Judging by my Facebook feed Americans are perfectly capable of vicious, polarized discourse without foreign influence.
It's gotten quite bad in the U.S. Common political discourse has devolved into a back and forth of insults, hyperbolic accusations, and sometimes just plain insanity. I agree with you that this will probably be something that will last a while.
If only we could get people to realize that believing something to be true merely because it reinforces a pre-conceived idea or because it's plausibly true is not a path toward finding the truth. How do you have a discussion with someone who believes the political equivalent of a flat Earth?
This problem can cut both ways. Ie. if one dismisses the other person as the political equivalent of a "flat earther," they're not questioning their own assumptions or seeking to understand why the other person could feel something so strongly.
Having lived in both deeply red and deeply blue states in the US, I think most people aren't as crazy or as far apart as they think they are. But many of the people who have lived their whole life in one camp have been trained to think that the other side is literally crazy, and that's a convenient excuse to be afraid of them and not bother seeking to understand them.
" Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the worse it gets. These feuds “seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total, driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their ruin,” Coleman writes. “We often think we understand these conflicts and can choose how to react to them, that we have options. We are usually mistaken, however.” "
" Once we get drawn in, the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. “Over time, people grow increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of others,” according to training literature from Resetting the Table, an organization that helps people talk across profound differences in the Middle East and the U.S. "
If you're looking for it, you'll see this behavior everywhere online, including HN, and it's getting worse.
Some ideas are so idiotic - like flat Earth belief - that one should not waste their time engaging with said ideas. There are people who deny that Sandy Hook happened. I see no need to understand such fools.
> How do you have a discussion with someone who believes the political equivalent of a flat Earth?
How can you decide if someone is the political equivalent of a flat Earther unless you actually attempt to have a discussion with them? All I really see online is people trying to collect the most virtual points (retweets and likes) within their own echo chamber rather than actually discuss things with people.
I don't need to have a discussion with the person sharing a photo of Nancy Pelosi "quoting" her as saying that a border will violate the rights of millions of illegal immigrants in order to know that this person's politics aren't connected to reality.
> Common political discourse has devolved into a back and forth of insults, hyperbolic accusations, and sometimes just plain insanity.
if i may: this example, and my own experience, is consistent with the newspapers from the american civil war, which i read lots of many years ago while my parents dragged me through the american South Eastern states and the myriad covil war national parks an monuments.
further:
> flat earth
just dont. let them vote. and relax. and remember you arent in charge. if you want Texans (for instance) to vote differently, well then... move to Tecas, y'all!
I am still hopeful that the hand wringing about social media is overblown. Flat earthers for example I believe are in two camps: the genuine loonies that have always been with us in small numbers and the large number of people who just want to pretend to have whacky beliefs for the entertainment value of holding them (think people who believe in crystal healing and such). As dissatisfying as it is, freaking out about people who hold beliefs for entertainment is counter productive.
We also have to remember that discourse waxes and wanes in tone. Throughout the 1800s for example it wasn't uncommon for massive brawls to take place between what were essentially political gangs. Think of the brawls we see today between antifa and right wing groups. Also the 70s saw literally thousands of bombings in NYC by far left groups. Its probable that due to political realignment and inevitable shifts in technology we're going to see this going forward. The most important thing we can all do is keep faith in our fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech.
It seems to me that the problem now versus 30 years ago is one of scale. It's much easier sequester oneself from sources of information we don't like for political reasons. It's easier in terms of time and money to get masses of people to believe easily disprovable claims. The adage in politics has been, "All politics is local." Is that true anymore? Will it be true in 10 years?
With demographic and economic changes and the power/scale of social media the U.S. is facing, I think the intermediate future does not look good for political discourse.
I'm thinking that a lot of this perceived difference is that taking a political stance is much more natural on social media than previously in real life. Before you would have to care enough to find some place to set your soap box or buy a printing press. The crazies definitely were there but there were also a large segment of the population that would have gladly espoused whacky beliefs but didn't have the motivation and/or resources to do so. Now, proclaiming that the earth is flat takes about 10 minutes of account setup online. I'm just not convinced that it really matters as much as people think it does.
