This was the headline that the Texas Standard chose to run for this story. It’s soft-pedaling hogwash, that’s what that headline is. Forty-two Percent of Texans Are Poor is how that headline should read. That is what the coded word struggle represents. Poverty. These people are poor but the media doesn’t want to call them poor. Poor is failure. Poor is less than human. Poverty is never to be admitted to, even by the poor themselves.
Though the state’s economy is experiencing relatively healthy growth overall, a new report by the United Ways of Texas shines a light on the surprising number of Texans who are struggling financially. The new report, “ALICE, A Study of Hardship in Texas,” says 42 percent of all households in Texas cannot afford basic needs such as housing, food, transportation and health care.
Don’t believe me? Here’s the definition of ALICE from the secondary link,
ALICE, an acronym which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, represents the growing number of individuals and families who are working, but are unable to afford the basic necessities of housing, food, child care, health care, and transportation.
Asset Limited. Poor. Poverty. Now, the federal government and most especially the state of Texas will tut-tut that and say that those people are well above the poverty line established by government. Again I say, hogwash. Federal guidelines and especially guidelines from the state of Texas will not be truthful, if by truthful you mean accurate. This goes for anything that touches on the sacred beliefs of the average American, most especially the delusion that poor Americans aren’t poor. They just aren’t wealthy yet, and they never will be wealthy. But don’t tell them that.
This is well trodden ground for me these days because I’ve spent the better part of two months arguing with an in-law about this very subject recently.
I don’t think you know what poverty is. I was born in it and raised in it. The only thing that got me out of it was hard work. I had no intention of raising my children the way I was raised, therefore they had better than I had. And I do pretty well now only because I work hard to better myself. President Trump is making it so people can work and better themselves and get off the coattails of the government. I do not understand how anybody could think putting people back to work is a bad thing. Obama on the other hand closed down factories and put millions of people out of work and on food stamps.
I had to block that poor fool because he kept calling me stupid. This exercise would be me once again wasting my time, convinced I can somehow reason with someone who refuses to think. The uninformed political opinions he’s throwing around I will dig into somewhere else, have already dug into somewhere else before (Obama, Caveat Emptor) But the poverty stuff? I don’t talk about that very often (Greece, Bootstraps) However, I’m pretty sure I have a general understanding of what poverty is and what it can do to people. I’m positive I understand it better than that in-law, because poverty has been my constant companion throughout my adult life.
That in-law is better off than I am, but he’s still right on the margins of poverty. He’s middle class but not comfortably so, and not likely to stay part of the middle class unless he can keep working for another twenty years. The proof is in the statistics cited above, 42% of Texans are poor. That is just under half of all Texans being poor. Half. No one who isn’t independently wealthy will stay middle class without working, and independent wealth is built up through generations of hard work. Something I know neither he nor I come from.
There was a brief period of about two years in my adult life where I wasn’t poor. And when I wasn’t poor I never struggled for anything other than struggling to keep my job so I could keep paying for things. People of means do not struggle. They see a shrink and work it out, because they can afford to pay to have someone listen to them and help them work out their problems. Having a job that generates enough money to live on is not struggling in the way that the research demonstrates. The struggling that the United Ways is highlighting comes from having too much work and not enough money. A uniquely post modern development. Gainfully employed and still starving.
I keep linking this video in the vain hope that people who think that a dollar has work value attached to it would watch and learn a few things. It’s not like it’s a long video. It’s not a huge investment in time to watch.
I’m sure it’s quite painful to watch if you are a conservative. Conservatives and conservative economics have created this problem. Have created it more than once. Thinking you have to work to survive, to deserve to survive, is outmoded thinking and has caused the kind of crisis we are living through today. Has caused it repeatedly down through time. Today’s system throws off enough wealth all on it’s own to eliminate poverty completely if we simply set ourselves to the task of eliminating it. And even if we do eliminate poverty we’ll still have people wanting to work, and even more people capable of doing that work, because poverty is a man-made ill. Poverty is something we created to justify ourselves and our assumed status in life.
“Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.”
Poverty is looked down upon as being caused by the behavior of the poor themselves. This is patently not the case, as the OTM series Busted: America’s Poverty Myths (Bootstraps, again) goes to great lengths to spell out. But that doesn’t change the beliefs of most Americans. Poor people are more hated now than they have been in generations, and this is a worldwide phenomenon, not just in America.
If you think of yourself as white and you are poor in modern America, the fact that you are poor grates on you so much that you go looking for people who suffer more than you. Having a paler skin color is seen as a sign of status, has been seen as a sign of status down through the ages. Being pale means that you don’t have to work out in the sun. You have leisure time. you can throw this assumed status around, use it to your advantage in social interactions.
Unless you are poor. If you are poor, there is no question that your paler skin doesn’t convey advantage any longer, because there are demonstrably people darker skinned than you that have more status than you. They have more status because they have the conveyor of modern status, money. This is a corruption of the natural order in the mind’s eye of a racist, and we can’t just allow the natural order to be corrupted, now can we?
This is how we get to the point where the party of Lincoln, the party of the man who lead the Union through the Civil War and destroyed the slavery based economy of the Southern Confederacy; this is how the Republican party has become the party of people who wave the stars and bars of the confederacy and demand that they be given privilege over the brown-skinned. Republicans see everyone who is darker than they are as other, outsider, illegal. They couch their arguments in law and order, just like Nixon coded it in the seventies. But Nixon was a racist, too. They don’t even know that what they are promoting is racism. Donald Trump’s naked attempt to create a white American royalty.
How can Democrats win in deep red America? During the midterms, momentum behind progressive candidates in red states garnered national attention — Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Andrew Gillum in Florida and Stacey Abrams in Georgia. These were no overnight successes. They were the culmination of, among many things, including the tireless efforts of grassroots organizers.
But it is even more basic than that. Will our children and their children go hungry? Will they have access to shelter from the cold or the heat, especially given the unpredictable nature of the climate change we are creating? Will there be schools to teach the children that all of us will rely on in the future to provide every single thing we need? Things we will need paid for with money we didn’t work for that day? We didn’t have to work for, because the system itself provides a mechanism (money) that allows us to not have to work every single day in order to survive? These are real, hard questions that have to be answered today, so that we can have access to those things tomorrow. All of us, not just the 1% that currently receive all the benefits of modern society.
Or would you rather that your children starve for want of food when fortunes turn on them as it does on everyone? Sleep out in the cold because they can’t afford shelter? Rather that they die of preventable diseases because there was no profit in researching cures or vaccines? All of these things require public investment, something that you won’t learn from the worship of robber barons that pervades what passes for conservative ideology these days.
“The liberals will always do what they can to hold you back”
Conservatism is about adhering to the past, not looking beyond what our ancestors did, the rights they claimed for themselves. That is the sum total of conservatism.
Liberalism is about experimentation. Liberalism is a friend to entrepreneurs, scientists, etc. Liberalism promotes new ways of thinking and new ways of dealing with the world. That is the definition of liberalism. Look it up anywhere aside from conservapedia, and you will find that I am right on this subject.
Liberals accept that society and its inventions, things that we all inherited, belong to all of us. Because none of the living invented any of the technologies that provide the food for our tables today. We stood on the shoulders of giants and thought ourselves tall. Liberals understand that the only way to do justice to those who came before us is to see that those that come after us have what they need to thrive, just as we had what we needed to thrive.
Our rights include things like clean air and clean water. Health care is a basic human right since it takes the wealth of the entire nation to maintain the system, it has to be available to everyone, not just those who can pay.
If you want questions answered, you have to ask questions. Ask questions which are answerable. Declaring that everything you don’t understand is a plot to take the little you have to your name now is nothing more than a paranoid delusion. You can’t lose something you don’t own, and most of what we deal with today are things that don’t belong to us alone. The internet is useless without other people to talk to. You can’t tend to your own physical injuries if those injuries require expertise to remedy. If you have that expertise and try to doctor yourself, then you have a fool for a patient. It takes others to do anything meaningful in life. Spitting on the state, on government, and turning your back on progress in the name of preserving what you have now is to settle for less than you could have had, if you only have the sense to look around you with eyes that aren’t clouded by fear.
