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actionjackson posted:What's the counter argument to the right-wing talking point about the rich being the "job creators?" I saw some youtube video where this rich businessman (his last name was Schiff or something) was arguing with the Wall St. protestors and he kept going back to this, like "I've created hundreds of jobs, how many have you created?" The rich don't create jobs. They just control the capital other people need to create jobs. Here's an even richer person calling it out as BS at a TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wc9bWc-WRs Demand creates jobs. People spending money creates jobs. As he says, hiring people is the last course of action for any capitalist. You only do it when demand finally necessitates it. Amused to Death fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Feb 15, 2013 |
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Feb 15, 2013 04:32
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It's easy to keep wait times down, all you have to do is make sure people don't go to the doctor  http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/m...l_update_v2.pdf quote:Americans were the most likely to say they had access problems because of cost. Half (51%) said they had problems getting a recommended test, treatment, or follow-up care; filling a prescription; or visiting a doctor or clinic when they had a medical problem because of cost. U.K. patients were the least likely to report having these problems (13%). Americans were significantly more likely to have out-of-pocket costs greater than $1000 for medical bills (34%), as opposed to only 4 percent of adults in the U.K. The next highest on the list after us was New Zealand at almost 15 points below us.(The UK was the lowest) I mean whatever our wait times are(I believe in general they're below average, but not for everything), it's also a reflection of the fact a huge part of the population just isn't going to doctors, and people with awesome insurance or lots of money are getting more elective surgery while people who need medical poo poo done to them are staying at home.
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Feb 15, 2013 19:04
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Vogler posted:I am writing this thing about feminism for a paper, and I need some striking examples about horrible injustices done to women, both modern and ancient. Everything from misogynistic quotes from famous thinkers and world leaders to acts of violence. Anything more specific? I mean, if you're talking about misogyny and oppression of women throughout history, well, let's put it this way. There's 138,496,211 total posts on SA, all of those posts could in theory be about misogyny. Start at one of the most basic places, women couldn't vote well into the mid 20th century in many places. In Switzerland, it wasn't until the 1970's.
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Feb 18, 2013 18:23
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Jack Gladney posted:Maybe stick with contemporary examples if you're in the US: the Republican party has some fairly high-profile members who have said some pretty inflammatory things about women and their assumption that they have the right to bodily autonomy or privacy or employment benefits. On the note of US politics, just check out the gender make up of congress, as well as state legislatures. Also, here's one video out of an ongoing series about the lovely way women are portrayed in television and other media https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnJxqRLg9x0 and more fun things: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110810133015.htm "Marked rise in intensely sexualized pictures of women, not men” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120515131719.htm "People See Sexy Pictures of Women as Objects, Not People; Sexy-Looking Men as People" And on more social issues, men generally don't face the problem of overbearing, creepy women almost stalking them in public places that women do. Street harassment is still a huge problem.
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Feb 19, 2013 04:36
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Accretionist posted:Anyone have good data on Medicaid reimbursement rates and if they're problematic? I've seen some good data about Medicare but not Medicaid. Check out the current conversation in the sequester thread, Medicaid is the topic at hand. e: Medicaid themselves also has information on reimbursement http://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid-chip-program-information/by-topics/financing-and-reimbursement/financing-and-reimbursement.html http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/fmap12.shtml Amused to Death fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 19:38
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For those myths, it's almost like, if 1/2 of people making minimum wage are 25 and under, or 1/2 have a spouse that is making decent money, the other 1/2 are over 25 or not making decent money. Combine that with the fact, this right here, the numbers most discussions refer to: is only the federal minimum wage numbers. It doesn't include all the people in states with higher minimum wages, or the huge number of people making a 40 cents or whatever above minimum wage. Also, you can just dispel the entire myth of Brietbart itself by visiting the right wing media thread. Brietbart is such a wonderful news organization they actually posted a satire story as truth accidentally.
