:47 am
Tam:
If my my angry left math is correct, that would work out to about $25,000 a year which you admit you “had to get by on”. So what was your problem?
My problem is you don’t get the obvious point: follow a few very simple rules — graduate from High School — and jobs paying decent money are there for the picking. Your incessant focussing on extremely low incomes, below even what is mathematically possible given the barest requirements, indicates you aren’t concerned about what the economy is really like.
“Then distribute the remainder across the entire economy. Unless that is going to make even as much as a penny’s differnce in a gallon of gas — which it won’t — then your rant is irrelevant to “paying $2.50 a gallon”
Income redistribution may or may not change the price of gasoline, but it is patently obvious it would affect people’s ability to pay for it, so in relative terms, it would be cheaper. But leaving relativity aside, it’s even possible that if CEO Lee Raymond and his corporate cohorts were making only five times minimum wage, the price of gasoline and a lot of other products might very well come down.
If you can’t even do basic math, stop lecturing me about economics.
You are the one who didn’t do basic math. Reduce CEO salaries by any amount you choose, even 100%, then divide that by production over a year, and see what the difference per unit is. Or look at it another way: find the percentage of CEO salaries as a portion of the company’s total operating costs. Millions divided by billions is a very, very tiny number, which would effect neither the price, nor people’ ability to pay.
So until you can do some basic math, don’t lecture me about doing basic math.
But a fairer system of income distribution would serve a much larger purpose only if it actually achieves the ends you desire. All experience thus far demonstrates that such a thing is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, particularly since you have not even begun to consider moral hazard.
You are still ranting. Until you propose a way to equalize incomes, and consider the implications, then your argument is empty.
Tam O’Tellico - March 18, 2006 @ 11:15 am
Saturn Devouring His Children
Jeff: “… you end with a string of anecdotals that amount to nothing”
My long, long list of corrupt individuals is neither “irrelevant factoids” or “a string of anecdotals that amount to nothing” – those are very real people and very real dollars involved. Of course, millions upon millions in corruption may not matter to you.
The inordinate number of politicians involved in this corruption are proof that something is rotten, and it isn’t in Denmark. They are proof that the system is broken, a system that makes it far too easy to corrupt and be corrupted. And yet people of your ilk argue that what few safeguards do exist should be removed in favor of even more “lazy unfair” Free Market economics.
Perhaps you think we would all be better off if the Free Market for bribery was allowed to regulate itself. Hogwash. It is simply too easy for weak-willed self-promoters like Ken Lay and Duke Cunningham to surrender to the vast sums of money.
The fact that these men are all Republicans, as well as crooks, is your problem, not mine. And no, I am not so foolish as to suggest that Democrats are all that much better – they just happen to be out of power at the moment. If they should happen to return to power – a big IF given the effects of gerrymandering, K-Street campaign-financing and the undue electoral influence of the Christian Right, they would likely be equally corrupted by big business and wear the collar of the lap-dog just as their Republican counterparts are now doing.
The K-Street Project ought to serve as a warning of the danger, even to you diehards, that there is a larger disease, a disease which has exposed Trickle Down Economics for what it really is: Trickle Down Syndrome.
The first victim of this disease is the poor, who are always the first to suffer. But this time, relentless greed may make a victim of the American Dream. The promise of equality and social justice is dying and perhaps mortally wounded by the rise of multi-national corporations avowedly disinterested in the economic complications, social consequences, and environmental impact of unmitigated and rampant wretched excess.
But as history proves, no amount of regulation can ever fully thwart the desire of dirty, little men for wealth and power. Therefore, some form of socialism is necessary, else your pure free-marketplace becomes a jungle in which some citizens must suffer needlessly and die prematurely.
Most Americans are perfectly willing to accept some degree of socialism, acknowledged or not, in order to make the system a bit more humane. Free-Market Libertarians like you and MrM are unable to grasp, or what is more likely acknowledge, that fact.
