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Extreme policies lead to extreme outcomes.
Income inequality reached its highest level in more than half a century last year, as a record-long economic expansion continued to disproportionately benefit some of the wealthiest Americans.
A key measure of wealth distribution jumped to 0.485 in 2018, the Census Bureau said Thursday, its highest reading since the so-called Gini index was started in 1967. The gauge, which uses a scale between 0 and 1, stood at 0.482 a year earlier.
Work alone won't solve poverty—unless wages and earnings pick up substantially. It still takes government aid for families with children and others who do not earn enough, despite working 40 plus hours a week.
The most troubling thing about the new report, says William M. Rodgers III, a professor of public policy and chief economist at the Heldrich Center at Rutgers University, is that it "clearly illustrates the inability of the current economic expansion, the longest on record, to lessen inequality."
According to some research, US income inequality might be higher than it was during the Roman Empire, and pre-tax income inequality is as high as it was in the Roaring Twenties.
Income inequality is blamed on cheap labor in China, unfair exchange rates, and jobs outsourcing. Corporations are often blamed for putting profits ahead of workers. But they must to remain competitive. U.S. companies must compete with lower-priced Chinese and Indian companies who pay their workers much less. As a result, many companies have outsourced their high-tech and manufacturing jobs overseas. The United States has lost 20 percent of its factory jobs since 2000. These were traditionally higher-paying union jobs.
Service jobs have increased, but these are much lower paid.
If current policies touted as "decreasing globalism" in the US economy are trying to reduce income inequality, they're failing.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 29 2019, @06:04PM (21 children)
Yes it is.
Let me repeat that. Yes it is.
Go to Sealand ya big selfish, stupid oaf! Leave civilization to the ones who care to make it work.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Sunday September 29 2019, @09:20PM (20 children)
The liberties of humanity are only defended and protected if the means to exercise these rights is also protected. Freedom of speech is worthless to those who cannot use their language because they never were taught to read and write. Education is a basic human right, one necessary to enable free speech and free thought. Being alive and healthy is a precondition of the right to pursue happiness, or much of anything. Medical care is a fundamental human right.
The Not-too bright Buzzard is a case in point, no liberal arts (arts or skills of a free person) education, and smoking his way into the end of his seeking happiness, and catfish, anymore.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday September 29 2019, @11:15PM (16 children)
Made that exact same argument to him ("A starving man is not in any real sense of the word free, because finding food takes up all his energy"). Uzzard's reply was something along the lines of "My definition of liberty is that someone is free to make any of the choices they have available to them." Nevermind that there is essentially no choice here. That is the point at which his mind shuts down; that's his River Styx, beyond which his mind dies, because he has killed it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 03 2019, @09:15PM (15 children)
We are not starving men. The obvious rebuttal to this tripe is that we would have, even as starving men, plenty of choice in how we choose to fix things.
And repeated applications of food will solve starvation indefinitely. Repeated applications of health care will still result in the death of the patient. It's a very thick layer of bullshit to speak of the right to imaginary solutions to problems we presently have no clue how to solve. Further, the exercise of these imaginary rights is very expensive for societies. As I noted before, one should look at the institutionalized trampling of rights with great suspicion not knee-jerk that health care, education, or whatever are rights without regard for how we're supposed to provide for these rights.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday October 04 2019, @01:11AM (14 children)
I'm going to ask you the same question Uzzard has permanently dodged, then: what are rights, and what is their ontological grounding? It occurs to me a weakness in my debating style is letting my opponents get away without clearly defining their terms...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Friday October 04 2019, @12:53PM (13 children)
They are simply things you are allowed to do or something which you are due. This is commonly classified as negative and positive rights respectively.
As to ontological grounding, it's simply whether they are provided or not. If they are respected empirically, then they have ontological grounding.
The big difference between negative and positive rights is that the former merely requires noninterference by the parties who have to respect the right. The censor doesn't act to stifle your speech, the police officer doesn't take your car. Inaction in a vacuum is low cost to society to implement. Invariably, real world negative rights are for things that are almost always net goods like communication or self defense. Not things like murder or fraud.
Moving on, positive rights have three huge problems with them. First, how much provision is your due? For example, the right to a public defense is a relatively uncontroversial positive right. But in practice the state doesn't have to provide a competent lawyer. Conversely, one could require that the public defender be a top rated defense lawyer with a relatively strong record of success. What's the valid level of support? There's no real obvious threshold to these things. It creates a never-ending conflict.
