Sure, ask Japan, GDP debt of 250%, still running deficits and their rates are still low, the USA and Germany could be more like Japan, use that debt to buy goods from the world stimulating the world economy, helping poor people around the world and then raise taxes on the citizens to pay for it, a Tax on us the 1% to help the world. Well is not like I am totally opposed, give me half my salary, send my checks to some Caribbean Island where I will move to and I will vote for a guaranteed income, let the svckers work. Well not every person can take a taxi or Uber from the Metro/Metrobus stop to your house and work. Unless the poor want to walk, they want cheap alternatives to taxis. A MetroBus is a cheap way for cities to [not] have to build expensive Rail Metro systems. I am not sure how the efficiencies work between a Subway and a BusMetro. I guess we can ask the poor to be more healthy and ride bikes for the final legs, it would also help reduce health care costs. And the rich are transitioning, I think before 1980 there were no official billionaires in China, but now there are a bunch, I think they have or will have the most Billionaires by the next decade. How do you tax them? As I said tax the rich to help the poor is cool with me, but most "ideas" are to tax the rich to give to the middle class and then throw crumbs at the poor. Taxing the .001% to give the money to the 1% is not something that I would approve of, but as you pointed out, that is how this works politically, the rich 1% of the world (me and you) want to get the richer people to give us more of their money. I prefer that money skip you and me and go directly to the real poor if possible (we do not really have a political system to make that possible).
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/29/14112084/war-on-poverty-brooklyn-great-society Interesting review of a book about the way on poverty in Brooklyn. He writer makes he case that persistent poverty is more of a sociological problem than anything else. He also makes a case for the end of the war on drugs that @Timon19 and @MasterShake29 will find interesting.
We were kind of having a discussion about it with @Timon19. I think that the premise that the WOP failed is misleading. It is also possible that WOP was not enough to counterbalance all the other factors hindering the development in communities like this. In the 1960s and 1970s apparently there were some efforts to improve education and employment in the neighborhood, yet they don't look at the results in the light of racism and possibly poor funding that affected the area. In the 1980s you have the WOD that put young African American males in jail at many times the rates of White males. Consider the changes to welfare, stagnant wages, the lack of healthcare, or daycare, or stop and frisk. It is not that the community lacks the elements to rise above poverty; is that the establishment is doing all they can to prevent them from doing it.
The war on poverty was successful in that it greatly reduced poverty. It didn't succeed in ending a more or less permanent underclass.
Fox conducts a War on the War on Poverty then retracts their bullshit. They can't even lie well in Wingnuts' favor in cooking the food stamp numbers. But they are always such dishonest f#cking shits whose shittiness purposely aims to hurt poor people: Fox News Screws Up Its Latest Lie KEVIN DRUM DEC. 28, 2016 12:40 AM This post starts out in an all-too-familiar way: with a Fox News headline. Here it is: Food Stamp Fraud at All-Time High: Is It Time to End the Program? Now, the obvious response to this is twofold. First, they're just lying, aren't they? And second, this is like a headline that says, "Traffic Deaths at All-Time High: Should We Ban Cars?" But at this point the story takes a strange turn. First, I have no idea where Fox's $70 million figure comes from—and I looked pretty hard for it. The Fox graphic attributes it to "2016 USDA," but as near as I can tell the USDA has no numbers for SNAP fraud more recent than 2011. But that's not all: $70 million is a startlingly low figure. In the most recent fiscal year, SNAP cost $71 billion, which means that fraud accounted for a minuscule 0.098 percent of the program budget. Even if this is an all-time high, the Fox high command can't believe this is anything but a spectacular bureaucratic success. And it would be, if it were true. But it's not. If you look at inaccurate SNAP payments to states, the error rate since 2005 has decreasedfrom 6 percent of the budget to less than 4 percent. However, this isn't fraud anyway: It's just an error rate, and most of the errors are eventually corrected. SNAP "trafficking"—exchanging SNAP benefits for cash—is fraud, but it's been declining steadily too, from 3.8 percent in 1993 to 1.3 percent in 2011 (the most recent year for which we have records): So in any normal sense, the Fox story was a lie. SNAP fraud isn't at an all-time high. It's been declining for years. But here's the thing: The fraud rate in 2011 may have been low, but this was in the aftermath of the Great Recession, when total SNAP payments were very high. So although the percentage is low, the dollar value of fraud clocked in at $988 million. Fox could have used this far higher number, which is, in fact, an all-time high. It's only an all-time high because SNAP was helping far more people, but still. In the Fox newsroom, that would hardly matter. Bottom line: Yes, Fox is lying in any ordinary sense of the word. But they're also vastly understating the amount of SNAP fraud. Even when they're trying to deceive their audience, it turns out, they're also incompetent. http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/fox-news-screws-its-latest-lie
Props to Fox on this score, though. CORRECTION The statistics reported Tuesday in a "Fox & Friends" segment about 2016 food stamp fraud were incorrect. The latest USDA information, from 2009 to 2011, showed $853 million in fraud, or 1.3% in those three years. Nationally, food stamp trafficking is on the decline. I wonder if this retraction made its way to the Fox and Friends studio and then over the airwaves.
