Heartening:
I was happy and surprised to hear, for the first time since Reagan, a major party presidential candidate actually talking about cutting federal spending. And his opponent didn't really disagree (and, indeed, Obama has recently talked about taking a hard look at all current federal programs). I'm not a fan of either candidate, but this is heartening.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Heartening, Part II:
- Heartening:
You watched a different debate than I did.
When asked repeatedly didn't Obama keep mentioning -new- programs and not -existing- ones?
Remember?
Obama will never cut spending below his announced increases and has no intention of trying. And any significant cuts will invariably come from the "unnecessary" military and intelligence communities. Musn't touch the special interest and entitlement dollars necessary to buy Party votes.
Hopefully, he was just looking for an opportunity to sound like a small-government type, and is not really so clueless as to think that the first thing we need to do to resolve the current crisis is to find programs to cut.
So it should not be a surprise if McCain says he will cut spending. It would be a continuation of his record.
Now I know you didn't watch the same debate I did.
and strangely, I seem to remember only McCain talking about cutting military spending.
Oh, sure, he was talking about "fixed cost contracts" but if a Democrat were to espouse fixed cost contracts that resulted in reducing the number of dollars available to develop "Piece of Equipment X" by 20% you don't think Republicans would be screaming about military spending cuts?
Your memory is failing you. Bush I, Dole, and Bush II kept harping on the "less government, not more" theme in their campaigns. The fact that Bush I and Bush II didn't follow through doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Are you on drugs? They all say it all the time and for some reason it never comes true.
Perhaps you will be happy and surprised when one of them says he will lower taxes.
Potential in all of these areas are dwarfed many times over by the real savings we could achieve right now by winding down our reckless Republican foreign entanglement in Iraq.
Do not believe Republican lies about reducing federal spending. Except for Republicans who opposed the war in Iraq, they have no right to say they favor reducing federal spending.
A fortiori John McCain, who envisions staying in Iraq for 100 years.
neither of them even brought up entitlements.
Was it McCain who said, "i cut 17 million from the budget"? And not two minutes earlier said he was trying to get this 700Billion dollar bailout together?
Not saying BO didn't have his problmes, but from the persion who I thought would be the most likely to say, "our economy requires spending cuts all around". ...i was left utterly disappointed.
Spending Cuts aren't a part of the Republican party any more.
I was under the impression that the Obama campaign has issued newer talking points after beating the above misrepresentation to death. Apparently not.
No, McCain's prototypical example of wasteful spending was a three-million-dollar program to study the DNA of bears in Montana. To any yahoo watching the debate, this might sound like an example of a totally wasteful program. And maybe it is, but before jumping to that conclusion, we should know what the study is likely to accomplish.
We humans have a really bad record of getting along with the animals of North America. We wiped out the woolly mammoth and the saber-tooth cat (Smilodon) in prehistoric times, and in modern times, we hunted to extinction the passenger pigeon, a bird that was once so abundant that the skies were blackened during its migrations. The golden bear, which adorns the California flag, was exterminated from California in 1922. These are just a few examples of the many warm-blooded animals we have lost — to say nothing of the frogs and other amphibians, fish, reptiles, and invertebrates that we've lost forever.
If this DNA study, which McCain disparages as a prototypical example of wasteful earmarks, but which costs less than 15 minutes of our war in Iraq, will help ensure the survival of bears, it's worth it. That's my conclusion without knowing anything about the study. But what do scientists say? Thank you, Google. I guessed right. This DNA study is key to preserving the species.
There are only 1,500 grizzly bears left in the lower 48 states, a 97% decline since Columbus. Scientists want to save them. Why does John McCain hate grizzly bears?
Maybe your Republican Party... but not mine.
I believe McCain represents "Back to Basics" Goldwater Conservatism for the GOP. In turn Obama is also a back to basics guy only his is more a back to the Jimmy Carter Liberalism of the 1970s.
Who won the debate depends on if your check comes from the public treasury or from the work of your hands.
There is no misrepresentation in pointing out that McCain envisions staying in Iraq for 100 years. It is only a misrepresentation to claim that McCain envisions fighting a war in Iraq for 100 years. The latter is what Obama said, twice. And then he stopped saying it. So the misrepresentation is yours.
The video is here. Here are the words:
The word the commenter used ("staying") is exactly the word that appeared in the question McCain was answering.
What kind of lunatic would want 50,000 Grizley Bears running wild in Modern America? I know victory goes to the swift, but hey I don't run so fast anymore. With Obama's view on the 2nd Amendment and you promoting a 97% increase in 800 lb man eaters, Obama might want to rethink his stand on the need to increase Social Security and a need for day care, both demographics are slow and easy prey.
McCain's only substantial proposal was to think about imposed a spending freeze on government aside from defence, veterans, entitlements, and then left himself some weasel room to add other exceptions. So he'd let the biggest areas of government grow even more and not shrink everything else.