We see that with the alleged right to health care (often termed "access to medical care"). For example, the US has universal health care, if you pay for it yourself. But that apparently doesn't qualify for the "right" which apparently requires access to health care paid by others. There's also the matter of what you're receiving. Many supporters seem particularly interested in the appearance of health care (such as emphasizing health care over health!) rather than its supposed benefits - what I call "health theater".
Second is the matter of cost. It doesn't matter how earnestly you want a right, if the society can't afford it and still function. The US has already gone pretty far due to this sort of thinking in a variety of sectors (for example, health care, education, and residential real estate). Sure, it's been steered for half a century by all sorts of for-profit parties, but the rationalizations that get that regulation implemented aren't about making money for the big businesses. They appeal to rights and other nonthinking feelgood.
We can consider some extreme examples: what right to health care do you have, if you wandered into a wilderness and now are dying 200 miles from any sort of road? If you choose to engage in extremely risky activities (like unprotected sex with random people)? It takes extraordinary resources to rescue someone in the middle of nowhere. And in the second case, someone is deliberately creating costs for society through the existence of this right. A common attempt to fix is to punish people who do such things.
This leads to the third problem. Existence of positive rights leads to all kinds of institutionalized and permanent impairments of freedom. A recent example is the Walmart subsidy - the accusation that Walmart (and related businesses that pay below federal decreed poverty level) are profiting from government welfare programs by being able to pay their workers less due to the existence of the programs. Rather than sucking it up and accepting yet another consequence of the many welfare programs and such, there's this common urge to force Walmart to pay more without regard to whether it's a good idea. Apparently, there's a right for poor people to get handouts, but not a right for those poor people to work to better their situation. And of course, taxpayers are on the hook not just for the welfare programs, but also for the costs of the nutty efforts to prevent businesses from ever profiting from such arrangements.
So what makes the right to medical care such a nutty idea? First, there's no real idea of what it should entail. Almost all of the world already has de facto access to medical care, just not the right sort of access. There's no practical limit to what it should be. In particular, it breaks supply and demand. When you're no longer paying for your own health care, then there's no incentive on your part to hold back from demanding everything that could possibly make your health outcome even a little better. Contrary to your past assertions, health care is quite elastic when one has to pay for it themselves and quite inelastic when they don't.
By elevating it to a "right" in the legal sense, one chokes more important government duties like maintaining transportation networks or emergency services. And more important rights like property ownership. You have this vast diversion of resources without regard to whether it is a good idea and this vast trampling of our freedom because something is considered a right.
And of course, it'll ultimately fail - for example, it doesn't matter if there is a right to live forever or not, one couldn't honor it no matter how hard they tried. No matter how important you think health care should be, you'll be dead in the end. A right to health care is a dead end in many ways.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday October 04 2019, @10:14PM (12 children)
You didn't answer the question: what grounds rights? What makes a right a right, as opposed to, say, "something I can force out of you?" Where do they come from?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Saturday October 05 2019, @09:03AM (11 children)
No, you merely asserted I didn't answer the question.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday October 06 2019, @03:03PM (10 children)
You didn't answer it: what is it that makes a right a right, as opposed to something like "well, I can force you to give me X, so give it here?"
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 07 2019, @03:05AM (9 children)
What does that have to do with rights? You can't force good health, for example.
I read my original post again. I did answer it.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday October 09 2019, @02:42AM (8 children)
No, you did not.
What is a right? What makes a right a right, as opposed to simply something you take from others by force?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 09 2019, @07:46AM (7 children)
I recall saying
As to your question, a number of rights you can't take by force, particularly when the force is applied myopically. You can't create a right of property ownership by stealing from others, for example.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday October 10 2019, @02:43AM (6 children)
What is it that establishes that one is due something (positive right) or allowed to do something (negative right)?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 10 2019, @05:10AM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday October 10 2019, @10:38PM (4 children)
No, you didn't. You enumerated *types* of rights, but you never explained what it is that *makes* a right a right as distinct from "something I take from you because I can kick your ass and I will if you don't give it to me."
I have a few shrewd guesses as to why :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 11 2019, @11:47AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday October 12 2019, @01:27AM (2 children)
You don't know what words mean, Hallow. In order to be provided, or not provided, they first have to be acknowledged to exist. I am asking what is it that grounds these things in reality so that they *can* be acknowledged to exist, and then provided (or not). Am I using words that are too big for you or something?
Because if so, good: let's add the epistemology of rights. How do we know a right when we see it?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 14 2019, @04:29PM (1 child)
Caught you not using that brain again! Since we know these rights are provided by empirical evidence, that logically implies they have been acknowledged to exist. QED.