It's increasingly hard to justify not doing business in China for moral reasons whilst doing business in the U.S. If the moral high ground could indisputably be claimed by the U.S. then peoples' views would be different. Now it's not a big deal that Google wants to do business in China since it's doing business in the U.S.
It's not necessarily that morality has gone down in the U.S; it's that trust in the morality of America's leaders has gone down. I see this as a sign of a decline in the faith of America's institutions. Also with globalization the distinction between nation-states begins to erode. This is especially so in the case of business.
I was born and raised in the Canal Zone. While it was still an American territory. Went to American schools and was taught about the U.S. I too once had the patriotic fervor you display. Then I came to the U.S. and slowly realized that reality did not match what I was taught.
I do not sweep under the rug the ills our society and government have done. Nor do I diminish their accomplishments. Indeed I don't do this for any nation now that I understand that the blind patriotism I was raised with is a destructive thing.
Empires come and go. The American empire is in decline. It may rise again to greater heights and glory. It might not. Eventually it will be replaced. There is no longer any moral superiority in our leadership.
It seems foolish to decry Google doing business in China whilst importing billions and billions of dollars of Chinese made goods. Google works with the American government to do mass surveillance on its citizens. I'm not going to get in a tizzy if they decide to do the same in China.
Say what you like about his content, but it is not fringe.
This is a man spouting off that there is evidence that Michelle Obama is a man [1]. If that's not a fringe idea I'd like to know what you think one is. To me a fringe idea is one that is so obviously wrong that it is not worth considering its merits.
Doubtless there are many fools willing to consider the 'facts' surrounding Michelle Obama's gender but they are wackos. His ideas are not worth debunking. They are prima facie false. Discussing his punditry gives credence to the notion that his ideas are worthy of consideration. They are not.
His followers will not see him for what he is. They are clearly impervious to facts and reasoning. Anyone willing to follow the rantings of a man spouting off Alex Jones' nonsense is beyond being able to be reasoned with.
I do not have proof in the mathematical sense that Michelle Obama is a woman. I merely have an overwhelming preponderance of the evidence that she is a woman and absolutely no evidence to the contrary. Indeed, interestingly enough you wrote:
...you can genuinely say SHE is a female?
Emphasis mine. I do not need definitive proof. Collect all the statements you believe to be true. Now collect all of the statements you can actually, definitively prove true. The intersection of these two sets is quite small. This is true for everyone.
You have to give a better example if that's was your best shot to make Jones looks like a loon.
You believe that Alex Jones thinking Michelle Obama is a man is not sufficient evidence that he is a loon and you have the temerity to claim that my approach to reasoning and facts is precisely what's wrong with the country.
Thank you for your post. It was instructive, illuminating, and hilarious all at the same time. That is a rare feat.
Donald Trump is a woman. By your definition this statement is not enough to make me a loon. Therefore...
----
> So how much of the proof we got that Donald Trump IS actually a man? His look? Many transgander look much more male than he does. Same sex marriage? Could be? Have you seen his birth certificate (original, NOT the copy) that you can genuinely say he is a male? Yes I know he has the kids... okay so let me see his DNA test that actually they belong to Donald. as a parent. Exactly; you have none.
---
Are you suggesting that the above information should be provided to debunk me? (I mean, after all this is the President I am talking about rather than the First lady which means the fact he is secretly a woman is much more important!)
Do you have evidence that this happens in the ER? When my wife did her ER rotation it wasn't like this.
We have a study that shows women with heart attacks do worse in ERs unless they are treated by a female doctor. You are presenting facts (without attribution) about surgeons. ER doctors are not surgeons. So what evidence do you have from the ER that contradicts the apparent conclusion of the study?
Is funny that those who fight gender biases the most are some of the most biased.
