Resolved: The United States is Getting Poorer

Discussion in 'Politics & Current Events' started by Karl K, Jan 5, 2006.

  1. Matt in the Hat

    Matt in the Hat Moderator
    Staff Member

    Sep 21, 2002
    Brooklyn
    Club:
    New York Red Bulls
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    What's wrong with want?
     
  2. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I got sloppy with my wording on the second half of my post, and used "want" two different ways.

    "Freedom from want" means want as in "The condition or quality of lacking something usual or necessary".

    See, the thing is this - in a vacuum, with no other considerations, everybody wants lower taxes. Who wouldn't want to pay less to the gov't in taxes if everything else was the same? Our point is that everything else is NOT the same. "Cutting taxes" in and of itself is a terrible policy - especially when it comes to voting for someone - because it doesn't address how that cut will be achieved.
     
  3. VFish

    VFish Member+

    Jan 7, 2001
    Atlanta, GA
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Puts them in the top quintile, no? But I'm glad to see you finally acknowledge 120k could easily be middle class.
     
  4. Mel Brennan

    Mel Brennan PLANITARCHIS' BANE

    Paris Saint Germain
    United States
    Apr 8, 2002
    Baltimore
    Club:
    Paris Saint Germain FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    That's not middle-class income, is it? I understand better the position you hope to guard, the masses you hope to avoid.


    Let me know the parts for which you need clarification.

    This is close, but not quite correct; my argument is that a focus, or a lack of focus, on the most vulnerable in society - poverty being one of the many ways one can be rendered vulnerable in a society...but there are lots of ways - "costs," and that we can "pay" such "costs" on the front-end, in clear indication that we consider one of our national values to be the idea of embarking on this Great Experiment together, in reflection of what is the clear nature of the universe - interdependence - or we can "pay" such "costs" on the back-end, societally, and join your thinking, above and below, in the manifestation of Myth (I'm self-made, I exist due solely to my own efforts, I exist outside meaningful relationship with others, including the vulnerable...in fact, I prop up the vulnerable when they should in fact be left to die/Nature's own devices...), a way of being in the world that just produces different "costs," across different time frames. I choose the former; from your posts you seem to choose the latter. Those diverging sensibilities produce a radically different America. No doubt. I further argue, however, that your vision is reflective of none of the best traditions of the Founding, nor of the Nation-Building, of this nation; that in fact some of the best..."values," if you will, have sprung from various groups standing fast AGAINST such thinking. It is, in fact, how we got the rights we have, the extension of the Constitution we currently enjoy.

    And yet because a vision of America keeps track of everyone's humanity, especially the most vulnerable, should a "good illness" render you so, THAT type of America would play a robust role in ensuring that you subsisted in dignity and with services renders in reflection of the truth that you deserve such simply because you are part of society, where the very vision you argue for would leave you in the dust, and FAIL to acknowledge you humanity, your inherent worth, our shared Social contract, not only with the government, but, really, one to another.

    Capitalism springs in large part from Adam Smith's works. It sounds like you are familiar with Wealth of Nations, which, in part, engages the ideas you claim (the notions of capital and capitalising), but you've failed, it seems, to also read Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, upon which he grounds all his notions of captial and markets and enterprise; moral sentiments like trust, community, loyalty - one to another. See, rapacious free-market fundamentalism not only undermines the vital public life upon which democracy is predicated, but also places a particular CONCEPTION of the human bewing and human family above all others...that of "human=economic man or woman." The problem with that is that so many things require non-market values to survive...inlcuding, I'd wager, every context and landscape in which you've had your ostensible "success." Unless you can trace all the branches of your family tree (and family economic tree) back to the Founders and their compatriots, you probably do not spring from the landed white males of regarded heredity for which, initally, the Declaration was written and the COnsitution referenced (in terms of a fullness of rights). Indeed, the very PROCESS by which others took to heart non-market values and made THEM primal is the extent to which you have the landscape of rights and responsibilities by which you can even propose such market-driven non-sense. All kinds of considerations must be brought to bear when considering "property" or any other marketized, commodified, unitized value (or any non-market value, for that matter), in order for a nation with governance by, of and for the people to not perish from the earth. Now I understand, from your posts, that you apparently do not want to exist in relationship with anyone else. That's okay. That's just not this nation, and renders your dual analysis impotent in the face of the historical record.