Or iperhaps the unwashed masses are more sophisticated than you theorists. They seem to comprehend, if only intuitively, that the system must be regulated else one day it will, like Saturn, devour it’s children.
lonbud - March 18, 2006 @ 1:38 pm
Jeff:
To reprise your earlier complaint about my alleged use of ad hominem attacks, your calling me a hissy pedant says far more about you than it does about me, as does your characterization of Tom Cordle as being guilty of “thumb-sucking pabulum.” It’s interesting that your opening posts on this forum complained about behavior which seems to be your own stock in trade.
…pacifism is doomed from the start, and socialism ultimately results in either widespread poverty, murder, or, more likely, both. … human nature is not now, nor will it ever be, “in tune with the music of the spheres.”
How sad it must be for you to have such a limited, and limiting, view of human nature and the possibilities for its development.
As I’ve said previously, nothing about the history of human experience obviates the potential success of a pacifist approach insofar as one has yet to be adopted on a widespread basis. In addition, the changes wrought in India in the wake of Gandhi’s teachings and example, as well as the cultural history of Tibetan Buddhism all point to the efficacy of pacifist principles.
And if socialism portends widespread poverty and murder, how is “free-market” capitalism any different?
I think we can all agree that economics is not a zero sum game, even if none of us knows, or is able to agree on what that means. Having dispensed with the need to use that phrase ever again in the context of our debate, I’m not sure why it seems so difficult for you to acquiesce in the notion that corruption and greed and avarice are to be discouraged rather than rewarded (or ignored), and that at current rates of minimum wage pay it is NOT possible to live either adequately or comfortably.
Meredtih Charpantier - March 18, 2006 @ 4:46 pm
One might want to note the number of French citizens who have both survived and strived through out 14 years of socialist governance followed by years socialist tendancies and to pay special attention to the current riots in the streets being waged by a new generation of not apathetic youths for the equal right to work and to earn a pension that their spring of 68 parents garnered not just for them but for us all. And if there is a statitician in the house, I would be interested to know how the standard of living compares to that of our almighty free market ‘s taking into account of course the relative price of cheese bread and wine.
Tam O’Tellico - March 18, 2006 @ 9:50 pm
Jeff: “Your incessant focussing on extremely low incomes, below even what is mathematically possible given the barest requirements, indicates you aren’t concerned about what the economy is really like.”
For the last time, I didn’t offer the ridiculous $10,000 a year figure, Michael did, and you supported him in that folly. Now if the two of you will be adult enough to admit that was foolish, as you seem to indicare by your above description of mathematically impossible incomes, we can move on.
What troubles me is the reluctance, which seems to present itself more frequently with conservatives, to admit to error even when it’s obvious. Certainly, the Mr. Bush is a prime example of this personal deficiency.
Feel free to prove me wrong by owning up to your bad argument. Frankly, I’d much prefer to move on to a legitimate debate.
Jeff Guinn - March 19, 2006 @ 7:42 am
Meredith:
Perhaps you should start with their unemployment rate of rougly 10% (roughly double that for those younger than 25). Or the much higher government take of income. Or that the average French income is substantially less than that in the US.
Tam:
Once more — his number was notional, and was made primarily to substantiate that it is possible to live “comfortably” (I suspect he meant it in the same way as I used “adequately”) on that money. You could have done the same thing he did, which is to back up your assertion with a minimum amount, and basis for that amount, that it takes to live “comfortably.” Then, you could take that a step further to find out what actual incomes are in your area. In my area, two people could share a two bedroom apartment for $400 ea/month. They could do so sufficiently close to their place of work to either use buses, or ride a bike. Presuming they are working at minimum wage, that gives them just shy of $600/month for food, clothing, and utilities. (Excluding the EITC).
Okay then, tell me, where’s my error?
Beyond that, you have asserted that market economics is zero sum, that high CEO salaries make gasoline substantially more expensive than it would otherwise be. Then you insist that a fairer means of income distribution would make people far more inclined to believe in an economic system which a growing number of citizens believes is more and more skewed toward the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. That is proverbial zero-sum economics.
