Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the declasse' dept.

America divided – this concept increasingly graces political discourse in the U.S., pitting left against right, conservative thought against the liberal agenda. But for decades, Americans have been rearranging along another divide, one just as stark if not far more significant – a chasm once bridged by a flourishing middle class.

Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, believes the ongoing death of “middle America” has sparked the emergence of two countries within one, the hallmark of developing nations. In his new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Temin paints a bleak picture where one country has a bounty of resources and power, and the other toils day after day with minimal access to the long-coveted American dream.

In his view, the United States is shifting toward an economic and political makeup more similar to developing nations than the wealthy, economically stable nation it has long been. Temin applied W. Arthur Lewis’s economic model – designed to understand the workings of developing countries – to the United States in an effort to document how inequality has grown in America.

The 2017 World Economic Forum had the answer: "The people who have not benefited from globalization need to try harder to emulate those who have succeeded," and, "'People have to take more ownership of upgrading themselves on a continuous basis.'"


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:08PM (18 children)

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:08PM (#514151) Journal

    Which "social programs" increased? If they are directed mainly at the middle class, then that may be odd. If they are directed mainly at the poor, then increasing pay-outs would be the natural concomitant to an increase in the number of poor people. Perhaps cutting taxes on the wealthy will help.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:14PM (17 children)

    Start back in the 50s. Graph the size of the middle class. Then graph the increases in/creation of social programs.

    I'll sit here and wait while you figure out if they do have a causal relationship, it is a negative one.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:23PM (9 children)

      by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:23PM (#514161) Journal

      Again, which "social programs" are you alluding to? Please name them. One will do.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:57PM (6 children)

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:57PM (#514187)

        OK, the "War on Poverty" starting in the 60s. Take a trillion dollars from the middle class, give it to the poor classes. Predict what will happen, predict what the leftist narrative will be, then look at the actual results.

        The results have been so negative that if we had shoveled the cash into a fire at least we'd have kept warm.

        "Well, if taking one trillion from the middle class to give to the poor didn't work, we gotta try taking ten"

        Lets say you got a culture that is dysfunctional. Could abstract it away from the politics and discuss business. So you have a dysfunctional unfit corporate culture. The way to turn that around is to ... turbocharge it with VC cash? Naah that just makes a bigger crater when it crashes. Pretend there's nothing wrong until the collapse? Well that will maximize your individual extraction of wealth from the system and has a long tradition in business. Talk about something else? That has a long business tradition, if the revenue is collapsing then to distract the rank and file we'll issue draconian dress codes and fill our empty working days with diversity training.

        I mean... think about it. The healthiest, longest lived, best educated, richest black population on the planet isn't in Africa, its in the USA. The most successful black city on the planet is Detroit, which is an absolute paradise compared to, perhaps, Mogadishu. Possibly the "best" hispanic spanish speaking city on the planet isn't in Venezuela or Cuba; its Miami.

        It should be pretty obvious to someone living in a slum in Detroit that if they're unhappy with being dirt poor compared to majority americans, emulating the culture of Mogadishu is somewhat less likely to lead to success than emulating the culture of some random white suburb.

        Throwing money at that problem never fixed anything ever in the history of humanity.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:12PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:12PM (#514251)

          War on Poverty [wikipedia.org]

          But let me guess, its wikipedia so its automatically wrong somehow. You're brain is crammed full of Fox news level propaganda. You should really attend college uzzie, if only to test your pet theories against people with actual in depth knowledge who are more willing to try and educate you. "Go fuck yourself and here's a link if you want to be less stupid" is about all I'm likely to do for you. Maybe some others will be more tolerant and polite, but you've probably pumped that well dry. Educate yourself before the sinkholes come.

        • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:57PM (4 children)

          by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:57PM (#514286) Journal

          OK, the "War on Poverty" starting in the 60s. Take a trillion dollars from the middle class, give it to the poor classes. Predict what will happen, predict what the leftist narrative will be, then look at the actual results.

          The War on Poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced [in January 1964.]

          [...]

          The legacy of the War on Poverty policy initiative remains in the continued existence of such federal programs as Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), TRiO, and Job Corps.

          [...]

          Deregulation, growing criticism of the welfare state, and an ideological shift to reducing federal aid to impoverished people in the 1980s and 1990s culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, which President Bill Clinton claimed, "ended welfare as we know it."

          --
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty [wikipedia.org]

          The Brookings Institution is quoted as saying

          [...] caseloads began declining in the spring of 1994 and fell even more rapidly after the federal legislation was enacted in 1996. Between 1994 and 2005, the caseload declined about 60 percent. The number of families receiving cash welfare is now [in 2006] the lowest it has been since 1969, and the percentage of children on welfare is lower than it has been since 1966.

          -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act [wikipedia.org]

          From the above I gather that the "War on Poverty" encompassed several programmes, some of which have been curtailed.

          > The results have been so negative that if we had shoveled the cash into a fire at least we'd have kept warm.

          Looking at the accompanying graph of the number of people in poverty and the poverty rate, I see that the poverty rate had been declining prior to the legislation's inception. After the legislation, the rate continued to decline for a bit, then varied within a range that was lower than the previous levels. The number of people in poverty did increase greatly beginning in 2000 (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 had taken effect in July 1997). It's not obvious from the graph that the programmes were effective, nor is it obvious that they were harmful.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate_1959_to_2011._United_States..PNG [wikipedia.org]

          • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:06PM (3 children)

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:06PM (#514336)

            I think the take away from the wikipedia article of this section :

            According to the Cato Institute ... published by Columbia University... According to OECD data

            Much like climate data people with an axe to grind can find numbers that support almost anything.

