Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Bacchus]

Yeah, people seem to ignore that training too few doctors is a very purposeful feature of the system in place in the US, not a bug.

[darrelljs]

What?  Disagreement about matters of fact is great for productive conversation (among reasonable people) online:  Point out a fact you think is wrong, find a source for the correct version, and everyone will learn something instead of just fuming about each other's opinions.

Let me take another tact with it. I can think of several ways to look at income disparity.

1. Wealth should be redistributed because its obscene that a society has such disparity.
2. Wealth should be redistributed because from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
3. Wealth should be redistributed because the top have made it to the top by exploiting the bottom.
4. Wealth should not be redistributed because the top have done nothing wrong but succeed, and in doing so have benefited society.
5. Wealth should not be redistributed because the top have done nothing wrong but succeed, and have harmed no one along the way.
6. Wealth should not be redistributed because the top have done nothing wrong but succeed.

There are probably more. I believe in #2 and #4 (which is probably pretty common in America), so something like:

If the world's governments weren't so fixated on an economic system that gives the vast majority of the fruits of labour to the owners of capital, despite the minimal labour they put towards making those profits, we'd have well more than enough to be able to afford a decent standard of living for everyone.

Is just such a non-starter for me that there really isn't much point in engaging. I'm not saying Brian is wrong, far from it. He could be right. But to untie all the things that lead me to believe in 2/4 and start believing in 1/3...that's not going to happen in an Internet forum .

Darrell

So, although disparity of wealth, income, and opportunity is incredibly important to me, I have nothing but disdain for this particular statistic!

To make an argumentum ad absurdum, if the top 1% made $10^12 while the bottom 10% made $10^6 would it still be important ?

[ipecac]

To make a serious dent in the cost of medicine, we'd need constant pressure on cost, and right now every incentive is instead to remove any pressure on cost.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Universal healthcare is seen as a right, no matter how much of other people's money you need to use to pay for it, or how much needs to be borrowed, printed, or created out of thin air. Why should cost be a serious concern then, since some entity will pay for it?

[SevenSpirits]

So, although disparity of wealth, income, and opportunity is incredibly important to me, I have nothing but disdain for this particular statistic!

To make an argumentum ad absurdum, if the top 1% made $10^12 while the bottom 10% made $10^6 would it still be important  ?

I'll take that as a question to me, and I'll assume you don't mean that there was massive inflation, but rather that even the poorest of the poor have massively more money than needed to get by.

1) This world sounds great! Way better than what we have now.

2) I actually don't think income disparity needs to take the poorest people into account. For the poorest, it's absolute, not relative income that matters. It's for society's benefit that I think income disparity is important as I'll now get into.

3) Once basic needs are taken care of, for a lot of other things people spend money on, relative amounts DO matter. For example: access to the most prestigious colleges and programs, housing in the most desirable cities and neighborhoods. A big one is political power because it can translate to unlimited power over others. For a society similar to our current one, I think the ideal is for a majority of the population to have relevant political power. By "relevant" I mean not completely outclassed by orders of magnitude even after organizing into groups. This is where income disparity is ultimately dangerous.

4) Along the way, I believe that more income means more money means more power, and power tends to warp societal structures to benefit you, which leads to even more money and power. The tendency is towards consolidation. So even if the disparity seems currently acceptable, it's worth pushing back against it just to keep the status quo.

5) A specific thing that concerns me with increasing wealth disparity is the way in which it's happening. The way I see it, capital is becoming increasingly important compared to labor. That's good - it means less sucky work. But take these two situations:

a - you're the new guy on an island. Everyone else is like "hey, welcome, if you spend 4 hours a day foraging in the woods you'll be fine". This world is 100% labor, 0% capital, because the forest is big. And so you, someone who can inherently produce labor, are as well off anyone else.

b - you're the new guy on an island. Everyone else explains that this guy Mark has a machine that provides everything anyone could ever need but he doesn't just give handouts. You're useless. Your labor is worth nothing, and you have nothing, and you will starve to death. This world is 100% capital, 0% labor, and you started without any capital.

That's the problem I have with capital. New people don't start with any, let alone enough, to have a good experience. You as a baby only start with capital to the extent that you have the right parents, and your present self only starts with capital to the extent that your past self was responsible. Luckily, labor is still worth something in our world. But I think ultimately we will need a policy of distributing capital more evenly than occurs naturally.

6) I said in 3) that it applied for a society similar to our current one. I'm not ruling out that we can invent new societal structures that solve this problem without decreasing disparity of wealth. But it doesn't work with the structures we have. How do you build a staircase that works for gnats and elephants at the same time? We don't yet have that technology.

[ipecac]

To make an argumentum ad absurdum, if the top 1% made $10^12 while the bottom 10% made $10^6 would it still be important  ?

What does the scaling factor of currency matter, as long as they're still chasing the same amount of good and services?

That's the problem I have with capital. New people don't start with any, let alone enough, to have a good experience.

Serfdom endures. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

[RefSteel]

Wow; good catch, Seven. I didn't look into it nearly deeply enough to notice that. That's ... a completely ridiculous metric. Also a good illustration of how thoroughly misleading (and polarizing) news reports can be even when they get their facts "right."

