We have been discussing the tax policies of President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government — a record that I have criticized as ruinous from an economic standpoint. A recent report indicates that for some high-earning families — more than 8,000 — the Hollande policies impose a 100% tax. It is the ultimate “eat the rich” policy. Even for those families facing a 75% rate, it is unclear why they would continue to work in the country. Many are not. France is experiencing a flight of both high earners and companies.
The bizarre 100% tax is the result of a one-off levy last year on 2011 incomes for households with assets of more than 1.3 million euros ($1.67 million). The surcharge was imposed shortly after Hollande took office on a promise to hit the rich with high taxes. The Hollande 75% direct tax was so unfair that the Constitutional Council struck it down. However, this report states that the one-off levy effectively pushed some families to a 100% tax.
The newspaper Les Echos found that nearly 12,000 households paid taxes last year worth more than 75 percent of their 2011 revenues due to the exceptional levy. ($1 = 0.7798 euros).
Putting aside how many families are impacted by taxes above 75%, it is in my view an insane, self-destructive economic policy for France. I just spent an evening with a friend and his parents discussing the situation in France. This is a moderate family politically that has long fished in French waters. My friend is now an American citizen but his parents and family remain in France. They recounted how they had to destroy half of their ships because of taxes. They are seeing other businesses doing the same or simply moving out of France. These a patriotic and proud French people but they are watching their government cannibalize off the economy. The government is getting instant revenue while killing revenue producing businesses. It is like eating the grapes and roots of the vineyards of Bordeaux for food and leaving the fields barren.
As someone who truly loves visiting France, it is disheartening to watch Hollande’s cultural war on the wealthy. I favor higher taxes as part of a comprehensive package of reforms in this country and other countries. However, Hollande’s expressed hatred of the rich resulted in a political success and now an economic disaster. It is also grossly unfair to wealth French who love their country and are not opposed to making sacrifices. Hollande played the class card and told the French that their problems were due to a sinister upper class rather than France’s high labor costs and burgeoning budgets. Even if one dismisses this study and the one-year levy, there are still many thousands of families and businesses who face a government demanding 75 percent tax rates.
These policies however will only lengthen the economic crisis. Indeed, France is already viewed as a hostile country for business and that is likely to continue under Hollande who is fighting the French judges to impose taxes higher than what is viewed as constitutional or fair by the courts.
Source: Reuters
Mike: No, that was premature, it showed up above without alteration. I thought you had done that. As you can see by the time-stamps, I gave it about half an hour to show up before I called for Help. I suppose I will have to be even more patient than that…
Thanks for looking, though.
Tony,
Just checked WordPress and your comment isn’t in the spam folder, the pending folder, or the trash folder. Damned WordPress ate it.
HELP on wordpress, I think my reply was flagged as spam or something.
DavidM says: Therefore I take umbrage at you saying that me and Bron support selfishness.
Take all the umbrage you can carry, it is free today. I believe your taxes, as they stand, are 90% devoted to helping people that need help, and are not so high that you cannot live comfortably on the after-tax income. Therefore, I believe if you take offense at this level of taxation, then you are either making a petty and vindictive judgment to stop important help because it inevitably comes with a side of bitter corruption, or you are selfishly demanding that your own creature comforts and hedonistic pursuits are more important than food, education, safety, shelter and health care of people that need it. Either seems very selfish to me.
I do not want to give the impression I am a self-sacrificing saint; my wife and I live comfortably on less than half of our take-home pay. I am saying that I do not mind my taxes, even though I am very irritated and often infuriated by corruption, because I have been up close and personal with the good that taxes do, and I think the good outweighs the bad ten to one.
DavidM: When you speak of voters supporting Social Security, I am pretty sure you are not thinking about that homeless or near homeless guy who votes for it because it is a monthly paycheck to support his drug habit.
On the contrary, my sister is a drug addict, and I get acquainted with the people of whom you speak more often than I care to be. But I am not opposed to drug use. Certainly marijuana is no worse than alcohol. When it comes to harder drugs, I think most addicts (including alcohol and tobacco addicts, including caloric addicts) are self-medicating their unresolved pain and trauma, emotional or physical. I do not wish to deny them that comfort. I wish I could help them resolve their trauma, but I am something of a blunt instrument in interpersonal relations, so the privilege of helping is for somebody else, that I may be able to enable or support in other ways.