    And, again, it appears that you do not really want this type of national environment, only just enough of it to empower yourself, and marginalize others. If "you should take care of yourself and, if you want, you help out others" was the sole, prevailing ethos, then those whom God placed at the top, the cream of the crop, in terms of, for example, firearms usage and gang leadership - you know, real values - would TAKE, along the lines of such an ethos, everything you have, and everything you'll ever have. You don't wnat everyone to live by that way of being in the world, you want JUST ENOUGH of that way of being in the world, then want contrived law to cut that ethos off at the pass when it's natural evolution comes to take what you've got.

    I argue an entirely different, and, I think, more realistic - not in terms of rapacious short-term grabandtakeishness, but, rather, in terms of the knowable nature of the universe...realistic in terms of "reality" - frame on the whole thing. Acknowledgement of interdependence. You are, and will be, in relationship with the rest of the citizenry whether you want to see it or not, whether you produce a government that acknowledges it or not...constructing an "every man is an island" mythology just takes you that further away from an authentic solution that relfects...reality.

    I f you want to argue that government wastes money (b/c imv, we are so deatached from education, authentic information, and the daily doings of governance), then we agree. If you want to take that one step further and submit b/c we as citizens have failed to make government be what it needs to be to relfect democracy that we then abandon all instruments of government that reflect our relationship to one another, well, we'll have to disagree...your way leads to barbarism, imv. Because such inequality eventually leads to folks empoying whatever assets THEY have to come out "winners" in the "Success" ethos of perfect individualism you embraced earlier.

    There's no doubt that if there's a law saying "you cannot walk down the street swinging your arm into the face of another person," that such a law reduces your freedom. But there are lots of ways to conceive of freedom. One is the myth of perfect independence that you shroud your argument in...another sees freedom as embeddedness, as connectiveness; that the more connections I have, the freer I am to act in a world of human beings. Indeed, a cursory glance at some of the world's constitutions in different nations, Western and not, helps to gain a clearer understanding of how many different conceptions of freedom there curently are, in play, around the world. If you are arguing that your arguments here somehow represent the American version, I would argue that they do only in that decades and centuries of struggle have stood against those definitions and conceptions of what America could be, and have produced the rights and responsibilities we possess today (or, more accurately, possessed in ther fullest form from about 1965-1975, and have seen erode/mythologized and made impotent since...).

    I think Galt got at the place and space where we begin to talk about being in fundamental relationship with one another through the Social Contract, but, really, the idea as it has expanded to included more and more people more nad more of the time is shot through the entire Experiment's history, up until this very moment...
     
  5. VFish

    VFish Member+

    Jan 7, 2001
    Atlanta, GA
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Mel, perhaps you can do something John Galt, SuperDave, and Ben Reilly refuse to… help define this elusive “middle class”. Everything with them is defined in terms of quintiles. Is a family of four earning 100k "middle class" in the traditional sense? What is middle class in your eyes?
     
  6. yossarian

    yossarian Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jun 16, 1999
    Big City Blinking
    Club:
    Arsenal FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    What you want and what you need.....has been confused.

    :D
     
  7. Mel Brennan

    Mel Brennan PLANITARCHIS' BANE

    Paris Saint Germain
    United States
    Apr 8, 2002
    Baltimore
    Club:
    Paris Saint Germain FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States

    Perhaps wikipedia can help us:

    The following factors are often ascribed in modern usage to a "middle class":

    -Achievement of tertiary education...
    -Belief in bourgeois values, such as high rates of house or long-term lease ownership and jobs which are perceived to be "secure"...
    -Lifestyle. In the United Kingdom, social status has been less directly linked to wealth than in the United States, and has also been judged by pointers such as accent, manners, place of education and the class of a person's circle of friends and acquaintances. Often in the United States, the middle class are the most eager participants in pop culture. The second generation of new immigrants will often enthusiastically forsake their traditional folk culture as a sign of having arrived in the middle class.
    -A net worth, what a person's total material assets are worth, minus their debt. Most economists define "middle-class" citizens as those with net worths of between $25,000 (low middle class) to $250,000. Those with net worths between $250,000 and $500,000 typically are categorised as upper middle class


    But also, the notion can be conceptualized outside economic factors in other ways:

    [Sociologically,]...the middle class is defined by a similar income level as semi-professionals or business owners; by a shared culture of domesticity and sub-urbanity; and by a level of relative security against social crisis in the form of socially desired skill or wealth. While 95 per cent of Americans identify themselves as middle class, using the measures of sociology the reality seems different. Some of these individuals are clearly lower or upper class...

