OT: Higher taxes..

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belong

Pretty much agreed, but i can't get past the jostling of the entitlementeers (and their lawyers) to reach the few that need help over = a rough patch or will never be able to be properly self sufficient. I have a nephew with rather serious autism, his family is not broke and have = made provisions for him; they did not and do not and depend on the State. Nor are they so foolish as to not use some of the support that the State provides.

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But what is that "60%" actually getting?

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The complete Oxford sees it as a very old word

as does the on-line etymological dictionary

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with a first use in 1823, derived from earlier legal language (English lawyers originally wrote in Norman French ...)

Merriam-Webseter claims that it was first used in 1942

which says something depressing about Merriam-Webster.

In fact "entitlement" refers to something to which you have a legal right - there's no implication that this right was "earned" in any way.

Social security is about as far away from plunder as you can get. Bismark invented the modern form to steal a march on his socialist political opponents - it's better seen as a bribe that was offered rather than plunder that was carried away.

If one thought about it - not something that James Arthur's rigid preconceptions permit - one might realise that social security is paid for out of taxes collected by society as whole, and distributed by that same society, acting collectively.

Plunder reflects individual initiatives, and benefits isolated individuals.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Germany and the Netherlands are fantasy lands? You may think you live in God's only country, but other countries exist and do things differently. You could learn from them, if you knew anything about them.

pport those who the government thinks it can bribe with increased handouts.

Bismark may have invented modern social security as a means of bribing the electorate to vote for him rather than his socialist rivals. Today, the government hasn't got enough money to increase handouts enough to attract the votes of people getting social security - and why should they bother? Those on social security are going to vote for the Democrats anyway.

a state of dependence and the appearance of caring for the downtrodden whil= e it actually treads more and more underfoot.

Really? Society can't afford to have a dependent majority, and a dependent minority can't - on it's own - win an election.

In reality, socialist governments target social security to minimise the number of the unemployed - by making sure that the kids of the less-well-off get well enough fed and educated to be able to grow up into potentially productive workers, and by getting the adult unemployed retrained so that they can do work that somebody is prepared to pay them for.

ce or provide anything much, except hot air and have a better > than averag= e income.

Your perceptions are distorted by your prejudices. Even during the

2010 mid-term elections, some 25% of the US population voted Democrat. This is rather more than could be attributed to a "chattering class with above average income".

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ent and police.

class was beginning to develop and before they had left the middle ages beh= ind them, totalitarianism was foisted on them by a bunch of terrorists. =A0= Then there were serfs in both factories and farms.

Which doesn't explain how the serfs were able to throw out the terrorist in 1991. The communist takeover in 1917 was certainly a coup d'etat, and Communist Party members certainly did well for the next 74 years, but they did invest in developing an modern economy - if none to efficiently, and behaved rather better than - say - Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein.

I'm not joking, and you clearly haven't been paying attention.

week, I can give you a reading/viewing list. =A0Try to forget your ideology= - it is only really good for stereotyping, deceiving and killing people.

I suspect your reading list will reflect your own ideology, which seems to be based on the idea that the US is perfect, and the US way of doing things is the best possible solution. This isn't remotely true. Your health care system costs half as much again per head more than the French and German equivalents, but provides no better health care for those that are fully insured than the French and German systems provide for everybody, which is reflected in your - low standing - in the health care indices

Germany doesn't do all that well - re-unification with East Germany in

1990 didn't help their statistics.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It's a simple discussion, but you stripped the context.

We're not talking about life-and-death needs, denying or prohibiting anything, or anyone being hurt. So, it's a false comparison.

The Catholics, by not providing free abortion pills, aren't denying anyone anything. These products are widely available to anyone who wants them. Anyone can buy them, just like they buy toilet paper, food, shoes, cable TV, and everything else.

It's simply obscene for a government to callously force people of goodwill to do something against their beliefs. That's how totalitarian governments subjugate a people: they crush their spirit.

Shall we force the Amish to shave, and Muslims to eat pork for the "general welfare," or in the name of regulating interstate commerce, the rationale in Obamacare?

If we interfere in interstate commerce of health care by rejecting Obamacare, surely the Amish are interfering in interstate commerce in razors by not shaving, in fashion by dressing plainly, and Muslims are hurting interstate commerce by boycotting pork?