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Mar 12, 2013 17:10
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Plastics. posted:My friend insists that the financial crisis wouldn't have happened if it weren't for government regulation. I assume he's referring to government backing, and the fact that some players saw fit to burn their institutions to the ground because they were confident that the government would bail them out. Financial institutions didn't take on mind boggling amounts of risk, use derivatives to skirt around every reserve law, spend huge amounts of time fighting any regulation on derivatives and securities, conduct mortgage fraud on a mass scale so they can sell/refinance a home to anything with a signature, package securities, then repackage them into CDOs, and ect until one security was leverage a dozen times because the government forced them to. They did it out of sheer greed. So much greed that many companies ruined themselves into non existence in the quest for a higher quarterly report than admit to themselves the amount of risk that was being taken on. We're not even getting into the corruption of the rating agencies, who would thought when they changed it so that companies paid for them to rate bonds, they'd start slapping AAA onto everything to get more of those sweet dollars. I mean christ, Greenspan himself who promoted market discipline instead of actual regulation admitted post crash that it failed. I doubt he'll read the book, but if you want a decent book on the subject that's written in more or less laymen terms and makes for a great read since it's not dry economics, it actually tells the story of both companies, regulatory boards and the main players in all of them like a saga, check out this: http://www.amazon.com/All-Devils-Are-Here-Financial/dp/B007SRVWGE I mean sure, the GSE had their role in the whole clusterfuck,(heck when it comes to the sub-prime part of the collapse, most companies had already lowered the loan standards and entered the sub-prime bonazna long before the GSEs because of their stricter regulation on mortgages they could back), but to insist that the crisis was caused by the government in any way(aside from the government not doing enough to crack down on financial markets) only works if you live in fantasy libertarian la-la land. I mean everything is true if you don't have to accept historical facts and stuff.
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Mar 19, 2013 01:51
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Plastics. posted:"They were acting out of self-interest, the government wasn't holding a gun to their heads." The thing though is, there was no safety net. No one beforehand had any idea the government would bail out companies.(because no one knew how bad it would get, because they literally thought everything would just perpetually keep going up) And in fact, many weren't. Ask Bear Stearns and others how that safety net went for them. Heck, we could've just nationalized all the failing large institutions. quote:I don't know how to respond to that. For now, I'll look into Greenspan's remarks, and I'll read the book you recommended, which I happen to have. Awesome! It's a fun/terrifying read. It's amazing just how out of control some institutions were, not even just with their gambling, but how oblivious so many of them were to their own debauchery. AIG itself seemed near oblivious to what would really happen if its rating ever fell due to call the collateral calls that were in place in such a case with everything AIG Financial Services has sold. The beginning of the book actually starts with another example. I forget what company it was. The CEO called into his office though an old risk analysis acquaintance who had been marginalized in the company after he had heard of a loss report he had come up with that was severely different from what other brokers had come up with. He looked at it and reality suddenly got slapped into his face, he had no idea how bad it really as. And then you go back in time to the early 80's.
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Mar 19, 2013 02:48
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The question is how do we put that against the fact the one person who openly opposed this measure, John Tester, is also the only farmer in congress.
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Mar 29, 2013 02:11
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StandardVC10 posted:Watching MSNBC, I saw a segment relating to the UN Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty. Apparently it's being opposed by the NRA and thus the Republican Senate. At the time this struck me as rather vile. I've now read the text of the treaty and, well, it still strikes me as vile to be opposed to it. Apart from whatever commercial interest gun manufacturers have in this type of treaty, what exactly would be the Second Amendment objection to it if any? Or practical objections besides the obvious one (the abstentions by some prominent arms exporters.) It seems that the United States follows a lot of the treaty provisions anyway, just on a piecemeal basis. Do people even need a reason for objection aside from their own inane paranoia. I mean forget the arms treaty, the other month Senate Republicans with a wheel chair bound and dying Bob Dole in the chamber, shot down the UN treaty on the disabled. A treaty which their members admitted had no way of enforcement and was near entirely based on the Americans With Disabilities Act. If I remember, the UN taking our guns, and Rick Santorum rambling about not being allowed to home school and kids being euthanized were part of their stated objectives.