I think the number of welfare cheats and undeserved checks are a small fraction compared to the legitimate help being delivered. I do not understand the disproportionate reaction to cheating that would deny legitimate help, to me the Right’s obsession with cheats, that would let those needing legitimate help live in misery just to prevent a few cheaters, boggles my compassionate sensibility. That level of “burn the village and everyone in it” vindictive cruelty over a handful of bad actors rises to the level of mental illness to me.
Any comprehensive program serving millions of people is going to be defrauded, that is reality. But major government programs are run by trained professionals using standardized bureaucratic filters that have a much lower probability of being scammed than a private charity run by housewives, and can systematically prosecute and punish frauds in a way that housewives and weekend volunteers cannot.
There is no perfect system. Waste, fraud and abuse will exist in any system, because greed and evil are like gas pressure; if there is a leak somewhere the gas will find it, and no business or organization can ever really be air tight. So we will be occasionally outraged, which hurts but may help us seal a leak. Before we act on that outrage, it is important to understand the transgressions in terms of percentages and keep one eye on the totality of the program and the good it is doing. When I do that, I routinely find it more productive to support fixes and patches than to give in to emotion and just sweep it all off the table.
Tony C –
In my experience, my own personal money has helped more people in paying for lodging, meals, job transportation, cars, scooters, bicycles, etc. than anything I have seen come from federal government. Also, county funding for social programs have helped far more people than anything I have seen from federal government. If I had a choice of where to put my money, the federal government would be the last place.
I suppose I am frustrated in seeing so much of my money going to the federal government, and there is always all this talk about how much good they do. Sure, I have senior friends and family members who receive Social Security and that is real nice, but the poor people at the bottom, the people who are really hurting and oppressed in society, I just don’t see any federal programs actually helping them. You say you have a different experience, so I am left scratching my head wondering what you are looking at. Wish I could spend a few days with you working with the poor showing me what the federal dollars are doing for them.
In regards to the number of professors being liberal, are you forgetting who feeds them? Most educational institutions are funded by government, and most of their grant writing is to federal agencies, so naturally, who do you think they want to be funded? I don’t see it as a result of their great intelligence about what is best for everyone but rather what is best for them.
Mike, you make some excellent points about the colony mentality at the time and the need for compromise if they were going to get the colonies to be united in some way. Some of the colonies actually still had state sponsored religion too. I can see your point that the natural direction toward a strong central government is kind of inevitable, and that most people today see themselves as Americans rather than Floridians or Californians or New Yorkers, etc.
Still chewing on your comments, guys. Thanks for taking time to share.
David,
I had a 37 year career working with the poor, the disadvantaged, people with mental illness, drug addicts and abused children. The Federal Governments assistance is vital to helping them. Most of what you hear about that help is nonsense, spouted by ignorant people on both sides of the political spectrum.
Mike, I am not talking about what I have heard. I am talking about my experience working with them. Maybe I am working with people who fall through the cracks? I can’t explain the disparity between our experiences without more details. Care to share more specifics?
David,
Sharing my 37 year experience would take a very long book. I will say that you might have seen what you expected to see. As an institute trained psychotherapist I’ve been trained to question even my own assumptions. Quite frankly in this you simply don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you saw what your pre-judgment expected to see.
Mike, I only speak from what I know, but we all have different experiences in life. If you think I don’t know what I am talking about, it is not because I am being dishonest or misrepresenting anything. It is because our experience is different. We therefore develop perceptions that are different. Hearing more specifics from you would be more helpful than just hurling epithets.
I will say that upon some reflection last night about this difference between us, I realized that there is one federal program that has been very helpful in my own work with social justice issues. It is HUD’s various housing programs, including Section 8. About one-third of the homeless people I have assisted have mental illness problems. Some of them cannot hold a job. How do I help these people who will never be able to pay rent on their own?
The answer is HUD programs which allow them to pay rent based on a sliding scale adjusted for their income. People with no income pay zero rent. I did not think of them readily as a federal program because they operate in the Tampa area as the Tampa Housing Authority. I had established a relationship with them years ago to work with homeless people that me or one of my volunteers brought to them. Section 8 involves a long waiting list that usually takes 2 years, but there have been individuals I have worked with who have been greatly helped also by Section 8 housing. They provide nicer housing in nicer neighborhoods, much better than the projects. So this is one federal program that I would donate to on a voluntary basis, and therefore say that they are worthy of my tax dollars. It is a good thing for people to have the opportunity of shelter and a place to call home. HUD has been extremely important to people who would otherwise be wondering the streets without purpose.