Modern farming would be impossible without federal research grants, federal subsidies, federal mandates. The ability to get a mortgage and own your own home was a federal mandate. Every single scientific endeavor survives on federal seed money. There would be no internet without it. There would be no handheld computer to read this message on without NASA. There would be no vaccination program without federal mandates. No science-based medicine without government oversight and consequently no way to know what medicines work without government involvement.
So yes, I will rely on government. So will you, even if you don’t think that’s what you are doing. Government touches everything. And in the United States, we are the government. We can pay ourselves enough that none of us need starve, and still leave room for entrepreneurs to profit off of their ideas, giving them motivation to create, to work. Contemplate that for as long as it takes to sink in.
Postscript
The problem is nation-wide.
About 39 percent of Americans ages 18 to 65 experienced at least one type of material hardship last year, statistically unchanged from the 39.3 percent who suffered hardship in 2017, the nonpartisan think tank found. The study spans the first two years of the Trump administration, as well as the first year of the tax overhaul. Yet there was little progress easing the financial challenges experienced by U.S. adults last year, the Urban Institute said.
I admit I am poor because it is the truth. I admit I am poor because it places me in the group that shares the most to gain from the current reversal in political power. Watch this 10 minute video and try to understand the concepts presented in it.
I don’t make racial arguments on this blog very often. I don’t make racial arguments largely because of the points made by the host of the video. I was virtually homeless for years. I have been poor all my life. The only things I’ve ever had going for me was the color of my skin, and my ability to think clearly and deeply. Only one of those is something I can do anything about.
Poverty is what we all share in common. Nearly half of the US is poor. Everyone around you is probably poor, unless you are one of the lucky few still in the middle class, and even then your neighbors are probably poor. The 1% would like nothing more than for us to forget just how good they’ve got it right now.
I don’t make racial arguments because they are divisive, and I am not proud of the history of race as my white skin would have that history be told. I support Black Lives Matter every time I hear the group derided, even when black people aren’t around to hear it. See it. I do this because I know we are fellow travelers. We share a common human bond.
The real separation, the real dispute, is between the haves and the have-nots. Just as it has always been down through history. Make no mistake, there is a war on poverty in the US. It just isn’t the war you think it is.
Before the war on drugs became our national fixation, there was a short-lived, halfheartedly implemented war on poverty. Would that the same amount of resources and political will been expended here. But hyper-individualism, rampant capitalism, and a political discourse that persistently racializes poverty and stigmatizes governmental assistance continue to stand in the way.
The series of linked videos below highlight ideas to fix the economy, the top 11 12 points on Robert Reich‘s mind when it comes to our current economic problems. These aren’t rocket science or socialism, just some pretty hard-nosed factual recommendations; and we’d do well to follow them. They run contrary to the long debunked refrain of Reaganomics or trickle-down economics that has held sway in the US since Ronaldus Maximus was President, long before most of the people currently breathing on this planet were born.
They also run counter to most current libertarian economic theory. It is painful to say this, but most libertarian thought on the subject of economics is so woefully uneducated that I almost balk at calling them out. Doing so is not likely to be profitable based on the standard of keeping old friends. As I was crafting this article a post from a good friend on Facebook showed up, trumpeting the flat tax proposals of Libertarian darling Rand Paul.
A flat tax will do nothing to recapture the ill-gotten gains of the wealthiest Americans, the people who profited from the latest boom and bust, as well as the previous boom and bust cycles. Cycles that have grown shorter and shorter since deregulation went into effect under… Ronald Reagan, who was also influenced by libertarian ideas of his time.
Recapturing this cash and redistributing it to the vast majority of Americans through increased pay and investment in infrastructure is essential if we are going to build a functioning economy and not fuel the next cycle of boom and bust. It is the outrageous amounts of cash that allow the 1% to engage in risky stock market betting like we’ve seen since the 1980’s.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A word about the composition of this post. Linking videos that are native on Facebook is a stupidly fiddly process, and Facebook is where I found these videos first. Consequently the text intro for each is a Facebook link, while the videos are from Youtube, giving me the ability to watch and comment on each video while it is running.
There are several common misconceptions about the minimum wage. He hits most of those points in the video. The free market types who object to minimum wage laws on the basis that it interferes with employer/employee contracts, or that it could cause inflation, only see part of the bigger picture which Reich addresses in the video. Commerce relies on the majority of the population being able to afford the goods generally available to that population. That means paying the working class enough for them to live on.
I quit my regular job to raise our second child. We could not afford to put our child into expensive daycare, and I really wanted to spend time at home with what I knew would be our last baby, having missed seeing much of our firstborn in her early years due to the demands of an architectural career in the job climate prevalent in the US. Had it been possible for me to take on outsource work at home, work from home, etc. the impact on our families’ finances would have been less drastic. Had it been possible for the Wife to spend meaningful time with the baby while still working in her tech career, I might not have had to give up architecture for a few years longer, might have enjoyed my final years in my chosen profession before being sidelined with a disability.
As a current Social Security beneficiary, I should probably recuse myself from commenting on this video. Still, it bears mentioning that the the cap that he focuses on is far too low (because of past inflation) and that rather than set a dollar figure cap, if a higher cap is the compromise solution, there should be a median income calculation involved in determining what the cap should be. Inflation will continue. Wages will continue to rise. Upper range incomes will continue to get higher unless we re-institute confiscatory income tax (90% as it was when introduced) for high wage earners. Might as well write laws that take it into account.
How I wish this one stood a chance of happening. I only do business with a bank when I’m required to; unfortunately that happens more today than it did in decades past. The reason for this is the lax rules on banks that should never have been relaxed in the first place.
Most of what is happening today is reminiscent of what occurred at the turn of the last century. One of the books I’m currently reading is The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism much of the battle the occurred then is re-occurring now. Nearly daily I get a sense of deja vu reading the news. I recognize this struggle. It is a shame that more people do not learn from history.
This one carried no real news for me. Having gotten one child through college and working on getting the second one through high school, and being an involved parent, has left me with few delusions about the state of US schools. They are pathetic. So pathetic, in fact, that I paid for private school for my children (Montessori) until their needs weren’t met by the school. Then I took the time to make sure they went to good charter schools, magnet schools, etc. Anything except the standard schools offered to average Texans.
The objection often raised to charter schools is that they are religious in nature. While it is true that some alternative schools are religious, the schools I selected for my children have actually had less religious content (generally) than the public schools in Texas promote. Sometimes people seek alternatives for very good reasons.
This is an old favorite of mine. If corporations get handouts then everyone should get handouts; because the corporations demonstrably don’t need anything to continue existing. They have no physicality to maintain, being figments of law in the first place. We would be much better off handing money to every citizen rather than handing it out to corporations.
I’ve never been a fan of unions; still, it is hard to argue against the positive effects that collective bargaining can bring to the employment side of the equation. Collective bargaining levels the playing field when negotiating with large employers. Unionization lead to days off, 8 hour work days, breaks for meals, extra pay for overtime, etc, etc, etc.
When capitalists spit at socialism in my presence these days, I point out the benefits that have come to the working masses due to the influence of socializing forces like unionization. If you don’t want to go back to working nude in the same place you sleep, with your children huddled around you at night for warmth because your employer is too cheap to heat the workplace (read The Bully Pulpit as mentioned previously) unions are a good thing to have.
(Putting employee representation on the board of public corporations, making corporations worker owned, would do more to fix the uneven playing field more quickly than creating an adversarial relationship between employers and employees with traditional labor unions. -ed.)
#8 is to raise the estate tax on the very wealthy.
Everyone who can work, should work. The existence of a wealthy class who feel entitled to live off of the earnings of their parents and grandparents is contrary to the ideals that the US was founded on. Contrary to the Midwestern work ethic most of us grew up with. It is hard enough for me as a disabled person who is lucky to get from the bed to the chair some days to justify not working. I can’t even fathom the thought processes of the 1% who wouldn’t dream of working for a living.
