This is very true and wll put together.

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This is a convenient myth for righ-wing nit-wits, who happily go on believing in it despite the absence of any objective evidence supporting the idea

cites Goode, Judith and Edwin Eames (1996). "An Anthropological Critique of the Culture of Poverty".

Dean H. and Taylor-Goody P.(1992)"The dependency culture: the explosion of a myth" published by Harvester Wheatsheaf in Hemel Hempstead, England, is more to the point. Hartley Dean investigates the social attitudes of welfare recipient in the U.K. and finds no evidence that their ideas about proper behaviour are signficantly different from those of the better off, though it can be more difficult for them to behave as they would like to.

But you believe in all kinds of nonsense that fits your right-wing ideas - like the blamelessness of the bankers who made the ninja loans that gave us the the sub-prime mortagage crisis.

Even better would be to examine the philosophy of the people who are claimed to have been "re-educated" by their exposure to social welfare

- the evidence is that they have much the same hopes and aspirations as citizens wth more money, if rather poorer chances of realising them.

You'd be referring to some kind of IQ test. 20ppm implies something like 5 standard deviations away from the mean, roughly an IQ of 175.

In other words, you are bright enough that you can get right through an IQ test in the time allowed and go back and check your answers, just as I can, and probably Jim Thompson too. For us, the IQ test isn't working the way it was designed to, and the result doesn't mean any more than that you are off the top of that scale, along with about

1% of the population. Your claim that your score puts you in the top 20 ppm of humanity just demonstrates that you don't understand how IQ tests work, which is decidedly ironic, but entirely representative of your intellectual deficit.

Mensa exists to allow nitwits like you to advertise that they do well on IQ tests, despite the fact that they show very few other signs of intelligence. Even Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson, who scored well enough on the Mensa IQ test to be an acceptable candidate, had enough sense to abandon the idea of joining the society when he saw what a bunch of losers they were.

Sadly, scoring well on IQ tests correlates well with just one skill, which is uncritically digesting material you have been taught and reproducing it during some kind of examination. You would have done well at school and as an undergraduate at university.

You incapacity to read critically suggests that you wouldn't have been too successful as a graduate student if you'd tried to follow that path. Scepticism is a skill, and one which you have signally failed to master. It's possible that you aren't so much gullible as incapable of unlearning a false "fact" - any one of the many things that you know that ain't so - but whatever your intellectual defect it is obviously crippling.

I produced a document - where you hadn't

which didn't - at the time - seem to have much to do with your figures.

It now shows something more similar to what you claimed - but different enough that it clearly wasn't the document that you were referring to. I didn't actually call you an idiot - I did claim to be looking for more insight into the way your "miserable excuse for a brain fails to work".

Tellingly, your response didn't quote your own source, whatever that was.

No, you just don't understand much, and post a lot of nonsense in consequence.

Which is to say that you don't understand Keynesian economics. Bankers never have, and you show clear signs of having been brain-washed by a banker or two at some time in your career.

But it won't bankrupt it, or anything like it. Why not concentrate you attention on the huge and persistent balance of payments deficit that the US has been running since Regan was president? For a long time you financed it by selling off US assets to overseas investors, but you've now got nothing left to sell. Your government is unlikely to be bankrupted - you could balance your budget over-night by putting up taxes to the same level as France, which seems healthy enough - but you are importing far more oil than your exports can cover.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I wonder why Mike Terrell would think that? As it is I drink barely enough wine to keep my cardiologist happy, and that merely to keep company with my wife, who is seriously interested in the subject. Mike presumably lacks the income to sustain that kind of interest, and it correspondingly envious, but it's still a pretty silly idea, even for him.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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It's interesting that James Arthur feels no shame about lumping the interest on the national debt into the costs of social spending. The invasion of Irak is supposed to have cost $500 billion so far, admittedly a small proportion of the 14.5 trillion US national debt, but still a significant contribution. Historically, the big rises in the US national debt occurred during WW2 and while Regan was in power, and in neither case can social spending be seen as primarily responsible.

Tell that to Allende's ghost. Pinochet and the Shah of Persia came to power with the active support of the US, and if the US had had enough sense to pressure the Shah to offer his subjects a little more freedom before they got peeved enough to take it for themselves, his successors might not be quite so thoroughly anti-American as they are (though the US encouragement and subsidy of Saddam Hussein's subsequent war on Iran also played a part).

You really are gullible. You may have scored high on an IQ test at some stage in your life, but parrotting that sort of patriotic clap- trap suggests that you might have skied head-first into a tree at some point since then.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No thanks.

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Did BS ever respond to you?

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Before you posted this, if Google groups is to be believed.

Quite how James Arthur could believe a test that put him in the top twenty of a million people quite escapes me - he is a nitwit with a very poor grasp of reality, but he's also supposed to be a practicing engineer, and you'd think that he had a better grasp of what measurements mean in the real world.