“I did not think of them readily as a federal program because they operate in the Tampa area as the Tampa Housing Authority.”
David,
This is the problem I have with what you say in a nutshell. Most Federal Aid programs distribute funds through local entities, but you don’t see the relationship. In my time as a civil servant, 20 years in management, I worked with a wide range of programs funded by entities such as HUD, USDA, Social Security, AFDC, etc. While we handled the services on the local level, most of the money came from the Federal Government, which does not deliver services directly. This is why despite you own personal experiences you don’t really understand what is going on, or the importance of it to the people being served. You have drawn conclusions based on your political predisposition, rather than the reality. You say you are happy to send your tax dollars to HUD, but you don’t realize that there are a multitude of other Federal Programs that do work just as good or better for the people who need it.
I am actually an expert in the system and in my last 20 years of civil service work I was what is known as a “program person”, which meant that I was tasked from the highest levels within the my agency (20,000 workers, perhaps $20 billion budget) to create and to re-organize a wide range of programs. When I retired from the agency I had a staff of over 300 people, located in 12 offices around NYC. While politicians for political gain talk of fraud and waste, I know better because I did the work. For instance in the NYC Food Stamps Program I was charged with reorganizing the office that collected on Food Stamp overpayments. While this represented a significant sum, only 4% came from actual fraud. The remaining 96% came from worker errors in budgeting. The budgeting problems were not exclusively the workers fault, but were created by politicians so worried about fraud that their regulations produced budgeting methods that were hard for even the best workers to figure out. I reorganized office and the system; and in the process saved NYC $120 million in fines from the Federal Government. At the same time I reorganized another sub-agency receiving federal money and saved them $30 million in fines. I also at various times served as a Director of Contracts, of Budget and of Administration of sub-agencies. I was for a time the Deputy Director of Facilities for the extensive NYC Homeless Shelter System.
I give the above not to puff myself up, but to explain to you that you really don’t know what you are talking about when it comes to helping the needy and you hold your views because they conveniently jibe with your resentment of taxation. You can be as personally charitable as you desire, but the fact is that to deal with the overwhelming social/economic disparity in this country aid on a national level is necessary. Beyond that necessity though is the fact that this disparity directly causes social unrest which makes it bad for even those insulated from poverty and social dysfunction. This is the problem of those who believe as you do David, you don’t realize that unless our society is just and fair, no one is insulated from chaos. Even the super-rich in Mexico for instance find their children and themselves kidnapped and murdered. This is a direct cause of economic disparity and chaos and cannot be policed. It is in all our interests to level the playing field and repair what is a shredded safety net.
DavidM: also do not think they ever envisioned the 16th Amendment causing the kind of income tax we suffer under now.
Clearly, the founders envisioned the amendment process and rules, that is why they wrote them, so they envisioned and embraced the idea of amendments being made as the collective sensibilities changed. If they wanted to restrict those amendments to edge dressing, they could have easily done that in a few clauses: For example, include the line “This initial Section and all within it shall not be subject to amendment,” then pile all their inalterable lines into the first section.
Other than the Bill of Rights, I doubt they envisioned any specific Amendment that has been later passed. So I will agree on that point.
DavidM: Their entire revolution was fought over taxes and the inability of people to do anything about how they get taxed. I feel that kind of tax oppression now.
I don’t think so, if you read their laundry list of complaints, I think their entire revolution was fought over oppression by the Crown, and taxation without representation was one minor aspect of that oppression. They wanted to pass laws in their localities and the Crown refused to let them.
Confiscatory taxes were certainly a complaint, but there was a difference: The Crown provided absolutely nothing in return, and I think in the Colonists view that was akin to theft. But the colonists did believe in taxation and regulation and collective action.
Although I also agree our government is corrupt to the tune of billions of dollars, our taxes actually do provide benefits. Social Security and Medicare are the most popular programs ever, and not just among the recipients; they are very popular in general polls of voters.
The military is heavily bloated (IMO), but I think most of us want the strongest military in the world (which I think we would still have if we cut it in half).