Mardoc, I certainly agree that no single factor is the source of all our problems, nor the solution to them; everything's part of a complicated web. I think that producing more (competent) scientists, doctors, and engineers over the long term would be extremely valuable, in no small part as a positive indicator of our economic health, but as with any other factor, any attempt to artifiicially increase the number in isolation will have unintended consequences and might even end up being counter-productive (even for the number of people we train in scientific fields itself, at least in the longer term).

On median income and compensation though, you're neglecting the increase in dual-income households (now more than 40% of all households in the U.S.) - meaning a lot more people have to work in order to achieve roughly the same real household income (still ignoring the skyrocketing costs of education, housing, and pre-ACA medicine). Where most women used to stay at home, perhaps caring for elderly family members as you suggest among other things, we have transitioned in the main not to a mix of men and women staying at home and doing the same things, nor to major increases in household income as the number of wage earners increased (with some of the proceeds paying for others to do things like day care, house cleaning, and elder care as you suggest) but to growing numbers of families needing multiple incomes just to keep up with what their parents used to make, without including the cost of elder care among many other stealth increases in the real cost of living. If anything, prospects are more dire for poor individuals than I was making them out to be.

Also, your image of the bottom of the income distribution being filled by immigrants who were previously impoverished in other countries is simply not accurate: The median income among immigrant households is nearly the same as for native-born Americans. This isn't even really surprising: How are dollar-a-day laborers supposed to make it across the Pacific (or even the Carribean) and emigrate to the United States? The poor of the United States are really fortunate in comparison with the poor of most other countries in the world (especially outside of Europe) but that's an awfully low bar to clear, and their prospects - indeed the prospects of the majority of American citizens - are getting worse.

(Compounding this problem: While the economic decisions that a wealthy person makes have a huge impact on that person's future prospects, this is not true at the other end of the income spectrum, where discretionary time and money are limited at best. It's been found that at lower income levels, socio-economic mobility in the U.S. is driven in large part by random chance.)

How do you build a staircase that works for gnats and elephants at the same time? We don't yet have that technology.

I don't think technology is the limiting factor; the difficulty is figuring out what would even accomplish anything. In the case of this metaphor: Make the individual steps small enough for a gnat, but with a structure sturdy enough and with a sufficiently shallow incline that elephants can use it as a ramp. If only socio-economic stuff were as straightforward as that!

[darrelljs]

Serfdom endures.

Hyperbole, or serious belief?

For the poorest, it's absolute, not relative income that matters.

That's a nice, succinct way to put it .

Once basic needs are taken care of, for a lot of other things people spend money on, relative amounts DO matter...
The tendency is towards consolidation. So even if the disparity seems currently acceptable, it's worth pushing back against it just to keep the status quo...capital is becoming increasingly important compared to labor. That's good - it means less sucky work...Luckily, labor is still worth something in our world. But I think ultimately we will need a policy of distributing capital more evenly than occurs naturally.

Saved a few of the better lines in that most excellent post .  Highest tax rate is just one piece of the overall picture, but look at the trend:

1960: 91%
1970: 70%
1980: 70%
1990: 28%
2000: 40%
2010: 35%
Today: 40%

Reagan went too far, but 40% doesn't really feel that crazy to me .  For me tax reform would be to treat all income as equal, e.g. tax inheritance or capital gains as ordinary income (and yes I am aware that's double taxation, but I don't care).  Eliminate or reduce deductions that favor wealth, and emphasize deductions that favor work.  Set the corporate tax rate to something globally competitive.  Figure out a set of graduated tax rates that would balance the budget.

Of course the other piece of the puzzle is how the money is spent.  According to USAFacts total outlays are $5.3T, which is 28% of GDP.  That seems pretty reasonable to me...

Darrell

[Brian Shanahan]

That is not possible.  There are no votes that are able to be 'privately counted'; these things have an elaborate chain of custody.  Every single level of the election apparatus in every state is staffed by a mixture of Democrats and Republicans.  Most of whom are volunteers and would have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by taking this to the press, if it were real.

Problem for your denial is that we know that those half a million voters were disenfranchised. It's been published the proof is openly available for the public to see. But the mainstream don't want to talk about it, for the very reason you say it can't happen, the electoral process from the ground up is political. It is staffed at every level by political appointees, all of them who want their party to do well, and a good chunk of whom want to advance to higher positions within their party.

The whole damned electoral system is wrong in the US, and it is only surprising that it has taken this long for a party to return to Jim Crow after the sixties.

[Brian Shanahan]

The fact that it's a big flashy symbol that can absorb a lot of Washington's time and effort, without requiring very much cash or causing much harm to the rest of the country.  That is, by Federal standards.  I admit the absolute magnitudes of cash and harm are still probably large.  Still, probably no lives will be lost, only property, which is an improvement over 95% of policies.

You think? The wall would cost over $100bn, and that's before the kickbacks, bribes and cost inflations get factored in. It is pork barrel and corporate welfare on a giant scale.

[ipecac]

Serfdom endures.

Hyperbole, or serious belief?

Reality.

Look at the economic relationships: previously, most people didn't have their own land, so had to work for lords who took the lion's share of any profits from their farming work.

During the industrial revolution, the masses didn't have their own machinery and factories, so had to work for tycoons who took the lion's share of profits.

Currently, as SevenSpirits points out, most people don't have their own capital, have to work for CEOs and executives who take the lion's share.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.