posted
Yeah, they have access to information or experiences that you do not have or are choosing to ignore.
Instead of trying to figure out what is wrong with them and assuming you have all the relevant information, maybe you could figure out what you don't know and then try to learn it.
Several people have offered suggestions of where to start.
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: At a glance, that would explain why Australia has a similar senior poverty rate to the US. Not sure how to explain Ireland though which is surprisingly high. http://www.fin.gc.ca/activty/consult/images/retirement_1-eng.jpg
Maybe a side-effect of the troubles?
I suspect the high poverty rate among the elderly in Ireland has to do not with current troubles but with past troubles. Thirty years ago, Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Europe, now its one of the wealthiest. The GDP per capita in Ireland nearly tripled between 1995 and 2008. That suggest that most of the elderly were earning a lot less during their productive years than current workers.
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Ireland is mostly Catholic. No Protestant work ethic there.
Edit to clarify: There are Protestants in the North but it doesn't have the same deep Puritan roots as we do.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: I suspect the high poverty rate among the elderly in Ireland has to do not with current troubles but with past troubles.
Thats what I suspected too. I probably should have capitalized "the troubles" to make it more explicit as The Troubles.
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I would have said that you were more accurate without making that explicit. The Troubles refer to N. Ireland and the past 40-50 years or so. Ireland's poverty is a result of 800 years of British occupation, war, theft, and starvation.
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Anyways, my main thought was just that swampjedi's independent settler idea does seem consistent with separating out US+Australia versus Canada/UK/Europe.
I have no strong feelings/thoughts about the others in the middle though.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: I suspect the high poverty rate among the elderly in Ireland has to do not with current troubles but with past troubles.
Thats what I suspected too. I probably should have capitalized "the troubles" to make it more explicit as The Troubles.
Possible, but since The Troubles predominantly affected north Ireland, which is part of the UK, and the 31% elderly poverty rate is for the Republic of Ireland, I think its less likely.
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Wasn't Canada also settled by independent, freedom loving Protestants? Sure, there are some Catholic French Quebecers--but when you think of the independent minded, individualist, its hard to imagine anyone tackling the same frontier as the US, but 20 degrees colder as being similar.
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The earliest European settlers were mostly French, Scottish, and Catholic. The Jesuits were big in Canada. British a bit later but Loyalist.
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That's why I included the American Revolution in my guess.
My grasp of Canadian history is woeful, but I don't recall a similiar definitive "breaking ties" event like the US had. I welcome correction if I am wrong, though.
ETA: The "making it for yourself" part should still be similiar, though. After all, the American Dream used to be more attainable, at least when there was unsettled land to be had.
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Well, I think there is a big cultural difference. Personally, I kinda feel like we didn't "really" gain independence until Trudeau repatriated the constitution. So thats like a 200 year difference in how much we wanted independence Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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Observation: I was watching the news and a contributor (not a reporter) made a statement to the effect of, "Obama stayed out of most of the budget debate that has been going on and has only gotten really involved at the very end." This statement is a fact. The reporter interviewing the contributor then said something to the effect of, "I agree with you that Obama should have gotten more involved earlier in this debate." This statement is an opinion.
It very well might have been the contributor's opinion that Obama should have gotten involved earlier. However, that is not what the contributor said. I, for one, appreciate when a reporter focuses on fact rather than opinion. So, for me, while this tangentially is related to the budget issue, I've noticed that reporters do this on occasion (on all news channels) and it drives me CRAZY! Am I correct in my analysis? And, if so, am I justified in being frustrated by it? And, does this warrant a whole 'nother thread?
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Well, I think there is a big cultural difference. Personally, I kinda feel like we didn't "really" gain independence until Trudeau repatriated the constitution. So thats like a 200 year difference in how much we wanted independence
quote:Ryan has moved us off Unreality Island. He is forcing Americans to confront the implications of their choices. With a few straightforward changes, his budget could be transformed into a politically plausible center-right package that would produce a fiscally sustainable welfare state while addressing the country’s structural economic problems.
I tend largely to agree. Maybe block grants for Medicaid are a bad idea, but they do solve a fiscal problem. Maybe fixed revenue Medicare needs to be balanced with (in Brooks terms) `technocratic' rationing. Maybe the tax target should be 20% of GDP instead of 18%.
