Simple insult =/= persuasive argument.

If an argument cannot be made without insults, then maybe it's not such a good argument.

Funding to NOAA was just cut, because you know, cut funding to government programs that actually work, then they can claim they don't work and can privatize them, subsequently costing the taxpayers more in consumer spending. Yep, NOAA has to drop 2 satellites, a government program that has worked very well for decades.

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/17/137251742/blind-eye-in-the-sky-weather-satellites-lose-funding

Lesson to all: if you have a government program that works, you can get rid of that pesky counter argument to your dogma by simply defunding it until it doesn't anymore.

I have one thing to say about how easy it is to break programs.

I'm in NJ...now a lot of people probably DON'T realize this, or do and are dumber then I thought, but our governor fucked Jersey over financially with grants for education and road work. He then cut all public Education funding and has repeatedly talked about how the education system in NJ is failing and that our best option is to remove it completely and favor a completely private education system.

It's not difficult to break a working program, in fact it's so easy even a complete moron can do it blindfolded, and most of the time it's so easy to break them in such a way where it looks NATURAL to most people. This is a problem most of these programs have, no one cares once they get started to keep watch on the people in our government.

Of course it is. What else would it be?

Sure. But don't ignore that in America, "it's the economy, stupid." Whatever programs are chosen to be implemented, they don't happen without a source of funding. And that source is the economy. As the economy declines, so does the funding available to support any gov't spending. Pretty basic stuff.

Um, flexibility is one of the basic things that defines an economy. So yeah. Not sure what your point is, since putting more of the economy into the hands of one entity (federal budget increasing as a percentage of GDP) decreases that flexibility.

And? The important one here is the one we currently operate under.

Improved by labor laws, not by a social spending that eats up 80-100% of the federal tax revenue, depending on which programs one includes.

For ALL was not the original intent of those programs.

Again, ~80% of our federal tax revenue goes toward the big three social programs alone. If we include the rest of the smaller social engineering programs, it's 100%. That's before we spend a single cent on police, education, infrastructure, military, NASA, and anything else.

Tell you what, take away all military and foreign spending. Every dollar of it. Where does that leave the budget? Still spending more than the incoming revenue, by about 15-20%.

As a family, we're doing alright with 40% going elsewhere. But I have to say that 40% from a middle class family is enough. I don't buy into the notion that not paying even more tax is going to put future generations in abject poverty; if anything, it puts my own family closer to poverty. You know what fixes poverty? Employment, not $2 trillion annually in social programs.

The math + historical charts show a low-wage worker (let's call it $10 an hour) would be better off at retirement (larger nest egg than what SS pays out) if, over his or her lifetime, in place of deducting 12.4% FICA for SS he had instead made reasonable private investments with the same money at 6%. And that includes big market drops like the Great Depression, and all recessions since then.

Are you really willing to maintain the status quo that is doing a worse job than what the working poor could do on their own if those funds instead went straight into a private investment vehicle?

Speaking of which, let's look at it further. I think the current poverty rate is sitting at 14.3%, or 43.6 million people here in the States. Of the $2 trillion in social spending, roughly $600 billion is used to deal with poverty in some manner or another. That's approaching an even $14,000 per year, per person, in poverty. If we simply gave out that money as-is, per person, a family of four would take in an amount not that far from what our family earns, or $56,000. For a non-working wage.

Am I the only one to whom that sounds a little... off? Am I the only who thinks that there is already enough money in federal hands to take care of the truly needy around here? If we can't deal with poverty at $14,000 per person...

Fine. In the US, we don't have a sustainable program for the long haul. Don't mistake my concern over the direction these things are taking for a lack of concern that we do them at all. An old saw says "anything worth doing is worth doing well". We're not doing them well, both from a service standpoint and as bang-for-the-buck.

Expanding the scope of the social programs we have today, that already have big structural problems, is not the solution. It simply isn't. Label it misguided, greedy, I don't care. It's the reality. It will not function as is, and it will not function by simply adding on more of the same. This is where your abject poverty comes from, continuing to do exactly what it is we're doing today, and increasing the funding from private sources until everyone is in poverty.

Funny, my own state has increased that spending since the 90s. So I guess my "impression" comes from, well, what has actually happened. Surprising no one, along with it came growing budget deficits. Ditto the federal side of things, including a massive jump in anti-poverty spending under GWB. We almost instituted universal coverage in this state, just a few years ago, that would have increased the budget outlays by nearly 60%, with much of that money coming from a huge increase in business taxes. Again, unsustainable.

I could not agree more. This is why I support State's Rights, as outlined in our US Constitution.

Who is pushing for that? If you want, we can go into how a fair portion of the population already works 50 hours per week, and why.