If the crisis is large enough both candidates will probably have to rethink their plans (although a major recession is hardly the time for fiscal restraint), but from what they said I don't see how you could think either of them would cut the size of government.
Did you put McCain and Goldwater in the same sentence? Unbelievable. That kool-aid must have some high-test horse-doodoo in it, too. Distinctly potable, apparently.
McCain thinks that by cutting pork spending and keep taxes low for about 5% of the population and multinationals, cut spending, life in America will be right as rain. Obama believes that if we cut spending, increase taxes on the rich life will good for all of the programs we want such as health care, waging wars, old age care and education.
Obama and Mccain are not only not being "4-Real" they avoid talking about painful subjects such as good and bad debt, taxes and spending as well as social moral choices.
Here are the sources of funding for the banking bailout. If anyone has another source please tell me about it.
1. Raise taxes.
2. Cut spending.
3. Sell federal land and other assets.
4. Sell Treasury bonds to foreigners.
5. Sell Treasury bonds to Americans.
6. Sell Treasury bonds to the Federal Reserve.
Item 6 is seignorage, and the one we will most likely get. It's also the one that has a big chance of igniting hyper inflation.
Neither am I. The fact that McCain twice referred to it as a "fiscal" crisis instead of a financial crisis may have been just an error, but in the context of his suggestion to cut spending as a means of solving the problem it looks like he may seriously misunderstand the issue.
You don't have to want to restore the original population numbers, just to preserve the ones we have left. That makes it a legitimate expenditure. The fact that Gov. Palin got a similar earmark for seals reinforces the legitimacy of these studies.
The earmark process may be wrong (I'm not convinced), but the specific example McCain chose was silly; he sounded like he was channeling William Proxmire.
Thanks to global warming, we can no longer put our elderly out on the ice floes for the polar bears. Grizzlies seem like the next best alternative.
Why? Other than it make one feel good, to what purpose? Ever hear of Darwin?
eyesay,
your knowledge of federal spending is lacking...
our annual spending between social security, medicare, prescription drug benefit is more than the whole iraq war ($500-600B). and it's only going up.
and the 60 years we've been in germany, japan, and our 50 years in korea have certainly bankrupted us haven't they?
I wish he'd leave the bears alone; from what Ive read it was a good program. Even if he's right about how it was appropriated via earmarks vs. peer review, it's a too clever by half example.
I have started investing this way too as the commodity sell off the last few months has provided some great entry points(IMO).
(1) Social Security;
(2) Medicare/Medicaid;
(3) Interest on the federal debt; and
(4) Military/veterans/other national defense.
Going after (1) and (2) in an effective manner requires reducing & eliminating benefits & increasing taxes & fundamentally changing the philosophies/structures of the programs.
Going after (3) requires major temporary tax increases to pay down total debt and permanent reductions in spending to keep the debt down.
Going after (4) requires a major re-thinking of the USA's place among the other states/nations/pretend-states of the world and how to maintain that place.
No presidential candidate I've seen in the past forty years (with the possible exception of Ross Perot) has had the political courage and common sense to address any of this. This presidential campaign is no exception.
This is utterly flabbergasting. Every single major Presidential candidate since Reagan has talked about cutting spending. George Bush talked a LOT about cutting spending. But I guess he doesn't exist, since he's a rather inconvenient example.
Now, maybe Bernstein believes that McCain and Obama are especially serious in ways that others aren't. But to say that he's the only major candidate who's said that he will is so far removed from reality that I don't know what else to say.
It's also worth noting that they, especially McCain, are following the exact same pattern as all these other candidates: they can't actually name anything significant that they'd cut. They haven't talked about means testing SS. They haven't said they'll cut medicaid. They certainly haven't said they'll cut military spending. Instead we have the usual trope of vague "efficiencies" and "waste" that will somehow add up to something significant. But there's simply no chance of making much of a dent in federal spending without cutting one of the big ticket items.
And as others have pointed out, it's economically illiterate of McCain to think that cutting spending is a direct solution to a financial crisis and recession. Economists can argue over whether Keynesian stimulus is worth it or not as a policy tool, but cutting government spending is not in any way shape or form going to ease credit crunches or blunt recessions.
You do realize that eliminating earmarking wouldn't actually reduce the total amount of spending at all, don't you?
Earmarking is essentially an issue of "who decides" where federal money allocated to states is spent. Earmarks are Congress deciding. Getting rid of them means local politicians decide. There are good things to be said about either approach: maybe local bureaucrats know better what their local areas need, but then again, maybe federal politicians should have some say on where federal money, taxed from the nation and not just the state getting the money, goes.
But the issue is in effect a giant red herring when it comes to reducing the size of government. Eliminating them might plausibly be said to help reduce possible corrupting influences on the system, but it's not a money saver. And since McCain selected the Queen of Earmarks to be his running mate, it's sort of silly to claim that he really thinks it's the be-all-end-all of good politics in any case.