But, in general, if we want to continue being taxed at about the rate we're being taxed today (and by 'we' I mean those in the under $250,000 category whose taxes President Obama has promised not to raise), the Ryan budget is about the level of government we should expect. The alternative is to raise taxes (not just on the rich, but on the middle as well) to pay for more benefits. I'll be interested to see whether Obama's budget will embrace such tax increases or if it will instead decrease benefits. My hope is that he'll adopt the Simpson-Bowles' recommendations (which includes both tax increases and benefit cuts); my anticipation is that he will do neither, validating our collective cognitive dissonance.
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I've read the Brooks article. In my opinion, it's a joke. There are many arguments in there that don't hold up to any scrutiny whatsoever. Example:
quote:As my colleague David Leonhardt reported in The Times, two 56-years-olds with average earnings will pay about $140,000 in dedicated Medicare taxes over their lifetimes. They will receive about $430,000 in benefits. This is an immoral imposition on future generations.
That doesn't follow at all. Above-average wage earners will mostly receive no more benefits from Medicare than average ones (probably less, on average, since they may have actual insurance they like better). So it may be that their higher Medicare taxes will go quite some distance toward covering the cost of the average wage-earners.
Here's how much you should trust that Brooks article (it also addresses the issue of whether middle-class taxes would have to be raised to maintain our current level of spending):
quote:Fact-checking David Brooks could be a full-time job. Just yesterday, he wrote this about the federal budget problem:
>Raising taxes on the rich will not do it. There >aren’t enough rich people to generate the tens >of trillions of dollars required to pay for >Medicare, let alone all the other programs.
Almost every word of this is wrong.
Medicare doesn’t require “tens of trillions,” unless your budget horizon is something like twenty years. This year, Medicare will cost $572 billion. In 2020, according to the CBO, it will cost $949 billion. Over the next ten years, it will cost $7.6 trillion, which isn’t even a ten of trillion, much less “tens of trillions.”
...
Right now, the top 1% of the U.S. pop has something like $1.4 trillion in income. The next 4%, $1.3 trillion. The next 5% has almost a trillion. (Computed from Piketty and Saez data here.) In other words, you could entirely fund Medicare by hitting up the top 1% for about a third of its income. Yeah, I know that’s politically impossible, but they’ve got the money—we just can’t have any of it.
Of course this comes from a very liberal source, but the numbers by themselves are what matter to the point at hand, and I don't think he's lying about those.
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quote:In other words, you could entirely fund Medicare by hitting up the top 1% for about a third of its income.
Wow. If it takes 1/3 of the wealthiest one percent's income just to fund Medicare, let alone SS, defense, Medicaid and the rest, it seems to sort of prove the point. I'm not opposed to raising taxes, but I just don't think there's sufficient potential revenue in the top bracket to pay for spending at the current levels. Either something must be cut or taxes must be raised broadly. Preferably both (ala the Simpson-Bowles proposal).
From early tea-leaves reading (based mainly on stuff David Plouffe said over the weekend), it looks like Obama's proposed budget will increase top bracket taxes, leave middle class alone, and take a 'scalpel' to Medicare. I think he'll need to cut a lot with the scalpel to make up for not raising taxes more broadly.
<edit>And Henwood's suggestion of single-payer as the solution to the Medicare/Medicaid problem is short-sighted. During the 90s, US healthcare costs grew less rapidly than several single-payer systems. The problem of cost growth doesn't seem to have been solved in other countries that have moved to a single-payer system.</edit>
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Fair enough, but it was a thought experiment rather than a serious proposal. As he said, raising the top bracket taxes that much in the present environment would get you killed politically. The point was that Medicare is nowhere near as expensive as Brooks implied.
By "increase top bracket taxes," do you mean he'll actually raise them, or just roll back some of the unfunded temporary tax cuts put in place by Bush?
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: Fair enough, but it was a thought experiment rather than a serious proposal. As he said, raising the top bracket taxes that much in the present environment would get you killed politically. The point was that Medicare is nowhere near as expensive as Brooks implied.
By "increase top bracket taxes," do you mean he'll actually raise them, or just roll back some of the unfunded temporary tax cuts put in place by Bush?
I don't know. This article from Daily Kos explicitly links Plouffe's statements to repealing Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but I don't see that anywhere explicitly in the text of Plouffe's statements (but I haven't read a full transcript).
<edit>Here's the transcript from Meet the Press (note: the labels of who is speaking seem to be off) in which the only mention of the Bush tax cuts is by Paul Ryan saying his plan makes them permanent. I'm not sure why Kos thinks Plouffe was saying Obama's budget will roll back Bush tax cuts. That may have been his meaning, but it's not made explicit in his statements. Instead, he just says that those fortunate enough to have enough could pay "a little more.