It and the other videos in the playlist talk about this same subject, how wealth inequality is worse than it has been in almost a century, and the last time it was like this, the economy didn’t improve until after we fought the second world war. That should not be a direction we should head in this time around.
Also in that playlist is a trailer for Robert Reich‘s excellent film Inequality for All. I have viewed the film several times on Netflix and recommend it to anyone who wants to get a feel for the problems America currently faces. This as opposed to repeating trickle-down mantras in the hopes that they will self-correct and prove themselves true in the long run.
I can still hear the screaming raised against the carbon tax back when President Obama first took office and suggested some of these very things. Six plus years later, it is even clearer that the only solution is to do exactly what this video suggests. Make the oil companies and energy companies pay to use carbon producing fuels. Incentivize the use of green technologies. CO2 is over 400 now. We can’t keep adding it to the atmosphere. We just can’t, if we want our species to continue.
This is probably the biggest point of agreement with libertarian/anarchist thinking on the subject of governance and the economy. The kind of thinking I was most frequently exposed to while active in the LP of Texas for about a decade. The business of keeping prisoners has been a target of small government types for years, long before the average American or the re-emerging liberal majority took notice of it. It is a serious embarrassment that the US has 2.5 million members of its population behind bars; more than any other nation on the face of the planet.
Needless to say, as soon as the 10 were out, there was a glaring need for one more item on the list (isn’t that the way it always works?) So here is the latest one;
The problem with most free market approaches to healthcare is that modern medicine is too complex. It’s ability to function, to deliver its product (if health is even a product that can be sold) is tightly linked to corporate structures that are themselves an imposition on free markets. Price gouging is a part of the calculation of every new drug introduced to the market, how much can we get away with charging for this drug? And testing and development of these drugs requires large staffs, deep pockets, wide access to the population. The only way to counter the corporate nature of modern medicine is to either subject them to public control directly (which would be socialism with all the baggage that a state-run organization brings to the table. This would stifle innovation) or to leverage the pricing of the drugs and services produced with collective bargaining. It has to be one way or the other. Neither solution is pretty, but the group purchasing option that medicare provides leaves the companies free to do what they do best, produce goods for the general public.
He swears this is the last one. Makes an even dozen.
I’ve been on this bandwagon for about a year now. Maybe longer. I blogged about this subject after reading several scholarly articles on the subject of campaign finance, and reading Lawrence Lessig’s book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It which is free online now. In my article from last November, following the election, I list the various groups working to get money out of politics. If you want to get involved in politics, if you want to see any of these many points acted on and made policy, then I suggest you contact one of those groups or get involved in your local precinct for whichever flavor of the two major parties that you prefer (D or R) if you object and say “I want more choices than that” then I need to be frank with you. Including more choices than those two on ballots requires more work than even the 12 points addressed here would require. You’re welcome to engage in that struggle if you have the strength for it. Or just go vote when the time comes. If you don’t know where that is, go here.
His book Saving Capitalism should be in bookstores (if you can find one) soon. You can vote on which one of these 12 ideas will be a new campaign for Moveon to promote here. Has to be #12 for me.
In an argument on DC’s forums last year, amidst all the caterwauling, hair tearing, and general hatassery concerning the President and the upcoming elections, I proposed the following;
Barack Obama could well be considered the best President since Dwight D. Eisenhower
I said it at the time largely because I like to take a devil’s advocate position, but I also said it because I’ve become quite weary over the last 6 years listening to idiots run down the sitting president. Generally, I’m right there with them. I mean, given the track record of U.S. presidents in recent history, it’s not hard to thrash a president and have a receptive audience. Let me run down a bit of the history of presidents over the past fifty years, just so you can get a feel for where I’m coming from.
I first started paying attention to politics when Carter was in office. I couldn’t vote back then, but I thought Carter was getting a raw deal leading up to the election of 1980. His policies weren’t anything to brag about, but the weakness of the president and the country that conservatives railed about was largely an illusion that they invented simply as a tool to use against him. As history has demonstrated, Reagan didn’t know anything more than how to hit a mark and say a line (mostly) correctly; and people in his employ did negotiate with the Iranian hostage takers. In 1984. Negotiate again in 1984? Who knows.
Reagan’s term in office was hardly anything to brag about either, in spite of what armies of conservatives say on the subject. During Reagan’s term in office the Soviet Union did begin to collapse, and the Berlin wall did fall during his VP’s only term as President; but the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall that represented it had almost nothing to do with US policies in the region and had everything to do with the ham-handed bureaucrats in the USSR. The Soviet Union falling was a result of Glasnost, a call by the Soviet people and their president who was specifically elected to usher in a new era of openness. (fixed that sentence. -ed.) What Reagan should be known for, the albatross that he should wear, is Reaganomics or trickle-down economics, which has been shown to be a complete failure and has actually contributed more to economic instability than any other action committed by any other US executive in modern history.
Reagan’s real legacy is the S&L debacle, brought about by loosening regulations on financial institutions, almost exactly as predicted by people opposed to that action. The Iran-Contra affair that I mentioned previously barely moves the needle compared to the destructiveness of Reaganomics.
But Ronald Reagan was popular and was elected to two terms. His popularity even earned his Vice-President, an almost unknown political animal named George Herbert Walker Bush, a term as President. (Listen to Bagman and hear how he helped Spiro Agnew avoid prosecution, and then sought out Spiro Agnew’s advice on how to beat governor Dukakis. -ed.) But the damage done by Reaganomics continued to plague the nation, and not even a short, victorious, righteous war to stymie the aggression of a Middle Eastern dictator could secure him a second term in office.
As a peacenik, someone opposed to war in general if not in principle, George H.W. Bush’s willingness to go to war didn’t earn any points with me. None of the things his successor said or did made me believe he was any different. Bill Clinton’s term in office benefitted from the investment of the LBJ administration in space technology, in the form of microchips that were finally small and powerful enough to drive the information technology revolution that we are in the middle of; which makes his term in office seem halcyon in hindsight. But his willingness to involve the US directly in every crisis that made global news (with the exception of Rwanda. Which he says he wishes he’d gotten involved in as well) lobbing missiles like they were footballs at every hotspot on the globe, provided the grist for the mill of anti-American sentiment around the world.
Packing a bomb which exploded on 9-11. That’s the takeaway that history will draw from this era, the post-post WWII decades. This will be the time when the US fumbled the ball handed to it by the old-world European powers, and let someone else take up the lead internationally (who that will be remains in question) That is what this time will be remembered for. the election of Bush II will not be remembered for what Al Gore supporters would like it to be remembered for (the theft of the 2000 election. A footnote to what happened in 2016. –ed.) but for the results of America being asleep at the wheel internationally almost since the end of the Vietnam war. To be involved is to take an interest in the problems of the people around the world. Not to give payola to their leaders and lob missiles at them when they start to tear down the governments they no longer support.
Bush II didn’t steal the election, he simply won it on a technicality. Because of this, he got to be the guy in charge when 9-11 happened. The saying roughly goes we get the best enemies money can buy and we made the enemies who attacked us on 9-11; both figuratively and in reality. We trained a good number of terrorists to resist the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, including some who later worked for Al Qaeda, possibly even OBL himself. The administration was warned but ignored those warnings, and then set about fighting a war that would end up being the longest in US history, and arranged for that war to occur based on false evidence. In the process the Bush II administration destroyed American credibility on the world stage (whatever was left of it) torturing innocent people who just happened to be in a warzone at the wrong time.
To finish off his term, Bush II also failed to act on the looming financial crisis (also about which he was warned) and consequently handed the election of the next President to the Democrats. Handed the election to the Democrats who could have run the proverbial yellow dog, and it would have won. If it hadn’t been for Sarah Palin’s circus show, there wouldn’t have been anything of interest about the election of 2008.
With that as a backdrop, you can imagine what I thought of Barack Obama going into his first term. Don’t get me wrong, I voted for him in the primary in a vain (?) effort to throw the election his way instead of towards Hillary Clinton (I have no use for political dynasties) but I voted straight Libertarian for my last time in that general election. Held my nose and voted for a Republican in Libertarian clothing.