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Apr 6, 2013 21:54
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KaiserBen posted:Basically, if they'd explicitly allow "civilian sporting use" exemptions (or just clarify the reporting requirements), or the political situation wasn't so bad w.r.t. import laws, it'd pass and not even be in the news. It would never pass regardless of any exemption. Again, these are the same people who voted down the treaty on disabled rights where many of them were espousing paranoid tales of the UN potentially taking our guns. They're sure as hell never going to pass or be quiet about a UN treaty that actually involves guns.
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Apr 9, 2013 16:44
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Caros posted:Now compare it to the share of income charts for each percentile CTJ has you covered  As for taxes and norms, the corporate tax has had its share of federal revenue has dropped dramatically over the past 50 years. The share of income the payroll tax cap covers has also fallen, although it's been lower at points. Amused to Death fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jun 2, 2013 |
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Jun 2, 2013 19:23
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KernelSlanders posted:The class warfare speak just alienates people. Why not just say, "How is it justifiable that hundreds of thousands of Americans are an inch away from destitution," full stop? I mean, isn't that the problem? I agree we need a war on poverty. I disagree that we need a war on wealth. You only confuse the issue by making it sound as if those have to be the same thing. It's only a "war on wealth" if you call it that, others call it making the wealthy pay their dues to society. It's ridiculous the idea of making the wealthy pay more can even be constructed as class warfare when it's the wealthy are are waging a war constantly on everyone else, leaving millions in this country alone ruined.
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Jun 3, 2013 04:54
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.html?_r=0 http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/05/30/2075791/immigrants-put-more-into-health-care-system/ These might help as well. Immigrants, both legal and illegal, pour billions of net dollar in SS and Medicare. Immigrants are in a weird limbo where they work so hard and for so cheap they all our jobs while simultaneously sucking us dry because they just want all our welfare.
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Jun 4, 2013 18:23
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wateroverfire posted:And I'm sorry, but for the most part workers do not take anything like those kinds of risks. Showing up to do a job for a wage is not taking a risk. There's some occupations that beg to differ
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Jun 5, 2013 17:50
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Aren't unions actually forbidden by law from using direct dues to support political campaigns?
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Jun 22, 2013 03:33
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Accretionist posted:Edit, Question: Does anyone know how fringe (or not fringe) the Libertarian position of opposing mandatory vaccination on the grounds of [Freedom!] is? I've got a guy on another forum who literally asserts that Freedom from Vaccination is worth the cost, up to and including polio and small pox. The idea really isn't fringe, a pew poll showed 29% support letting a parent decide(this was the only poll I could find) http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-5-evolution-climate-change-and-other-issues/ although the actual amount of people who don't follow through on all the quasi mandatory vaccinations is probably fringe. It may be slightly higher now because of the HPV vaccine and parents freaking out their daughter may at one point in her life have sex. A yougov poll in Britain showed about the same amount opposed there http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/04/11/majority-support-compulsory-vaccinations/ But no, you don't get to ramble about freedom when your
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Aug 22, 2013 19:08
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Literally even the Romans realized "hurr, personal responsibility" was stupid and provided a public grain dole along with other intermittent welfare acts. Tell him congrats to evolving to 4,000bc e: More seriously though, the 'free market' is as much a government invention as a corporation is since he's not a random farmer offering me a bin of apples for my bin of cabbage. Not to mention the corporation is the end result of the fact the market wanted corporations as they have distinct economic benefits. If corporations were bad, people wouldn't be buying shares in them. Free market at work  But really, how does he expect global economics to function in 2013 without the entity we call corporations.
Amused to Death fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Aug 22, 2013 |
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Aug 22, 2013 22:51
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Hey thread, I(by which I mean my sister)could use a basic breakdown of conflict perspective. Also which theorist most evoked the idea minorities predominantly poor because they deserve it or are too lazy to have a job(and no it's either of the 2 authors of The Bell Curve)
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Sep 29, 2014 06:17
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