Re: serfs, the best welfare program is a job. But in 20% of American families, *no one* has one:
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Not surprisingly, people with no jobs have lower incomes. The "Gini-index" people might want to consider that when getting so worked up over their envy-index.
Jobs? We ought to let all the people who want to do and make stuff, do it. Like we used to. An amazingly large number of people want to, have a dream or invention they want to try. Burying them in Obamacare, taxes, payroll deductions, blah blah blah doesn't help.
Most of those experiments fail, the best succeed. New experiments (new companies, products, and processes), driven by competition, make stuff better, faster, and cheaper all the time.
But we've put such huge burdens on people in the name of kindness people can't ever save a "stake" to get started, or clear all the hurdles.
The sliding scale still produces very high marginal effective tax rates. Even losing $.50 in subsidies per dollar earned cuts your marginal wages in half, on the very hours you value most--those extra hours at the end of the day or week, when you'd rather be home. There are a bunch of articles about it.
Obamacare's worse--you can lose a $15k subsidy by making $1 too much.
The Clinton-Gingrich welfare reforms seem to have been one of the best solutions by simply encouraging people to work, but Barack's dismantled those improvements.
That's too bad. Only ~3% of people who have full-time jobs of *any* kind are poor.
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"The Census Bureau found that 2.9 percent of Americans between 18 and 64 who worked full-time, year-round in 2012 were in poverty."
The Gini-index isn't any kind of "envy index". Gini invented it as a single number inequality index. The fact that the top 1% of the US income distrib ution has enviable record of garnering most of the US producutivity growth since Reagan came to power can provoke the envy of the 99%. but the Gini in dex would be much the same if it was the top 10% of the income distribution that had done the same.
German entrepreneurs are buried just as deep, if not deeper, but they seem to do better. Having a better trained and educated population available to be hired to work on your dream does seem to make more of a difference.
In Scandinavia and Germany it's happening all the time. In Germany it's hap pening to such an extent that they are out-exporting the US despite the fac t that they only have a quarter of the population to generate the innovatio ns and manufacture the superior products.
Twaddle. The US collects some 30% of the National income in taxes and compu lsory levies. Sweden collects 55%. France and Germany collect about 50%.
This much larger "burden" doesn't stop their entrepreneurs from getting sta rted. Not having to pay for over-priced health insurance for their employees to c over the cost of an extravagantly expensive health care system may give the French, German, and Swedish entrepreneurs something of a compensating adva ntage, and the wider availability of well trained and educated potential em ployees may give them another.
Actually, you should, but since you can't think things through, you don't. Your national incapacity to think straight may be traced back to the defect s in your primary and secondary education system, which has always been bia sed towards producing good, gullible, citizens, rather than critical thinke rs.
You'd be a prime example, incapable of seeing the flaws in the Tea Party ar guments, and unwilling to face the evidence that's obvious in the reams of statistics you marshal to support your fatuous case.
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