71–80 of 221 posts
It wasn't only predictable, but, in the US, its not even new ; it's been a significant, powerful feature of the political landscape and since almost precisely the time the Democratic Party leadership was conquered by the neoliberal/DLC Third Way movement led by Bill Clinton. (Remember H. Ross Perot and the campaign that launched the party under whose banner Donald J. Trump would launch his first Presidential run in 2…
You mean exporting the middle class and then undercutting upward mobility was doomed to face a political backlash? What a surprise.
It probably is a surprise if you put a lot of faith in Ricardian equivalence, the theory of comparative advantage and read and nod your head to this sort of thing: http://www.economist.com/node/605144
We have gotten lost about what it is we are actually optimizing for.
It is too easy to forget that when a person is employed at $100k-$200k per year in the Bay Area, you want things like stopping climate change, more parks, more air, fair treatment, and above all, peace and prosperity. When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said…
Good news is that outside of countries like USA and UK, there is a lot of improvement. Global average income is rising, more people are going to schools, and people are being connected to the internet. I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a huge rise in the amount of African software developers. They could compete with USA software companies in the global internet industry.
It is too easy to forget that when a person is employed at $100k-$200k per year in the Bay Area, you want things like stopping climate change, more parks, more air, fair treatment, and above all, peace and prosperity. When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said…
Sure, the GOP in D.C. doesn't give two pennies about climate change, more parks, more air, fair treatment, or the rest, but they also are doing nothing different that will substantially help the Atlanta warehouse worker either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you were lucky (to be smart enough) to out-compete your peers and a bunch of Americans. By definition not everyone can achieve this success (as it's based on competition), so it does nothing to alleviate inequality on a scale that matters.
At what point do we reward human accomplishment instead of throwing it all away to "luck"? I hear this all too often nowadays that any kind of success can always be attributed to luck and therefor you have a moral obligation to those less "lucky" than you. Don't get me wrong - I agree with the moral obligation to help those less lucky than you. I don't always agree with the looseness in which the word "luck" is appli…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and you can fix it by fixing poverty. Not by calling poor people racists.
Poor people aren't racist (well, some are, racism knows no class boundaries), but many minorities are in poverty due to racist policies (or their families were pushed into poverty by said policies and the poverty cycle is incredibly hard to break out of, even if the policies have been largely removed or mitigated).
Keep in mind that under Obama, the relative wealth (percent share of aggregate wealth) of minorities and the white working class actually decreased.
While I have no doubt racist policies have contributed to the misfortune of some, when you look at wealth distribution in the US the problem is far bigger than most people think, and spans all races.
For those who don't want to click, here's the abstract: > Populism may seem like it has come out of nowhere, but it has been on the rise for a while. I argue that economic history and economic theory both provide ample grounds for anticipating that advanced stages of economic globalization would produce a political backlash. While the backlash may have been predictable, the specific form it took was less so. I distin…
Not sure why quote works like this, but it's very difficult to read on a phone.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]"
-Dr. King, Beyond Vietnam (1967)
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...
It is too easy to forget that when a person is employed at $100k-$200k per year in the Bay Area, you want things like stopping climate change, more parks, more air, fair treatment, and above all, peace and prosperity. When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said…
For me the real story here is that despite the ascendance of right wing populism the GOP in D.C. is doing the exact same thing it has always done : tax cuts for the rich while shrinking services for the rest. That and deregulating wall street. Sure, the GOP in D.C. doesn't give two pennies about climate change, more parks, more air, fair treatment, or the rest, but they also are doing nothing different that will subs…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you were lucky (to be smart enough) to out-compete your peers and a bunch of Americans. By definition not everyone can achieve this success (as it's based on competition), so it does nothing to alleviate inequality on a scale that matters.
At what point do we reward human accomplishment instead of throwing it all away to "luck"? I hear this all too often nowadays that any kind of success can always be attributed to luck and therefor you have a moral obligation to those less "lucky" than you. Don't get me wrong - I agree with the moral obligation to help those less lucky than you. I don't always agree with the looseness in which the word "luck" is appli…