It's quite ironic that you wrote the above sentence given your post. The only evidence you provide is about surgeons and conclude that male superiority in medicine is the most likely reason for the statistics in the study. That is quite a stretch there.
Thanks, it's meant to be ironic. There are only guesses all around based on a numbers with a similar ratio of 5 cases for women physicians and 700 for men. How can this be considered serious reporting? If the numbers favored men, we wouldn't be having this conversation for a number of reasons.
There hasn't been thousands of years of gender bias in favor of women so it's expected that results that show men are better than women in some areas are not necessarily newsworthy. Sometimes such results are newsworthy.
You miss my point. No statistician worth his salt would ever consider these numbers relevant, Yet here it it's all over the news. Why the over compensation for women? A whole story making women out to be superior to men in some way with trash to back it up. Why? If women are capable, give them props. Don't make up stuff based on horrible data.
The uncomfortable reality is that 7 billion people can’t all live like Americans (or Europeans). Extracting the resources necessary for everyone to live like Americans would be very bad for the environment. The effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide. It seems to me all other options are not effective.
They very likely can, but it would require a massive program of nuclear power plant building. This is unacceptable to environmentalists, who prefer to pretend that people will voluntarily reduce their quality of life.
It’s not just energy production and consumption that is the problem. Resource extraction, pollution, toxification of the environment are all contributing to the creation of a planet that sucks to live in.
Cheap energy goes a long way toward solving those problems. Many "rare" materials are only rare because they're energy intensive to extract, or they might not be needed at all (e.g. rare earth metals in motors and batteries) if we can afford to sacrifice energy efficiency in products. If we can irrigate all the deserts with desalinated sea water then there's less need for intensive agriculture. Pollution control technologies need energy to run and build, so cheaper energy means there's less opposition to using them.
The classic hyperboloid cooling tower works by evaporation, and the latent heat of vaporization of water is high, so a few degrees difference in the temperature of the make-up water isn't going to matter. It only matters with the more environmentally harmful once-through cooling, where the waste heat is dumped directly into the sea.
We have a route to that direction, and have made a lot of progress. It involves ending global poverty, providing economic opportunities for women, and ensuring contraception is available.
If you have high child mortality, limited access to contraception, and few employment opportunities for women, they have a lot of children. You change that, and they choose to have fewer. It happened in Europe. It happened in North America. It happened in South America. It happened in Asia (with some draconian policies to help it along). It's starting to happen in Africa: [0] (Check the map tab to see country-by-country over time).
We can do this without draconian policies. All we have to do is work to end global poverty. People think is hopeless, but twenty-five years ago, those same people would have said there's no way we'd cut it in half by now, and we did[1].
(Obligatory plug for the Against Malaria Foundation[2], which is my charity of choice for fighting global poverty, and at the same time, climate change.)
Yeah, it’s not a practical solution in terms of implementation. However, if implemented it would work and not require Star Trek levels of innovation. There are simply too many people in the world.
Okay...but how would that work? Where are all these people? China had a one-child policy which they've recently reversed because the ratio of old people/young people has basically reversed. On the plus side it seems that with education and generally societal improvements people tend to have less children anyway. Having said that in some developed countries they're struggling with declining birth rates. Partly because of lifestyle choices and partly due to high costs of raising children...
I mentioned that it's not practical. Forced sterilization - I'm not advocating this - would do the trick. Again, it's not practical to implement just now but I think it's clear that having fewer people would be ideal and would solve lots of problems.
I reckon the first step is to price negative
externalities into the things we buy for once. The first reason people and businesses consume so much is because they can afford it.
You don't believe that having fewer people in the world would lead to less pollution and less harm to the environment due to human activities? Or you don't believe someone is suggesting that there needs to be fewer people?
It seems clear to me that if there were only 5 million people in the world then human caused climate change wouldn't be an issue. Isn't that obvious? I'm not advocating that we get to that level. I'm just pointing out that there exists a number for the population such that human caused climate change would no longer be an issue. I don't think it's disputable that this is so.