Yet you leave all those things completely unsupported. How would you impose a fairer means of income distribution? Does our economic system fail to reward merit? Does benefitting the few actually come at the expense of the many? That you assert such things does not make them true, and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
I understand you find current executive compensation morally offensive; I happen to believe much of it is inadequately related to performance. But none of that serves to substantiate any of your basic points.
As for corruption: Republicans didn’t invent it, and are not the monopoly practitioners.
lonbud:
your calling me a hissy pedant says far more about you than it does about me
Your comment suggests you need to read what I say more carefully. What I said was so as not to provoke hissy pedantry from those who are unable to separate spelling from usage. I did not say you are a hissy pedant. I did say that focussing on a spelling error, while completely declining to address the actual argument, is pedantic. Now whether my characterization is correct, it was clearly an attack on the statement, not an attack on you.
Similarly with my characterization of Mr. Cordle’s writing quoted above. If my assertion that human nature is not a tabula rosa is correct, then Mr. Cordle’s article is in fact empty nonsense. I have said nothing about Mr. Cordle himself.
How sad it must be for you to have such a limited, and limiting, view of human nature and the possibilities for its development.
Human nature is what it is. If you believe that evolution is the process by which we came to be, than human nature is indelible, and essentially unchangeable. There are no possibilities for its development. The only option open to us is a political and economic system that is consistent with human nature.
Enlightened self interest will never be anything like perfect, but it beats the heck out of the coercion that is the only alternative.
You very much need to read F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
lonbud - March 19, 2006 @ 8:45 am
Jeff:
I’ll take at face value your assertion that the only option open to us is a political and economic system that is consistent with human nature. Explain, please, how you can fail to decry the current state of affairs in the United States.
Our political system has failed to remedy the presence of executive leadership that brazenly holds itself above the law and purposely fails to protect the citizenry from certain harm in order to achieve political ends.
Our political system has been gamed to produce an economic system that diverts public resources for the benefit of a very few at the expense of the vast majority, and which has enriched a tiny minority by taking on debt in the name of generations yet unborn.
I’ll look into Hayek’s book, but just by it’s title, I’d say it’s on the right track. You might want to have a gander at American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, by Kevin Phillips.
lonbud - March 19, 2006 @ 10:08 am
Jeff and Michael:
It is beyond me for you to read Hayek and not be calling for Bush’s head and for the imprisonment of the GOP leadership.
While “socialism” may indeed pave a path to totalitarianism and the ultimate subjugation of individual freedom, the neo-con failure to accept responsibility for breaking up monopoly powers and for stewardship of public health and safety leads inexorably to a similarly grim existence for the greatest number of people.
As Tam pointed out earlier, believing that a combined Exxon-Mobil creates greater competition in energy markets requires a degree of intellectual gymnastics firmly rooted in what you might call the field of “moral hazard.”
Tam O’Tellico - March 19, 2006 @ 11:03 am
Since neither Michael nor Jeff has the intellectual courage to admit the simple truth that their insistence on supporting the $10,000 a year figure was at best hyperbole and at worst plain ignorance, it is perfectly fair to hold any of their other assertions suspect. But I’m moving on.
As for our politico-economic system, it is clearly socialist in many respects, though no one dare speak the name – especially a politician. I say thank God for it while Libertarian Free-Marketers shout “Tear down the safety net!”
Nor am I about to accept the notion that “socialism may indeed pave a path to totalitarianism”. Present-day European nations are more than adequate proof that is not so. In fact, it may be more easily argued that capitalism unfettered is more likely to lead to totalitarianism. The Nazi’s may have called themselves socialists, but their system of a paranoid strongman in league with greedy capitalists is far closer to our present system than are the present nations of Europe.
The furor that so divides our nation at present is because many perceive the perversion of the system IS leading to totalitarianism unless we do something quickly to eliminate the bastard notion of a Unitary President who decides for himself when the law applies to him, and excuses anything and everything in the name of “security”.
