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From the Economist "Poverty in America: No money no love"

It's not fear; it's greed.

The right wingers around here truly don't care how much anyone else suffers as long as they "get theirs."

Agreed, agreed, agreed. It is soooo patently obvious.

To a lesser degree, this also percolates into the Right-wing crowd. They think that by "hard-work" they deserve the "fruits of their labor". Namely a house and a good-enough retirement.

Sounds good to me, but that's not the whole picture. If you are born at the wrong place at the wrong time, life pans out quite differently. So, what do you do, when luck doesn't break your way. One looks for alternatives.

And the alternative that looks best is the "enticing offer" from the DoD. Military service, and if you survive it, you get your tertiary-education paid for you. From the Internet:
There are four main initiatives that make up Tuition Sup-port Programs: Montgomery GI Bill. The Montgomery GI Bill is designed to help you pay for your college education. Depending on how long you enlist with the Army and the job you choose, you can get over $50,000 to help pay for college.

And here is what you, as a prospective student, are up against - an explosive Cost Price Index for a college education:
330px-College_tuition_cpi.jpg


Today, the average cost of in-state students is $9410 per year, and military services will pay for it - though perhaps not all when one calculates total costs in addition to tuition. If you survive your military service - perhaps sacrificing your life trying to obtain funding of a postsecondary education.

Nobody is placed in that predicament of a choice in Europe. It is, for the most part, either free or ridiculously inexpensive. As shown here:
Education - Average Tuition Fees 2011.jpg

The high-costs are totally the responsibility of privatized education. Were at least the state-schools subsidized by the Federal government, their tuition-fees would be far lower - and available to more of our children. Which is why we have a first-rate military establishment* but a higher-than-necessary cost of tertiary schooling that impedes enrollment in an education crucial to one's earning-career.

Not so? Tell me how ...

*When, in heaven's name, are we going to get off the DoD-binge we've been on for at least three decades!?!
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Federal Interference in higher education? The nationalization of student loans???

The Federal Government has been a major (if not the major player) in spiking the costs of higher education for years. This hasn't resulted in an increase in the quality of our educational infrastructure, or in our student body, or in their post-collegiate options. Instead, we are sending massive numbers of students to college who will not graduate 4 years later, but who will find themselves under burdensome student loans. If they do graduate, they will often find themselves in jobs that don't require degrees.

The US Military is also in a serious readiness shortfall. As of last year, only 1/3rd of our combat brigades were at the readiness level necessary for them to be able to respond. We've had to strip out an entire carrier group, shuffle parts and pieces from one to another in order to try to desperately keep them afloat, raid museums for replacement parts. Our planes are older than the pilots. Our armor and attack rotor-wing platforms represent the very peak of 1980s technology. Coming up with 5th Generation fighters has been similarly problematic - when we were trying to update the fleet, we planned for 750 F-22's, we got 187. We need 313 ships in the Navy, we have 273.



nah - as foolish as your list of policy prescriptions were, I wouldn't say you don't have the right to advocate for them.

Patent BS from the Rabid Right. Of course the government is responsible for "bad education". Easy target, that one.

Of course military readiness is never sufficient. That's the mindless justification for more spending!

When education is of lesser importance than the Defense Establishment, a country is destined to downward spiral economically. What it costs to maintain a military superiority, it should be paying to obtain a higher-class of employee-competence.

Your argument is lamentable - apparently not enough jobs have quit the US for China ... ?
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Agreed, agreed, agreed. It is soooo patently obvious.

To a lesser degree, this also percolates into the Right-wing crowd. They think that by "hard-work" they deserve the "fruits of their labor". Namely a house and a good-enough retirement.

Sounds good to me, but that's not the whole picture. If you are born at the wrong place at the wrong time, life pans out quite differently...

Actually, there's nothing wrong with the idea that, if one works hard, one should reap material gain from doing so.

What makes the right wing so toxic is that they turn this thinking backwards: if someone doesn't have all these material rewards, they must not have worked hard, either because they're lazy or inferior. The idea of being born "in the wrong place at the wrong time" simply never occurs to them.
 
Patent BS from the Rabid Right. Of course the government is responsible for "bad education". Easy target, that one.

Of course military readiness is never sufficient. That's the mindless justification for more spending!

When education is of lesser importance than the Defense Establishment, a country is destined to downward spiral economically. What it costs to maintain a military superiority, it should be paying to obtain a higher-class of employee-competence.