            Yet, fundamentally, from a very high alititude view, the program has failed. It actually cost more like $15T not $1T and the result is we have about as many poor people as we always used to.

            A successful program is you spend $155B to get an international space station, and if you have a medium to large telescope you can see it up there. Or a successful program is you pay an inflation adjusted $750M and you get Hoover Dam. Or you pay roughly $30M inflation adjusted dollars and you get a Washington Monument. Or the Manhattan project. Or the physical Pentagon building (not the pentagon as an abstract DoD analogy but the bricks and mortar). Or for that matter services. The cost of the regime change in Panama was $163M. Personally I think it would have been wiser to pay Noriega a bribe of half of that to leave, but whatever. Or services sometimes "fail" the regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq were miserable failures yet remarkably expensive.

            The war on poverty was orders of magnitude more expensive. Now orders of magnitude more expensive than hoover dam would be an alaskan land bridge to Russia. Or order of magnitude more than the cost of the ISS would be colonies on Mars. Or order of magnitude more than the cost of the war on terror would be the cost of fighting Iran. The point is multiples of fabulous expenditures should be absolutely stupendous results.

            So given the last paragraph, whats the stupendous earth shattering result of blowing $15T on "poverty"? Well, maybe, as long as the spigot keeps flowing probably the poverty rate is a small percentage lower in the very short term. But generally speaking, piling up the money and burning it would have had more effect. I'm not seeing much of a return on investment here. I'm not even talking about running a long term profit by "eradicating poverty" but I'm not seeing much of a result from the investment.

            $15T should have more of a result. Well, it is helping destroy the middle class by trying to fund it... which might have been an original goal anyway.

            • (Score: 3, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday May 23 2017, @08:17PM (2 children)

              by FakeBeldin (3360) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @08:17PM (#514504) Journal

              the result is we have about as many poor people as we always used to.

              Yes. Time progressed 5 decades, the world population doubled, the USA population increased, and the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same. Monetary power got consolidated into fewer and fewer hands. Yet the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same. The economy of other countries has shot up like a rocket, going from isolated enclave to world-dominant player (e.g. China) -- yet the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same.

              Sounds like a pretty stupendous result to me.

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 24 2017, @05:06AM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 24 2017, @05:06AM (#514679) Journal

                Yet the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same.

                How again is poverty measured? There's usually two ways. The first is that we decide the poorest X% are poor. The second is that someone pulls a number out of their ass, calls it a "living wage" and uses that. The number is usually chosen relative to what people usually make and generally tends to a set fraction of the population making less than that number. End result is that the usual ways of defining poor people results in the same number of poor people no matter how wealthy the society is. So I believe you can't use number of poor people as a measure of how well a society is doing.

              • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:54PM

                by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:54PM (#514781)

                Well, wait, that flat line is kinda my point, that the number was kinda flatline before the $15T spent, and kinda flatline after the $15T spent. So apparently we could spend anywhere from $0T to $150T and we'd get about the same flat line, so how about trying on $0T for a thought experiment?

                For a similar comparison, the number of terrorists in the middle east is slightly higher after the trillions spent on the war on terror than before. Therefore it failed.

                In practice welfare funding is exactly like public high school funding where any theat to the gravy train results in ridiculous threats of cuts "Oh well no more football team". Likewise probably 1% to maybe even 10% of the poverty spending is legit, but any threat to the program growth rate is met with threats to cut all the funding to the few deserving recipients.

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:30PM (1 child)

        All of them. Welfare, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, etc... Anything that takes from the wealthy and middle class and gives to the poor.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 4, Informative) by Weasley on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:59PM

          by Weasley (6421) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:59PM (#514288)

          Yet, despite all this wealth redistribution to the poor, somehow the upper class now has more of the money, and the lower class is filling with former members of the middle class.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:54PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:54PM (#514185)

      And what was the upper tax rate in the 50s and what direction has that gone since then?

      http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-tax-rates [businessinsider.com]

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:27PM (3 children)

        Oh, you think you get more money by having higher tax rates on the wealthy? Interesting. Naive, but interesting.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:28PM (#514263)

          No, Comrade Marx thinks he can make everyone equal by making everyone poor. But he should know by now some people are more equal than others and even in a society with 0 cash there will be wealth disparity. He is just denying reality, it is a leftist coping mechanism for the real world.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:21PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:21PM (#514394)

            And yet one of us posted a link with facts and data and 2 of us resorted to basic logical fallacies like strawmen and ad hominems.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:45PM

          by Whoever (4524) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:45PM (#514318) Journal

          Oh, you think you get more money by having higher tax rates on the wealthy? Interesting. Naive, but interesting.

          Yes, actually. We all know about the Laffer curve, but to suggest that US tax rates are at or above the peak of the Laffer curve is ridiculous.

          You are the naive one. You are the one promoting the interests of people far wealthier than you at your own expense.

    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:41PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:41PM (#514313)
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @08:05PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @08:05PM (#514497)

      Start back in the 50s. Graph the size of the middle class. Then graph the increases in/creation of social programs.

      Your premise is ridiculously flawed [srcf.net].