Shimrra Jamaane posted:

I sometimes wonder, if Obama were to announce some actual radical program (not that he ever would) like forced confiscation of wealth from the rich, demanding reparations for slave decedents, subsidizing for free iPhone 5s with unlimited data plans and yearly netflix subscriptions for every homeless person, or even just the most vaguely socialist program imaginable. What would these paranoid conservatives do? They are already completely convinced that Obama is and has been doing these things for years. What exactly changes here? Would they even loving notice?

Mooseontheloose posted:

Jon Jones themselves?

Also, does anyone have a good study on waste/fraud/abuse in the system. I always tell people that state governments and even the federal government usually knows where the money is going.

darthbob88 posted:

Good to see I gave something to this forum. From my end: I've got this dude who's got interesting if possibly wrong opinions on the matter and cites a 2-3% figure, this guy who says 1.9% of UI claims are fraudulent and cites a few other uncertain numbers, this Limey who cites .8% for fraud and 1.4 for error, and this guy who cites many numbers from many sources, including a 3.8% error rate for SNAP which is more human error than fraud. What amuses me no end is another story they cite;

quote:

In fact, welfare fraud among Philadelphia’s 95,456 recipients is “minute,” according to Peter Berson, assistant chief of the government fraud unit in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.

The 200 to 400 cases of welfare fraud in the city each year – down 50 percent since 2002 because of better enforcement and fewer recipients – are not nonworking women having babies to game the government, but working women receiving welfare and working at other jobs without reporting the income, Berson said.

TL;DR-Welfare fraud is almost certainly less common and probably less costly than tax fraud, though they both still need to be reformed. I'd also provide a hotline for reporting welfare fraud, but apparently they vary by state.

Sarion posted:

No kidding. We're talking about a store where if most people relied on them for their sole income for a family, they would need Food Stamps and Medicaid just to survive. Yeah, sure, lets have THEM fix the economy. Jesus christ. Wal-Mart is easily the biggest welfare queen this country has ever seen.

Uglycat posted:

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Isn't it nice to know that the Obama administration is taking advice from right-wing email forwards? (Obama to appoint head of Walmart Foundation to head Office of Management and Budget)

Before I'm accused of a derail, this was posted by a friend on facebook, and one of their friends had this gem to share:
: "Perhaps he is playing a chess game. Get these individuals to go into the government, see how Walmart hurts so many people, and maybe, just maybe, things will change. It's a risk, but Obama has pulled them off before."

Tab8715 posted:

North Dakota is now making it mandatory for DUI Offenders over a certain BAC to spend a night in jail. Another guy chimes in how "over-serving laws" are ridiculous and reduce personal responsibility.

Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:

That Jane Fonda/Nancy Reagan/Obama is honoring a traitor thing is going around like wild fire on my FB today.

Didn't some one post a good response to this in this thread? Or was it the other thread.... hmmm.

myron cope posted:

It's very disheartening to me that we can't link to snopes anymore. The crazy people are winning.

Interlude posted:

You guys really defriend people based on the politics they reveal on social media sites? Echo chambers are dull.

Interlude posted:

You guys really defriend people based on the politics they reveal on social media sites? Echo chambers are dull.

Interlude posted:

You guys really defriend people based on the politics they reveal on social media sites? Echo chambers are dull.

Interlude posted:

You guys really defriend people based on the politics they reveal on social media sites? Echo chambers are dull.

Guilty Spork posted:

There is something to be said for giving yourself legitimate intellectual challenges to force you to reexamine your beliefs. There are an awful lot of people who don't do that, and sometimes it's not worth subjecting yourself to a Facebook pseudo-relationship with them.

What I actually do a lot is set Facebook to only show me a person's posts that are marked important without defriending them. It cuts down on both political crap and the people who post a zillion cat meme pictures.

Bizarro Kanyon posted:

Can someone repost the response to the college class socialism scenario? I tried to find it but I cannot. A cousin posted it but it is now in video form.

Mo_Steel posted:

There are so many obvious lines of attack on this particular often reused parable (socialism is improperly used in the example, Obama has presented a mostly center-right administration particularly where economics is concerned, etc.), but the most obvious one is that the structure and distribution of grades is nowhere close to analogous to money.