President Obama (surprisingly) did most of what he promised he would do in the election. Yes he did crater on a lot of issues that privacy advocates and conspiracy mongers think he should have taken a hard line on (failed to deliver mortgage relief too. –ed.) He did try ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and no matter how much saber rattling conservatives do, the anarchy currently afoot in Syria/Iraq doesn’t amount to much in the scheme of things unless you happen to have business there. Happen to live there (if you do, you have my sympathy. But do you really want to help Bashar Assad stay in power? Really?) The Syrian revolution managed to win the Republicans seats in the midterms, blowing out the possibility of a more productive congress in 2015, but in the end they remain on the wrong side of history.
Why, you ask? Why are they on the wrong side of history? Why would Obama be considered a good President? Because the general trends are predictive and obvious. I tripped over them even if you, dear reader, did not.
Since the Cold War ended and we blithely went on unchanging in or priorities, the Old World powers found their legs and stood on their own again. If you want to visit countries with the highest ratings for health, productivity, happiness, etcetera, look no further than the old economies that hard liners in the US still wrongly dismiss. Proof of this can be found by the ease with which Germany absorbed the poorer provinces of Eastern Germany, long held back under Soviet rule. How the French absorb refugees into France at a rate that rivals the US.
Canada’s adoption of the Canada Health Act hasn’t proved disastrous for the Canadian economy as predicted. It’s services continue to improve at an impressive rate, leaving the US in the dust. Even Mexico City has better healthcare than we have in the US, finally making the claims of liberal agitators like Michael Moore truthful, if only in hindsight.
The writing is on the wall, has been on the wall for sometime and US citizens apparently never noticed. Socialized medicine, for lack of a better appellation, appears to be the future. The notion that individuals can pay for health services as needed and build the kind of infrastructure that the average person wants (emergency services, research, etc) has been effectively shown to be a pipe dream; and that systems can and do function with the amount of complexity required to provide services in a timely fashion.
Ergo we will all be charged something to provide the services we all say we want but don’t want to pay for, or rather, underestimate the cost of. But that subject is beside the point I’m trying to make, and I don’t want to get distracted from it.
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is out this morning and reveals that 15.9 percent of American adults are now uninsured, down from 17.1 percent for the last three months of 2013 and has shown improvements in every major demographic group with the exception of Hispanics who did not advance.
If the Affordable Care Act continues working, if we actually expand on the basics of standardized healthcare provision set down by the Obama administration, What then? When Presidents back to the time of Truman tried to get this done?
Why Eisenhower?
Because Eisenhower was the last President to put his name on a fundamental change that was positive to the US as a whole. Lyndon Baines Johnson might have done this with his Great Society had his plans worked out, but his term was marred with the Vietnam War, which could have been avoided and dominates both his legacy and Kennedy’s legacy, even in the face of the Voting Rights Act. Eisenhower managed to avoid any major conflicts, and he established the Interstate Highway System with funds Congress had given to the military.
I’m not planning on doing an exhaustive search back though 60 years of Presidential history just to make my simple point. When I first proposed the idea, I stated it as best President in our lifetimes not best president since Eisenhower. I was born in the age of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and while his ending was tragic, what LBJ achieved in his name was of more importance than anything he did aside from not starting World War Three during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the grand scheme of things that is what he will be remembered for, aside from his words that took us to the moon on LBJ’s watch.
Which is really all that matters to history.
LBJ might pull a close second, even with Vietnam on his record, but that just really speaks to the lackluster nature of our leaders post-WW II, not to any high achievement on LBJ’s record.
I’ve heard similar talk in the news lately, which is why this subject came back to mind, the subject of Obama’s greatness. Obama took the shellacking of his party in stride and decided he wouldn’t sit out the last two years of his Presidency and play golf; at least not yet anyway (If you ask me he’s earned it, having taken less vacation than the last two Presidents) he took his Presidential pen in hand (something else he’s done less than recent Presidents) in order to reduce the suffering of people that were within his power to help.
It is noteworthy that every president since and including Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower has taken executive action on immigration without facing threats of lawsuits, government shutdowns, impeachment, or loss of executive authority.
The title caught my eye Every President Since Eisenhower. Well that’s interesting. It’s not a recommendation, but it is a true observation on the consistent obstinacy of the houses of the US Congress across the decades. It seems like Americans have a hangup when it comes to the subject of immigration. So I went looking farther. A piece from this time last year in the New York Times lays the case out pretty well;
Mr. Obama, barring tragedy or resignation, will get to serve eight years, but his margin of victory last November was not overwhelming. He won 62 percent of the electoral vote, which ranks 16th among the 30 presidents who sought re-election after their first terms. Mr. Obama’s electoral vote percentage was better than any of the 10 first-term losers, of course — but among the 20 winners, it exceeded only James Madison in 1812, Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Harry Truman in 1948 and George W. Bush in 2004.
That’s just going on percentages. Puts him in the running with Clinton, well below Eisenhower or LBJ in historical importance based on electoral percentage.
But that’s a little dry, don’t you think? Surely it means more than that, historical importance? More than the President’s popularity with the voting public? Not necessarily. Specifically, I have a hard time believing that Reagan will maintain his high rating (historically ranked 10th in importance) even with his overwhelming second-term victory percentages, given the looting that his administration ushered in and is only now coming to light.
Still, the cost-cutters will be hard pressed to nay-say Barack Obama’s place in history if he stays on course through the rest of his term. Check out the stats in this image from Forbes.
You are reading that right. Obama was the most conservative federal spender since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Don’t hold your breath waiting for your conservative outlets to spin this the right way, they won’t be doing that. They might even take the Heritage Foundation’s tack on the subject and insist that Bush II’s war costs should be saddled on President Obama. In any case, the groundwork has been laid. My work here is done. Barack Obama is the best US President since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Financially speaking.
Postscript
When I say that Obama was the best President since Eisenhower, this shouldn’t be seen as a compliment to Obama or to Eisenhower. I just want to make this point clear. It’s an observation on just how predatory our government has been in the past and continues to be at present. Imagine what our society, the culture in the United States, would look like if Americans thought of themselves as not engaged in a zero-sum competition with their fellows? If we elected a government that actually focused on common welfare and not killing perceived threats to our ever-diminishing piece of the pie?
That is how Obama is/was different than his predecessors since Eisenhower, or at least since Carter. This is the first time the military agenda hasn’t dominated every second of the sitting president’s time. The first time in decades that any social advancement has been registered; or more precisely, the first time the downward slide of the average American has been noted publicly.
What I find amusing in this Trumpist hellhole we have been trapped in, is that a lot of people are now saying that Obama was the best president during their lifetimes. So all the flack I got when I said the very same thing in 2014 means absolutely as little as I thought it did then. I was right, for once. We as citizens should build on this discovery, that Obama was the best president of our own experienced lives, rather than be distracted by the same-old glittery glamour of sabre-rattling and outright warfare that has come to be synonymous with US policy since WWII.
We will look back on the Obama years as a halcyon moment we should have known to cherish. Because it will be a long time before we ever have it that good again.
I post this here simply to point out how willing I am to admit error (those of you who don’t know where I started on this forum, just click here) and embrace a different way of approaching a problem. The charge of cult is one of those thought-ending metaphors; however, the observation of of cultish devotion to an anarchist ideal demonstrated in this post (to the point of fabricating histories. Something I’ve experienced first hand) should give any honest libertarian pause.
My previous Salon essay, in which I asked why there are not any libertarian countries, if libertarianism is a sound political philosophy, has infuriated members of the tiny but noisy libertarian sect, as criticisms of cults by outsiders usually do. The weak logic and bad scholarship that suffuse libertarian responses to my article tend to reinforce me in my view that, if they were not paid so well to churn out anti-government propaganda by plutocrats like the Koch brothers and various self-interested corporations, libertarians would play no greater role in public debate than do the followers of Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron Hubbard.
