Losing Our Way

[Gerald]

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/op...erbert.html?bl


Note: March 25, 2011

[tater]

The US already spends too much on public education. The average is around what I pay for private school. In NYC and other urban areas, public school spending per student is well above what I pay per kid. Do they have 14-16 kids per class with virtually all the kids finishing grade school with excellent academics? Didn't think so.

I'm with you on the expense of Libya, etc, but some of the "usual suspects" for where money should go instead are false choices, IMHO. Better to cut spending, then pay of debt, then with whatever is left over, cut taxes (there won't be any left over any time soon). Edu is the bulk of most state budgets, too, so it should get cut first, not last—it's not like the end product is an intelligent electorate, I'd be willing to be more HS kids (public) would be able to tell you some trivia about virtually any celebrity, and nothing at all about WW2, or even the Revolutionary War period.

[Growler]

The simplest distillation of the current situation is that nothing is working as may have been initially intended. Education, as tater pointed out, is plainly broken. Social services = broke. Election processes = broke. Accountability of elected officials = broke. Corporate responsibility extends now only to shareholder dividends on a quarterly basis - that's three months. If a retailer isn't reporting double digit sales growth every three months, they're a failure. That kind of growth isn't sustainable; the only way to achieve those kind of profits is to cut other expenses - lower lighting levels at night, fewer on-hand employees, reduced benefits, lower salaries. Eventually, you get what exists today: Salaries too low to pay for people to even live in the communities where they work, or unemployment, creating a strain on social services that could otherwise be more efficient in helping others, ramping up their costs, which leads to calls for tax hikes, ad nauseum.

What's called for is a wholesale revamp of the way this country does business - literally and figuratively. We cannot continue to support a Congress and White House - either party - that is controlled by what the chief "sponsors" tell them to do. They're no longer accountable to the public they allegedly serve; they've become lackeys of special interests on all sides, at all levels. Both parties are experts at spin, making it look like the other guys' sides' fault, while the special interests go marching along with their agendas and benefits.

Meanwhile, we need to see fair wages instituted for workers, and jobs kept in this country. In order to do that, this quarterly profit sharing dividends model bullpucky has to stop. The reason jobs are outsourced is because they're cheaper, which leads to more profits to keep the shareholders happy. We have become a nation ruled by shareholders who, by their power, dictate what they want from business, who then goes to Washington to get what they need to post those profits from Congress, who pays for it all off of taxpayer dollars. That model has to change.

But it won't. We still believe in some dude who created all of the world, to whom we owe our very souls, and who will reward us for being sheep in this life by making us shepherds in the next. So if we can still, after all the advances of society and technology, believe in a middle-ages-serf-control method today, why should the lords change anything about how they work, either?

[Takeda Shingen]

Education spending did not cause this crisis, nor does it perpetuate it. What we are seeing is what Rahm Emanuel summarized as 'not letting a crisis go to waste'. Education spending has long been in the crosshairs of the right, and we now see that they use the current problems as an excuse to take care of an old enemy. So much for the argument of moral superiority.

[Wolfehunter]

Originally Posted by Growler

But it won't. We still believe in some dude who created all of the world, to whom we owe our very souls, and who will reward us for being sheep in this life by making us shepherds in the next. So if we can still, after all the advances of society and technology, believe in a middle-ages-serf-control method today, why should the lords change anything about how they work, either?

So true... so true.

[gimpy117]

being 19, and ready to come of age in this world...this article depresses me. Hell maybe I should learn Swedish and move there or something. Even the women are hotter there.

[Gerald]

Originally Posted by gimpy117

being 19, and ready to come of age in this world...this article depresses me. Hell maybe I should learn Swedish and move there or something. Even the women are hotter there.

Are you really sure that they are better in Sweden instead of U.S.? Personally, I think the opposite (sometimes), but it depends on the time and opportunity

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by Vendor

Are you really sure that they are better in Sweden instead of U.S.? Personally, I think the opposite (sometimes), but it depends on the time and opportunity

Alas, a lot of us Americans grew up on the glorious myth of the Swedish Bikini Team.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Bikini_Team

The Swedish Bikini Team was a group of American female models who appeared in an advertising campaign for Old Milwaukee beer. These commercials ran for several months in 1991 in the United States, playing with American stereotypes of Scandinavian women being blonde and having big breasts. The premise of the commercials was that a group of bored or thirsty men were "saved" by the Swedish Bikini Team. Other commercials would focus on a group of men male bonding on a hunting trip and saying "Guys, it does not get any better than this", to which a narrator would say the man was wrong and an Old Milwaukee truck would drive miles off road towards them claiming "it improved", "..and when the Swedish Bikini Team showed up, it got somewhat better."

[Gerald]

Originally Posted by Torplexed

Alas, a lot of us Americans grew up on the glorious myth of the Swedish Bikini Team.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Bikini_Team

Not invite him to some temptation now

[UnderseaLcpl]

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent

I always hate hearing stuff like this. I hate it because that kind of inequality is indeed scandalous. I hate it because even with stats like that, the bottom 80% of the US is a damn sight better off than 90% of the world. But mostly, I hate it because it's almost always part of an argument that is indicative of a desire to force a redistribution of wealth, which in turn requires government intervention.

Contrary to popular belief, the US government doesn't actually redistribute wealth in the way people hope it will. What it does do is akin to distributing a pie somebody else made by eating a disproportionate share of the pie itself, passing what's left to the fatties most interested in eating the pie, and then redistributing the leftovers to those most in need as defined by who is the most popular. Unfortunately, it doesn't have enough pie for all of that so it borrows or steals pies from people who made them. But, there still isn't enough to go around so it starts gradually diluting the pie filling so that more pies can be made, though they won't be as good. While it does all this, it loudly proclaims to everyone in the room that it is doing good work and, in fact, made all these pies. Then it repeats the process, but faster the next time. Even when the pie-makers start leaving because they are tired of having their pies stolen and distributed thusly, the government just keeps doing it until there is no pie left.

