ah, if only social progams weren't by and large spectacular failures
I mean, seriously, who the fuck gets OFF welfare for example
Seriously has political liberalism done ANYTHING for poor people or for minorities?
Depends on a few definitions - I would argue 'yes it has'. It's given them more of a chance than they had before. Properly-funded and well-constructed (Note that last bit) education and healthcare systems are pretty much mandatory for that. Notice that the gap between rich and poor in America is widening. This is not a good thing. Economies break down over this.
First off, I am no fan of Reagan (mainly because he grew the warfare state and increased the deficit) but it's not so much the exact rate, its the rhetoric.
Obama advocates, at least rhetorically, using the power of the state to decide who should have how much income. I don't give a shit about why or how much; that is a purely totalitarian idea, and is simply unacceptable in a free society. Period.
Incidentally we had 90% top rates in the 1950s.
And what are minimum wages? Or are you opposed to those, too?
All it is is the government making sure people on the bottom don't miss out. It's ensuring a basic level of healthcare available to the people on the bottom, and a basic level of education available to their children. It's giving them a chance.
Which is an abject failure regardless of how much money is spent on it
D.C schools spend more per capita than any school system in the country, and are arguably the worst.
Yeah, I've read about that. It does show that just blindly throwning money at problems is a Bad Idea. Your school system does need some major restructuring to try and reduce the administrative overhead. An inherent problem with publicly funded projects is that they can tend to the bureaucratic. It just means that they need to be managed carefully. It's clearly better than the alternative of schooling only being privately provided - that would be the nail in the coffin for the working class of any country.
So clearly your public school system doesn't really need any more money, it just needs some administrative replumbing. Good. Your universities, on the other hand... well, they need some sort of government-funded student loans scheme. Something that means people can go to university on ability, rather than on ability to pay off a massive loan.
In Australia, the system works pretty well. Basically, when you finish high school, you are given a Tertiary Entrance Rank, or TER, which is a percentile ranking of how well you did relative to the rest of your yeargroup in the standardised exams - so if you get 90, you beat 90% of the school population (Well, theoretically. There tends to be some jigging with it that probable distorts that). Other states call it something different, but it all basically works the same.
Students then apply to a variety of courses in different universities, in preference order. Universities have a certain number of government-funded places in each course. They pick the top n applicants for each course for a government place, and fill the rest with full-fee paying and international students. The government pays... I think it's about half of the cost of a government-funded place, and the rest goes into a "HELP debt" (Higher Education Loan Program). This is a debt you owe to the government - it's indexed against inflation (Actually, the CPI, technically, but it's the same effect), but there's no interest. Repayments are automatically added onto your tax when you earn enough.
It all works quite well and greatly helps the ability of clever kids in poor families to study medicine. There are certainly some issues with it, but I'm not sure what changes should be made.
America needs something like that. You don't even need the government to pay half for the place or something, just government-held student loans would help incredibly.
Fair enough, the government does produce some innovations.
Now imagine a government-run Internet.
At best government can seed innovations for private industry to take over.
You absolutely positively need government scientific research for the exact reason mentioned in your last paragraph - the government is able to do 'risky' research because it's got a guaranteed income stream. They can do things with no obvious payoff and benefit us all in the long run - like the Internet. Or NASA, which has produced a list of random spinoffs a kilometre long.
which seems
to fail
every time
Works pretty well in France, which is widely regarded as having the best healthcare system in the world.
Once again, this is a system that you need to be careful about. The biggest thing is that you need to ensure it costs the same for companies to insure an 80-year-old with diabetes as it costs to insure a perfectly healthy 18-year-old. It certainly sounds silly, and it raises costs for everyone, but it's absolutely essential or only the healthy can afford to get healthcare.
For one thing, "the american capitalist system" is not that far from "European socialism" - you guys have lower corporate taxes, we redistribute income less. (maybe a better system of "social capitalism" but meh whatever)
But well, it's kind of hit or miss - Germany and France flirt with double digit unemployment, Swedish people are poorer than African Americans, and the EU as a whole is trailing the U.S.A by 10,000 dollars per capita.