Protectionist, nativist paleoconservatives of the Patrick Buchanan school might have reason to idealize the U.S. as it existed between 1865 and 1932. But libertarians who want to prove that a country based on libertarian ideology can exist in the real world cannot point to the United States at any period in its history from the Founding to the present.
While the liberal welfare-state left, with its Scandinavian role models, remains a vital force in world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but genuine models. Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.
But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.
This problem is one that was brought up time and again at LP and Libertarian outreach events throughout my 20 years in the Libertarian movement. Contrary to the heated outrage leveled at the cult charge (or perhaps symbolically linked to it) is the fact that there are no functioning libertarian governments in existence after 40 years of the libertarian movement, and even less embracing of libertarian ideals by the public than there has been historically. These facts pose the question “does libertarian thought have any basis in reality?”
(after the thread had run for six pages and several days, I went back and culled the favorite arguments presented in those six pages so that I could rebut them in an addendum. This was a trick I learned while shepherding the Atheism is Not a Belief System thread. It worked pretty good. The flamers had all burned themselves out by that point, and the triumphalists would quit in disgust when the OP short-circuits their bad arguments in the first post, making their arguments look even dumber when read by a newb to the thread.-ed.)
Wikipedia is a legitimate fast reference. Dismissal of Wikipedia as a reference requires that you find an actual respected source with which to dismiss the wiki (I may have to add this one to my signature) you cannot simply roll your eyes and state “wiki” as if it proves something.
“The word cult is not a term of abuse, as this paper tries to explain. It is nothing more than a shorthand expression for a particular set of practices that have been observed in a variety of dysfunctional organisations.”
So the use of the word cult is not itself an ad hominem fallacy upon which the entire argument can be dismissed.
Libertarianism as discussed here is American libertarianism as endorsed by the Libertarian Party, and found defined here. We are not talking about the flavors of libertarianism found in other countries, so please don’t drag those assumptions into the thread.
Dismissal of anyone who thinks government is necessary as Statist simply confirms your membership in the libertarian cult. Government exists and exists because that is what the large majority of people want; structures that they can rely on to maintain a relatively stable and reliable system in which to do business, live their lives, etc. It is not statist to accept the status quo as having a legitimate reason to exist.
Libertarians do not have a problem with violence. Libertarians have a problem with government violence, sometimes referred to as force. Violence in defense of person is absolutely endorsed. The government cannot have a monopoly on force, because anyone can trump the ban by exerting force themselves. If they are never caught and brought to justice, their use of force remains an example of productive individual force, and the so called monopoly for government remains the pipe dream of those who wish to believe themselves ‘safe’, a condition non-existent in the temporary condition known as life.
(My first reply to the thread, on page seven, went as follows. -ed.)
I see I waited long enough for the thread to tangent. Going to interrupt the tangent. My apologies for exercising the rights of a thread author and doing that. I was waiting for the insanely-long-winded cult membership to stop harping the standard “it’s my freedom and I’ll do what I want to” string of bullshit arguments and finally wind down to the two or three people willing to continue patting each other on the back. When I visited the thread yesterday after starting it, whole pages of rambling had occurred in an hour or less. There really is no point in attempting to converse in a reasonable fashion when the replies scroll that fast.
So, here we are. Anyone who wants to start the harping back up should probably go back and read the 6 previous pages of the thread. It’s all there, don’t need to hear it again. Having said all that, the first post of any merit and it’s first meritorious response went like this:
Bouncing Bear wrote:
Not trying to be an ass here….the joke being that Somalia is a libertarian country….what about the plains indians of America? (Comancheria?) Basically no government to speak of, just tribes of people doing their thing and fighting when they rubbed each other the wrong way.
The Mad Zeppelineer wrote:
The Comanches had a government. Read Hamalainen’s “The Comanche Empire.” He’s a Scandinavian who studied the Comanche without all the inbred condescending prejudices Americans have against Indians. He discovered a very well organized government which reigned over large swaths of North America for centuries.
And Somalia is not Libertarian. Its tribal and partly ruled by religious figureheads. Very stern in their governing philosophy. Nobody is quoting Austrian economists there.
The real reason there has been no Libertarian societies is that people generally don’t like their ideas. People prefer one big dysfunctional commons to 10,000 petty tyrants nickel and dime-ing them for everything. If libertarianism was more popular it would win more elections.
I would say the reason is that most people really love freedom, and one of the freedoms they love is not having to reinvent the wheel each and every time they want to do business with another person. Government is what has grown out of this desire to have certain rules apply to all transactions between people. To put it as bluntly and simply as possible.
(Now I’m skipping to the forth reply. I was still trying to wend my way through the various self-congratulatory hold-outs occupying the thread. Reply two was simply an observation about how much I liked a particular users posts. Reply three was chastising a user for continuing to post on subjects that I had already rebutted. When I hit the discussion of US healthcare, that was when the rubber solidly met the road I wanted to drive on.-ed.)
Healthcare does not lend itself to market forces in the first place. You don’t shop around for life-saving drugs. If you economize at all with healthcare, it’s to not pay for preventive medicine. All that does is kick the can down the road and make the later treatments for disease all that much more expensive.
“Should the young have to pay for the healthcare of the old?” is the question that everyone is asking. How about we turn that around and apply it just like Social Security does. The young are paying for the services they will need when they in turn get old, they are simply doing it in advance. Imagine how much easier we’d have it now, if only our parents had paid for the healthcare they are consuming now by paying for it over the course of their working lives. Would they have whined about paying for their parents healthcare?
This argument is at the heart of the cult mentality. The demonstration of this is that libertarians wave their hands and say “we don’t want the sick and the poor to die, we just want them to not consume what they haven’t paid for.” Never understanding that the second necessitates the first. People will die because medical services will be denied them since they are unable to pay. The poor clog emergency rooms now, because the cost of providing healthcare to the poor is externalized and picked up by the various cities large enough to fund and staff emergency rooms. Shall we allow free-ridership to continue, or do we actually make people pay in advance knowing that they will utilize the health services eventually?
So many of the arguments fall out this way. Anti-abortionists don’t want to have to pay to raise all the children the poor will have, an act that would dramatically reduce the abortion rate, the stated goal of those people. Much easier to externalize the cost of raising those children by simply forcing the women to have the children that they can’t pay for. Take away their choice, and they’ll just struggle along not costing the rest of us a cent more in welfare (and they wonder why I label it hypocrisy) never mind that poor unwanted children drive up crime rates, fill the prisons, destabilize the society.
Everyone is looking for a way to externalize costs, internalize profits. All of us do it. If libertarians weren’t pursuing this, they’d pay for the health insurance without being forced to. Would gladly pay the taxes, and more, in order to reap more benefits from society. But that’s not how you come out on top, in a competition judged on how little you are forced to give. The way to do that is to make sure someone else pays for the things you need. Corporate welfare far outstrips ‘entitlements’ that weren’t paid in advance like social security; but all the talk about economizing centers around stripping SS recipients of benefits that they paid for in good faith over their working lives, while closing tax loopholes and revoking tax cuts and corporate welfare are rejected out of hand.
…and again, the cult embraces this, the corporate plan to suck even more cash out of the American populace.
The false choice is the vain belief that individuals acting alone can fix the problem. Collective action is the only way to fight back, and that means joining a party, unionizing, working for a common goal. It is the opposite of what Dan Carlin says, it is the opposite of what libertarians preach. Not more government, but smarter government.
As to the request for a source demonstrating that healthcare does not lend itself to market forces? You go to your doctor and he says “you need drug X.” Do you haggle over price for the drug? do you ask him to change the diagnosis? Whether you personally do or not, most people do not, even though they should.
A further example. Chemotherapy is one of the most expensive areas of health care, and yet it has very little proven benefit. Very few people will decline to get the treatments, because it really is the last hope for most cancers.