    But also:

    ...social classes result from massive disparities in access to wealth, income, social access, and influence, as well as the tendency for people to associate with people of comparable social capital and financial means. Class is usually correlated strictly to ownership of productive, financial, cultural, social and human capital. For this reason, social class is often called socioeconomic status because of this inextricable connection. The connection is bidirectional, that is:

    - Capital begets class, because people with unusual amounts of capital are often sought by others and can make transactions on terms that are favorable to them...Generational social mobility is also pronounced; the children and grandchildren of "self-made" wealthy people may have additional social access that the initial generators of wealth did not, due to the stigma some associate with nouveau riche status.
    - Class begets capital, because individuals with social capital can often access other forms of capital more easily than others.
    Class is reinforced by class traits, or characteristics of speech and behavior that signify a person's class...


    So the notion is muddied with attempts at understandign and description, acutally. The Census Bureau, according to NOW(PBS), shows the middle 20% of the country earning between $40,000 and $95,000 annually. That's where I begin to talk about the middle-class, and move onto a fuller picture with some socioeconomic analysis.

    In any case, not much is to be reduced to class warfare notions; my argument is that it all depends, man...vulnerability can manifest in slots of different ways, regardless of economic or social capital. The question is, are we constructing a nation and a society, and promoting a global conception of such, that keeps track of each other's humanity, or not? Some folks are interested in doing just that; others are not interested in acknowledging that they exist in relationship to others at all. Out of that come disparate conceptions of what it means to BE "American," "human," a "citizen," "aware," "caring/loving," "successful" or even "great." My argument is that whatever side you come down on in that set of conceptions does in fact align and place you among certain folk in history, and certain folks today; that a nation claiming both free-market fundamentalism is its primary locomotive agent AND, for example, Mary Harris Jones, or Abraham Joshua Heschel, or Martin Luther King Jr., is pathologically fooling itself. Far from ripping the United States, I'm just taking it seriously, that's all.
     
  8. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    And the post of mine you quoted certainly didn't help that matter, did it? :) The common usage of "want" is a synonym for "desire", while the usage in the Four Freedoms is more like "need".

    Just for clarity, the last sentence should have read: "Didn't your parents teach you the difference between desiring something and needing it?"
     
  9. yossarian

    yossarian Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jun 16, 1999
    Big City Blinking
    Club:
    Arsenal FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    It helped just fine......reminding me of an REM song I like.

    ;)
     
  10. Mel Brennan

    Mel Brennan PLANITARCHIS' BANE

    Paris Saint Germain
    United States
    Apr 8, 2002
    Baltimore
    Club:
    Paris Saint Germain FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    There's also "time poverty," as well...lots of ways to engage the notion...
     
  11. John Galt

    John Galt Member

    Aug 30, 2001
    Atlanta
    I don't recall you asking me.
     
  12. CosmosKramer

    CosmosKramer Member

    Sep 24, 2000
    Yokohama
    Club:
    Yokohama F Marinos
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Time is certainly the ultimate commodity.

    I like Bertrand Russell's take on the subject in, In Praise of Idleness.

    http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
     
  13. MikeLastort2

    MikeLastort2 Member

    Mar 28, 2002
    Takoma Park, MD
    Am I the only person where who wants to know how NYfutbolfan and his significant other "pay 50-60k per year" in taxes without being wealthy?
     
  14. VFish

    VFish Member+

    Jan 7, 2001
    Atlanta, GA
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Sorry, I thought I asked you once about that fictitious family of four earning 100k. You offered a rather narrow interpretation: they were affluent and middle class hovered around to the median 47k income. Apologies if I confused you with someone else.
     
  15. VFish

    VFish Member+

    Jan 7, 2001
    Atlanta, GA
    Club:
    Atlanta
    I'd actually be more interested in finding out what my actual tax rate was when we combined federal, state, local, property, payroll, excise, sales and any other taxes levied against us.
     
  16. NYfutbolfan

    NYfutbolfan Member

    Dec 17, 2000
    LI, NY
    Firstly, if you look at my name you'd know that I live in the tax capital of the USA.

    Secondly, this thread would be alot more informative if you guys gave some personal information. Why? I think that sharing real info on what it takes to live in different parts of the country would be enlightening.