To reduce spending, you still ultimately have to say that this this and this money will be cut from the pool that gets sent to states. You have to say "Ohio will get 50 million less for roads" and so on. And that, for a politician looking to win the EC, is not easy.
Actually it might work to their advantage. As the mass extinction of the Black race through the promoting of the "Drive Thru" Abortion scheme (ala, Planned Parenthood)has seemed to help Democrats at the ballot box.
The GRR EAT Act -- Biblically correct natural selection, good for the environment, and good for taxes.
I keep hearing these promises, but it seems to me that we've got understaffed and underfunded agencies protecting us from melamine-laced Chinese dairy products and pet food products, lead-containing children's toys (also from China), salmonella-containing produce from Mexico, shady practices in derivatives markets, price collusion in the egg and tomato industries, unfavorable royalty arrangements for mineral rights to federal lands, and on and on. Do we really want to cut spending?
Even the tilting against earmarks doesn't make sense to me. Our federal government extracts a tremendous amount of our income and then finds strings to attach to the funds when it gives it back. States have to fight for earmarks, because if they didn't, they'd essentially be conceding to income redistribution outright.
I'm in favor of less government spending and smaller government, too. I'm in favor of keeping our income taxes (and the programs they fund) small and local. But given our present regulatory regime, pontificating on merely "cutting spending" strikes me as irresponsible, or at best only half an answer. If you want to cut spending, what regulatory functions are you thinking we no longer need? What can we get rid of, and how might we replace it? Would we even need to?
That's a discussion we might get in this blog, but it's certainly not one we ever hear about in the national campaigns, whether they speak directly on cutting spending or not. So it's not heartening to me at all. It's just empty rhetoric, designed to push the "conservative base endorphin" button, like railing against "judicial activists" or refusing to talk to leaders of unjust regimes.
Among the major Western Powers, our quality of life has been in free fall for years. As a percentage of the population we have more in lock up, more in poverty, more homicides, more with out medical insurance, more not getting regular dental care, more who do not own a passport, more who do not read books (other than books about religion) and newspapers, and more that can not understand, discuss and hold critical analysis talks about issues of the day. We also enjoy the largest compensation gap between the Fortune 500 CEO and the lowest paid worker, the biggest gap between the Middle Class or Working Class and top 3-5% of the population.
But then again in the Western Hemisphere we're No 1.
I do not disagree with you. Mine is to add weight to your position as causes and effects of our choices as a society. If we cut Social Security we increase social dysfunctions. If we want to maintain SS we must raise taxes.
Comparing the quality of life with Mexico with the the USA would be unfair to the USA and or Mexico. According to the international studies the USA ranks poorly when compared to Northern Europe as to quality of life.
The comparisons are made between the USA and Northern European nations because of the historic connections, and shared economic/political/and government likeness. We have more in common with the UK than with Mexico.
He also mentioned spending cuts during the 1992 campaign, but I didn't see anything as detailed as this SOTU address on the first couple pages of Google results.
and according to Cato, about the same level of economic freedom, too. (personally suprised at that, but the study was pretty thorough).
And we pay for Canada's national defense.
Blar, but that doesn't count, because Clinton was a Democrat and we all know that Democrats want to raise taxes on everyone and spend on everything. Even otherwise smart academics, if they are republicans, fail to investigate empirically and test their
campaign slogansparadigms.No one in Canada must choose between eating and paying for medical drugs. No one in Western Europe is driven into poverty or bankruptcy for medical care.
"And we pay for Canada's national defense."
That's the service cost of building and maintaining an empire.
Canada lacks the underclass the US has. For example, eliminate blacks and Hispanics from the crime statistics and the US has a typical homicide rate among Western nations. If you want to compare the US to Canada then compare American whites to Canadian whites etc. Aggregation leads to misleading inferences.
According to government records the biggest users of AFDC and food stamps are White people. The poorest regions in America also happens be to in the South where the dominant population is White. White poverty is understated and under-reported by the media.
I'm sorry to say that even adjusted per race, according to FBI reports, there is no evidence to support your position. No matter your color, you are more likely to die from homicide even by accident if you live in the wrong zip code and or have a gun in the home than if you live in the right home and have no gun in the home.
I guess there is a point you are making here if you can find it
Yes. So I understand what he meant by natural selection.
I think it's worth noticing that we spend more on defense than the whole rest of the world combined.
I wonder how we arrived at that as the correct number. Why should it be 1x the rest of the world? Why not 2x? Why not 0.5x?
You used the right word: "enjoy." Mission accomplished.