The majority agrees with funding public education; and funding a reasonable level of unemployment insurance. The majority agree we need watchdog institutions like the FDA, DOJ, FAA, and so forth.
What’s left? 20% of the budget? If you pay typical taxes, that amounts to less than five percent of your paycheck. Which is a raise worth fighting for, but it isn’t a motivation for revolution.
The problem is you guys (Bron and you) do not seem to want to live in a majority rule country, you want to live by rules the majority reject as too harsh and too callous. Your claims of how much better off we would be if we just understood selfishness was a virtue ring false. We understand you think that way.
For myself, I really and sincerely do not care what the founders wanted or thought. Neither antiquity or fame sway me, neither does public acclaim or precedent. I am not here on Earth to execute anybody else’s vision, but to find my own way. That said, I do believe that good arguments have been formulated for thousands of years. I do not have to believe Euclid or Newton or Einstein or Darwin or Jefferson were infallible in order to believe they have made some groundbreaking arguments which I am not genius enough to either find flaw or improve upon.
However, one flawless argument, or a hundred of them, does not in my mind impart any presumption of infallibility for all of their arguments. One can reason perfectly from a false premise or assumption and still come to a wildly wrong conclusion. If I do not follow their argument, or I detect a failure to consider something by their ignorance at the time or just oversight or a failure of vision, I do not just accept their conclusion because they are famous. I believe argumentation must stand or fall on its own and the identity of the author is irrelevant at best, and misleading at worst. It is one of the reasons I post here anonymously.
Hi Tony.
I eventually want to get back to my previous questions about fairness, but no time right now. I just want to make a few quick points about how I think you misunderstand my thinking.
First, I think selfishness is the opposite of love, and therefore the origin of all evils in this world. Therefore I take umbrage at you saying that me and Bron support selfishness. I think this will become more clear when I get back to the questions I posed to you about fairness.
Second, I do believe in majority rule. The reason I speak is because I believe in government by the consent of the governed, and I believe strongly in free speech and the voice of dissent. I abide by majority rule, but when the majority get it wrong, I am going to speak out about it and make my case. I am sure that when you say the words “Social Security,” you have in mind nice responsible older seniors who lived productive lives and now have something to sustain them in their later years. Unfortunately, I have in mind drug addicts who cash that Social Security check to buy drugs and then go to private charities to meet their everyday needs like housing and food. I realize there is good in Social Security. My own mother collects it and does not in anyway abuse the money. But there also is a lot of waste and fraud. When you speak of voters supporting Social Security, I am pretty sure you are not thinking about that homeless or near homeless guy who votes for it because it is a monthly paycheck to support his drug habit. Nevertheless, I see that face of Social Security more often than I see the face of my mother who collects SS in a very legitimate way.
I do not believe it is right that there are billionaires in society. Who needs that kind of money? Who could even spend it? Something is wrong when so much wealth is consolidated in the hands of a few, and rather than spread their wealth around, they hold onto it. It has been said that they hold enough wealth to pay all the debts and make many in society pretty well off. If that is true, something is terribly wrong and needs to be fixed. So I think we somewhat agree on the problem, but we have different ideas about how to fix it. You trust government to do it. I don’t. I think we would just be switching from one group of sociopath monsters or whatever you want to call them for another group of the same.
The problem rests on the obscene amounts of money that they control and their love for that money. The problem is their selfishness. This is why I see the only way to fix the problem in government is to cut off their money supply by reducing taxes. They refuse to do it voluntarily, so the people have to take action. Hopefully we can do it through voting, but if the people do not do that, then some courageous individuals will have to rise up in revolution. It is said that only about one-third of this nation actually supported fighting Britain on the principle of truth being on their side. It apparently was enough.
In regards to the extremely wealthy in society, something needs to be done there as well, but I do have some uncomfortableness with just taking away what they have earned. I have problems with punishing success and how that affects society as a whole. I am open to hearing concrete ideas about what to do.
“For myself, I really and sincerely do not care what the founders wanted or thought.”
The entire comment you made to DavidW that the sentence above is quoted from is quite cogent. However, the sentence above is key. The idea that we are bound by what the founders wanted is a false theme used by “originalists” to thwart policies they don’t care for. The reality is that our Founders were wise enough to understand that times and conditions change. They set up the Constitution and the amendment process to allow the country to grow and change with the times. Such was their prescience and wisdom.
