Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Are you going to volunteer to take a family by the hand and guide them through life (multi-generations, here)? Or are you willing to suffer that much tax burden and that big a governmental hegemony? How long will it be before some bright young mind in the "What should I read instead of watching Game of Thrones reruns or playing Grand Theft Auto Department" asks "why can't we make the same decisions for Thurgreed's kids?" After all, they're the experts.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

They're wards of the state now. The point of the negative income tax is that it reduces the State's size and omnipresence. People are given more money directly and then they have the obligation (hi, Thurgreed!) to learn better how to spend it themselves. The enormous masses of bureaucrats would collect negative income tax until they get new jobs.

Video Interpretation of the Politics Board
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUC2EQvdzmY

TM

Re: Video Interpretation of the Politics Board
 

That is fucking awesome.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I see a problem with your idea to give people money and then they can learn better how to spend it. It's not just the money that's the issue, it really is the education that matters. I was particularly interested in this tidbit I saw today regarding retirement savings: "Among workers who hold similar jobs with the same pay and who both contribute to 401(k) plans, a college graduate tends to save 26 percent more than a worker with just a high school diploma, the study concluded."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...-on-retirement


Even with equal money and similar jobs, people with more formal education do a better job of securing their future than people without. It's not just that rich people have extra and can save more than the poor or middle income. The money is not going to solve the problems without educating people as to how to make financial decisions.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I find your response a little aggressive for no fucking reason.

I gave you short term and long term goals. I do not dislike your idea. I'm all for actually putting a system into place that helps people who have been relegated to the trash bin of this country. If yours is the best that we can do, I'll take it. Based on how people view our current, progressive tax system, I can't imagine what kind of negative reaction the poor (or any color) would receive under a negative tax system.

But I think my overarching point is that a negative tax system doesn't fix the institutionalized racism and classism the way destroying pockets of poverty in ghettos and slums and redistributing those people around so that they can benefit from neighborhoods drawn up to exclude them would. If you gave everyone in the projects a bunch of cash, some would make it out. But the physical barriers (at the very least) would remain because your negative tax system isn't going to pay enough to move people to really nice neighborhoods with awesome schools. And it isn't necessarily going to undo decades upon decades of damage done by the fact that (i) poor minorities haven't had (or even been exposed to) the type of success that comes from education and (ii) whites have created homogenous oases in which they all aspire to live. And, in the long term, it's about exposing people to one another.

But I'm not really interested in arguing since none of this shit is going to change since it requires people with stuff to give some of it up for the good of everyone and not just themselves.

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Is there something going on in your head that is making you piss me off? If so, fix that shit.

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Wonk, it's my job to piss people off for no reason.

Off. my. corner.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

And there are poor white communities that may be largely rural, and thus not even possibly solvable by T's proposal.

i have heard Amsterdam/Broadway in the 80s/90s Street wise was a much different place before the 1990s than it is now. I believe West Side Story was sort of set there. The Warriors had a major scene there.

Now it is where Hank stays in the city. On my block, 93rd and Broadway, there is a project.* There are several others on Amsterdam within a few blocks. The neighborhood has changed to be what you seem to be suggesting might help. I wonder if any study has been done about kids from these type places and education. i hope it would show you are right.

*not sure if "projects" means the complexes as opposed to these, which are stand alone buildings.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

now i read this a third way, that you are simply talking about what some people might do, so deleted the angry rant.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Environment.

Jonah Hill on Stern mentioned that living in Hollywood with a dad who's an accountant put him around people who did movies so that throughout his life he was exposed to the notion that being in movies was attainable. Contrast that with a niece of mine who has two stellar gorgeous kids who could be but they will never get beyond the school play. Being in movies is not part of their environment.

People in less stellar environments are drawn to what they see on a regular basis as far as academic goals, professional goals despite equal intellect. Couple the with institutionalized hurdles and there's a big bar to success.

I grew up in the projects and lucked out getting a performing arts gig, which changed things in a big way for me in seeing what can and can't be done.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

you had perfect hair though.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Still do, every bit.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

These are projects:

http://columbiaspectator.com/sites/d...FD%20house.jpg

The Frederick Douglass Houses are probably the closest projects to where you live and they're on 100th-104th Street.

IF you're thinking about this place, you're off. It's a condo. The website has a 1-bedroom available for $874k.

https://ds4.cityrealty.com/img/1cdd5...3rd-street.jpg

If that's not what you're thinking of, I'm not sure. But there are many buildings from Mitchell-Lamas to other types of income-specific buildings to 80-20s that provide affordable housing.

And your neighborhood has definitely changed. Every neighborhood in Manhattan has. There are maybe a handful of streets in the city that you shouldn't be on late at night.

The school district in Chelsea, where I live and grew up, has gone from crappy to very good, given the property values and who now lives in it. The Fulton Projects (which is in Chelsea) and the Chelsea Projects (which are north of where Chelsea is--for anyone who grew up there, at least) are probably the safest projects in the city. The Fulton Projects are surrounded by million dollar apartments. The Chelsea Projects sit west of Penn South, a huge middle-income co-op, where people have to apply and qualify (based on income) to get in.

