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.