You could also make a good case that the current crisis was kicked off by the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act which can also be blamed on the Republicans as well. But the this Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act lovely piece of work lines up nicely with the start of the housing boom we are paying for now. Some gems from the wiki page "Democrats agreed to support the bill only after Republicans agreed to strengthen provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act and address certain privacy concerns"
or "Crucial to the passing of this Act was an amendment made to the GLBA, stating that no merger may go ahead if any of the financial holding institutions, or affiliates thereof, received a "less than satisfactory [sic] rating at its most recent CRA exam", essentially meaning that any merger may only go ahead with the strict approval of the regulatory bodies responsible for the CRA.[6]. This was an issue of hot contention, and the Clinton Administration stressed that it "would veto any legislation that would scale back minority-lending requirements."
So how you like your government mandated subprime now?
Not to be left out we could look at the "money shot" during the mid 90's when fractional reserve lending went gonzo by introducing "retail sweep accounts". A gimmick that put the final nail in the concept of banks keeping reserves on the books to cover for downturns in the economic cycles. The money supply exploded from there and we could probably point to that as one of the lead causes in our current crisis of bank failures.
Clinton should definitely not get a pass.
The American community has a very high level of neurotic defenses. They will try denial, displacement, disassociation etc and if that does not work they will turn to God, drugs, and spin doctors to justify their feelings or beliefs.
You are aware that while Reagan did talk about cutting federal spending, he didn't actually do it, right? He cut taxes, but kept spending about the same. He cut programs, but increased spending on other ones. No serious economist would ever characterize Reagan's administration for actually reducing federal spending.
Call it what ever you wish according to Kevin Phillips there has been creative booking and record keeping for years and it did not start with Bush or Clinton. In his book "Bad Money", Phillips tells of how the state has lied, denied, contrived for years as to taxes, debt, borrowing and spending. He states that most presidents has "borrowed from" Social Security and federal employee pension funds - the money never paid back. He tells about the dubious tax cuts for the Working Class and issued reports on the fiscal state of the union. It's all sad and disgusting
This would not have been a completely unfair statement during the Cold War. but now I suspect it costs Canada a significant amount living next door to a country that is a magnet for terrorism, and seriously paranoid.
"I'm sorry to say that even adjusted per race, according to FBI reports, there is no evidence to support your position."
The black murder rate is about 8 times the white murder rate. The Hispanic murder rate is about 3 times the white murder rate. Other violent crime rate data reveals a significant racial disparity. Look at Table 42 from the Department of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey for violent crime. Of course this is non-homicide violent crime because obviously the victim is dead in a homicide and can't report the face of the offender. The Victimization Survey data does not depend on arrest records, so you can't say the racial disparity is the result of police and justice system bias.
I don't understand your problem here. Higher crime rates for blacks and Hispanics is pretty non-controversial, the data is the data. The controversy lies in the causes for the racial disparities. But in any case you must adjust for this before you come the US to other countries.
"According to government records the biggest users of AFDC and food stamps are White people."
Of course white people are 2/3 of the US population.
If there is any good to come of this credit crisis it will hopefully be a generation of people more interested in economics. Thanks for the book recommendation I will check it out.
The UK has a very large multiracial population as does the USA, but if you adjusted for none-White racial groups the murder rate for the USA would still exceed that of the the UK per percentage of the population.
According to a study the USA is the only major western power in the top 25 for murder:
Crime Statistics > Murders (per capita) (most recent) by country
#1 Colombia: 0.617847 per 1,000 people
#2 South Africa: 0.496008 per 1,000 people
#3 Jamaica: 0.324196 per 1,000 people
#4 Venezuela: 0.316138 per 1,000 people
#5 Russia: 0.201534 per 1,000 people
#6 Mexico: 0.130213 per 1,000 people
#7 Estonia: 0.107277 per 1,000 people
#8 Latvia: 0.10393 per 1,000 people
#9 Lithuania: 0.102863 per 1,000 people
#10 Belarus: 0.0983495 per 1,000 people
#11 Ukraine: 0.094006 per 1,000 people
#12 Papua New Guinea: 0.0838593 per 1,000 people
#13 Kyrgyzstan: 0.0802565 per 1,000 people
#14 Thailand: 0.0800798 per 1,000 people
#15 Moldova: 0.0781145 per 1,000 people
#16 Zimbabwe: 0.0749938 per 1,000 people
#17 Seychelles: 0.0739025 per 1,000 people
#18 Zambia: 0.070769 per 1,000 people
#19 Costa Rica: 0.061006 per 1,000 people
#20 Poland: 0.0562789 per 1,000 people
#21 Georgia: 0.0511011 per 1,000 people
#22 Uruguay: 0.045082 per 1,000 people
#23 Bulgaria: 0.0445638 per 1,000 people
#24 United States: 0.042802 per 1,000 people
#25 Armenia: 0.0425746 per 1,000 people
#26 India: 0.0344083 per 1,000 people
#27 Yemen: 0.0336276 per 1,000 people
#28 Dominica: 0.0289733 per 1,000 people
#29 Azerbaijan: 0.0285642 per 1,000 people
#30 Finland: 0.0283362 per 1,000 people
"Of course white people are 2/3 of the US population."
