He murders like three people...he is an anti hero. So, despite his politics being so funky it -did- cause me to comment to my wife (I understand that entitlements are a tiny part of the budget...military spending is WAY worse) but I don't really expect reality from my entertainment.
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I think the point is that in that series, for the Underwoods, partisan politics and just about all issues anytime are almost completely incidental to their own ambition. They don't go out of their way to betray anyone or any interest, but it is never, ever off the table. Nor is making friends with anyone ever off the table.
Setting all of that aside, once you discover who the mastermind is of so many things in series 2, how anyone would call it a pro-republican piece is pretty silly to me. In fact just about the only politician in the series who retains any ethical core I can recall is an old-school liberal democrat.
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I understand that entitlements are a tiny part of the budget...military spending is WAY worse
This is ludicrously false.
As of 2013, entitlements accounted for 49% of federal spending. That's $1.6 trillion dollars. DoD budget for that year was $633 billion, with another $138 billion for Veterans affairs.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I think the point is that in that series, for the Underwoods, partisan politics and just about all issues anytime are almost completely incidental to their own ambition. They don't go out of their way to betray anyone or any interest, but it is never, ever off the table. Nor is making friends with anyone ever off the table.
Setting all of that aside, once you discover who the mastermind is of so many things in series 2, how anyone would call it a pro-republican piece is pretty silly to me. In fact just about the only politician in the series who retains any ethical core I can recall is an old-school liberal democrat.
Salon did an interview with Beau Willimon about Francis' political party. (which, as it turns out, is a very well thought out choice) He had this to say:
quote:The broader point of “House of Cards” is that anyone is fair game, no matter what side of the aisle they are on. You could easily write this story about a Republican congressman as well, but we wanted to dramatize the fact that these sort of creatures live on either side of the aisle.
The things people will find objectionable about Underwood will be about deeper ethical belief systems that transcend political affiliation. If you look at Underwood and what he’s actually doing, he is not someone who binds himself to any particular ideology. His ideology is quicksand, and he would say that the only way to truly survive in Washington and to be effective is to be adaptable.
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Something to consider also in simpler terms, SW: American military spending is still, I believe, in excess of the next, is it still a dozen or has it dropped some?, next most wealthy nations on earth.
As Dogbreath has mentioned, our military spending is more than doubled by entitlement spending. As a nation compared to other nations, we are absurdly, incredibly wealthy.
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I understand that entitlements are a tiny part of the budget...military spending is WAY worse
This is ludicrously false.
As of 2013, entitlements accounted for 49% of federal spending. That's $1.6 trillion dollars. DoD budget for that year was $633 billion, with another $138 billion for Veterans affairs.
Oh, thanks, I had that wrong
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I have a question tho, is there a delineation between those who have paid into the system their whole lives and are receiving money that is -theirs-...and those that qualify for help simply because of their demographics? Or are both of these considered "entitlements"?
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quote:Originally posted by Dogbreath: Salon did an interview with Beau Willimon about Francis' political party. (which, as it turns out, is a very well thought out choice) He had this to say:
quote:The broader point of “House of Cards” is that anyone is fair game, no matter what side of the aisle they are on. You could easily write this story about a Republican congressman as well, but we wanted to dramatize the fact that these sort of creatures live on either side of the aisle.
The things people will find objectionable about Underwood will be about deeper ethical belief systems that transcend political affiliation. If you look at Underwood and what he’s actually doing, he is not someone who binds himself to any particular ideology. His ideology is quicksand, and he would say that the only way to truly survive in Washington and to be effective is to be adaptable.
This is exactly what I was getting at...Frank Underwood is evil first, not a democrat or a republican. Whatever label he hides behind, who he is at the end of the day is a blindly ambitious villain, more consumed by worries of his legacy than helping anyone at all.
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I carefully read the thread title...and see that I was likely arguing against my own misunderstanding, and that in all likelihood everyone in this thread is in agreement. Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Oh, to me it is a bit more complicated than simply calling him evil and letting it lie at that. He is, of course, by most definitions, that's unmistakable.
It's just that 'helping people' comes a distinct second to his ambitions and power. With complete reliability. But once that's satisfied, he will help people and even take pleasure in it if they're close to him.
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He's not pure evil...sure, but it is his defining quality...not evil...but ambition...blind ambition specifically.
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As for me, I wouldn't say blind but rather primary. The entire first season is about him exercising patience in pursuit of ambition, among other things.