Here's the quote:
quote:I think the president's goal, and he's been clear about this, is to protect the middle class as we move forward here. So people like him, as he'll say, who've been very fortunate in life, have the ability to pay a little bit more . Now, under the Republican Congressional plan, people over $250,000 get over a trillion in tax relief. So this is the important thing, you're making a choice. You're asking seniors and the middle class to pay more. You wouldn't be having to do that if you weren't giving the very, very wealthiest in this country just enormous tax relief.
From a framing perspective, Plouffe's use of "tax relief" should be really troubling to Progressives. He's already conceding the cognitive frame that taxes are a burden from which we need relief.</edit>
<edit2>Furthermore, if he's talking about repealing Bush tax cuts he's only talking about doing it for those with incomes over $250,000, essentially making the cuts on those below that threshold effectively permanent. Again, I think this should be very troubling to Progressives, because it means the President has already accepted that he can't raise taxes on the broad middle.</edit2>
quote:Originally posted by Destineer: So I take it nobody's actually defending the Paul Ryan budget?
Good.
Dest, I'm pretty sure you meant this as meaning that you are glad that no one here is supporting this budget and are glad for people's discernment, but I've got to say, it comes across as more than a little tinged with the idea that it's good that no one dares to express support of it here, no matter if they do support it. I think the latter idea, and I'm not saying that you intend it this way, something to shy away from even giving the impression of.
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I entirely agree, and I'm sorry if I gave anyone that impression. I can see how it might seem that way from the wording. There is some bullying that goes on here, and I don't want to be a part of that.
I was mainly trying to get at the fact that -- as was immediately pointed out by the careful commentators out there -- the Ryan budget simply ignores present-day realities about how much money is needed to run the government, instead pretending that we can dial general spending back to 19th-Century levels. In that sense it's not a serious proposal, and I would be sad to see people defending it.
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quote:From a framing perspective, Plouffe's use of "tax relief" should be really troubling to Progressives. He's already conceding the cognitive frame that taxes are a burden from which we need relief.
Yeah, hopefully it was a slip of the tongue. "Tax relief" is up there with "collateral damage" in my dictionary of favorite politically-whitewashed phrases.
quote:Furthermore, if he's talking about repealing Bush tax cuts he's only talking about doing it for those with incomes over $250,000, essentially making the cuts on those below that threshold effectively permanent. Again, I think this should be very troubling to Progressives, because it means the President has already accepted that he can't raise taxes on the broad middle.
I'm not sure I get why this should be a concern for liberals. He wants to tax the rich way more than the non-rich, and this should bother me why?
(Especially since the top 1% has been doing so very well compared with the middle class of late.)
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: I'm not sure I get why this should be a concern for liberals. He wants to tax the rich way more than the non-rich, and this should bother me why?
(Especially since the top 1% has been doing so very well compared with the middle class of late.)
From what I can tell, if you want to maintain spending at current levels (about 25% of GDP), you need to broaden the tax base, which means raising taxes on the middle class. Just raising taxes on the uppermost 1%, even if you raise those tax rates extremely high, won't do it; there just isn't enough potential revenue there. The other option is to cut government spending, which is (outside of Defense spending) something that Progressives (here and elsewhere) have generally equated with balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, elderly and defenseless. That's why I think Obama's insistence that a middle class tax increase is off the table should be troubling to Progressives.
<edit>I guess according to Reich, if we raise taxes on the wealthy to 70% (or 85% after including state and local taxes) that would generate enough revenue to keep spending at 25% of GDP. But Obama isn't proposing anything more than raising the top bracket to appr. 40%. If that's as far as he's willing to go, and there are no other increases to speak of, then the level of revenue won't be more than about 20% of GDP, by my rough calculation. If that's the case, then (absent eliminating all defense spending) Progressive favored programs have to be on the chopping block if we want a sustainable level of spending.</edit>
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it's that important to save those poor oppressed rich people and their diminishing share of the pie or something
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posted
If I can't trust someone to keep their promises, why would I believe that calling it a "covenant" and getting their signature in blood would make a difference?
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: If I can't trust someone to keep their promises, why would I believe that calling it a "covenant" and getting their signature in blood would make a difference?
Let us say you are hypothetically an old, white, heavily religious conservative easily pandered to?
*pans camera to crowd in video*
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: If I can't trust someone to keep their promises, why would I believe that calling it a "covenant" and getting their signature in blood would make a difference?
Let us say you are hypothetically an old, white, heavily religious conservative easily pandered to?
*pans camera to crowd in video*
Rabbit looks at crowd and wonders why "obese" seems to correlate with that same demographic.