Of course Texas being the biggest Southern state also has a large White population and Texas ranks in the Top 10 of states in poverty.
The UK has a very large multiracial population as does the USA, but if you adjusted for none-White racial groups the murder rate for the USA would still exceed that of the the UK per percentage of the population.
So do the adjustment. What is the white murder rate in the US as compared to the white murder rate in Canada or the UK?
I don't think you are going to find those statistics, especially for Canada. It is considered politically incorrect to collect such data.
This will sound strange to the American ear. I believe most US statistics were collected and welcomed by those arguing that blacks were discriminated against. Somehow in Canada minorities thought it was terrible that someone would classify by race.
sorry to sound vague. The debate took place 15 20 years ago
So you're agreeing with Zarkov? Texas is less than half white, New York is well over half white.
Here I will do it for you. Black homicide rate is 8 times the white rate, and Hispanic is 3 times. Assume Asian rate is equal to white rate.
US Demographics:
White: 68%
Black 12%
Hispanic 15%
Asian: 5%
The homicide rate in Canada is 1.9 per 100,000 population according to this table. The homicide rate in the US is 5.6 per 100,000 according to this table. Using the US demographic data given above we can solve for the white homicide rate, and it's 2.6 per 100,000.
This approximate analysis shows that the US white crime rate is close to the Canadian crime rate for the whole country. But look at the homicide rate in Alberta Province, which I suspect is more urbanized and more like white America. The rate is 2.5 per 100,000 almost exactly the same rate as the white America.
The talk is about murder per 100,000 people, you are not framing your evidence in that manner. You give violent crimes per 1,000 and 100,000 and that can change the argument and the finding of fact. You did not say anything about the population of Canada as to race.
"At the end of the day you find why you are safer on any street in London than any street in Detroit ..."
I don't know about any street, but it looks like you agree with me. Look at Detroit demographics. The city is 82% black and has a high homicide rate of 47.2 per 100,000. Do you think London is 82% black? These other countries don't give much in the way of racial demographics and don't enumerate crime by race. But you can see from the data I provide that comparisons at an aggregate level must take into account the racial disparities in crime rate.
"The talk is about murder per 100,000 people, you are not framing your evidence in that manner. You give violent crimes per 1,000 and 100,000 and that can change the argument and the finding of fact. You did not say anything about the population of Canada as to race."
Unless I made a typo somewhere all my homicide rates are homicide counts per 100,000 population. If we get down to small geographic region then we have to be careful about rates become influenced by small counts. But we are not dealing with small counts.
Here are Canadian demographics, and notice blacks are 2.5% or the population. That's pretty small compared to the US where blacks are 12-13%. Notice that Hispanics are 1% of the population as compared to 15% for the US. Now I don't think the Canadians break down their reported crime statistics by race, but by it's pretty obvious that you have to adjust to do comparisons. Canada has few people from the groups that exhibit high crime rates in the US.
Russia has almost no Blacks or Spanish speaking population but it has a higher murder rate than the USA and both populations are about the same. In the London metro area there are more none-Whites than in Detroit but the muder rate is lower than Detroit.
No I do not agree with you
The USA is listed at number 24, yet most of the nations listed here have a low Black population.
Let's go with 1,000 people and murder:
#1 Colombia: 0.617847 per 1,000 people
#2 South Africa: 0.496008 per 1,000 people
#3 Jamaica: 0.324196 per 1,000 people
#4 Venezuela: 0.316138 per 1,000 people
#5 Russia: 0.201534 per 1,000 people
#6 Mexico: 0.130213 per 1,000 people
#7 Estonia: 0.107277 per 1,000 people
#8 Latvia: 0.10393 per 1,000 people
#9 Lithuania: 0.102863 per 1,000 people
#10 Belarus: 0.0983495 per 1,000 people
#11 Ukraine: 0.094006 per 1,000 people
#12 Papua New Guinea: 0.0838593 per 1,000 people
#13 Kyrgyzstan: 0.0802565 per 1,000 people
#14 Thailand: 0.0800798 per 1,000 people
#15 Moldova: 0.0781145 per 1,000 people
#16 Zimbabwe: 0.0749938 per 1,000 people
#17 Seychelles: 0.0739025 per 1,000 people
#18 Zambia: 0.070769 per 1,000 people
#19 Costa Rica: 0.061006 per 1,000 people
#20 Poland: 0.0562789 per 1,000 people
#21 Georgia: 0.0511011 per 1,000 people
#22 Uruguay: 0.045082 per 1,000 people
#23 Bulgaria: 0.0445638 per 1,000 people
"Russia has almost no Blacks or Spanish speaking population but it has a higher murder rate than the USA and both populations are about the same."