To get a more apt example, you need to limit the amount of possible points available to the entire class. We'll set the student number at 100 for simplicity and the limit at 7,000 points per test so that if it was evenly distributed among all 100 students everyone would get a C on each 100 point test. Let's assume that the distribution of all points follows the current U.S. distribution of income. Here's how we end up:

Top 20: 4,137 points, average grade: A+ (206 points out of 100)
Second 20: 1,323 points, average grade: D (66 points out of 100)
Third 20: 812 points, average grade: F (41 points out of 100)
Fourth 20: 497 points, average grade: F (25 points out of 100)
Bottom 20: 245 points, average grade: F (12 points out of 100)

Congratulations, 3/5ths of the class flunked and 1/5th barely passed while 1/5th got more points than they will ever need to pass. None of this accounts for the amount of studying each quintile did by the way; some of the bottom 20 students worked their asses off doing 80 hours of studying just to scrape by with their 12 points each. Why did the top 20 do so well? They own the pencils and sharpeners and only agreed to let the other students use the pencils and sharpeners if they gave up some points to do so.

Welcome to capitalism.

Cynnik posted:

The whole ABCDF grade system is totally ridiculous when applied to things like wealth or prosperity, since an F comprises 50 percent of all possible grades.

Say this class has 100 students so a total of 10000 points will be given.

If you follow the current wealth distribution in the us http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

1 student will have 3460 points
9 students will have 3850 points to share, so 427.7 points on average
90 students will have 2690 points to share, so 29.8 points on average

so 10 students have more than they would ever need. 90 students have only a grade of 30. If you were to reasonably redistribute the grade points, you could say:

the number one student, works really hard. hard enough to be taking 4 classes at once. let's give them 400 points, so they don't have to enroll and take those other classes. this student benefits from the other students asking questions and discussing the class material, so let's give the surplus points back to the rest of the class. 3060 points back in the pool.

The 9 students, they too are hard workers. Let's give them 200 points each. 2050 back in the pool.

The other 90 students, with everything redistributed, now have an average of 89.6 points per person.

Look, no one starved failed!

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

quote:

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little.. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one will try or want to succeed.

...

The economics teacher concluded his story, "And that's how an entire class failed this course with their experiment in socialism."

A young, brainy, student spoke up "Excuse me, while we're on the subject of grades, I've been having a hard time understanding exactly how grades work at this University, I've asked around a lot and while I have been repeatedly assured that it's fair and that if I work hard I will succeed, I can't actually figure out how my GPA is determined."

The professor perked up and answered "Unlike other schools that punish students for their success, here at Free Republic University we reward our most academically distinguished students. The top students receive first picks at the classes they'd like to take and are also entrusted with the distribution of class supplies, i.e., textbooks, paper and pencils.

Speaking of which, it'd be a good idea for you all to get in contact with our current top student right now, Edgar Moneybags IV, with a GPA of 25.34, he's been entrusted with all of your textbooks."

A student from the back cried out "Edgar isn't here today, he's FAR too busy with his academic pursuits to waste time here, I work for Edgar and you can each rent one of Edgar's textbooks for only 30% of your grades."

The brainy student asked the professor, "How can Edgar have such a high GPA when it's only the first week of class?"

The professor answered, "His father was a student here and when he passed away, Edgar inherited his father's GPA, after all, Edgar Moneybags III earned that GPA, we don't have the right to tell him how it should be distributed."

An angry student stood up "So wait, some student who isn't even here is going to force us to give up 30% of our grade to him just because he was lucky enough to have parents with good grades? We'll all be stuck at a GPA of 2.0"

Edgar's Lackey spoke next "Actually, after all the fees from pencil rental and purchases of paper, we're expecting to get around 40% of your grades, and you're not all going to get perfect scores on every test so you guys can all look forward to a class average of GPA of 1.2 . But that's just from grades alone, if you're motivated like me, you can do some extra work for Edgar and make some extra GPA points, I've got a 4.8 . The GPA points that Edgar spreads around to people who help him actually brings the class average all the way up to 4.4, we call it "Trickle Down"

Another student asked "But wait, doesn't that mean that if we spread the grades around evenly that everyone would have an extremely high GPA?"

The brainy student spoke again, "I heard that half of students have a GPA less than 0.9, I thought you said that no one ever fails."