What is sobering about this booming business is that, as a group of oncologists wrote earlier this year, “most anti-cancer drugs provide minor survival benefits, if at all.” They often (but not always) reduce the size of inoperable tumors, but they rarely eradicate the disease. For relatively uncommon malignancies like testicular cancer, some forms of leukemia, and lymphoma, drugs effectively cure the disease; for the common “solid tumor” cancers (lung, breast, colon, prostate, and so on), which account for the vast majority of annual cases, drugs buy some time—precious time, to be sure, but time usually measured in weeks and months rather than years. And even though many of the newer drugs are less toxic, they often still have to be given with older drugs whose side effects include nausea, hair loss, fatigue, and decreasing blood counts. One anti-cancer drug produces a skin rash so severe and disturbing, according to Saltz, that some patients have been asked by employers not to come to work.
In 1965, at the dawn of Medicare, the chemotherapy drug Vinblastine cost $78 a month, according to a widely cited Sloan-Kettering price compendium. In 2011, Bristol-Myers Squibb introduced a new melanoma drug called Yervoy at a cost of about $38,000 a month for a three-month treatment.* Yervoy followed, by about a year, a new prostate-cancer therapy called Provenge that cost $93,000 per course of treatment. Even an ancient chemotherapy like nitrogen mustards, cousins to World War I’s mustard gas and in use since 1949, have gotten caught in the cost updraft; in 2006, a course of treatment experienced a thirteenfold price increase, from $33 a month to $420 a month.
And it’s not just that the price of cancer drugs has doubled in the last decade—it’s that the rise in prices, according to cancer doctors, has far exceeded the drugs’ effectiveness. In 1994, the median survival rate for someone with advanced colon cancer was eleven months, according to Saltz, and the lifetime costs of the drugs used to treat the average patient would be about $500 at today’s prices. By 2004, the median survival rate had increased twofold, to 22 months, but Saltz says the drug costs had increased hundreds of times for that extra eleven months.
Another source? Trying reading any number of psychological texts, studies on healthcare usage, etc. Try going places that aren’t CATO or dominated by delusions of free markets. You’ll find plenty of material that illustrates just how far from the mythical free market that healthcare is just in concept, much less in execution.
“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one”
Corporations were created to shield investors from liability, consequently the very existence of corporations is destructive to the free market. The depth of restructuring for all of society that would be required for ‘free markets’ to succeed makes the chance that something like that to ever be tried exceedingly remote. As a philosophical exercise, it may be intriguing, but highly unlikely and impractical.
One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.
Free ridership must be combated, and the hippocratic oath binds doctors into treating patients who cannot pay, so the only way to insure funding of necessary healthcare functions is to mandate it. Taxes or non-profits, makes no difference. Funding has to be done in advance of services being needed, or we simply end up right back where we are now, people going without necessary care.
Yes, charitable giving can be increased, and there are subtle ways that people can be nudged in the right direction; that is to say, the direction that yields the benefits we desire. Freakonomics: Riding the Herd Mentality (Ep. 80) gets into how you motivate people in the direction you want. Supposedly in some of the scandinavian countries, the wealthy contribute more to the government than they are required to pay in taxes; so it probably can be done, it just isn’t done here.
Saying “Self destructive people should be forced to face the consequences of their actions, and ask for charity, not expect or demand it.” is just describing how the healthcare system works now. How about we not let people die on the side of the road for lack of care, see how that works? How about we make it cheaper to eat right than it is to eat poorly? How about we let some of these empty houses go to people who need shelter? Or is that too much to ask?
The only group that cares about the cost of healthcare is the group that pays. If the insurance companies are charged with getting services to us as cheaply and efficiently as possible (not what they are currently charged with doing) and are rewarded for doing this, you’ll see changes in what you pay for healthcare. This doesn’t have to come down to each individual household duplicating the exact same work across the entire nation.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
There are insane government imposed regulations in every state. The most destructive of which is that nurses can’t learn to be doctors through work experience… Everyone needs a doctorate, and that’s insane. Most nurses know far more about human physiology after 10 years than a graduating doctor could have ever learned in “college”. On the job training ftw.
(where to start with simplistic solutions. I should be a master of this after all these years of listening to Dan’s) As one of the last licensed architects under the bar requiring a master’s degree to practice architecture, I have to say that a degree is worth a lot more than on the job training. What you learn is what you are exposed to on the job; so as long as nothing new shows up, you are equipped to deal with the problems of the job. Many, many times in medicine doctors are exposed to things they’ve never seen before. Then what? Then you fall back on the training you received getting your doctorate.
…aside from which, have you never heard of “nurse practitioners”?
LifeIsBrief wrote:
No one dies on the side of the road, except by choice. Pure self destruction, before the state got involved, led to bankruptcy and debt, that’s all. Even if I were to concede your point however… The richest most powerful country in the world, was the one where the state didn’t force its citizens to save everyone. It was done voluntarily. Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner… Or rather, we had a winner. One in which you could choose to help people, because that’s what humans naturally want to do.
Right. Because what we need is to make sure that we let people die on the side of the road. That will teach those poor people to take better care of themselves. That is who you will be punishing. The poor. Not the self-destructive. People don’t get diseases because they misbehave, they get diseases because that’s what happens to living organisms. After you’ve been sick for awhile, you run out of money. After that…? Die on the side of the road, and you deserved it, according to those who need that confirmation bias ego boost.
Look up how cancer is becoming more common as a cause of death. That’s because cancer will always win in the end. (Editor’s note: link directly to the podcast episode on cancer replaced with a link to my article that discusses the podcast episode on cancer. Because I’ve had to refer back to that episode at least a dozen times now.)
…Diabetes is an outgrowth of poor diet, and poor diet comes from being poor. Cheapest place to eat, from someone who knows? McDonald’s, and you get large fries with every order. Or Taco Bell. Now there is some bad for you junk food. It’s much cheaper to go to a fast food restaurant than it is to eat at home. I’ve demonstrated this in my own kitchen many, many times.
The government used to deliver cheese, bread, milk, etc. to poor communities. Some of the worst years in my childhood, the block of government cheese and loaf of bread was all we had to eat on a day to day basis. They phased that out (Editor’s note: they ran out of cheese. See Planet Money Episode #862) and then started food stamps, now they want to cancel food stamps, and people are starving in the US. Wake the fuck up! It’s not the 70’s anymore. And we aren’t the richest nation anymore.
If wealth is power, then Qataris have some serious muscle to flex. The Persian Gulf emirate of 1.7 million people ranks as the world’s richest country per capita thanks to a rebound in oil prices and its massive natural gas reserves. Adjusted for purchasing power, Qatar booked an estimated gross domestic product per capita of more than $88,000 for 2010.
Diabetes, is the result of bad diet, also known as poor choices. It’s not that much cheaper to eat decent food, and where it is cheaper, guess what, government involvement.
That is a myth. Like so many things about health and healthcare, diabetes being a lazines problem is a complete myth.
Being overweight is a risk factor for developing this disease, but other risk factors such as family history, ethnicity and age also play a role. Unfortunately, too many people disregard the other risk factors for diabetes and think that weight is the only risk factor for type 2 diabetes. Most overweight people never develop type 2 diabetes, and many people with type 2 diabetes are at a normal weight or only moderately overweight.
You have to be genetically predisposed to get diabetes in order to be able to develop it. It’s genetics and lifestyle together. McDonald’s low food prices financed by government? Hardly. Tons of places want to loan to McDonald’s franchisees. They almost always make money.
…and if you want to eat healthy at McDonald’s, don’t eat the fries but do have an unsweetened drink. A hamburger alone has all the basic food groups. But it’s still cheaper to eat there than at home, and that is with wheat subsidies, corn subsidies (which makes the sweetened drinks cheaper) etc, etc, etc. The corporate farmers get their handout, but the poor do not get theirs. Not anymore.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
You’re winning, we have a centrally planned economy
Centrally planned economy? Really? I would really love to see the proof of that, because the last 5 year plan I heard of was for the USSR and they never completed it. What I hear is a fucking ton of whining about government interference, and a government so starved for cash that they can’t even inspect food plants and dangerous chemical plants more often than once a decade. What we have is a priority problem, in that the wealthy think they should have priority over the rest of us. The next 10 years will be interesting to watch, not much fun to live through.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
Is lung cancer still the number 1 killer among cancers? Yes.