But Avenues, the insane new private school where Katie Holmes sends her kids, pulls the elite's elite out of neighborhood schools (although, let's be honest, those kids probably wouldn't have gone to public school even back when I was in school) at a cost of $50k/yr.

Here's a study performed in Maine that concludes that poverty levels and performance are related: https://usm.maine.edu/sites/default/...vement_Web.pdf

Here's an article that states that (in Chicago), the lowest scoring teachers are more likely to work at high poverty schools: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...112-story.html

TM

Re: Video Interpretation of the Politics Board
 

I used to work there.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

It's there to learn. Obviously, you have to learn what your choices are, and their impact. We would need to bend over backwards to make sure that taxpayers have an opportunity to learn.

The question is whether the state is going to act in loco parentis for a permanent underclass, which never goes away or advances because to do so puts one out of the safety net and there are no jobs any more which a person without skills can get that will pay a living wage, or if we are going to realize that the state's job is not just to make sure nobody starves or wants for an education or health care, but also to incentivize the people in that safety net to take even an incremental step out. You sound like a hedge fund shareholder or the Queen of the Netherlands: I want my quarterly dividend and I want it now.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

2. Geography's a huge part of everything. How many people working in hedge funds, private equity, and Wall St banks are from Greenwich/Darien/Rye/Stamford and nearby areas? You can be all sorts of well-off or brilliant from Boston or Philly, but you'll never have that Connecticut/NY finance biz inside handshake.

I can't even fathom the hurdles a kid growing up in a really bad area has to overcome just to hit upper middle class status. You're starting life with a zero score in the increasingly more determinative "who you know" category.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I don't disagree with any of what you are saying, just that you are trying to cram 5 pounds into a 2 pound bag. Institutionalized racism and classicism affect education. of course. They inform the way we live, period. But even if you made the best of all possible education systems, it would still exist in a world of race and class, where color, religion, ethnicity, etc. often have as big an impact on your success in life as any other factor. That doesn't mean you throw up your hands on the education system.

If I came across as aggressive its because I was reading a healthy dose of "well, we can't make it perfect so why bother." That frustrated me, because it's so the way we have been living up to now. We can't fix it all, so we won't try to fix one or two pieces and hope that from that will grow a culture in which, "it's too big, too pervasive" is no longer an acceptable excuse for doing nothing.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

You have a fine sense of irony.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

True, bureaucrats are wards of a sort. However, the things with which they busy themselves do create benefits for other parts of the economy. The clerk checking boxes in cubicle 14 on floor 37 in building 22 buys lunch from somebody, and does a bit of shopping in town. Subsidizing him to stay at home and do nothing eliminates many of these multiplier effects.

And they won't get new jobs. They're where they are in many instances because they couldn't or wouldn't take certain risks. Some of this is their fault (they value safety and comfort over quality of life). Some of it is not (they simply don't have any talents for which the market would pay them better than that which they're already receiving, or their circumstances made risk-taking an impossibility). Whichever reason it is, once they've been institutionalized as bureaucrats are, it's near impossible to retrain them for work in the private sector. Particularly the increasingly demanding work required by private employers in the current labor market.

Retraining or reschooling people is a policy is generally unrealistic. Maybe 20% of people could benefit from it. The more honest argument for negative income tax is that it's a good way to manage a growing population of people who will never be able to survive without it.

But this forces us to recognize the elephant in the corner: Tech and globalization are rendering massive portions of the US workforce obsolete, and will continue to do so at increasing speed. We need to prepare for a world in which a large segment of the population will not be working, or will only be working part-time, and for low wages. Nobody wants to address that head-on. Instead we hear bullshit from economists about how new technologies displace labor for a period, but ultimately lead to more jobs years down the road. Or we hear nonsense from politicians about how we're just shifting to a "service economy." As usual, the ugly reality is a third rail conversation.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

So it is and so it has always been. Let's smash some looms!

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

We've done nothing to incentivize people to step out of govt assistance. All efforts have been to force them out of it. Speeches about "personal responsibility" and drug testing as a condition of welfare aren't going to magically match an unqualified person to a decent wage job.

But even if you find that magic incentivizing policy, where are the jobs paying living wages for these new workers?

There are simply far more bodies than there are things for bodies to do. And that trend is going to increase. If you doubt me, just look at your phone, and ask yourself, "How many decent paying administrative jobs have been eliminated by the smartphone alone?" Run with that thinking for a bit and see where it takes you. It's not revelatory, of course. We all know this stuff. We see these trends. But I'm not sure we think about it enough. If we did, the need for a negative income tax would be debated in national forums, rather than in odd little chatrooms like this one.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I was wondering just how fast you'd offer this dull comment. You're nothing if not consistent (which you probably take as a compliment).

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I'm not sure how what you just wrote is related to the discussion we've been having. You want to pay the poor through a negative taxable income system. When I suggest that the problems that exist based (mostly) on housing won't be addressed, and suggest how those issues might be tackled, you plug your ears and start yelling about a nanny state.