There's no reason why a nitwit can't have a high IQ - Jim Thomspon scored high enough on IQ tests to qualify to join Mensa - but it is ironic that James Arthur understand so little of what an IQ tests measures that he thinks a five standard deviation high score means anything except that the test is working outside the area where it was calibrated.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I think if he really understood the numbers there'd be a lot less arguing.

No one can defend spending what we're spending--there's no way we can pay for it, and Obama doesn't even try.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

There are two things wrong with that view. #1, they pay out more in benefits than the recipients contributed. So, it's not your money. #2, they spent your contributions the moment you made them--your money's long gone, wasted. You're talking about getting someone else's money. If a robber takes my wallet, can I fairly take someone else's?

I don't fault anyone for taking it--that's what the government's encouraged, that we vie for our neighbors' pensions. In fact, John Galt might encourage taking it. Cloward-Piven cuts two ways.

The good news is you'll get it. The bad news is it won't buy coffee ;-)

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Theoretically it was supposed to be "invested". If it truly had been there would be no problem.

...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
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      Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed

rely on raw data from the U.S. Treasury department mostly. When I produce those documents you commonly don't understand them or my analysis, as you didn't appreciate the document you yourself linked here, so sometimes I try to link to popular sites you might accept.

Sometimes I make engineering approximations, when those are close enough. I never make up numbers. I almost always consult direct sources as I post, though sometimes I quote familiar numbers or close approximations from memory.

Don't preach, just do the math. It's not working. That's because it doesn't work period. It doesn't, can't, and won't.

That's the worst of it--we're catapulting into debt needlessly, uselessly, wasting the money. Everyone's.

There is no tax rate--France's or otherwise--that closes our gap. We'd have to nearly triple income taxes on everyone to do it, and they wouldn't be able to pay.

You can see from your own link (Table S-3) that actual revenue from income tax was $899B last year. The projected deficit this year is $1,645B. Doubling income taxes only brings in an extra $900B, leaving us $750B short /this year/ (assuming people actually lined up and paid the tax rather than avoiding it).

That is, we have to double taxes AND cut $750B per year just to break even.

If you calculate debt service, we're at the limit of what we can service. We've borrowed so much that soon we won't be able to make the weekly payments. We've got a year or so, depending on various factors.

Those calculations are complex; I'm not going to repeat them here. Just consider that there's a reason banks won't loan you more than 3x your income to buy a house. Current American debt is $14.3T. Divided by $2.1T in projected revenue gives a ratio of almost 7-to-1. We're a sub-prime mortgage.

-- Cheers,

James Arthur

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No, not really. He had a lot to say, but none of it justified or explained the spending.

That's because there is no justification for it--we can't afford it, and the money's being wasted. Waving the 'ol Keynesian wand at it doesn't change that.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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That's the popular assumption and it's what the government promotes, but it's incorrect.

Here's the exact quote from the FDR-era U.S. Supreme Court decision explaining that the Act is constitutional expressly and only because the employer and employee "contributions" are a tax, nothing else, and never were:

"The proceeds of both taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like internal-revenue taxes generally, and are not earmarked in any way." -- Helvering v. Davis

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Well, it was certainly MY paycheck that the money was confiscated from, throughout my working life.

It's not really my fault that I was forced, essentially at gunpoint, to participate in the biggest Ponzi scam there is, is it?

And the lady at the Social Security office said it's my money, in so many words, and who am I to argue with a government bureaucrat, especially when it involves having my own money returned to me?

Thanks, Rich

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They took your money, to be sure but it's gone. The big-spenders spent it. Any money you get today comes from people who are still working, paying into the system.

No, it's not your fault. It's FDR's.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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It was invested in US treasury bonds that pay interest. It's all the young disabled freeloaders, who paid nothing that break the system.

-Bill

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That's a diversion. It doesn't matter how they 'invested' the money, the more important point is that from the moment you surrendered it, it wasn't yours.

You never had any policy that offered a particular benefit in exchange for specific premiums. They never promised, nor had any obligation to pay you anything back. Ever. Your money became their money.

Benefits are exactly whatever Congress decides each year. Ask real nice and they'll even give you someone else's.

They're a monopoly, and non-participants are jailed. It's a nice business model.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Here's a good one.

"Unlike a typical private pension plan, the Social Security Trust Fund does not hold any marketable assets to secure workers' paid-in contributions. Instead, it holds non-negotiable United States Treasury bonds and U.S. securities backed "by the full faith and credit of the government".

Well, at least the bonds are backed by the "full faith and credit of the government". But so are treasury bonds held by the Chinese. The question is who gets paid first? or is it "who's on first"?

-Bill

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Yes, but other countries do the same thing, so why is the US so evil?

Looks like Brazil employers pay 37.3% for employee social security benefits.

"The contributions by the employer and the employee are subject to to ceiling defined by law. Employer: 37.3% of the gross salary, 28.8% social security and 8.5% for severance fund. Employee: 7.65%-11% of the gross salary. The employee's payment, which is capped, is based on a "contribution salary table", provided by the government.

-Bill