Shouldn't those Amish be driving GM Volts too, instead of those buggies? They're so much safer--it's for their own good.

James

The argument goes: Those buggies are a danger to everyone else, so must be banned. Volts are much better for the environment than horse dung. ...and don't forget animal "rights".

Fair enough. As a taxpayer, my only hope is that you enjoy your stay at the Graybar Resort. Maybe you'll even learn a skill while you're there.

The problem is that with government, the 5% *become* 60%. It's the nature of bureaucracy.

Block grants. The problem is that there is still no way to measure success without the same issues. ...and why should money be shoveled to feed the federal government, then filtered (watered) down to the states and locals? Why don't they take care of their own, as the Constitution suggests.

One "entitlement" (Social Security) is then morally equivalent with another "entitlement" (welfare, abortion,...). It's all so Alinskian.

Go for it. Keep Slowman busy. Something should.

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It's silly. If you've been robbed you can go to the police. If you think the government is robbing you, your only recourse is to join a political party that shares you bizarre ideas. If they've got enough bizarre ideas of their own, this may lead the police to come after you.

Earlier in the thread it was only 60%. You've yet to tell us how you came upon this 60% number, now raised to 65%, and one has to imagine that you uninhibited way with numbers is playing a role.

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I certainly wasn't benefited by not being able to get work, and the inept legislation that contributed to my situation doesn't meet with my complete approval. It was still legislation passed by an elected assembly, and there's a certain cognitive dissonance in your enthusiasm for the words theft, robbery and plunder. You are - quite explicitly - lying.

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What makes you think that? Apart from irrational political prejudice, of course.

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Identify the falsehoods then.

Whence your enthusiasm for lying claims about plunder, robbery and theft.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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It's a long stretch to equate paying for a package that includes covering contraceptive pills with forcing the Amish to shave or the Muslims to eat pork. The Catholics are upset because they can't interfere with something that's essentially none of their business - within the legal framework of the secular society they are living in - and you are equating this with direct personal indignities.

You do get off on creating rhetorical exaggerations of the wilder sort, but this is a bit silly, even for you.

The do have the personal freedom to avoid shaving and pork. Personal freedom also means that the Catholics aren't free to dictate how non- Catholics (or less-observant Catholics) use their health insurance. The Catholic Church can have opinions about contraception and early abortion, but they can't interfere with other people exercising their legal rights to do stuff that the Catholics find immoral.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Which are basically what allows krw to post here.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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James isn't reporting it, he's claiming it, on the basis of his - biased - personal observations of a rather limited sample of beneficiaries..

Granting his fallible grasp of reality, this is a significant distinction

Albeit not one that you have the wit to recognise.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Oh, alright. Your statement looked pretty unqualified up there, though; I'd certainly agree with you that there's a difference between the government forcing people to provide life-saving care vs. contraception.

Although contraception is also not quite the same category as cable TV. :-)

---Joel

No, just that it's not uncommon. :-)

I'm also not as worried about someone on welfare getting one extra SNAP payment they shouldn't have as people who are on the program and every single payment is fraudulent. But of course "lottery winner still received SNAP benefit" does make for good political theater...

---Joel

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You are right, it helps keep the numbers down in the productive classes (and to a lesser extent the poor entitlement classes) so that the entitlement classes do not have to worry too much about them voting.

?-)

You're assuming that this is somehow a problem rather than a fact, a human condition, and that yet another federal government program can solve it.

Maybe that's not the case. Maybe the federal government doesn't have a magic poverty-fixing wand. Maybe this is just how people behave given these conditions and incentives.

I'm not suggesting either, just pointing out current truth--that more and more people are getting some sort of assistance.

The very fact that ever more people need it indicates that it's not lifting them up out of poverty, not curing their condition, just making them dependent. (We knew that already, but it's confirmation.)

But of course government then *does* run lives. It makes complicated rules for the hand-out people, and then bureaucrats to help them with the complicated rules. And gov't then tells paying people to labor longer to support those who aren't, and calls this "fair share."