The issues are deep and entrenched. I thought we were talking about how to fix all of this shit (or at least start to). The fact that you get pissy when I say your solution doesn't go far enough means you don't really want to talk about it beyond your opinion. Since I don't want to fight about something that is about as likely to happen (given what I said about people having to give shit up in order for anything to happen) as Hank hitting 3 straight jumpers, I decided not to.

Uh...no. I wasn't saying nothing is possible. I was saying there is no point in arguing over a destruction of ghettos and a redistribution of people vs. instituting a tax system in which we outright pay poor people. I'm not going to argue with you about which is better because neither will happen.

But your voice has changed in general. I don't mind angry and aggressive--in fact, I kind of like it (see: Finch). But when it comes from someone who generally isn't (or who didn't used to be), it's strange. And when it comes from a discussion in which I'm saying your solution doesn't go far enough, it's just plain weird.

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Maybe this time is different, but don't pretend that you're saying something that hasn't been said ad nauseum back to antiquity and been wrong.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Let's assume you're right. Let's assume eventually tech and globalization will lead to even more jobs down the road... when will that be?

Because -- and you know this -- an element of the argument that new technologies inevitably lead to more jobs includes the recognition that this takes a long time. That initially there is labor displacement.

So, under your own theory, there is what we can all an "interim" period in which there is considerable loss of jobs to impacted sectors. How long is this interim? And what's your solution for the job losses occasioned during it?

I believe a reasonable estimate for when jobs created by tech and globalization eclipse jobs lost from them would be 2035. So, wise Adder - what say you to those savaged in the "interim"? Because neither you, nor any other economist trotting out that argument has ever addressed that issue.

Do we "let them eat cake"? Or do we laughably suggest they be "retrained." Or maybe we run with a negative income tax. What's the consistent thinker's conventional solution for that interim?

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

No shit. The obviousness of it is implied. Which I noted (I figured someone, somewhere might have utter shit for brains and need that explanation).

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I don't know, now? We've got some slack still in the labor supply in prime age people who dropped out of the workforce, but nonetheless, we're currently in a low-unemployment environment.

ETA: And just to put some perspective on that, it looks like prime age labor force participation topped out at 84.6% in January of 1999. In July of this year, it was at 81.2%, or at a higher level than at any point prior to the early '80s. The problem is just not as big as you think it is.

Sure, globalization and catch up growth means we're not going to continue to maintain the lead we've enjoyed in living standards, but result isn't the apocalypse you're predicting.

You sound like you're talking to us from the '80s. The manufacturing jobs you're worried about, they are already gone and have been for decades.

ETA: It's not an argument. It's a historical observation.

There are lots of policies we could be implementing if we didn't have one party that defines its identity by opposition to government actually doing anything.

The frictions you're talking about just don't play out the way you see it. Instead of masses of useless people without work, you get stagnant median wages and greater income inequality. Those are problems we more or less know how to solve (higher taxes on the rich and greater investment in education, research, training, etc). But again, one party doesn't want to solve them.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Would you like to also address the "it's always been wrong before" part too?

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

? huh. was that not what you meant? did you mean to insult me?

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I have one word for you: Rather. Chafing.

Here is some sleazy funk that opens with maybe the worst fake police siren in the history of funk. The Soulfadelics with "The Big Chase." The Daily Dose:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQrrUtZ7-U0

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

How about some sort of safety net, a sort of minimum standard of living that provides a decent existence?

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

There's a dj sub-genre called Ghetto Funk. My husband sometimes plays it. This is from a Halloween party he did in 2014: https://www.mixcloud.com/graham14/g-funk-train/

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

My sister worked at EPGY, which was an online school developed by Stanford, for 8 years. The school itself goes back at 30 years, and I've known a few people who benefited from it because they blew past their own school's math or science courses.

If done properly, online education can be an awesome supplement to in classroom education. I'm sure that the State of Georgia (as probably my own state) have other motives, but it could be certainly something that helps teach kids.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

When one of my republican (or formerly republican) friends posts something bemoaning the state of their (former) party on FB, I never know whether to just silent slip in a like or actually say something positive. Does it come across as too schadenfreaudish to post an "Attaboy" or "You go girl" in such a situation?

This has become a daily conundrum. Thankfully.*


* said with appreciation and not schadenfreude.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I prefer the simple "Good on you, Jim."

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Unless you know something i don't they still/will control Congress, so Don fucking Corleone wouldn't be able to get a bill passed. In a sense being a dem President has to be a little bit like living in Hell with that lot.

I saw Icky Thump drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's.
 

Ahhhh-OOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

If Trump really screws things up, the Congress is in play. Crossing my fingers...

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Most likely, you are right. The Dems have a +15 pickup, and Ryan, who can't do squat with a +30 margin, is left with two years of total paralysis in his house.

But, if you follow places like Cook, enough seats are in play so if the Dems ran the table, taking all the toss-ups and R leaners, they'd squeak into taking the house. That is unlikely to happen unless this turns into a wave election. It would be amazing to get a wave after holding the white house for 8 years. But it could happen.