[ April 13, 2011, 06:29 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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without the prominent obesity, you lose the dramatic irony when you have large quantities of health issues and diabetes that turn them into even more of a bubbling fiscal disaster under the ryan budget!
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: without the prominent obesity, you lose the dramatic irony when you have large quantities of health issues and diabetes that turn them into even more of a bubbling fiscal disaster under the ryan budget!
It really boggles the mind to think that the old, overweight guy with the cane on the front row is gung-ho to cut medicare and social security. Even if he is in the over $250,000 a year tax bracket (which seems improbable), paying his own medical bills is going to cost him a whole lot more than the proposed modest increase in his taxes.
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What do you guys think of the do nothing plan Slate proposed? They claim if Congress does nothing, everything will work out. The Bush tax cuts will be repealed giving us that revenue source, the AMT fix will go away giving money there, caps on paying medicaid drs will stay in place, cutting costs there, etc.
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: I'm not sure I get why this should be a concern for liberals. He wants to tax the rich way more than the non-rich, and this should bother me why?
(Especially since the top 1% has been doing so very well compared with the middle class of late.)
From what I can tell, if you want to maintain spending at current levels (about 25% of GDP), you need to broaden the tax base, which means raising taxes on the middle class. Just raising taxes on the uppermost 1%, even if you raise those tax rates extremely high, won't do it; there just isn't enough potential revenue there. The other option is to cut government spending, which is (outside of Defense spending) something that Progressives (here and elsewhere) have generally equated with balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, elderly and defenseless. That's why I think Obama's insistence that a middle class tax increase is off the table should be troubling to Progressives.
It should probably be troubling to progressives who think running a deficit during hard times is bad. I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that we still need to be stimulating growth at present.
Spending as a percentage of GDP was over 25% during the later Clinton years when there was a surplus. I would hope that when times are good again, it will be politically possible to return the tax rate to about the same level as it was then at all brackets, but for now that's not going to happen, and probably shouldn't.
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quote:Originally posted by SenojRetep: The other option is to cut government spending, which is (outside of Defense spending) something that Progressives (here and elsewhere) have generally equated with balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, elderly and defenseless.
As for defense spending, I think I'm one of the rare conservatives who would love to see some cuts to the military budget but i dont think it's a likely scenario. Both parties realize it's a politically dangerous proposal with consequences that shouldn't be overlooked.
According to some, drastic cuts to the defense budget would slow economic growth and deficit reduction. The military offers a way for many people of all demographics to get an education and income and represents a major employer in the US, both directly and indirectly.
What's more, statistics show most demographics -excepting Asians and women but including black and hispanic minorities and low-income earner - are proportionally represented in the military, but a decrease in military jobs would have a disproportionally negative effect on low-income earners and minorities. For the nation overall, jobs and contracts lost due to a decrease in the defense budget would add to unemployment and reduce taxable revenues. You simply cannot tax zero income.
And you have to assume the impact would be considerable because it's not as if the money is being spent elsewhere in the ecomomy for things like entitlements and social programs or education funds; its being use to pay down our enormous debt.
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quote:For the nation overall, jobs and contracts lost due to a decrease in the defense budget would add to unemployment and reduce taxable revenues. You simply cannot tax zero income.
This applies to pretty much any federal budget cut.
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I think it wouldn't be hard to maintain the areas where low-income/minority earners in the military are unaffected, while cutting a fair bit of largess (like private contractors and/or mega-corps like Boeing)
Maybe I'm wrong about the distribution of military money, though.
quote: As for defense spending, I think I'm one of the rare conservatives who would love to see some cuts to the military budget but i dont think it's a likely scenario.
You are not that rare, as long as they are making the right cuts. Every federal program is loaded with fat that needs to be trimmed. For instance, there are a lot of bases that should be closed but won't be because of job losses and re-election hopes.
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Its pretty well established that defense spending has less economic impact (dollar per dollar) than any other government program.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: It really boggles the mind to think that the old, overweight guy with the cane on the front row is gung-ho to cut medicare and social security. Even if he is in the over $250,000 a year tax bracket (which seems improbable), paying his own medical bills is going to cost him a whole lot more than the proposed modest increase in his taxes. [/QB]
Lots of people believe in causes that do not benefit them personally.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: It really boggles the mind to think that the old, overweight guy with the cane on the front row is gung-ho to cut medicare and social security. Even if he is in the over $250,000 a year tax bracket (which seems improbable), paying his own medical bills is going to cost him a whole lot more than the proposed modest increase in his taxes.