The Professor interjected "To answer the first question, that doesn't work, remember the story?!, and for the second question, Edgar Moneybags III, as the Valedictorian, was the one who got to choose what counts as a passing grade."

The brainy student spoke up one final time, "I guess that answers my next question, I looked up the grades for that class that did that experiment in socialism. The class earned nearly perfect scores for all three tests! Let me guess, Edgar set the scale so that 100% was a B for the first test, a D for the second test and an F for the third test?"

The professor furiously stammered "Edgar was being generous when he gave them all F's, he should have had them all expelled. Why do you all insist on punishing him for his success!" The professor ran crying from the room.

The brainy student walked to the front of the classroom and spoke "From now on we'll distribute the textbooks to everyone and we'll share the pencils and paper, if you study you'll succeed, if you don't you'll fail. Either way it'll be because of your own effort, not because of what family you happened to be born in."

That brainy student's name: Albert Einstein

ducttape posted:

Economics classroom, now with 30% less straw:

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had almost never failed a single student before but had, once, failed almost an entire class. The class had insisted that capitalism worked and that no one would be poor and everyone would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on capitalism. After each test, students would be allowed to buy and sell grade points, so that each student would have an economic incentive to succeed.

After the first test, the trading began. Most of the class sold a couple of their points that they felt that they could afford, but almost everyone sold to Frank, who had spent the weekend visiting his parents asking for money, rather than studying. After the second test, Frank was joined by Daniel and Rachael. Adam, on the other hand, had had his hours cut back at work, and his mother couldn't afford to send any money, so he estimated how many points he would need to still pass the course, and sold the rest. By the time that the third test came around, everyone was already planning their point trades. However, much to their dismay, that test was significantly harder than the previous two. A quarter of the class hadn't even studied, under the assumption that they could buy a couple points if they needed. Only a couple of students ended up passing the class that semester. Adam lost his scholarship, and had to drop out of school. Daniel and Rachael both failed when neither of them could match Franks bids on the few points that were being sold. The professor told them that capitalism would ultimately fail because when gaming the system is more rewarding than improving it, people won't try to succeed.

You have full permission to reply with this if you ever encounter the original.

Bizarro Kanyon posted:

Thanks for those responses. Here is the video in all its glory.

http://youtu.be/3h8O7V-WxWQ

Free Republic posted:

Among policy nerds back in the day, “Swedish model” meant the brand of social democracy practiced in Sweden in the second half of the twentieth century. (Somebody would usually crack wise about Anita Ekberg whenever the phrase was uttered.) But for a very long time, whenever the problems of socialism were discussed, it was common to hear people say as a kind of shut-up argument: “Ah, but socialism works in Sweden; what about the Swedish model?”

Swedish social democracy created an extensive welfare state—including comprehensive health care, generous unemployment benefits, and marginal tax rates commonly in excess of 70 percent. But that followed years of relatively free-market policies in the early twentieth century, which generated impressive economic growth. Government intervention in Sweden didn’t really get going until the 1960s.

The Economist on “Northern Lights”

Interventionists in the United States could learn something from what’s going on now in Sweden (although I fear they won’t). According to a recent spread in The Economist magazine:

Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67 percent in 1993 to 49% today. It could soon have a smaller state than Britain. It has also cut the top marginal tax rate by 27 percentage points since 1983, to 57%, and scrapped a mare’s nest of taxes on property, gifts, wealth and inheritance. This year it is cutting the corporate-tax rate from 26.3% to 22%.

Compare these rates with the U.S. tax rates, under the 2013 tax law, of 39.6 percent on incomes above $400,000 (filing single) and 35 percent on corporations.

But in some sense the current dramatic policy changes in Sweden are just a continuation, after an interruption of several years, of a dis-interventionist trend that began in the 1990s. The “new” Swedish model is not really that new. Indeed, Sweden has climbed to 30th out of 144 countries in economic freedom according to FreetheWorld.com, compared to the United States, which has fallen to 18th, just ahead of Germany (31st) and far outpacing France (47th) and China (107th).

So What About the United States?

The federal deficit numbers in the United States, however, look worse compared to Sweden’s. Again, according to The Economist,

Sweden has also donned the golden straitjacket of fiscal orthodoxy with its pledge to produce a fiscal surplus over the economic cycle. Its public debt fell from 70% of GDP in 1993 to 37% in 2010, and its budget moved from an 11% deficit to a surplus of 0.3% over the same period.