Your argument is lamentable - apparently not enough jobs have quit the US for China ... ?
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So... you have no counter.

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Re: From the Economist "Poverty in America: No money no love"

It's not fear; it's greed.

The right wingers around here truly don't care how much anyone else suffers as long as they "get theirs."
:yawn: a claim that is as lazy and obviously driven by self regard as it is wrong.

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I countered nothing with nothing ...
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Well, true enough. You countered by offering nothing.

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Actually, there's nothing wrong with the idea that, if one works hard, one should reap material gain from doing so.

What makes the right wing so toxic is that they turn this thinking backwards: if someone doesn't have all these material rewards, they must not have worked hard, either because they're lazy or inferior. The idea of being born "in the wrong place at the wrong time" simply never occurs to them.

No, there is nothing wrong with it. It's a fundamental of life. What's wrong is to think that's all there is. Me, myself, and mine.

As a nation of people we have a collective existence within a market-economy, where consumers produce the goods/services that they consume. How many millionaires do you know got rich on a deserted island?

Becoming a millionaire is the reward for either some good luck or hard-work and likely both. Millionaires are not the problem. The problem is the insufficient taxation that allows excessive millionaire and billionaire riches that serve no further purpose. They are unnecessary to a properly functioning market-economy. Their wealth is handed down generation to generation creating dynasties. But what country needs dynasties?

Each and every country allowing dynasties to run governments has failed historically. (Europe has proved that truth time and time again.)

So, a well functioning economy needs neither alternative - abject poverty or excessive riches.

So, what's a country to do? Get its taxation right such that a market-economy can (1) assure lesser Income Disparity by redistributing* excessive income (before it becomes wealth) thus minimizing poverty and (2) be sufficiently dynamic to assure that national employment remains minimal thus preventing further poverty.

The former results in the latter - by taxation a government has the means to assure:
*Sufficient education for the people to developed themselves not only as persons/individuals but also skilled workers, whilst
*Offering them low-cost National Health Service to assure both the ability to work and assure longevity, and
*Invest in developing technologies, techniques assuring long-term national productivity, and thus
*Maintaining a wholesome life-style free of disease, crime or untimely death - and also the general "pursuit of happiness".

What more can we want of life ... ?

*Which does not mean "giving it away", but reinvesting it in programs that better our lives (education, a national health-service, decent large-ccity housing, reduction of pollution generating means of transportation, etc., etc., etc.) There's a lot we can do to better the nation that is already creaking at the seams due to a lack of adequate public investment.
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NO MONEY NO LOVE

Excerpt:

The fight against poverty aint over yet. It is mired in the same discussion as Income Disparity, to which it is appended. That is, far too much money going "untaxed" (under the Reaganite reform of taxation in the 1980s) and too little taxed-income in the form of subsidies to the states to enhance postsecondary education. Whyzat?

Because it is the only means of bringing those without the necessary qualifications for our Information Age out from washing-dishes for a living and up to well-enough paying jobs. Fifteen percent of the American population below the poverty-threshold (of $24K annually for a family of 4) amounts to close to 50 million fellow Americans. Or the combined populations of California and Illinois.

Tell me how that isn't so ...
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Pls note that the welfare reforms passed by Clinton now are classed as a failure. You have people living with no incomes on a few dollars a day.
Poverty is a great incubator for a number of societies problems, crime, drugs, drop out significant, to name a few.
 
The fight against poverty aint over yet. It is mired in the same discussion as Income Disparity, to which it is appended. That is, far too much money going "untaxed"

actually raising taxes for more liberal and crippling welfare will increase poverty. When Clinton changed welfare to workfare 1/2 decided they were no longer in need of welfare. 1+1=2 This is something a child could understand, just not a liberal.
 
actually raising taxes for more liberal and crippling welfare will increase poverty. When Clinton changed welfare to workfare 1/2 decided they were no longer in need of welfare. 1+1=2 This is something a child could understand, just not a liberal.

The point of this whole thread is that there would be no need for welfare if everyone were educated enough to be employable.
 
THE HAMMERLOCK OF POLITICAL STAGNATION

Pls note that the welfare reforms passed by Clinton now are classed as a failure. You have people living with no incomes on a few dollars a day. Poverty is a great incubator for a number of societies problems, crime, drugs, drop out significant, to name a few.