I'm not advocating mass killings or anything like that. Just pointing out an obvious thing. If where were way less people then pollution, etc. would not be an issue.
Given how most polution comes from places where people generally have very little children, I doubt that reducing births in the third world would be an effective measure.
We need to solve for different variables: energy source (we need more nuclear), transportation (we need people to utilize public transportation and drive less cars), and we'd need to work on carbon capture (which is a technological problem).
Solving all these requires policy shift and government enforcement.
There’s a commonly held belief (myth?) that mathematics is a young person's pursuit in the sense of great discoveries. If you look at Erdös you see most of his great contributions occurring when he was younger and he was prolific throughout his life.
I think the downvotes come from your sentence about significant developments going under reported. I don’t think this happens at all. If someone discovers something great or profound in math no one cares about the age of the discoverer. Wiles was given a special prize because he was past the age of 40 when he proved Fermat's Last Theorem.
When the mathematical knowledge increases, does the general character of the mathematical problems stay the same in the terms of required work and time? It's possible the problem set that young people can solve before they turn 40 will decrease after some time.
The Korean War ended up benefitting South Korea in the sense that they didn’t up like North Korea. The free trade agreements have largely been responsible for large numbers of the world's population improving their living standard. There are other examples of intervention being good. Of course there are lots of examples of intervention being bad.
There is nothing special about Western intervention vs. intervention by other regional powers. Nations with power rarely use it for the well being of the world. But shouldn’t one strive to have governments do what you consider to be right?
>The Korean War ended up benefitting South Korea in the sense that they didn’t up like North Korea
This is an incorrect understanding of Korean history. US anti-communist policy played no small part in creating North Korea in the first place.
In the postwar period, US support for the right-wing dictator Syngman Rhee, who murdered tens of thousands of Korean citizens he suspected were his political opponents, empowered and drew popular support to Kim Il-Sung. Sung was further bolstered by the US giving favored status to Japan over Korea, forcing them, for example, to purchase goods and expertise from their brutal, former colonial rulers. With this state of affairs, Sung, a former anti-Japanese resistance fighter, was successful in persuading many that that the US-backed rule of Rhee was just an extension of the pre-War colonial rule, ultimately devolving into the never-ending civil war we have today.
This in no way benefitted the south, but instead has been a nearly 70 year long drag on their economy, as well as their development into a liberal democracy (which really didn’t happen until a popular revolt in the 80s because the continued US to provide financing and support to authoritarian rulers in the south).
I think it is undeniable that Sung would, with Chinese and Soviet help, would have revolted against anyone who was in power at the time. Regardless of US actions. (The Sino-Soviet split occurred later.) Without US backing Sung would have won and Korea would be much worse off now. At least as I see things.
In 2008 I bought a high end Dell laptop. It ended up running way too hot and it would freeze up playing some games. I got fed up with the Windows ecosystem and tried out a MacBook Air. It was easy to setup out of the box. No crap Ware was on the computer. For the first time I actually used a trackpad and it was good enough that I no longer use a mouse with Mac laptops. When I bought my next computer it was a breeze transferring over my settings and programs. Whenever I use a Windows machine the workflow is way worse from my perspective. I remember well the frustrations with using Windows that disappeared with using Mac OS. I won’t go back.
Apple has its own set of frustrations but none of them, in my experience, compare to the hell of dealing with Dell and Windows. Never again for me. I recommend to people to use Macs. I think it’s rational to use Apple products. My iPhone 6 Plus still gets updates and works well. My iPad Pro is better than any other tablet I’ve looked at.
I would say just the opposite. Dell laptops have single handedly made me never want to spend money on Apple laptops. They are cheaper with more versatile configurations.
I have no complaints about either the cheap Dells I’ve had over the years or the midrange ones - just always buy thier business line or from the Microsoft store.