    IOW, what is the after tax cost of living for a single 20-ish guy who rents a 1 bedroom apt., owns a car in Atlanta vs Chi vs KC vs DC vs Cal?
    or
    what is the after tax cost of living for a married 30-ish guy who rents a 2 bedroom apt., owns a car in Atlanta vs Chi vs KC vs DC vs Cal?
    or
    what is the after tax cost of living for a married 40-ish guy who owns a 3 bedroom house, owns a car in Atlanta vs Chi vs KC vs DC vs Cal?
    or
    what is the after tax cost of living for a single 50-ish guy who rents a 1 bedroom apt., owns a car in Atlanta vs Chi vs KC vs DC vs Cal?

    This thread was about whether people in the US are getting poorer. The thread started with an examination of US Govt. median incomes and theories evolved from those stats. Reading those posts made me wonder why so many people decided to postulate from just a number instead of something real something personal.

    So, I posted my tax payments as an illustration of the incredible taxing power of our govt. Most posters have decided to fixate on what my income might be or have written back about some esoteric theory of theirs.

    I was surprised that not a single soul in the last 100 posts would say something remotely personal about their finances. It's funny when I think about it. So many wrote about their socialist dreams of brotherhood and/or government enforced/coerced interdependency or some other theory. Yet, did their lack of sharing of personal info reveal a HUGE lack of trust in their fellow man? 100 posts about caring and the goodness of man, yet not one of you mentions personal financial info in a conversation about how people feel about their financial status in america.

    Sometimes what you don't say, may be more revealing than what you do say.
     
  17. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I did.
     
  18. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    Eh?
     
  19. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    Did you actually read any of the posts after your one?
     
  20. NYfutbolfan

    NYfutbolfan Member

    Dec 17, 2000
    LI, NY
    Foosinho mentioned he makes 3X his county's median.

    Mel mentioned some stats such as "a net worth of $25,000 (low middle class) to $250,000. Those with net worths between $250,000 and $500,000 typically are categorised as upper middle class........ and
    "So the notion is muddied with attempts at understandign and description, acutally. The Census Bureau, according to NOW(PBS), shows the middle 20% of the country earning between $40,000 and $95,000 annually. That's where I begin to talk about the middle-class, and move onto a fuller picture with some socioeconomic analysis."


    The deficiencies with both of their comments is that they don't consider age or the size of the family or the geographic region.

    Andy, you don't live here, so I don't know how familiar you are with the differences in the cost of living in the states. In NY, an average 2 bedroom apartment condo sells for $1.2M. I have to admit I'm guessing, but you could probably buy (4) or (5) 4,000 sq. ft. homes on 2 acres each in Kansas for that kind of bread.

    In other words, the left and right coasts are much different than the prairie states. That's why a 100k income in Kansas is so much greater than a 100k income in NYC.

    That's why I asked for personal info, not census book stuff, but real life stuff. Maybe you guys are just too young to understand.
     
  21. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    That's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me on here... thanks ;)
     
  22. BenReilly

    BenReilly New Member

    Apr 8, 2002
    In my eyes, I'm a lot more worried about the "middle class" that can't afford medical care than the "middle class" that can't afford Columbia tuition.
     
  23. John Galt

    John Galt Member

    Aug 30, 2001
    Atlanta
    Obviously, context matters, but it only matters to a degree.

    People living in Manhattan are making ends meet on 35,000 a year. They're worse off than people making 35k in Wichita, but you're better off than they are, as we assume and you don't deny you're making 150-180k per year.

    In actuality, one of my objections to the Bush tax scheme is the way that it inordinately punishes upper middle class persons like yourself. You're statements suggest that you get little to no value from the capital gains tax cut, and you're not very likely to get any benefit from the estate tax disappearing. Your tax burden will keep increasing because the Bush tax policy is to put the squeeze on you in favor of the millionaires.

    But, your original post was not about tax policy. You claimed that your taxes were very high and you could improve your standard of living if you did not pay such high taxes. My response is that your standard of living is fine where it is (as is mine). I agree with Ben that I'm more worried about those who are "one illness away from the impoverished class" than I am the ones who can't qualify for financial aid but can't afford to send their kids to elite private universities.
     
  24. nowayjose

    nowayjose New Member

    Apr 24, 2005

    Is the price of a Big Mac the same in Kansas as in NYC?
     
  25. VFish

    VFish Member+

    Jan 7, 2001
    Atlanta, GA
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Do you live in a dumpster behind Mickey D's?
     

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