The current federal deficit—the annual excess of government spending over tax revenue—is around $1.1 trillion.

The accumulated debt of the United States federal government now exceeds $15 trillion, which is roughly equal to the current gross domestic product (GDP), the dollar value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. economy in 2012. That means that the federal debt as a percentage of GDP is now slightly more than 100% percent (compared to 37 percent in Sweden).

The United States does compare favorably to Sweden in federal spending as a percentage of GDP. For the United States, that’s about 39 percent, versus over 50 percent for Sweden. Including state and local spending boosts this figure somewhat over 40% percent of GDP for the United States, but that’s still significantly below Sweden's figure. Sweden, though, with one-thirtieth the population of the United States, has a per capita GDP of $57,091 to the United States’s $48,112.

If Sweden Can Do It, Can the United States?

Some fear that a debt-to-GDP ratio above 100 percent places the United States past the fiscal “point of no return”—that is, past the point where in modern times governments have been able to significantly reduce the percentage of debt to GDP. How did things get so bad?

Milton Friedman brilliantly characterized the main alternative politico-economic systems as follows:

1) spending my own money on myself (capitalist model)

2) spending my money on someone else (Christmas model)

3) spending someone else’s money on myself (rent-seeking model)

4) spending someone else’s money on someone else (socialism)

He went on to say that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

But if Sweden, a country in which the welfare state has been so entrenched over so many decades, can make such dramatic, even radical, changes in its interventionist habits, why couldn’t the United States? A comparably dramatic reform here—perhaps “revolution” comes closer to describing what would be needed—is certainly possible, despite staggering institutional barriers, tenacious entrenched interests, and sheer economic ignorance.

The biggest obstacle, as I see it, is not having the strength of will to sustain the relentless intellectual and political battle needed to overcome all those other obstacles. And in all honesty, I find it hard to be very optimistic about that.

The Greek Model

Well into my sixth decade of life, one of the things I think I’ve learned is that radical change and the will to see it through are indeed possible—beyond any so-called point of no return—but only when it’s clearly a matter of life and death. There has to be a sense of urgency, even desperation, to the extent that you become willing to do whatever it takes to survive. But of course desperation is tricky; desperate people can easily make matters worse. It’s perhaps during crises, moments of widespread desperation, that a well-developed philosophy of freedom can have its finest moment by guiding desperate people toward real solutions.

So does the United States have to follow, say, hapless Greece—with its bloated welfare state, strangling regulation and taxation, and monetary profligacy—before our crony-capitalist system develops cracks wide enough for enough of us to see that embracing liberty and rejecting statism is our last, our best, and our only hope?

I’m afraid our economy will have to look much more like the Greeks’ before we’ll muster the will to follow the example of the Swedes.

Empire State posted:

I recently had Jane Fonda come up on my news feed too. When Snopes wasn't enough, I just used someone else's response from this thread almost verbatim. I'm blue:



It was a conscious decision to refer to the Civil War era South as "traitors." I hoped to provoke a stupid response, and I was pretty happy when he painted Lincoln as the aggressor. I think some people speak volumes about themselves with just a little prompting.

Bizarro Kanyon posted:

Thanks for those responses. Here is the video in all its glory.

http://youtu.be/3h8O7V-WxWQ

Interlude posted:

You guys really defriend people based on the politics they reveal on social media sites? Echo chambers are dull.

Empire State posted:

The guy I was arguing with about Jane Fonda is very well read about some alternate-universe-American Civil War.

Technogeek posted:

If you haven't already (and the argument is still on the topic), be sure to point out that the Confederate constitution explicitly states that no state would actually have the power to say "we don't want slavery here". (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 4 - "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.")

Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:

That Jane Fonda/Nancy Reagan/Obama is honoring a traitor thing is going around like wild fire on my FB today.

Didn't some one post a good response to this in this thread? Or was it the other thread.... hmmm.

Forgall posted:

I wonder if Nancy was in on the Iran-Contra thing.

A Fancy 400 lbs posted:

Nah, her husband forgot to mention it.

quote:

Being Green...

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."

The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment f
or future generations."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled.

But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.

But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart-rear end young person.

We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to piss us off.

smilingfish posted:

I think this basically translates to "I'm old and I'm not happy." Any ideas on a response?