I have a 2008 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell that’s going strong as my Plex server. It was one of the last great 15” displays with a 1920x1200 display.
My current work and personal laptops are midrange 2n1 Dells.
MacBooks just aren’t compelling to me and this is coming from someone who has an iPhone 8 Plus, an iPad, a 6S (without a sim) and 5 AppleTVs (2 free from DirectvNow). Not to mention I had two FrankenMacs in the past - an LCIi with a //e card and a PowerMac with a Dx/2-66 card and later two Mac Minis.
It's totally reasonable for someone to like Dell and want to stay with Windows. It's not for me though and my point to the OP was that it's not irrational to prefer Macs. I don't buy them for status symbol (at least not consciously). I've looked at Surface Pro and Surfacebook but I just can't get over how clunky Windows feels to get anything done. I especially hate the nagging to get a One Drive account.
I don't think of people who prefer Windows and Dell as status seekers or in otherwise derogatory terms. To each his own!
That’s not what I am getting at. Apple has never produced a mainstream compelling laptop - a laptop with decent specs with a decent screen at a competitive price.
When I was in the market for a laptop in 2016, all I wanted was a Core I7, with 8GB RAM, an SSD and a 1080p display. The closest Apple had was $1600. The Dell was around $800.
Even today, if I wanted a MacBook with those specs there is nothing. The MacBook Air has anemic specs and the MacBook Pros cost a lot more - and I would still want a 5K monitor.
Luckily, I don’t have a need for a personal laptop. I’m good with getting a 5K iMac. The cost of a good 5K monitor is $1300. The 5K iMac doesn’t seem excessive.
We Americans have a pathological fear of socialism and since the 1980s it's been ingrained in the collective psyche of the nation that government is bad. You'll hear people talk about how government can't do anything right but we have the greatest military in the world. Such contradictions are endemic to the right leaning people of the country. Left leaning people of the country have a differing set of contradictions.
There is also a coupled fear of a poor person getting something they don't deserve. This has foundations in religion and in the development of the nation. There was a time (over a hundred years ago) when a man(family) could do it on their own and live off the land. This inculcated in us the idea that being poor is associated with being a slouch. Such a time has long since passed but that ethos is still in the collective consciousness.
There is also a pathological fear of taxes. It is widely believed that government is always more inefficient than a privatized solution. We had a Vice-Presidential candidate laugh at the notion that paying taxes is patriot and this while her son was in the military during a time of war! A lot of people think of themselves as some sort of Daniel Boone character that can do it on their own if only government got out of the way.
We do have a national healthcare system for elderly, members of the military, and most children. Everyone else can fend for themselves.
Overal taxation in the U.S. is low compared to other OECD countries [1]. We, as a nation, decided that low taxes was the goal. As a result infrastructure is poor, toll roads are increasing, privatization of prisons, intelligence gathering, war, etc. are rising too. Yet Americans falsely believe they are overtaxed. The situation is easy to fix in economic terms but not in political terms. The road to an Ayn Randian paradise in which everyone fends for themselves will lead us to ruin.
Corporations have largely shunted the responsibility for retirement savings onto individual workers. Now said workers have no pensions and have uncertain retirements. Instead of asking why they have no pensions they seek to equalize status by falsely believing we can't afford any sort of pension.
As a nation we need to seriously rethink the role and purpose of government and how taxation is a part of the proper functioning of government.
Taxes being lower or higher are not what determine size of pension hole. Greece and Italy have higher taxes and still have a pretty big pension hole. The problem is public sector employees are promised pensions higher than county/city can afford. Unlike a corporation which has to balance its budget, city officials go beyond means with their promises in order to get elected and leave the problem for the next set. This is one of the main reasons why many in this country prefer a small government vs big.
> The problem is public sector employees are promised pensions higher than county/city can afford.
Precisely. But in fact, it's worse:
The people doing the promising and those receiving the benefits are in fact the same.
Who makes the promises? Local and state government employees.
Who receives the benefits? Local and state government employees.