Hi Mike. Good point that the Constitution can and has changed from its original meaning through the amendment process. I agree with that.
Nevertheless, I find the founding fathers of this country to be somewhat wise, perhaps superseding the intellectual abilities of many in today’s society in regards to government, liberty, etc. Therefore, I have an interest in what they envisioned and imagined for this country. In my mind, we are heading in the direction of what they ran from and fought against. That is why I attempt to understand their original intent and question whether we are wise to deviate too far from it. History has a tendency to repeat itself, and we should learn from the mistakes of our forefathers.
If limited central government is what they envisioned, if they blamed their woes upon a strong central government in England, then I think we should try to understand that and not go down the path of a big central government. Even if we think the time has come to evolve into having a big central government, then we need to be honest and say, “yes, the forefathers did envision a limited central government for reasons x, y, z, but the time has come for a big central government, and we need it because …. and we will not have the same problems that our forefathers did with it because …
Does that make any sense to you?
I tend to think that a big central government is needed when the general public is lawless, not responsible, and inept. I think a strong, mature, wise general public should evolve into smaller central government, maybe even no need for a central government at all. I tend to think the same way about executive leadership. Immature civilizations might need a strong dictator to keep society in line, but a mature civilization might be able to get along with no strong executor, maybe just have a round table of councilman with no one man having more power than another.
So in some ways, the bias in my mind is toward smaller central government in the evolution of things, but I do question that as I see most of society devolve into selfishness and ignorance. I am amazed at how many of the public do not even know the names of their leaders or any current political events. I saw a University of California student the other day who not only did not know what Benghazi was all about, but he didn’t even know who the name of the Vice President. They can identify Britney Spears in a picture but not Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden. Strange times we live in.
“if they blamed their woes upon a strong central government in England, then I think we should try to understand that and not go down the path of a big central government.”
David,
They blamed their woes on an absolute Monarchy, that was exploiting the American colonies for profit and taxing them without allowing them a say in Parliament. The original governmental framework was a compromise because of the fact that it was made up of 13 former colonies whose citizenry was loyal only to that colony. More than two centuries later, although regional differences still exist, almost our entire population sees themselves as Americans, not just residents of individual states.
“So in some ways, the bias in my mind is toward smaller central government in the evolution of things, but I do question that as I see most of society devolve into selfishness and ignorance.”
David, I think you are wise to question it. While I agree with you that the devolution is happening, I don’t blame it on the citizens. I believe that it is the result of many years of propaganda disguised as entertainment, education and religion that has worked to separate us and to make us afraid of chimera’s.
nick,
Yeah … they’re cross-dressers
http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article1480895.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/PEOPLE+ONLY+Lee+Star
Blouise, Any research on Queen Bee’s?
Tony C.,
Alpha male concept versus leader concept … two different things.
The new research is indicating that the term alpha male: life is a struggle and only the strong shall thrive; Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” (not Darwin’s words); or “breeding male” in the wolf pack, has little to do with actual leadership and more to do with the aggressive, me first/me only psychological/social behavior that depends on fear.
I have often run the leadership experiment with groups.
If you have ever run the experiments on leader emergence within the group then you know that leadership is a group decision that is often denied to the overly aggressive member. Send the overly aggressive leader from the room and the so called “beta” leader, the one who listens and encourages, gets the mantle. Reinsert the aggressive member and he or she only succeeds if the beta member supports his/her actions. If the beta member ignores the alpha, the group follows suit.
In other words … alpha/aggressive equals leadership is being disproved by social scientists over and over again in studies around the world.
There’s fascinating work being done in this field and the implications are enormous.
DavidM: I believe “General Welfare” is a specific acknowledgment in the language of the time to the legitimacy of the government coordinating collective actions and projects on behalf of the citizens.
Like building a highway system, universal retirement and health insurance program, public school system, and so on. I do not believe that is open to interpretation or opinion. Individual founders may disagree, but collectively they agreed to majority rule and a system that allowed such programs. It isn’t like they did not know, either, I am sure the colonies had various communal and socialist programs in place, those have been an integral part of human society since the dawn of intelligence.
A few years back I heard the author of the book, Factory Girls, interviewed on Public Radio. The author is a WSJ reporter. She spent a lot of time following the lives of a couple of “factory girls” in China. The book covers working conditions, but it goes into much more than that. I learned a lot about the lower middle class life in China from women’s perspective. It’s a good read.