I can agree with the above. Poverty is the key question in a world where a Global Economy took a seismic shock from the SubPrime Mess in 2008/10, which threw it into near total disarray. Fortunately, we are coming out of that period. Not fast enough, but as fast as the American economy will allow presently without Stimulus Spending.

By which I mean this consequence: We no longer have the uniquely inventive and dynamic market-economy that we once had. We must share that "halo" both with China and the EU.

I will not either blame the Clintons for today's problems (and I am not saying that you did). There's been a lapse of 15 years since and time ruins everything if nothing is done to economic givens. And, in fact, as a nation, we are in a hammerlock of political stagnation. And, it is the consequence of nobody else but ourselves, that is, the electorate. Two terms of a Replicant PotUS who gave us a useless war over in the Middle-east Sandbox, then the corralling of a dEM PotUS who genuinely wanted to effect significant change but was hamstrung by a Replicant HofR.

Let's not look at finger-pointing, unless we point it at that face in the mirror. We, the sheeple, are fully responsible for what has happened by electing those who now represent us. Both chambers of Congress are presently in Replicant hands, and what they would like is that the PotUS be Replicant as well.

In that manner, the income-tax flat rate that allows them to amass and grow their riches will remain untouched.

Whilst 15% of the population (of the Greatest Nation on Earth) lead an existence in abject poverty, a percentage that has been much the same since 1995:
Poverty -  Number in Poverty and Poverty Rate.jpg

MY POINT? One thing!

So, let's ask the question "why nothing has been done?" And what can be done? Then answer that question in November.

Obama tried and was hamstrung by Replicant control of the HofR at each turning. These people play hardball because they don't care a fig about the "small guy". They are run by dynastic plutocrats who want only ONE THING: Maintenance of the present unfair taxation that permits them to fund Replicant candidatures that, in turn, keeps the status-quo of grossly unfair taxation in America and the maintaining of abjectly high numbers in poverty (close to 45 million fellow Americans).

It's sooo simple - socially devastating, but simple in cause and effect ...
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I countered nothing with nothing ...
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You asked how the federal government had interfered with post secondary education, and I told you how. You asked if there was really a readiness problem, and I laid out for you how. :shrug: you didn't like the answers you got.

Then you veered into the historically illiterate:

When education is of lesser importance than the Defense Establishment, a country is destined to downward spiral economically. What it costs to maintain a military superiority, it should be paying to obtain a higher-class of employee-competence.

:lol: name a single time in the post-war era when the federal government spent more money on education than it did on defense. :)
 
:lol:

People actually believe this :)

The US has a substantial poverty problem. Yes/No
Welfare reforms with time limits were enacted. Is that correct?
 
You asked how the federal government had interfered with post secondary education, and I told you how. You asked if there was really a readiness problem, and I laid out for you how. :shrug: you didn't like the answers you got.

Then you veered into the historically illiterate:



:lol: name a single time in the post-war era when the federal government spent more money on education than it did on defense. :)

Did we prosper for the first 100 years without a Dept of Education or not? In fact I don't think we had that dept until Carter.
 
Education is not a federal power or responsibility. Raising unskilled labor wages (300%?) by fiat will not fix poverty - it will push more into it. Giving some people stuff that others are not only expected to provide for themselves (and their dependents) but to demand that they pay more taxation simply for having done so is foolish. Income redistribution is like covering a drunk's bar tab - it helps them avoid any need to change unsuccessful personal behavior and still remain comfortable.

100% correct....it is a State power, for all of those who do not understand federalism.
 
You got something on that?

Before widespread industrialization, artisans and craftsman went into business for themselves (after apprenticing under a master), and they were able to do so in towns where there was little to no competition. It was easy to move on to the next settlement if the closest one had a saturated market.
 
Did we prosper for the first 100 years without a Dept of Education or not? In fact I don't think we had that dept until Carter.
That would explain why we were so destitute and weak before that time.

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Did we prosper for the first 100 years without a Dept of Education or not? In fact I don't think we had that dept until Carter.

Well, as a conservative I don't mind a small education department that would do national testing so the states would know how well or poorly they are doing.
 
That would explain why we were so destitute and weak before that time.

We were definitely more destitute: settling the west was incredibly risky, to the point that nobody would have done it if not driven by economic desperation.
 
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