Who pays for them? Us ordinary taxpayers who can only dream of such sweet defined-benefit pension deals.
Yet some folks see this as reason we should pay even higher taxes, and sacrifice our own pensions, which are already lower and less secure than these privileged government pensioners.
I'm a public employee. I don't cause the government to write its contract with me to be the way it is. It's negotiated between my union and the state Department of Education. It is then voted on by the legislative branch and signed by the governor. It's a long process. At no point am I or my fellow workers the ones making the promises.
It costs money to run government. Employees need to be paid. We have had lay offs when budgets were constrained. The funding per pupil has steadily decreased the last 30 years and hence tuition has similarly increased. Our salaries relative to purchasing power has decreased over this time.
> I don't cause the government to write its contract with me to be the way it is. It's negotiated between my union and the state Department of Education.
Exactly. So one group of state government employees (your state's DoE) meets another group of state government employees (your union) and decide to give each other an incredible defined-benefit pension deal that nobody outside of government can even dream of.
State government employees are giving each other dream pension plans, that are unsustainable and wildly over-budget even if they were well-managed (which generally they are not).
You know why nobody outside government has defined benefit pensions? Because they were proven to be unsustainable decades ago. Yet government employees keep conferring them upon themselves.
Then, when the inevitable deficit arises, as any economist would predict, you have a great solution: me and my peers in the private sectors should pay more taxes to bankroll your party!
I hope this slow-motion trainwreck would be a wakeup call, but either way, know this: there is no amount of taxes that will prop up your unsustainable pension plans. State and local governments wasted billions mismanaging these funds, that are unsustainable even under the best management.
Any more taxes you collect will just fuel this fire for a couple more years, before the inevitable next crisis arises.
You can't fix fiscal irresponsibility with more money, because all that money (and no accountability) is what created fiscal irresponsibility in the first place!
Your state government needs to start applying the same basic fiscal responsibility that every single business in your state is adhering to.
Pensions are not inherently unsustainable. They exist in the private sector in other countries and there are still some well funded private sector pensions in the U.S. They don't work well if they are not properly funded. Corporations got rid of pensions not because the concept is inherently unsustainable but because it's more profitable to do away with them.
My pension plan is not a good one. You characterization of one group of state employees giving a dream set of benefits to another is not based in reality. Administration does not negotiate strongly with us the contract won't be approved by the legislature or signed by the governor. Our wages relative to buying power has not been going up or remaining steady.
If pensions are inherently unsustainable then you must conclude that it is unsustainable for a society to care for itself.
> If pensions are inherently unsustainable then you must conclude that it is unsustainable for a society to care for itself.
How do you figure?
It is unsustainable for us to support all people over e.g. 60. But we can support the 5% over 60 who really need the support and can't look after themselves.
Supporting that 5% who really need it would effectively be a means tested pension system. The point of a pension (retirement savings) is to prevent masses of destitute elders. The goal is to have a society in which masses of elderly are not left without means to live at a reasonable standard. That’s the purpose of a pension system. If the goal can be effectively accomplished in another way then I support it. I’m not personally tied to the notion of a pension system.
Defined Cost pensions are sustainable. That's what we in the private sector have: 401k and Roth.
Defined Benefit pensions aren't sustainable. That's why nobody outside of government has them, and the ones sponsored by the government suffer huge deficits and are slowly but surely edging towards bankruptcy.
The teachers union is a powerful lobby in California. By paying dues to your union you are supporting their efforts to lobby for the unfunded pensions.
Teacher unions are also responsible for keeping bad teachers employeed. See NYC rubber rooms.
Is there no level of personal responsibility involved? If the whole of my retirement was tied up in the promises of one entity... I have to imagine I'd be deeply concerned when my pension is underfunded. And underfunding is not new, there has been plenty of time to adjust on a personal level.
The people doing the promising are the same as those receiving the benefits.