Could any proposition be more directly associated with Big Brother?
bubbles - March 20, 2006 @ 1:54 am
87% of Iraqis want America to leave immediately, yet staying and fighting for democracy there is a worthy cause. The same logic would have us fornicating for the sake of chastity. You’d think spending $15,000 on every man woman and child over the course of three years in an entire country would buy a little gratitude wouldn’t ya? So not only the media seems to be under reporting the good news. But, no the only mistake we’ve made is we hadn’t counted on how successful we would be. Just think if these same executives have their way all records of these accomplishments will remain classified 10 years from now and still they’ll be under appreciated.
Michael Herdegen - March 20, 2006 @ 12:55 pm
Since neither Michael nor Jeff has the intellectual courage to admit the simple truth that their insistence on supporting the $10,000 a year figure was at best hyperbole and at worst plain ignorance…
As I wrote earlier, I’ve lived on less than $ 10,000 a year, and millions of Americans do the same RIGHT NOW.
You’re insisting that the world is flat, that what is done everyday cannot be done.
Michael Herdegen - March 20, 2006 @ 3:29 pm
Best job market in 5 years for grads
Reuters
lonbud - March 20, 2006 @ 4:19 pm
DOW 20K, here we come!
The future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades…
Michael Herdegen - March 20, 2006 @ 9:31 pm
That is absolutely true, if one is an American, and is also true for places like Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Singapore, or the UK.
If you live in Africa, China, the Middle East, Russia, the ‘Stans – the Asian former Soviet provinces, or Western Continental Europe, well…
Good luck.
Some nations and sub-cultures will do well in those areas, but they’ll be swimming against the tide.
lonbud - March 20, 2006 @ 10:56 pm
ever play the board game “diplomacy,” michael?
the american empire, uh, coalition is indeed impressive, not only in its obvious military supremacy, but also in its social and economic reach among nations.
to me this would seem the moment to chart a new course in human affairs instead of retreating to the comfort of age-old fears and demons.
if we’re right about our approach beyond the cave, we must leave its shadows and dark places behind. if we’re unwilling to do that, we’re no better than any of the timeless numbers who have preceded us, and we’ll get no better than they in the end — a timeless march to death.
little statistic check for you in the April Harper’s Index:
amount by which Americans’ total spending last year exceeded their earnings — $41,600,000,000
last year in which spending outstripped earnings — 1933
world war iii, anyone?
Jeff Guinn - March 21, 2006 @ 4:06 am
Tam:
Since neither Michael nor Jeff has the intellectual courage to admit the simple truth that their insistence on supporting the $10,000 a year figure was at best hyperbole and at worst plain ignorance. See 19 Mar, 0742. While I used the minimum wage for a 50 work-week year (no paid vacation), $10,000 would have also been sufficient.
lonbud:
In as much as I am an agnostic areligionist libertarian, I have little truck with Christianist nonsense. But as much as I dislike it, it is still preferable to the anti-human (in the sense that denial of human nature is the sine qua non [yeah, I know, there’s the Latin again]) essence of Left politics.
BTW: Before you get too enamored of that savings number, perhaps you should read Misunderestimeasurementation. Unfortunately, IIRC, that discussion leaves out the impact of retirees, who, practically by definition, are significant dissavers.
Michael Herdegen - March 21, 2006 @ 4:51 am
Strong US productivity growth in the current expansion has helped hearty economic growth and low inflation to coexist.
By Richard Berner, for MorganStanley
Yeah, best get out those shades; by the end of ’06, the unemployment rate will be 4.1%.
Tam O’Tellico - March 21, 2006 @ 7:40 am
Jeff: “My problem is you don’t get the obvious point: follow a few very simple rules — graduate from High School — and jobs paying decent money are there for the picking.”
Would that were true, but I’m afraid that you are once again in error. I’m still waiting for you economic geniuses who think someone can live “comfortably” on $10,000 a year to explain these numbers away:
“Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.
So who are the winners from rising inequality? It’s not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.
A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, “Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?,” gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn’t a ticket to big income gains.
But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that’s not a misprint.
Just to give you a sense of who we’re talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn’t give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it’s probably well over $6 million a year.”