A godlike entity with a narrow will that dictates how we live our lives.

It favors hardship and monastic living for the many while guaranteeing opulent living for the few.

It doesn't care much for the welfare of future generation and doesn't understand concepts that can't be readily monetized.


Actually, rampant capitalism, but ok.

Yes, hence why you don't want to concentrate wealth in too few hands.

Money is printed or generated abstractly in some databases.

To a large extent, we as a society, are responsible about the way it is distributed.

And different people have different definition of what it means to have a booming economy.

For some, it implies more profits for corporations and less for the overall population.

When a company makes profits by employing labor in China, it is not good for the economy.

When a company makes profits by exploiting a limited PUBLIC natural resource (pocketing the lion's share of the profits of course), polluting a lot and leaving the locals to cleanup the mess, it is not good for the economy.

If you look at how slowly our economy reacts to things like peak oil or how it ignores those with special needs (because the profit margin is not big enough), you have to come to the conclusion that market economic engine is not flexible enough on its own.

And lets not forget how badly market economy ends up treating it's labor without outside intervention.

I'm not saying market economy is the devil, but you can't base your entire political philosophy on market economy alone.

Following that line of thought, there shouldn't be any reforms ever.

Social spending and labor laws go hand in hand.

If someone is overly dependent on his current job, he doesn't have much of an incentive to challenge upper management or his employer by unionizing.

If someone wants to start a company, but has no coverage whatsoever (like health care for example if he breaks his leg, god forbit), you intrinsically tie economic enterprise to existing capital =and put upward mobility on a standstill.

Dude, if you live in the US, you have the most cutting edge military there is and your country is embroiled in 2 wars.

As a rationally thinking individual, you cannot possibly think that more money goes into wealthfare than the army.



Well, duh. Taxes should be scaled by income (if you are dirt poor, you pay little taxes, if you are Bill Gates, you pay 50% taxes).

By law, anything over 40 hours is overtime and paid time and a half.

Employees in the public sector already enjoy this as do those with strong unions.

I understand why you are saying (I worked as a non-unionized programmer, I know what unpaid overtime is), but what I'm saying is that it should be illegal (companies that pressure their labor to do unpaid overtime should be fined and possibly go to jail).

Most of that screed is disjointed gibberish, so I'll leave it at this:

Umm, $2 trillion to social programs is more than the ridiculous ~$800 billion for the military. The ridiculous $800 billion for the military is less than the ~$1.5 deficit. So rationally thinking, there is absolutely no other conclusion that one can reach because the math doesn't work any other way.

Math: live it, learn it, love it.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/tables.pdf

Well you're not exactly drowning in alternatives over there, are you?

Because I don't meet the argumentation on your terms, my argumentation is meritless?

That's like a chess player telling his opponent what moves he's allowed to make.

I guess I won't waste any more of my time debating this topic with you.

As Hugh Segal would say, have fun living in the basement I guess.

Sorry - that was a bit dick-ish of me. Frustration from something else today manifested itself here, and for that I apologize.

I have to ask, because it went unanswered and my curiosity is piqued: have you heard of some right-wingers pushing for a 50-hour work week?

Yeah, I shouldn't have taken it that badly. Fiery temperament.

Some bonehead politician here mentioned that it would be good for the economy if we increased the employment week to 50 hours.

Now, my problem with that is the following:

When I was a pre-university student looking for work, the only jobs I could find was minimum wage work 1.5 hours away from home (that is on over 100 applications per summer).

When I was doing my university work terms, I would only scrape employment toward the end of the pre-work semester and it would never be with a technology I know (I basically had to learn a brand new technology for each of my work term, what I complete waste of time... I think there are too many programming languages out there).

When I finished university, I had to apply to 50 something places, before someone got back to me for an interview and I lost the job later when the company fell on hard times.

So, I get the distinct impression there is a lack of work.

Now, meanwhile, I heard that Ericsson opening a studio in China and closing the one in Montreal and during an interview for one of my work terms, the employer tells me straight up that they are doing all their development in some Eastern Bloc country (dirt cheap) and only doing quality testing in Montreal.

That is the bright Right Winger globalization agenda in a nutshell for you.

And what is the Right Wing wants to add as a supplemental solution to the problem? Of course, increase the work week to 50 hours so that instead of hiring 5 employees, you can hire just 4 (creating less work) and milk them for all they are worth until they burnout.

This is the type of economic solution I've heard my entire life from the pro industry forces.

Don't get me wrong, It's great if you're a big enterprise, but it sucks for the middle and lower classes

So, the basic life lesson I learned is that 'Good Economy' != 'Prosperity'.