Cancer itself is fast approaching number 1 killer, surpassing heart disease, that will probably happen this year. (Editor’s note: it has happened) Surpassing heart disease because we’re eating better. Those of us who can afford to. Did you miss the part where we all will get cancer if we live long enough? Because that’s kind of important in the whole “you get sick because you deserve to” mentality that you are stuck in. If you live long enough you will get sick with something that will first bankrupt you, then kill you. It’s called cancer. Keep repeating that mantra until it sinks in.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
The number one contributor to type 2 diabetes is obesity, and if the diabetes doesn’t get you, being obese will. Heart and liver diseases are common in fat and sedentary people as well.
See my point about cancer becoming the number one killer soon. It’s sort of relevant to this whole “Americans are fat unhealthy people” vibe you are giving off. It’s not nearly as true as the media would have you think. It’s bad, and those people who can’t get a handle on their eating will be something that gets studied into the future. The only way that happens is if we fund research into the future. Research that is largely done with government dollars.
(Editor’s note: They’re so obsessed with fat people sitting on a couch. Who wants to bet they’re 600 lbs and sitting on a couch while they type on their laptop keyboard about fat, sedentary, unhealthy people? I can almost hear the potato chip crumbs crunching under their ass while they type.)
LifeIsBrief wrote:
I already said, don’t let people die on the side of the road… let them ask for charity.
That has been tried. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t even almost work. Disabled people (like myself) are routinely told to get a job, even by family members. As if we wouldn’t work if we could. Only people who hate their jobs think that it would be fun to be disabled. To stay home, day after day, week after week, year after year. Most of us don’t survive the year after year part. That’s what not having a purpose in life does for you. It kills you.
…but never mind. When the disability runs out, I’ll be seen with the rest of them, dying by the side of the road. We’ll see then if you stop or not. Or you could just shut up and pay your taxes. Better yet, tell the wealthy to shut up and at least pay as much taxes as you do. Most of them don’t.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
You believe people are evil, and will just watch people die
Doesn’t have anything to do with evil, or with what I believe. Peoplewillwatch other people die on the side of the road. (Lookie-loos. Rubberneckers. -ed.) It’s a favorite pastime in the US, gawking at roadside accidents, watching while other people die. One on one. Out on foot. The person lying in the road might be someone you stop to care about if that someone doesn’t have the smell of homelessness about them. If they do you are more likely to not even notice their presence as you are to stop and ask them how they got where they were.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
Starved for cash? Really?
Yes. Because the military programs get funded, and the other programs do not. They don’t make money for the wealthy. Threats hit that fear button, causing the military to be funded to extents that the military doesn’t even want. Welfare programs don’t (especially since everyone believes they will get rich, or deludes themselves into thinking they are rich) and consequently go wanting for funding, just like inspection programs, infrastructure programs, etc, etc, etc. If there isn’t some direct route into the 1%’s pockets, it doesn’t get funded. That isn’t government’s fault, that is our fault for allowing our government to be the way it is.
I started a thread on the subject of real government waste (DCBBS Archive: $8.5 Trillion) as opposed to the fake waste of paying for healthcare for the poor, paying the disabled so that they can have a roof over their head in their last years. But whatever. Hate me for my disability. You won’t be the first and you won’t be the last.
I pulled the contents of this article out of the DCBBS archive and whittled it down to a few essential arguments. If you follow the link back to the thread you will notice I only pulled the contents of four our five messages out of a ten page thread to make up this article.
I’ve been trying to codify an argument that I’ve titled “Why Libertarians Lose” for several years now. I think I started it before I started this thread. This thread might even have been the original seed for that article. I can’t remember now. Going through some of these arguments again (as well as establishing links to them on archive.org) has helped convince me that I needed to write a completely different article than I had intended, and have published this compiled article simply to illustrate just how far my thinking had come back in 2013-2014, even though I hadn’t written much about it here by that time.
I was no longer a libertarian and I needed to stop pretending.
Unlike InquizaJamesatribalistand my other detractors on the BBS, I don’t and didn’t pretend to have answers to all of life’s problems. I simply know that most of what they believed was wrong and they should try to believe something different for a change. They might live longer if they did. Or do.
I like Medicare. I think more people should have it. Maybe that should be the goal? Maybe government can do things right? It seems to work in other countries.
It was mere moments later when the boor showed up to tell me how this wasn’t true or funny:
I loved Gearge Carlin. If we don’t let the rich exploit the poor they would not stay rich long, then their would be no way for the poor to earn a living. I guess we could all live on government benefits until they run out. Sounds like a fun ride.
No, they give them jobs. Have you ever got a job from a poor man? That $100 I made yesterday, it was at the house of a rich person, but somehow I did not feel exploited. I felt grateful, even though it caused me pain. Does that make me stupid because I did not petition the government to just take the money from him and give it to me?
So we end up fighting over the table scraps of the wealthy who now own and control us all. I’ll make a counter offer. I invite the wealthy (since they are so much better than the rest of us) to simply hand over all their wealth and move off to Galt’s Gulch like the true creators of Ayn Rand’s novel.
…I mean, they’ll just make it all again, since they are so deserving, right? Otherwise, perhaps they should admit that they need to contribute some of what they have if they don’t want to lose it all. Because that’s the way it’s headed.
But who would you have to tax and support the poor if the rich left?
“Tax and support the poor” I’d laugh, but it’s not a funny joke. The wealthy pay less than the working middle class, less than the working poor, for the most part. Seriously, try studying the subject before spouting off about it.
I wasn’t talking about the working poor, I was talking about those on benefits. Rich people pay more taxes percentage wise per person that working poor. I have never paid income taxes, even those few years I broke 40,000. I have paid property taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, but never income.
*For a family of 4 or more living in an urban area. The US data is BS on this subject. They still claim it’s 22k, which is bullshit numbers even in Texas. A family that lives on 22k in Texas lives in the car that doesn’t run anymore. I doubt that a family of 4 that grossed 60k can afford much besides basic sustenance in any major city of the US.
OMG, I must be poverty stricken, I only made half that last year and still managed to survive, living in a house on an acre, with 2 cars and a motorcycle.
I guess since I don’t have a boat, I must be poor
I see why we disagree so much. You never learned the value of a dollar
…but none of this, NONE OF IT, has anything to do with the basic contradiction that one of the pantheon of the comic gods pointed out; that giving more money to the wealthy does the opposite of giving money to the poor; at least in the mind of your average conservative, a group I’m thankful I’ve never mistakenly identified myself as.
James, this issue is simple. The wealthy in this country are wealthy because of the infrastructure, and stability provided by this country. Stability built on the taxes provided by the citizens of this country. It’s their responsibility to return the favor, by reinvesting in that foundation, so that this country can continue to prosper. Educating, feeding, and providing medical care for American citizen, is the best way to ensure that a new generation of Americans can become wealthy, and thus protects the American dream we all hold dear.
If they wish to voluntarily do such things, fine. But using force is wrong. We all pay for infrastructure through gasoline and over-the-road taxation, so anyone who uses the roads and bridges already paid for them. Of course corrupt politicians cannot keep their hands off of any pool of money and use it for purposes it was not extracted for. It is not anyones responsibility to pay for another’s education, food, health care or housing. If it is the legal responsibility of the government to take from the rich and give to the poor, then they should just take it all and put them in concentration camps and distribute according to need. This quasi-communist attitude that the rich owe something to the poor is destroying the concept of individual liberty, which is based on the principal of personal responsibility. It is not the utilitarianism of the situation, it is the principal. Either we are free or we are subjects to be supported and manipulated for the betterment of society overall, and the empowerment of the government. So far government has used it’s credit, to keep from manipulating the people, by borrowing money for social programs, (and excessive military spending) but it cannot go on. And since the MIC is too powerful to contend with, and the AARP will not let government cut benefit programs, when the government cannot borrow or print their way out, it will be too late to salvage anything of the “American Dream” you so admire.
…and again, still nothing to do with the observation from Carlin.