I didn't say that race was the only factor that determines the homicide rate. I said that in order to compare the US to Canada one has to adjust for race. Obviously Canada and the US are very different from Russia. The population sizes are irrelevant as to comparisons of rates. Unless the population is so small that you get very few counts, about less than 30. So it does not matter if Russia has ten times or a tenth the population of the US to compare aggregate crime rates.
"In the London metro area there are more none-Whites than in Detroit but the muder rate is lower than Detroit."
Non-white is not the same as black. The non-whites in London metro are most likely Asians, who don't have a high murder rate. In any case you need to give me the numbers, otherwise you are just arm waving with vague concepts.
Hey, I don't get this. They're people, aren't they; why shouldn't they be included in the count? Perhaps we could compromise and count them as 3/5 of one person?
The problem is that all three of those programs are incredibly popular and legislators are completely uninterested in trying to cut them because that wins you a one-way ticket back to your home district. Witness the crash-and-burn results of Bush's proposal to privatize Social Security. On the other hand, politicians like to talk about cutting spending, because this permits voters to imagine their most-hated programs being cut, and voters have no idea what the budget actually comprises.
Conclusion: without some specific proposals about what programs of any size ("earmarks" are a tiny proportion of the budget) McCain plans to cut, this is just cheap talk and you are a fool for buying it.
Will you be around in 2040 because the Great White race will be the new minority according to projections. Some one will look back and call you uncle or great gandpaw.
"The USA is listed at number 24, yet most of the nations listed here have a low Black population."
Again the issue is Canada a country similar to the US and not the world.
But look the US white homicide rate of 2.6 per 100,000, which is equal to 0.0262 per 1,000 population. That's lower than any country in your list. Again race is not the only factor, but it's one you cannot ignore if most of the factors are the same as is the case for the US and Canada. Estonia is not like Canada.
Your position is not grounded in logic. You tried to frame murder rates with race be it Blacks, Whites and Hispanics. But the facts are there is no connection. We got all of these Eastern European nations with high murder rates - few Blacks or Hispanics live there. Not many Blacks or Spanish folks live in Thailand. Finland is very White, but is number 30 on the list - with a population smaller than the USA but far more guns and with a higher quality of life
"... but here we insult Canada because they not only out live us, they have less in lock up, less in poverty and far less deaths from homicide."
Canada lacks the underclass the US has. For example, eliminate blacks and Hispanics from the crime statistics and the US has a typical homicide rate among Western nations. If you want to compare the US to Canada then compare American whites to Canadian whites etc. Aggregation leads to misleading inferences.
Yeah, segregation is still the way to go, both in real life and on the books. Those black and brown people don't really count; only white folks do.
If these numbers are correct, they indicate that black and brown folks desperately need special help. We could call it affirmative action. It's justified by the compelling and overriding interest in bringing those horrible numbers you cite into line with those for the rest of the peopulation.
A. Zarkov: "During the debate Obama said we must keep some programs like early childhood education. How is that a vital program? How did we get along without for 200 years?" Head Start and programs like it are investments, not expenses. Numerous studies have shown that each dollar invested in Head Start and similar programs returns three dollars or more to the taxpayers by reducing the costs of juvenile delinquency and remedial education. The Declaration of Independence was in 1776, and Head Start was created in 1965, so we got along without it for only 189 years, not 200 years. We got along fine without air traffic control for something like 150 years. Shall we eliminate that, too?
Dan O: "Grizley Bears: ... Ever hear of Darwin?" What kind of an argument is that? We humans have the capability, if we want, to exterminate numerous species, by direct killing, or by habitat destruction. We could also start a nuclear war with Russia. Are either of these good ideas?
"Hey, I don't get this. They're people, aren't they; why shouldn't they be included in the count? Perhaps we could compromise and count them as 3/5 of one person?"
All people are counted , but if you want to make comparisons to countries with different demographics then you have to make an adjustment. In the alternative you can compare rates for different groups, but that data is usually unavailable in other countries for crime. So I don't understand your problem unless you don't think that race and crime are not correlated in the US. But abundant data tells otherwise.
Blar: "Were you paying attention during the Clinton years?" [Implies that Clinton stopped advocating for spending cuts after 1992.] Just as the Vulcan Proverb "Only Nixon could go to China," only a liberal democrat could preside over the elimination of AFDC ("Welfare as we know it" as Clinton called it) and replace it with a program with a lifetime limit of five years of benefits. Spending-control conservatives should be lauding Clinton to the skies for this.
CB55: "According to government records the biggest users of AFDC and food stamps are White people." Your point is basically correct, but AFDC was abolished in 1997, and replaced by the less friendly/coddling TANF.
"Head Start and programs like it are investments, not expenses. Numerous studies have shown that each dollar invested in Head Start and similar programs returns three dollars or more to the taxpayers by reducing the costs of juvenile delinquency and remedial education."