Lots of people believe in causes that do not benefit them personally. [/QB]
quote:President Obama and Paul Ryan are two of the smartest, most admirable and most genial men in Washington. It is sad, although not strange, that in today’s Washington they have never had a serious private conversation. The president has never invited Ryan over even for lunch.
As a result, both men are misinformed about the other, and both have developed a cold contempt for the other’s position. Obama believes Ryan wants to take America back to what he sees as the savage capitalism of the 1920s (or even the 1760s). Ryan believes Obama wants to turn America into a declining European welfare state.
Talk about false equivalence! Whatever the two gentlemen in question may intend, only one of them has put forward a plan that could actually be implemented without serious bad side effects.
And here he seems to be getting nostalgic for the insane idea of "privatizing social security."
quote:Every few years, Republicans try to reform the welfare delivery systems to make them more marketlike. Every few years, voters, even Republican voters, reject this.
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: It really boggles the mind to think that the old, overweight guy with the cane on the front row is gung-ho to cut medicare and social security. Even if he is in the over $250,000 a year tax bracket (which seems improbable), paying his own medical bills is going to cost him a whole lot more than the proposed modest increase in his taxes.
Lots of people believe in causes that do not benefit them personally.
Indeed. [/QB]
Certainly, but fairly few fight for causes that are to their detriment.
I myself have voted to raise my own taxes, but then I'm well enough off that I didn't need to go without anything important to pay the added tax. That isn't true for most people on Medicare. A cut in their benefits would be a real burden.
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quote:Certainly, but fairly few fight for causes that are to their detriment.
I don't know that that is accurate. People are often manipulated to be really committed to work against their own interests. Race baiting is a pretty clear example.
I think that the Tea party fight against health reform is another pretty obvious one.
If you can get people to buy into your narrative, it's pretty remarkable how badly you can get them to screw themselves before they'll check it. If you really do it right, the fact that they are obviously screwing themselves will get them to buy into your narrative even more.
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quote:President Obama and Paul Ryan are two of the smartest, most admirable and most genial men in Washington. It is sad, although not strange, that in today’s Washington they have never had a serious private conversation. The president has never invited Ryan over even for lunch.
As a result, both men are misinformed about the other, and both have developed a cold contempt for the other’s position. Obama believes Ryan wants to take America back to what he sees as the savage capitalism of the 1920s (or even the 1760s). Ryan believes Obama wants to turn America into a declining European welfare state.
Talk about false equivalence! Whatever the two gentlemen in question may intend, only one of them has put forward a plan that could actually be implemented without serious bad side effects.
And only one of them has put forward a plan that honestly deals with the government's inability to keep up with healthcare costs. The 'bad side effects' are a recognition that the government can't continue to pay more and more of the pie to healthcare costs. I don't like the privatized solution Ryan proposes, but the only reason Obama's plan (and the House Democrats' plan) don't have "serious bad side effects" is because they turn a blind eye to the healthcare cost growth.
I think there are a lot of positives in Obama's plan; I think taxes should be higher (both on the wealthy and less wealthy) and that Defense should be cut (along with farm subsidies and a host of other budget items). But without a hard commitment to index healthcare entitlement growth to the equivalent year-to-year rise in GDP, I feel like the President's plan amounts to kicking the real problem of entitlement growth down the road.
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MrSquicky, I guess what I meant is quite rare for people to fight for causes which "they believe" will be to their detriment.
I agree that its fairly common to see people fighting against their own interests, but it still boggles my mind to see them doing it.
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One would almost think paul here is relieved
quote:Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, sounds upset. And you can see why: President Obama, to the great relief of progressives, has called his bluff.
Last week, Mr. Ryan unveiled his budget proposal, and the initial reaction of much of the punditocracy was best summed up (sarcastically) by the blogger John Cole: “The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious?”
Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.
quote: The 'bad side effects' are a recognition that the government can't continue to pay more and more of the pie to healthcare costs.
I was mainly talking about the bad side effects of reducing non-entitlement spending to the level it was at in 1920 (including defense!). This is what the Ryan budget proposes, and it could not be done without wrecking the government and civil society.
Of the two plans on offer, one of them (like you say) puts off dealing with certain inconvenient realities about healthcare costs. But the other one, if implemented, would lead to an immediate collapse of the nation's military and infrastructure. This is the sense in which Obama's plan is much more "serious" than Ryan's.
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quote:I was mainly talking about the bad side effects of reducing non-entitlement spending to the level it was at in 1920 (including defense!). This is what the Ryan budget proposes, and it could not be done without wrecking the government and civil society.
Who's telling you that? It isn't true.
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