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However to clarify, I think his ambition is blind in that his ambition is to become as powerful and noteworthy as possible...and not specifically -for- anything. Not all of his tactics are blind. Just that his actual goal is nebulous power.
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Someone really liberal would say that Underwood's AmWorks is still socialist, because subsidizing wages is ultraineffective. Someone really liberal would say that it's not jobs that people need, but money. People usually don't need jobs to live, people need money. Work is just one of many possible sources of money. Thus, all entitlements should be prohibited and this action alone would improve everybody's well-being, since that would leave more money in people's pockets. Own money is 3-4 times more efficient than tax money spent on the same thing. Everything would be cheaper, creating more jobs thanks to the invisible.
I don't know why I wrote that. Anyway, AmWorks sounded really nice to me. Like a taste of a laissez faire past, that will never come back.
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How on earth is a massive government funded infrastructure and temp agency jobs plan laissez-faire?
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I have a question tho, is there a delineation between those who have paid into the system their whole lives and are receiving money that is -theirs-...and those that qualify for help simply because of their demographics? Or are both of these considered "entitlements"?
It's hard to answer this question because I'm not clear on what you're asking.
Are you asking what the amounts for social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare is? Those are listed discretely in the link I provided. Social Security is a little under half of all entitlements.
As far as money that is "theirs", do you mean this in an abstract moral sense or a real sense? In reality, none of it is theirs. Social security is ponzi scheme - the money you and I put in isn't invested and returned to us with interest. It's paid to current retirees, and we hope that it will be paid to us when we retire. In reality, it's very quickly ballooning out of control (thanks to the same Baby Boomers who so love to deride my generation), and will almost certainly not exist in it's current form by the time we retire. The money they're collecting isn't the money they put in - it's the money we're paying in taxes. The money they put in was squandered many years ago.
Whether or not they *should* get that money is a whole different discussion and probably not as simple as you might imagine, but that has no impact on the numbers involved or what they mean.
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I understand that entitlements are a tiny part of the budget...military spending is WAY worse
This is ludicrously false.
As of 2013, entitlements accounted for 49% of federal spending. That's $1.6 trillion dollars. DoD budget for that year was $633 billion, with another $138 billion for Veterans affairs.
Ummmm, the links make me suspect something isn't accurate about that figure.
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quote: Whether or not they *should* get that money is a whole different discussion and probably not as simple as you might imagine...
How so? They paid in...they were made promises. Morally it seems kinda b&w.
Yeah, if you think of it in black and white terms.
The average person will get back north of $400,000 in social security and medicare ($417,000 for men, $464,000 for women, source) which is $72,000 or $192,000 more than they paid into the system respectively. Married couples are better off, averaging $300,000 more than they paid in. This isn't money paid into a mutual fund accruing interest, mind you, quite the opposite: the debt we've run up to pay out entitlements is something we *pay* interest on, so the actual gap is much worse.
More to the point, though, who deserves entitlements? By your "b&w" logic here, the more you pay into the system the more you should get out, right? That's only "fair". But someone who has paid millions of dollars in social security and medicare taxes probably *needs* neither of them, since they probably have more than enough wealth to retire on. (if they were at all smart and created a retirement account) Whereas someone who has only paid, say, $50,000 total in entitlement taxes over their lifetime because they live in poverty probably needs the entitlements the most, but again, by your "b&w" logic, they'd get practically nothing.
And what about the flipside, here? Should you penalize those who were frugal and saved for their retirement by not giving them the same entitlements their neighbor who blew all their money on big screen TVs and financing credit card debt?
Once you start getting into who "deserves" social security and medicare, the system breaks down. Which is why applying morality to it in your black and white manner is stupid and dangerous. What's more pressing here is the raw numbers - half of all our government spending goes towards entitlement, and that number is rising rapidly. At some point we'll simply no longer be able to afford entitlements as they currently exist, so we'll either enact entitlement reform or go bankrupt and not be able to pay them. Either way, things are going to have to change, and I think when they do it needs to be with a system that addresses what people *need* and not what they deserve. You can check out Lyrhawn and my discussion about a guaranteed minimum income for some ideas on how to solve this.
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quote:Carolla may be one of the last free white men in America.
What
Yeah that was particularly bizarre. Especially given that despite his brashness and non-PC humor, Carolla is about as racially egalitarian as a moderate conservative can be- probably more so than most liberals, because he has a long history of working with immigrants. To listen to his talk about illegal immigration, you'd not peg him for a conservative ideologue at all: he respects people who work hard, and he doesn't respect the letter of the law that protects the rich and lazy.
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