DavidM: Gene will probably ding me on this :-), but you need to see the Constitution as meta-law, not law. The point of the Constitution is to declare how laws are to be made, it is not the end document, it is the planning document.
It is analogous to a business plan, or in academia, a research plan. The work isn’t done yet and there are unknowns, but this is the framework we will operate within, here are our goals, etc. In the Constitution, the Amendments specify boundaries within which the government must (or is supposed to) operate.
The fact that the Constitution contains some specifics is because those were known and obvious to the Founders. Just as, in a business plan, I can refer to my patents as an asset, or in an academic plan, I can point at papers and results I or others have achieved that are precursors to what I want to do, or support my case as plausible.
But those specifics are not the only things that are “Constitutional.” The Founders fully expected (and immediately began) for the Congress to pass laws, levy tariffs and taxes, ad infinitum. They could not know about radio frequency bandwidth limitations, but they did know, as we do right now, that the concerns a hundred years hence would be best understood by people a hundred years hence, so they were using their rare (not unique) opportunity to define how such people would deliberate and come to decisions about what laws to pass, repeal, or review.
The Constitution describes a machine, the input is supposed to be the current milieu, the output is supposed to be laws, constraints on behavior, consistent with the will of the people residing in the current milieu.
It is not a fixed target. In fact, even our First Amendment rights (or second or any other) are just amendments that can be revised, extended, or repealed with a sufficient majority. They are no more an absolute than was the Prohibition Amendment.
So Bron is wrong, the “common defense” has no special status because it was specifically mentioned, it was specifically mentioned as an obvious example. Just as my specific mention of autistic disability did not mean that was the only thing I was talking about; it is mentioned because appropriate concrete examples are better than pure abstractions when getting a point across (as you yourself did with your janitorial exercise).
What is Constitutional is any law passed following the rules set forth in the most recent version of the Constitution, that do not fall afoul of the specific prohibitions of the Constitution. What is unConstitutional are laws passed (or government action taken) that violate those rules or prohibitions; like Obama’s hit list, or waging war without a Congressional declaration of war.
Social Security and Medicare laws were, I believe, challenged, and a way was found to implement them within the Constitution. They are not unConstitutional.
Tony, my sense is that the founding fathers expected each State to be the primary collectors of tax and provide for their citizens general welfare in the manner that you describe. I don’t have time to do the research on this right now to back up what I am about to say, but years ago I read through the records of the early Congress and found many instances where businesses sought money that would serve for the general welfare, and they were turned down following speeches about how Congress was not to be involved with such things, not for $20,000 and not for even $1. It was a principle thing. We seem to have strayed far away from that principle.
I also do not think they ever envisioned the 16th Amendment causing the kind of income tax we suffer under now. Their entire revolution was fought over taxes and the inability of people to do anything about how they get taxed. I feel that kind of tax oppression now.
Today as I look over the political landscape, I think Congress is far more corrupt than local politicians, and I think it is because they are more removed from the people and also surrounded by much greater wealth. If I had to draft a system from scratch, I would favor the State and local governments being the primary tax collectors with Congress looking to the kind of taxes collected prior to 1913 and the 16th Amendment. Perhaps they could approach the States for some supplemental income, if the States felt it was warranted. I think programs like Social Security and Medicare are much more efficient when run at the State and local level. As it is now, there is way too much abuse and waste.
Bron,
Bettykath is referring to discretionary spending:
“Discretionary outlays—the part of federal spending that lawmakers generally control through annual appropriation acts—totaled about $1.35 trillion in 2011, or close to 40 percent of federal outlays. Slightly more than half of that spending was for defense.”
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42728
Bron: The others are entirely a constitutional function of government, the constitution gives Congress the rights to make laws, tax and spend for the general welfare. It gives the right to the Supreme Court to be the final arbiter of what is Constitutional, and they have held all of these budgetary items are Constitutional.
You can point out inaccuracy without conflating it with outright lies.
Tony C wrote: “the constitution gives Congress the rights to make laws, tax and spend for the general welfare.”