That's exactly it--that "legitimate interest" is not a benevolent interest, it's an intrusion into every aspect of the person's life, right down to which medical procedures they'll be allowed to have. It's control.

Administration, if they're lucky. Or green jobs, cash-for-clunkers, etc.

She's intelligent and shrewd. She knows what the president said. She figures she can live in her place rent-free for a few years, saving her tens of thousands of dollars. That's all she cares about.

James Arthur

Nothing's been raised, it's an example, nothing more. Does 5% justify taking 60%, is that your argument?

Taking 5% for a common purpose is not cause or justification to take additional sums for other purposes--redistribution-- that's the point.

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Taking from people by force, giving them nothing in exchange, this is plunder.

Using the government to plunder others on one's own behalf does not make it otherwise.

"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." --Bastiat

--=20 Cheers, James Arthur

You've got it into your head that money collected to be paid out as social security is counts as redistribution, while money being collected to be paind out to soldiers for defence doesn't.

This is crazy. In both cases the money is being collected for a specific reason - for social security to keep potential workers alive and health until they can get work, and for defence to keep soldiers alive, health and equipped until they are needed to fight off an enemy.

In both cases the money is being re-distributed, but you happen to love defence and hate social security.

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Nobody forces you to pay taxes. There is an eventual threat of force, after the legal system has exhausted all other avenues, but if everybody refused to pay their taxes there's no way that government could muster enough force to collect them.

And you do get quite a lot in exchange for you taxes. You may not collect social security - though granting the gaps in your understanding you may well be eligible - but you are defended by the army and the police, travel around on roads that are built and maintained by you tax payments, and live in a society where there's a lot of money spent on making sure that what you buy actually does what it is supposed to, even when it is built in China.

Trying to make out that you are being plundered is a remarkable stretch. If you house was ever actually plundered, you might notice the differences - the most obvious difference being that the plunderers would trash what they couldn't be bothered to take away, and waste stuff by using it for their immediate convenience - books and furniture would be used for fire-wood and kindling, for example.

Governments don't "plunder" their own constituencies. They are much too interested in maximising the tax revenue they can collect to indulge in anything as wasteful as plunder.

If you weren't blinded by your ideological preconceptions, even you could realise that social security is an investment in maximising the tax base, not a left-wing scheme to wreck society by allowing the poor to rip off the rich

Bastiat doesn't seem to have noticed that this definition made the entire French army the recipients of plunder - the money used to pay them had been taken from the tax-payers (to whom it used to belong) and given - as wages - to the army to whom it hadn't belonged.

The man was clearly an idiot, and you are are an idiot to take him seriously.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The fact that more people get it isn't evidence that more people need it. In fact it's not inconsistent with the proposition that fewer people need help, but that you've gotten better at finding and helping those that do need help.

The claim that people become dependent on social security is one that you need to demonstrate. I know that it is an article of faith in the right wing media, illustrated by the occasional anecdote, but I'm not aware of any statistical studies that show anything of the kind.

Of course, if the recipients of social security didn't get any help and starved to death, this wouldn't be making them dependent, but this is what a mathematician would describe as a trivial solution, and would normally be seen as an extravagant waste of the money invested in the education of of the unemployed who had starved.

You don't know anything of the sort. You believe it fervently, but knowledge is based on evidence, not wish-fulfilment.

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In other words, you don't know.

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If she were intelligent and shrewd, she'd never have talked to a reporter. She'd have known that being a lottery winner with a social security card would generate exactly the kind of splash that it got in the right-wing nitwit press, because it's the kind of story that right- wing nitwits love to read.

So much easier to understand that boring statistical studies that don't give the right answers.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Once again you've made up a nice narrative that explains everything, but it ain't so. She's my neighbor. She hasn't spoken to any reporters. She didn't win the lottery. Has nothing to do with statistics.

One error you make from the statistics is constantly assuming "the rich" is a static group. They aren't. Roughly 3/4 of the top earners aren't there 10 years later, if I recall Thomas Sowell correctly. Many, many of them are one-time windfalls, sellers of houses, companies, or other appreciated assets, etc.

Contrast that with your assumption of a single greedy group amassing ever greater wealth, a group that needs to be tapped, and equalized.

-- Cheers, James Arthur