Even if one believes Head Start programs are an investment with a positive return that does not make them vital. However I dispute the positive return assertion. Give me a link to a report on Head Start and I will break it for you. But it has to be a report with enough detail and data so I can see their assumptions and methodology. These highly politicized reports are usually wrong.
"We got along fine without air traffic control for something like 150 years. Shall we eliminate that, too?"
We got along fine without air traffic control until we needed it for airplanes. Obviously ATC is vital for an air transport system. But we have educated people for 200 years, and Head Start was never vital.
"... so we got along without it for only 189 years, not 200 years."
Ever hear of rounding? Do you really think that 189 versus 200 is an important part of the issue?
You said that if we adjusted our murder rate the numbers would be smaller, but if you do the math you must do the same for Canada, Russia, UK Finland and the other nations cited for comprison you will find that the USA has a very high murder rate. Note Sweden is not a very heterogeneous people as is Finland but Finland makes the murder list but Sweden does not nor the UK.
If we are really going to spend a $1 trillion on a bank bailout, then I don't think we can afford the Iraq war and many of the social programs either. To get the extra revenue we would have to double the income tax, go deeply in debt or print money. All of those would kill the economy. Something has to get compromised.
Were it not for a common policy of social welfare, you would be picking cotton or tending your masters' sheep. It's doubtful that you would be able to read or write unless you got it from a priest. In London and Roman they came around to the fact that a common sewer system was good for every one and public health.
"... but if you do the math you must do the same for Canada,..."
I don't because Canada has too few blacks or Hispanics to have a significant rate on their crime even if the groups rates were similar to the US.
Similarly if we assume that Russia, Finland etc are prominently white then we don't have to adjust for race. We can compare US white crime rates to Russia or Finland.
Sewer systems are vital-- Head Start is not. This is the whole point. If we want to spend huge amounts on a bank bailout then we have to compromise. Let's start with the non-vital stuff like Head Start. We could even abolish the whole Department of Education. Lots of us got educated purely with state resources. We don't really need the feds in this.
"Similarly if we assume that Russia, Finland etc are prominently white then we don't have to adjust for race. We can compare US white crime rates to Russia or Finland."
Math is math and the rules apply to the USA and Russia as to adjustment. Finland is more prominently white than the USA as is Russia, yet it is the case that both have high murder rates.
A. Zarkov
A population that can not read, write or compute is not an advanced population and can not compete or thrive in our world. Is it not the case that the Feds is in education that it trains and provides education to it's own military and provides scholarships to those who wish to be officers. Does it not grant grants and scholarships to students who wish to attend college, medical/dental school. If you should go to a doctor thank Uncle Sam because his school and education was funded in large part by Uncle Sam
1. The proposed bailout would be $700 billion, not $1 trillion, and it would include the opportunity for the money to return to the U.S. treasury later, after the U.S. government sells assets at a profit.
2. I don't necessarily support the bank bailout.
3. I don't think you know how much we spend on Head Start each year. It's about $7 billion per year. Tell me honestly, did you know that?
4. I admit this is speculation on my part, and feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but I strongly suspect that you are affluent, and do not have friends, family members, co-workers, co-worshipers, or other acquaintances that you know to be Head Start families. It's easy to call for cutting a program if you don't know the people affected. Again, please correct me if I guessed wrong. And let me also guess that you are not a vegetarian, and let me also guess that you do not advocate abolishing the federal meat inspection program.
And let me guess that you do not favor that the losing side of every civil lawsuit should pay 100% of the judicial salaries, bailiff salaries, court reporter salaries, court janitorial salaries, court building fair rental value, and all other costs associated with maintaining the legal system. Oh, and fair compensation to the jury panel, too. Please correct me if I guessed wrong.
It's very convenient for affluent people that we have a legal system that we can all access for barely more than the cost of our own counsel. And that legal system makes possible the broad affluence that most of us share. We wouldn't think of cutting that. But a lousy $7 billion a year for Head Start, which helps over a million kids start school ready to learn, fuck 'em, who cares about the poor.
A. Zarkov: "However I dispute the positive return assertion. Give me a link to a report on Head Start and I will break it for you. But it has to be a report with enough detail and data so I can see their assumptions and methodology. These highly politicized reports are usually wrong."
Here's the executive summary of the High/Scope Perry
Preschool Study Through Age 40; there are others for you to break after you break this one.
We don't as yet know the ultimate cost of the bailout until all the details are worked out. But whether it's $0.7 trillion or $1.0 trillion matters not to the basic argument here. The plain fact is the bailout is a significant fraction of the current budget and could really hurt the economy.
Head Start is simply one example of one federal program that's not vital and there are many others. Do you take the position that everything is vital? As to whether any particular program benefits me personally is also irrelevant. We have to make choice and any choice necessarily denies somebody something.