Kind of a stretch here, Tony. Seems like the best you could argue is that it might be Constitutionally allowable depending on how “general welfare” is interpreted, but “Constitutionally mandated” implies a duty and obligation. I don’t think the Constitution meant these programs were necessary obligations of the federal government when it said “general welfare,” especially considering that none of what is being done now could ever have happened under the original Constitution without the 16th Amendment being ratified just 100 years ago.
I would love to hear your thoughts extended because I think Bron’s comment was acceptable and not an outright lie. Is there really no room for a difference of interpretation and opinion here?
“50% of the federal goes to the military and war making.”
Federal Budget:
Defense is 23%
health care is 24% of which 510.5 billion goes to medicare and 333.9 billion goes to something they call Vendor Payments (Welfare) of which 266.6 billion goes to State Grants for Medicaid
pensions = 24% Social Security accounts for $818.4 of the 866.3 billion.
Welfare = 12%
Education = 3%
National defense is a constitutional function of government, the others listed are not.
So that is 23% < 63%
I dont now how you get 50% from 23%. Various welfare payments account for over 50% of our national budget, not defense spending. And out of the 856 billion spent on defense, 139.6 billion goes to veterans, 15.1 billion goes to foreign military aid and 41.9 billion goes to foreign economic aid. Actual defense spending is 660 billion which is 17.9% of total spending, no where near 50%.
I am curious as to where that 50% number came from?
here is a link for the information above:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collection.action?collectionCode=BUDGET
the down loads take some time.
If you got rid of all welfare spending, foreign aid and other programs not constitutionally mandated, spending would amount to less than 30% of the budget.
Correction: Above I said, Unequal economic status does strip the poorer person of their basic human rights, one of which I consider a right to be free from exploitation due to their desperation.
I was typing too fast, and in that context I meant it SHOULD NOT strip the poorer person of their basic human rights. One of which I consider a right to be free from exploitation due to their desperation. Financial or otherwise.
I think that poor or rich should have identical human rights. I have an autistic child in my family, and as a result I am occasionally acquainted at events (like birthday parties) with other autistics. For most, their prospects of a normal life and normal earnings are dim to vanishing, and for most their parents are not going to be able to leave them much either. This situation is not the fault of the parents, or the kids. Although I have my suspicions, I am not certain it is the fault of anybody, it may be just brutal nature. But their desperate circumstances now, and in the future when their parents are gone, is not an excuse to exploit them, enslave them, rip them off, or unfairly split any value their limited abilities can create.
I am not saying anybody is doing that; I am presenting a real-world example of the type of thing I am talking about.
bettykath: Thank you.
I think the military bit is sociopathic corporate competition by alternative means. It isn’t about our security or safety, it is about the security and safety of their profits.
Tony, Love your explanations. I’ve clipped and saved for more learning.
btw, all this stuff about taxes, 50% of the federal goes to the military and war making.
Bron: Mike Spindell could probably pontificate on this better than I, but I believe suicide is a choice made under extreme stress and failing to see any future that does not lead to unacceptable losses. That is more common in richer societies because people have much more to lose, and much more stress to perform with higher stakes. That can leave people feeling trapped and enslaved in their lives and duties, even if technically free to walk away from it all, they feel they couldn’t live with themselves if they did abandon their responsibilities, children, parents, etc. But you don’t have to live with it if you commit suicide….
Tony,
I think there is much of value in your comment on suicide. I would add that it is obviously common in people suffering in major depression thus feel hopeless. It is also connected with a sense of shame, or humiliation so deep that one wishes not to exist. Specific reasons are hard to define because each of us have different personalities. The rich country/poor country distinction you made seems quite on the money to me. Where this began was in the discussion of the Chinese labor situation. There have been many documentary news stories on this and the lives these factory workers live are ones of almost complete dreariness and desolation. Yet they are able to compare their lives to others more fortunate via the media. That in itself could lead to suicidal depression.
(What they think people want to hear; not what I want to hear; which is the unvarnished truth.)
Bron: What I have read, sometime last year, was statistics on a few dozen Chinese programmers, electrical engineers and assembly techs killing themselves over working hours in what are essentially round the clock sweat shops producing boards and software for various entities.
I don’t typically doubt Steven Levitt (Freakonomics author), but I notice Levitt is not the one espousing the reason you give, either; that is “media.” I do not trust Chinese media (or American media) to tell me anything except what I want to hear; they certainly aren’t going to tell me they are working people so hard they would rather die than continue.