I repeat: Small craft warning advised in this “rising tide”.
lonbud - March 21, 2006 @ 1:22 pm
Jeff: I don’t agree that denial of human nature is the sine qua non of “Left” politics. Your assertion begs additional explication.
Michael: full employment is a meaningless statistic on its own. Southern planters produced an economy with full employment in the first half of the 1800s.
Michael Herdegen - March 21, 2006 @ 2:14 pm
Tam O’Tellico:
What’s hilarious here is that roughly 4% of the full-time workers in America work for the national minimum wage, which is an annual gross income of $ 10,700, or $ 9,890 after payroll taxes.
Your argument is seriously that these people DON’T SURVIVE ?!?
I think that what you’re really trying to say, albeit inartfully, is that they don’t enjoy middle class comforts. That is something that all can agree upon.
However, as Mr. Guinn points out, they are clothed, fed, housed, entertained, and have access to medical care, which are the basics for a comfortable life, no ?
As for your Krugman article…
Refering to that error-filled nonsense was your first mistake. You may not know this, but although Krugman used to be an economist, he gave that up LONG ago in favor of partisan political commentary.
Read the past four years of his columns; if you can find even THREE accurate forecasts or predictions, I’ll concede this whole argument on the spot.
For instance, this howler: “So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn’t a ticket to big income gains.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between ’74 and ’04 the threshold income for the top 40 percent, four times the number of people that Krugman references, increased by 50%, adjusted for inflation.
A 50% real increase isn’t a “big income gain” ?
Further, the threshold income for the top 60% increased by 35% in real terms between ’74 and ’04, which is another “big income gain”.
BTW, 75% of American households headed by a person who works full-time for at least 27 weeks a year fall into the top 60%.
I addressed other distortions in that article on March 12th at 7:47 am; since you responded to the post, but didn’t argue with my conclusions, it indicates that you realize that I am essentially correct.
However, I’d be happy to read an alternative explanation for the data, if you really want to attempt to argue that Americans are less well-off now than they were in the ’70s.
I’d particularly like you to address this point that I made on March 13th:
Also, keep in mind that you’ve used these phrases in reference to my ideas before: “Michael is absolutely right” and “Michael is quite right”…
You may not LIKE what I’m saying about American society and the economy, but perhaps you should consider that I may be correct again.
Michael Herdegen - March 21, 2006 @ 2:29 pm
lonbud:
…full employment is a meaningless statistic on its own.
That’s quite true; it needs to be interpreted in relation to every other trend in American society and the economy.
However, since there are few slaves left in America, (and those that do exist are being held illegally), it would be hard to argue that an increase in employment DID NOT mean an increase in both individual well-being and prosperity for America as a whole.
Further, wages are rising, as employers compete for workers in a tight labor market. That can hardly be seen as a negative, even by employers, since they wouldn’t be competing for workers if business was bad.
So…
More jobs, and higher pay for all…
What is it that you don’t like about that ?
Jeff Guinn - March 21, 2006 @ 6:21 pm
lonbud:
Jeff: I don’t agree that denial of human nature is the sine qua non of “Left” politics. Your assertion begs additional explication.
Okay. Communism (no, I’m not accusing anyone here of believing in that particular religion) sounded great in theory, but relied totally on human nature being a tabula rosa — in effect, something that didn’t even exist in and of itself.
Socialism is the same, but less so. First, it completely ignores moral hazard (see, for example, absenteeism where there are significant illness benefits), and insists, as Tam has amply demonstrated, on equality of outcome instead of opportunity. Humans are not born with anything like equal ability, so imposing equal outcomes amounts to denying that obvious fact of human existence.
What is worse, because doing so imposes penalties on success, it also penalizes virtue, because the very qualities that, in general, we consider virtuous are also those that lead to success.
So when Tam starts talking about income distribution, the obvious question is: OK, so what are you going to do about it? Followed by: Now that you have done that, is the result better?
Oh, and one other thing: those most opposed to something so obviously human as gender differences are never found on the right.