That's the key point. Budget broken so we can't pay for something? Let's talk about putting money in. Systemic problem where the people making decisions about spending the money are the same people receiving benefits? You can't write a check to fix that. This isn't a traditional "how much do we tax and what do we spend our money on?" public policy discussion.
Systemic problems are another kind of problem entirely. They deserve and require non-partisan attention and discussion.
> Also notice that some of the worst problems are in locations that already have very high local and state taxes, such as California.
California has, along the US states, a fairly moderate pension issue measured per capita or per GDP. It has big absolute numbers, as with nearly every other issue, because it's a very big state.
> A more important question is how much room to manoeuvre does California have?
That's very hard to say.
> If California increases taxes by 5% to fix the issue how many businesses and highly paid employees will leave?
Even if it was a simple as taxes being a single number where distribution of the taxes doesn't matter, there's no consensus on the average effect of increases. And, in reality the distribution probably matters intensely.
(And, of course, taxes aren't the only lever; maybe California instead radically cuts back on mass incarceration; to the extent that California has less room to maneuver in taxes it has more on spending, which in some ways is better for this purpose—spending cuts tend to also inherently reduce the rate at which the problem is made worse, before you even consider how the savings are applied. Either spending or tax, though, may take ballot action or legislative supermajority, because much of State spending in CA is programmed by Constitution/ballot measure, and tax increases can't be done with a simple legislative majority.)
In some specific cases it's actually quite clear that specific tax increases drove out a large number of high-income earners and were thus a net loss. See for example Rhode Island's Millionaire Exodus: http://theluxuryhub.com/the-tax-factor-in-rhode-islands-exod...
Yes, a few, but those cases aren't really useful for answering quantitative questions about general tax level changes and their effects on tax base, because the only time the effects are even remotely clear (and it's telling that your one example is an article whose lead paragraph says “There could be several reasons for this out-migration, but one possible reason that finds support is estate tax”) tend to be fairly extreme cases of fairly targeted taxes, where there is a clear visible link between the change in policy and the change in behavior.
Pension holes mostly formed because interest rates dropped. Higher interest rates mean less money can be paid in to fund a pension today, since it will grow faster.
The critical error that pension providers made was to buy equities and 'alternative' investments instead of bonds. Had they bought bonds, their assets would have matched their liabilities. Instead, they assumed riskier investments would grow faster, effectively making pension promises cheaper.
Following the financial crisis, rates were cut aggressively, making bond prices and the present value of pension liabilities soar. IMO this is an under-appreciated facet of the financial crisis that's still waiting to bite us.
Perhaps people feel overtaxed, not in absolute terms, but relative to the services provided? The US Gov collected approximately 3.3T in revenue in FY2016--more than $10,000 for every person in the country. By comparison, the Netherlands collected 255B Euros from a population of 17M, or about $17k USD per person (2016 figure, according to OECD statistics). Clearly, a much higher number at the federal level, but they have a much lower average provincial tax (~$1,500) compared to the average state tax in the US, which varies widely, but averages out to about $4,800, bringing the totals to ~$14,800/person in the US, vs ~$18,500 in the Netherlands. Yes, the Dutch pay a 25% premium, but in my opinion they get a good ROI for their tax dollars. I think the issue of ROI is a major barrier to increasing tax rates in the US.
Yes, clearly the return on services and government investment is quite poor in the U.S. It's a situation in which people reasonably believe that paying more in taxes is throwing money at the problem. This is especially so when one of the major parties actively seeks to prove that government is incompetent.
A great comment. Usually the US state taxation is ignored when making comparisons.
You need to go further however, as the vast budget deficit is ultimately an inflationary tax on the US people (we'll follow the Japan scenario, and debase the dollar to deal with it over time, hammering the standard of living). You can see that represented by the dramatic damage to the US dollar during the Bush deficit years, which simultaneously sent the dollar plunging, commodities soaring and all other nation GDP figures soaring (when priced in dollars).