But the thing is that being unemployed isn't as big a deal in Germany or France.
Swedes are poorer than African-Americans, on average? That sounds a little suspect. Source? I'd also like to see the source for the less-money-per-capita stat, or at least some sort of clarification. I'm not saying you're making stuff up, I don't think you are, I'd just like to see how the number was arrived at.
6% unemployment is a fucking crisis for us.
Careful comparing employment figures. Counting methodologies - and in particular, /who/ counts - differ between countries enough to throw everything off. For example, the Australian unemployment rate is currently 4.7%, according to government stats - it suddenly and miraculously dropped by roughly 5% when the last Prime Minister, John Howard, got into power. Not because his sheer presence made people get jobs, but because he changed the way the figures were collected such that they didn't measure the long-term unemployed.
It would be interesting to see full unemployment figures for many countries, but they're just not measured, so it's all theorymon, really.
And of course, we have a much bigger population, the growing bulk of that from Third World countries to deal with! (Europeans will NOT be a minority anytime soon thank you)
So basically, even with our own socialism intermixed with our economy, we're still #1 (though not for much longer unless we actually start being...capitalist...again - like letting shitty businesses fail and stop politicizing housing/banking/taxation)
Iunno, I'd say Sweden is doing better than you on the whole. :P. I certainly know where I'd prefer to live.
and you likely think it's for lack of trying...we declared a war on poverty. And lost. Badly. And the HDI is a joke - it's strongly biased towards countries that have more social programs.
I think it's because your economy and policies strengthen the poverty spiral rather than help drag people out of it. Incredibly low minimum wages, hostility to unionism, little industrial regulation, poor access to tertiary education and exceedingly expensive healthcare make it difficult for the poor to find a decent wage and keep it.
It's not just the HDI, mind - a large number of international rankings put America well below where it should be. General health and scientific literacy are the big ones - although there are a lot of confounding factors, what with high rates of obesity and religious fundamentalism sort of clouding the data. And we don't really have a statistically meaningful sample, because we have no other developed nations without 'socialism' to compare to. So yeah, the statistics don't say a massive amount, but they don't exactly cross out any result.
"socialist hyperbole"
Who the fuck is getting 0% of the pie? Seriously. I mean, SERIOUSLY.
If you have a job you are getting a piece of the pie. Yes, not everyone can get a job. Nobody said capitalism was perfect. But socialists, social democrats, whatever, they shit on every flaw that capitalism has as a system, and do not care to realize that as a whole capitalism beats any other system ever tried, and its not even close.
Yeah, that was a litle hyperbolic. But the idea is that growing the pie doesn't grow everybodies slice - it grows unevenly, because the people with lots of pie can bargain that pie into lots more pie. pie tends to get more and more concentrated over time. The idea of 'socialism' as you have defined it is to try and prevent that trend, because then the people without much pie have a chance to earn some more pie. And because when pie gets more concentrated, the pieconomy breaks down - if one person has 100% of the pie, who will he trade pie with?
It's not really capitalism versus OH NOES SCARYSOCIALICOMMYNAZIS! It's more laissez-faire capitalism versus a sane economic and social model called 'modern democracy'.
I really have no time for the moral argument against socialism. Taxation is not the same as theft - it's quite clear that we need a government for some things - like setting laws and international diplomacy. The government needs to tax people to get that money, unless you want to run one based on voluntary donation. Good luck to you if you do.
Anyway, the end idea is that you need a government and it needs to tax people, or society breaks down. From there, the only argument is about how much to tax and what to spend the money on - and the overwhelming conclusion seems to be "Just enough" and "On things that further the common good". That's what government is
for - it's a communal spending pool used to do things that benefit the common good, things that private enterprise will not do. And 'socialism' benefits the common good, and most certainly isn't something private enterprise will do. The end. No moral problems there.