Actually, that's not the best analogy. What government actually does is so unrelated to any other entity in existence that no real analogy can be made that I am aware of. The best I can do is just point out the results. That's what the author of the article is doing. And somehow, he thinks the same agency that either created these problems or allowed them to happen is going to fix them? New leadership? Really?

Government is not some genie that will magically fix things just because you ask it to. It's just a bunch of people. And no matter how smart or well-intentioned those people are, or how you go about finding smart, well-intentioned people in the first place they are not smarter than millions of people working for their own benefit. That holds true in the case of both wealth-creators and lobbyists. Business will always capture the regulators. The stricter the limitations on government, the longer it takes to happen, but it will always happen.

The author of the article apparently does not realize that. Presumably, he is in favor of more regulation. Many people are. They think that if the regulations were just a little more plentiful, or a little stricter, or a little more well-written, they'd close all these loopholes that the monied upper-class uses to cheat the little guy. I can understand that. Hell, I'll even cede the argument (in this thread only). Effective regulation is a good way to redistribute wealth, except it often ends up redistributing it right out of the country. I'm actually kind of happy about that bit. There are a lot of suffering people in this world who live terrible lives and could use the work. But no, all of the sudden that's a bad thing for people who want the wealth to be redistributed. As it turns out, what they really wanted was for wealth to be redistributed to them.

Now that we've established that, let's look at what they did when they realized that wealth distribution wasn't going the way they planned. Of course, they asked the government to help, and it tried. Protectionist trade law in the US (tariffs, quotas, etc) is so mind-bogglingy huge and complex that I can't even describe it without going beyond even my very lax standards for post length. Or the character limit. Or even human comprehension. There's not one person alive who understands all of it. In response, business did exactly what people do. Where it could adapt, it did, and where it couldn't it just left. You want to complain about outsourcing, go ahead and point that finger right at a mirror. All those pages of trade regs didn't preserve any jobs. The US export industry is all but dead in every case where the work could be done elsewhere. I could bitch further about how all that law is completely unfair to people who are a lot worse off than self-centered a-holes complaining about self-centered corporate a-holes, but I trust the point is made.

Fighting business is like trying to wrestle water. It's pointless, tiring, does nothing but shift water about, and no matter how you go about it you still end up wet. All in the name of fighting something that makes your life possible.

I can't really blame the author for his views. Nor can I blame the people who unwittingly demanded that government outsource their own jobs. They're just people being people. Unsuprisingly, that's what people do best, and most often. Unless they're zombies, of course. I will, however, blame the government, which, as I said, is just a bunch of people. When you give people power like that you're just asking for abuse. I don't blame the people themselves, even when they are career politicians. They're just doing what we gave them incentive to do. But it needs to stop.

Private industry, on the other hand, is also just people doing what we gave them incentive to do. It extracts things. It manufactures things. It serves you because you have somthing to offer in trade because you served other people. Everybody who can make pies is making pies! For everyone! Unless you can't afford them of course, in which case people made wealthy by pie-making will just give you pies for free! And that's actual free, not "free" stolen from someone else. Or maybe you don't like pie. Maybe you like cake. Maybe you like sausage. It doesn't matter. Private industry generates so much choice that we had to invent supermarkets just to keep up with all the demand. Thousands of channels on TV. Hundreds of millions of websites. Billions of books on every subject ever, and some subjects that aren't subjects at all. Simply by letting people be people without fiat power.

[Blood_splat]

[Gerald]

No Taxes....

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organizes habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society: Edward Bernayes 1920s USA.

I hope the peoples of England wake up soon before this generation of middle class leaders (and liars) get us all into another world war, because the next one could be the last one. This oil lust will be the undoing of all that is good, if it's not to late already.

It is necessary to disagree with everyone who would control your spirit, therein is Freedom.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honour, duty; mercy; hope. Winston Churchill.

[AngusJS]

Originally Posted by Growler

The reason jobs are outsourced is because they're cheaper, which leads to more profits to keep the shareholders happy. We have become a nation ruled by shareholders who, by their power, dictate what they want from business, who then goes to Washington to get what they need to post those profits from Congress, who pays for it all off of taxpayer dollars. That model has to change.

But it won't. We still believe in some dude who created all of the world, to whom we owe our very souls, and who will reward us for being sheep in this life by making us shepherds in the next. So if we can still, after all the advances of society and technology, believe in a middle-ages-serf-control method today, why should the lords change anything about how they work, either?

QFT

[Ducimus]

I always hate hearing stuff like this. I hate it because that kind of inequality is indeed scandalous. I hate it because even with stats like that, the bottom 80% of the US is a damn sight better off than 90% of the world. I hate it because it's almost always part of an argument that is indicative of a desire to force a redistribution of wealth, which in turn requires government intervention.

UnderseaLcpl, last i checked this is the United States, not F'ing China or India. You've used that part in the bold before, and what it seems to me your really saying is, "Your not living in huts, so STFU". What you are arguing for, IS a redesitribution of wealth, in and of itself. Your arguing that it is ok to redistribute American wealth, across the globe, because we aren't living in huts.

Well, yeah, it's true, we don't live in huts, but this is the United States of America. Places like China or Inida is there, and this is here, and HERE is what matters. Here we have and should have higher standards, and you should expect no less for your home country! In order to ensure that, and to preserve the American way of life, we need to look after our own people.. You know.. looking out for your own? Didn't they teach you that in the Marine Corp?