BTW, concerning the wealthfare vs military spending in the US:

Welfare is ~232,596,000,000$ yearly (given that 9.1% of the working age population is on welfare, that half the population is of working age and that someone receives 600$ a month on welfare).

Army cost 687,105,000,000$ yearly on 2010.

Times are tough. Budget cuts have forced me to light my cigars with $50 bills; like a commoner! :(

Ah, you're talking specifically Welfare and I'm using the more general social spending outside of Medicare and SS. Even so, we could do away with all of that military money (and the millions of jobs it supports) and there would still be a big deficit caused by social spending.

Now I wouldn't call the globalization of labor specifically a right-wing phenomena; instead it's often considered left-wing ideology here in the US. The decidedly left-wing Apple Corp, for instance, shuffles a whole bunch of work to these cheaper labor markets, too.

It's not just that labor is cheap elsewhere, but that it can also be quite expensive to operate in the modernized nations like the USA and Canada. Employment taxes, benefits, worker's comp, OSHA compliance, liability insurance, etc, are things we pay for here that the manufacturer in Beijing probably doesn't spend nearly as much on. These are forces outside of the control of the domestic manufacturer, and when foreign-based competition enters the marketplace at a lower price with those cost advantages, the domestics are going to have a tough time keeping market share and profitability and thus may not be able to remain competitive while retaining its own domestic employees.

There are some domestic hiring issues in particular that I see in my job, where I travel to various manufacturers in a particular industry (wood) and consult on machinery:

- a lot of instability yet in many markets, so the work schedule is like a roller coaster: busy for a couple months, then finding make-work for the employees the next month. Not many of my customers are hiring permanent employees because they're having a tough time figuring out when it's going to level off. Some companies are staying quite stable but they're the exception.

- hiring costs, especially in light of the market roller coaster. A company can spend anywhere form a few hundred dollars to a few thousand just to get a new production worker ready to start the first day.

- ongoing labor costs beyond just the salary, including uncertainty about the costs of health insurance reform and other measures.

Of the owners I talk with, they would really like to hire new people but they can't justify it when another big dip might be just around the corner (we're in one now). So instead, the existing employees put in OT when it's busy and go back to 40 hours or less when it's slow. The employees get a boost in their paycheck for a while, the owner doesn't spend two or three grand to hire a new employee who may or may not work out (a bigger problem when unemployment is low), and there's no layoff three months later when business dries up again. That's how it's been for almost three years now. In my industry, nearly everyone I talk to has slowed down, whereas things were going quite well the first three months of this year. My own business reflects the same thing: dog-slow right now, and it has been for two months. When it was busy, it was OT, not new employees.

Industry wants to be able to hire domestic labor but for reasons beyond the greed they get labeled with, many just can't do it at this time.

It's hard to generalize social spending as a whole. You need to look at it on a case by case basis.

Some of it can definitely be replaced by co-ops and citizen's organizations.

Again, it really depends on the social spending.

The 3 main elements I'm a sticker for:

1) Public Medicare
2) Cheap or free education
3) Unemployment insurance and welfare (though I'll will agree that the later could use improvements, but it's not as much as question of "if" as it is a question of "how").

Actually, Free Trade occurred under the conservative's watch (center right) here in Canada.

Overall, it had a lot of provisions for corporation to supersede the authority of the government in self-governance (off the top of my head, there were instances where pharmaceutical companies forced products that the government would have disallowed due to safety concerns).

Overall, globalization of labor is the "free market" philosophy (a right wing approach) applied on a global scale. It weakens the power of the state.

Suddenly, you find yourself in situations where corporations "shop around" for the country that will give it the best economical conditions (not necessarily that ones that will guarantee fair conditions for the labor).

Not saying all corporations are like that, but many are.

It's more of a situation where company A gets cheap labor elsewhere and significantly reduces the cost of it's products.

Suddenly, company B, which offers a similar product finds itself in a situation where it has to resort to a similar strategy to compete.

I realize that to an extent, customers are to blame as much as the corporations, but it's not like it's always written on the label that the company exports it's labor.

Well, yeah, the manufacturer in Beijing is operating on industrial era standards.

Now, the questions remains whether we should accept to lower our standards to his level or protect our economy until his labor standards catch up to ours.

Pretty much, but you need to remember that between customers, politicians (who make the policies that allow this state of affair to persist and even encourage it sometimes) and the first few corporation that decided to export their labor, people are accountable for this.

I didn't back peddle as you're the one that said I implied the US Government has never gunned down protestors. People get executed for speaking out against their government in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa while we're allowed the liberty to discuss politics without the fear of the Revolutionary Guard bursting in and murdering us on the spot.