Do people read retractions on page 2 of the paper? when people used to read papers I mean... Anyway, Fox viewers already know Food Stampers are horrible, black & Mexican spongers who should have all their benefits cut off. So this is preaching to the choir no matter what made up numbers they use.
Chinese millionaires learning from the "west" China, too, now has tycoons threatening to invest abroad if the government doesn't cut corporate taxes https://t.co/JTz9DkElq3— The Economist (@TheEconomist) January 17, 2017
If you know the difference between wealth and income, the first minute of this video is a tired cliché. I stopped watching at that point.
I did say it was a very left wing source, they love tired economic cliches on that far side. I guess the thing that surprised me the most (if even close to true) was that we in the developed world control more wealth now, than right after colonialism. I imagined it was not as bad mostly due to the raise of China and India, I have feeling they massaged the numbers a little to get the number to look how they wanted.
These numbers are really bad, because they basically count wealth as "assets minus liabilities". That gives a really misleading picture. So, someone with a nickel is actually wealthier than someone with a 200K a year job but 150K a year in student debt. I'd rather have the degree and job than a nickel, but by these numbers the person with the debt and the job is worth a negative amount. This is also why the numbers with respect to the periods are off - there used to be far less debt. There are other misleading stats there too.
It's one of those 'zombie facts' that come up from time to time... http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03gj7h9 You may have seen the claim that ‘62 people now own as much wealth as half of the world’s population’. You may also have seen headlines that suggest that 1% of the world’s population now own more than the 99% put together. This is the latest iteration of Oxfam’s annual report looking at global inequality. They say that the overall the world may be getting richer but that most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. But is this really telling us what we think it’s telling us? Tim Harford asks economics writer Felix Salmon and development expert Charles Kenny. There IS growing inequality in some areas but this isn't the best measure of it.
Come on dude, you just don't want to admit that a just recently graduated English Doctor with hundreds of thousands in school loan debt has it much harder than a Bolivian farmer with 10 dollars worth of wealth.
Then there is this. The world is about 100 times wealthier than 200 years ago and, contrary to popular belief, wealth is more evenly distributed https://t.co/ovZ7TrNzS0— The Economist (@TheEconomist) February 26, 2018
True but the argument that, 'At least we're better than 200 years ago', is unlikely to generate huge celebrations, is it.
So the celebrations have to be ostentatious and massive for it to matter? ceezmad, I think you may trigger some people by bringing Pinker into it. It might get shouty all up in here, if other threads are any guide.
There is no way that there's a "common belief" that wealth is less evenly distributed now than it was 200 years ago. That's about as epically bullshit of a straw man as I've ever seen. The notion that there's a common belief among, I dunno, 330 million Americans, or 7 billion people in the world, is ********ing nuts. The vast majority of people have never given the question a thought. And if the strawman is that most educated people believe that, that's a slightly more refined level of bullshit, but bullshit nevertheless.