By semantics. I already gave the definition of a right.
It's funny how you ask these questions when the answers have already been provided.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday October 16 2019, @02:21AM
You aren't providing answers, Hallow. And now I'm actually wondering if your issue isn't willfully dodging the question but actually lacking the cognitive tools and/or firepower to engage with it.
Once again: you have not specified what makes this concept of "a right" different from "something I can demand and take from you due to threat of force." You also have not explained how we know in the abstract what such a thing would be even if at present ungranted/unrealized.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Monday September 30 2019, @03:47AM (2 children)
Indeed.
No, it's not. Healthy or sick, you can pursue happiness. That box gets checked either way. And how much should I violate your other rights, including the right to pursue happiness, in order to insure you are as healthy as my society can make you? The creation of alleged rights that mandate widespread violation of other more basic rights should be looked on with great suspicion.
Except when it's not, of course. There's a key, failed linkage you make here, namely that medical care has something to do with being alive and healthy. It does not. Everyone will eventually not be alive and healthy, no matter how much medical care you throw at them. And there's surprisingly little difference between throwing no healthcare at someone versus throwing a lot. You're not going to get a factor of two improvement, for example. No heavy drug use (including nicotine and alcohol), decent diet (not even trying to optimize), and good public sanitation will get you most of the lifespan difference between a primitive agricultural society and modern society.
That makes this whole discussion broken. You're claiming as a fundamental human right, something that has at best a weak effect on the very excuse that is supposed to justify it, doesn't really do that much, consumes extraordinary amounts of human resources, and opens the door to all kinds of anti-democratic skullduggery.
As an aside, I have no problem with people who refuse to be educated, to be allowed to make that choice.
(Score: 1) by aristarchus on Monday September 30 2019, @06:17AM (1 child)
Oh, fark! khallow, you just caused me to come down on you with a whole bunch of reason and logic! I hope your snowflake libertariantard mind can survive!
You craven syncophant to parasites? I would think that you would not think it a violation of justice, that when you experienced an "episode" due to your unhealthy diet and lifestyle, that the ambulance just decides not to pick you up, since the probate in the estate will take more time than it is worth. Die, khallow.
Pointed Granted! If you, khallow, want to increase your size (intentionally not specific) for merely cosmetic reasons? I say, no way I or TMB going to pay for that. But this is not what we are talking about, you libertarian ignoramous. If anyone cannot afford basic medical care, it impinges on their human rights, much as the lack of mental health care in America has impacted khallow. Did they deny your insurance, khallow, when you went to the mental health clinic? Oh, dear.
OMG! The Soylentil most likely to refuse education is justifying refusal to be educated as an excuse to exploit and oppress those who do not even have enough education to know what they are refusing when they deny education, which is also the case with khallow, and the TMB, and, unfortunately with the Runaway1956 for whom it is in fact too late and there is nothing we can do except wait for his timely, but unexpected, demise.
The obvious rebuttal is that khallow has no objection to his refusal to be educated. If he were my student, I would throw an chalkboard eraser at his head. And since I am his teacher here on SoylentNews, I throw an off topic mod at his head. When will you ever learn, khallow? You continue to argue in Bad Faith!
aristarchus, out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 30 2019, @01:43PM
Excellent! Should be a good look for you. Let's see what reason and logic look like!
"would think"? So why would the ambulance just decide not to pick me up? Under today's laws that would illegal. Even under the libertarian paradise that would be a violation of their contract.
Point is "basic medical care" doesn't imply fulfillment of any fundamental human rights. You'll still die in the end, a violation of that alleged fundamental right and not much anyone can do about it.
There's two problems here. First, you haven't specified what education is. The Khmer Rouge no doubt has a different opinion on that ("To destroy you is no loss, to preserve you is no gain."), involving lots of jungles and death. So does various radical religious groups of all stripes who would see a straitjacket of religious delusion as the ideal education). Occasionally, these sorts of groups get into power and get to decide for the rest of us what words mean. When the state gets to decide what education is, it can horribly wrong.
Second, what value is an unwilling education? You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink - a situation you claim fairly often applies to me!
And it'd whack the teacher's pet in the first row, because you can't throw far enough to reach, much less hit, anyone in the back row. After the amusement was over, I'd go back to cooling my heels while thumbing through the cellphone for more "fishman" pics.Internet education once again triumphs over a crazy lecturer with terrible aim and a weak throwing arm.