An executive summary is not a report, it's simply a statement of conclusions without data, methodology and assumptions. What is linked to is exactly what I said not to provide. Otherwise we end up pointing to reports with dueling conclusions. Moreover Lawrence J. Schweinhart is hardly a disinterested authority as he has a stake in the conclusions.
Bingo! The many are taxed for the benefit of the very few. How frightening that the academic gravy train for might end. In any case I'm not talking about "higher education." Why does the fed need to be involved in K-12 education? The states have the power to tax and pay for their own schools. Why should the feds levy a tax on the states, and then give their own money back to them minus a brokerage fee?
Do you believe the preamble of the Constitution reads "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, and promote vitality, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America"?
The preamble actually reads: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." [emphasis mine] The framers thought it fitting and proper that the federal, state, and local governments would tax the population in order to be able to spend money in ways that aren't vital but do promote the general welfare and prepare future generations for life's challenges.
Like most people I know, even self-identified libertarians, I don't look at the federal budget and suggest zeroing out every program that isn't vital to the survival of the United States. Like most intelligent people, I consider costs and benefits, and the possibility of cheaper alternatives, and don't restrict myself to a binary vital/non-vital decision procedure.
Zarkov: "As to whether any particular program benefits me personally is also irrelevant." It is relevant. When I listen to someone arguing that program X should be cut, but not mentioning programs Y and Z, in evaluating that argument, I may reasonably consider that the proponent of cutting program X but not programs Y and Z benefits from program Y and Z but not program X.
Zarkov: "We have to make choice and any choice necessarily denies somebody something." This is why intelligent people want to know if the proponent of cutting program X but not programs Y and Z benefits from programs Y and Z but not program X.
Zarkov, in response to your request for Head Start studies:
The High/Scope Perry Preschool Project — if that's not detailed enough for you, it includes an e-mail address to request more info. You can also request the study through age 40.
Because we are one nation indivisible, e pluribus unum.
Because states should not have to cut spending on social programs precisely when they are victimized by regional economic downturns.
Because in the 1960s we looked at the poverty of Mississippi and Alabama and Appalachia and we rightly elected liberal presidents and legislators that established programs that helped bring these disadvantaged areas closer to the Yankee standard. (Unfortunately those liberal presidents got us mired in a foreign entanglement that we could not afford, and this undermined the political support needed to continue.)
Liberals paid the price for liberal Johnson's war in Viet Nam by forfeiting the presidency and giving up many of the Great Society programs we established in the 1960s. It strikes me as extraordinarily unfair to ask liberals to pay the price for conservative Bush's war in Iraq and the Republican-deregulation-caused financial crisis. Both the Iraq disaster and the financial crisis were created primarily by Republicans, and Republicans need to pay the price by swallowing a rollback of the tax cuts we could never afford in the first place (especially on the rich and on estates) and other things they do not want. If you want to cut programs to pay for the financial bailout, cut programs that benefit the rich, not programs that benefit the poor.
The preamble to the US Constitution is in the nature of a mission statement-- in essence: boilerplate. The primary responsibility of the federal government is to first attend to those vital functions such as foreign relations, war, etc. The feds must do those things which would not otherwise get done or would be ruined by a fragmentary approach.
In the event of a fiscal crisis such as the one looming before us the merely desirable must take second place to the vital. Even assuming programs like Head Start are desirable, they are not as important as say, defense. Defense is a primary responsibility of the Federal Government.
Actually at this point, I'm against the bailout so I'm not advocating zeroing out programs without careful consideration. But if you think we really need to spend a trillion then be prepared to zero out something, otherwise we will face economic ruin brought on by a hyper inflation.
Fine. Aid only the poor states or provide emergency aid as necessary. But that's not what we do. Rich states like California and New York get taxed by the feds, who in turn give them their own money back. If the rich states really want these certain things then let them tax their citizens to get them. Right now the citizens are fooled into thinking someone is paying for their local projects.
The US Constitution has nothing to do with airlines, railroads, the internet, stem cell research, lead in my drinking, or education, but we take it for granted that that the Constitution does implies the above as to "General Welfare". General Welfare is about the public good. Public schools and education is a public good and you will not find it spelled out in the Constitution. Public health is a General Welfare but it is not in the Bill of Rights. The state promotes agribusiness but it is not in the Constitution. Old age care is not in the Bill of Rights but it is promoted as General Welafre :
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
If you do not like the whole of the model as welfare I suggest you start writing the Supreme Court and start a case for a re-write of The Preamble to the United States Constitution
Most college and medical school professors were taught by public school teachers and most of those teachers went to public schools of higher education and if they did not they went to private schools that got lots of money from the Federal Government. There is no fire wall between higher education and K-12 education funding. If one wishes to teach in any grade K-12 one will most likely do some practice teaching in a public school as one works toward his or her degree.
Some interesting facts that I think are indirectly related to what's being discussed:
The talk was not exactly in line with the reality.