James, volunteering is not required, that’s how taxes work. The founding fathers created the system we have with this exact philosophy in mind. Ben Franklin said it best:
“All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.”
You may not think it’s anyone’s responsibility to pay for things that go to the greater public good, but your opinion is irrelevant. We have a thing called the constitution in this country, and taxes, federal, state, and sales, are all legal, and protected by its authority. If you don’t like it, then I suggest moving, though I suspect it will be hard to find somewhere nice to live that doesn’t tax its citizens similarly(which isn’t a coincidence).
I do not oppose taxation. In fact, I think we should get rid the principal of self-ownership and put all the people with more than enough to survive in concentration camps. anyone who has more than 15X15 of living space is being selfish. Anyone who eats more than 2500 calories a day is being a PIG. I think it is “proper and necessary” just like the Constitution says. Obviously people, in or out of gov’t cannot be trusted. We gave the gov’t trillions to save for our retirement. What did they do? They used it for bailing out corporations, selling themselves Treasury Bonds to fill the void. When they come due, The cost of SS will double. They used the money to fight wars to spread corporate markets. They used it to pander to their constituents and keep themselves in power. Democracy has failed.The politicians have voted money from the Treasury to keep themselves in power.They borrowed and printed and pandered us to the breaking point. It is time for dictatorship It is “proper and necessary” at this point. Govt’ cannot be trusted. The founding fathers knew this and they limited it’s power. Slowly politicians have used the flaws document as a tool to enhance their power. Demicracy has failed, it is time for dictatorship to crush these “freedom Nazis” and give the people what they need to survive.
Ownership of self doesn’t mean what you think it means, James. Yet another in a long list of misconceptions that lead you to the hateful place you live in. How can you prove self-ownership? Do you have a deed? Do you believe that you are self-sufficient and therefore own yourself? Utter nonsense. No one is self-sufficient:
You are already a child of the state, so what do you know of self-ownership
I am being sincere. You soft liberals pontificating about helping this group or that, yet people still suffer. You want to make society fair. It will never happen under democracy. We nee dictatorship
Hate, hate, hate. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell other friends who clearly spend too much time alone. Join a dating site, go to church, go volunteer somewhere. Learn to socialize with equals. Then you might understand exactly how sociopathic you sound right now.
All you know how to do is attack. But as a master of the art of argumentation, I turn your attacks against you. You injure yourself while attempting to injure others.
truth hurts doesn’t it. Coming from someone that thinks 60,000 is working poor, you must feel guilty as hell when you see people working their asses of for 25,000 a year
Repeating myself here: *For a family of 4 or more living in an urban area. The US data is BS on this subject. They still claim it’s 22k, which is bullshit numbers even in Texas. A family that lives on 22k in Texas lives in the car that doesn’t run anymore. I doubt that a family of 4 that grossed 60k can afford much besides basic sustenance in any major city of the US.
Having enough to get by appears to be particularly challenging in the East, whose residents give a significantly higher average estimate of what it takes to survive. And while people may gravitate to areas that provide the lifestyle they can best afford, suburban life — with its heavy emphasis on single-occupancy detached homes, auto-based transportation, and relatively well-off residents — may also be less hospitable for those whose incomes fall into the $30,000 to $60,000 category.
…as I expanded on after you lol’ed your way into insignificance on the subject. Now you rage and rage as if you know what you are talking about, while being virtually clueless.
Personal experience, James. I have a family of 4. I know what the threshold is between sinking and swimming. You live alone in your hate-filled ranchette. I actually feel sorry for you. It’s the only reason I put up with you.
I could sure use some Government cheese about now; that stuff was delicious.
There’s a lot of character in your average poor in the US then:
The number of children living in poverty in the U.S. is up nearly 20 percent from 2000, according to the NCCP, because of higher unemployment and foreclosures. It’s a problem across the nation but children are the worst off in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. They fare better in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Massachusetts.
Nietzsche was full shit. You can quote me on that. It is his kind of perverted bullshit that has inspired some of the most hated and hateful governments in world history, and quoting him at me is possibly the most hurtful thing that anyone could do. Choosing to challenge oneself makes you stronger. Going to bed hungry every night makes you die young.
…and again, explain to your children, to me, to anyone, your objection to the George Carlin quote that started this thread. Explain how giving money to rich people works, but giving money to poor people doesn’t. This is my thread, on my wall. If you don’t want to play by my rules, I will delete your posts. I’m definitely not Dan Carlin. I find it hard to imagine how you could be more inflexible on a subject. There is no current spending that Republicans want to cut:
Which means that the corporate payouts will continue. Corporate payouts that benefit wealthy people. To give an answer to the question that you previously asked in the form of indictment; money is a meaningless concept when outside of a group. There is no need to trade with yourself.
The dollars we trade in the US are not really our property. It’s hard to define what they are, since they don’t have any existence outside of the computer systems that keep track of the numbers. If they were our property, we would be able to barter them for silver, etcetera, which the government has said we do not have the right to do. Given the conditions set upon the use of dollars, the government can and does take what it needs to run. It’s not really an issue of opinions for or against.
Try to define money. Most people cannot.
Money is what I use to buy my groceries and pay my mortgage. It what I recieve for a hard days work. I guess if all I had to do for my money was walk out to the mailbox, i may have a different definition.
What is money? Money is any good that is widely used and accepted in transactions involving the transfer of goods and services from one person to another. Economists differentiate among three different types of money: commodity money, fiat money, and bank money. Commodity money is a good whose value serves as the value of money. Gold coins are an example of commodity money. In most countries, commodity money has been replaced with fiat money. Fiat money is a good, the value of which is less than the value it represents as money. Dollar bills are an example of fiat money because their value as slips of printed paper is less than their value as money. Bank money consists of the book credit that banks extend to their depositors. Transactions made using checks drawn on deposits held at banks involve the use of bank money.
a thing is what it does. When money comes as easy as filling out some paperwork and making some phone calls, it is easy to say money is not real. But when you rely on work for money, it becomes more important. That disease you have, Meniere’s, looks like it be pretty easy to fake. My brother is completely deaf, yet he works and does not receive disability. I am interested to konw, how much more do you think the government should spend on social programs? Should they raise taxes 33% to cover the deficit, and then even more to be even more generous? What the hell do you really Want?
I enjoy the fact that my getting disability annoys you. That I can sit on my (vertiginous) ass and piss you off just by sitting here. Such power I have. Such power you give to me. It wasn’t nearly as easy as you make out to get disability:
Tell me how the George Carlin image is wrong. I mean it. Any post after this that doesn’t address the image will be deleted. I am quite serious. Explain away the subject of the image (which you have not done, no matter how many times you repost the assertion you have) how giving money to rich people is good, but giving money to poor people is bad.
One more post on the subject of the image debunking trickle-down:
A hat/tip is owed to Oliver Hoffmann whose quotes I included in the text without attribution. It reads better that way. I left Earl’s quotes in just the way he wrote them. Earl deserves to be printed widely.
James Robert Swartz is InquizaJamesAtribalist from the good/bad ol’ days of the DCBBS. I’ve duplicated the majority of this thread simply as an example of what it is that drove me from libertarianism. I don’t think it needs to be said that I also duplicated the argument here so I cold embroider my answers with additional material. This is, after all, the purpose of a blog. A personal diary. A narrative of your own creation.
I deleted several comments after the last one where I put my foot down, and several in between. I’ve forgotten how many. Another commenter on another thread summed up my feelings on most of my interactions with people like James Robert Swartz:
I don’t understand the mentality that enjoys causing others pain in some way. People who go to a site just to disrupt and denigrate. I see a lot of guys go to specifically women’s sports pages just to say have awful women athletes are and any high school boy’s team could beat them. I’m happy my life is filled with family and friends so I don’t feel the need to bully others to feel better about myself.
It is the zero sum mentality. To feel better, you have to make someone else feel worse. Airlocking these people is the only way to deal with them. If they believe the only way to win is to make the other guy lose, then you have to make them lose. You have to make them lose, not because that makes you a winner, but because that is the only way to satisfy the rules of the game that they are playing.