Total spending is about $7.1 trillion, between Federal + State + Local. What kind of return are Americans getting for their $22,000(!) per year? An absolutely horrendous return, that's what.
The US state + local spending is like an entire extra Federal Government stapled on.
I'm not concerned with slashing spending as some are, I'm overwhelmingly concerned about using that spending effectively instead. There's vast progress to be had in focusing just on that.
That is not the issue this article is talking about. Public pension spending in the US is not especially low compared to the rest of the OECD [1]; as a portion of GDP it's larger than Norway or the Netherlands, which have much higher taxes.
The issue is that those pensions have been comically mismanaged; edit: and were not sustainable in the first place
Defined-benefit pensions are economically bankrupt when lifespan keeps increasing. This has been known for decades[1] and is the reason why none of us reading this have a DB pension, except those lucky few state employees who got a sweetheart deal all those years ago.
Of course, the fact these pensions were managed by state government (read: mismanaged) only accelerated the inevitable crisis.
Public sector pensions are deficits and eventual bankruptcy are the result of greed and politics and not taxation.
chicago is a poster child for the corruption that has created a system which will bankrupt in three years [1]. It was never sustainable but its continued expansion kept politicians in office. just look at the numbers in the story I linked, what reasonable group of people would have ever signed off on this? Chicago isn't alone. Its rampant. six figure retirements? no public service job warrants that.
and it isn't just the public sector employees, there are story after story of city bureaucrats making a quarter million or more and that is just up front money. simply put, they control the piggy bank and they are willing to loot it for gains today because they don't plan to be in office when the bill comes due
I'm always dismayed here and elsewhere to see everyone assuming that collection is the problem, not the dispensing and management. If someone proves incapable of proper budgeting, surely it is foolish to want them to have more money? Always sad that it's everyone but the policy and budget makers being blamed for the failures of policy and budget making. You can argue an honest politician can't survive, but you shouldn't shift blame.
It seems like some feel it's a catch 22, that citizens don't want to pay for things yet they want things. But in reality, those clamoring for the improvements and government assistance are rarely those that don't want to pay and/or recognize government fallacies wrt spending. If you want to tackle the problems, you need to first be honest with where they lie...and not having enough money is not where the problems lie.
I agree that it's largely a crisis of leadership. Both major parties are to blame. Kicking the can down the road, so to speak, has proved politically rewarding. I think that we, as a people, need to stop thinking that taxation is inherently bad. Taxation with incompetent governance is inherently bad. Taxation with little in return is bad. But taxation itself is not bad. Nor are we overtaxed in absolute terms. We are overtaxed in terms of return from government.
I certainly don't advocate throwing money at the situation. I advocate that as a nation we take a step back on reassess what our views on government are. We've largely bought into the false beliefs that government is always incompetent, government regulation is inherently bad, and taxation is bad. I don't see how to get out of the mess we are in. These are structural problems in the nation and I think secession is going to occur in the next 50 years or so.
> I don't see how to get out of the mess we are in.
Gotta start at the top. Transparency and clarity of spending coupled with simplification of the tax code. In the meantime, deference to smaller regions can help (but not on everything) where accountability is more real.
> These are structural problems in the nation and I think secession is going to occur in the next 50 years or so.
Nah, apathy wins in these situations where boats are not rocked significantly on either side.
As someone who supports higher taxation, I've come around to the idea that liberals and conservatives are largely talking past each other on this point. Yes, our taxes are too low (if we want to have the kind of welfare state Sweden or Germany have). Yes, our public sector is particularly inefficient, compared to Sweden or Germany (or France or Canada).
In my experience your average voter who opposes higher taxes isn't a Randian. Rather, they feel like they're not getting enough in return for what they pay in taxes. (And when you look at data about how we spend more to get less in education, transit, etc., turns out they're right!)
> our taxes are too low [...] our public sector is particularly inefficient
Right. You cannot begin fixing the first problem in a democracy until you begin fixing the second. The solutions cannot happen in parallel either. So we either need to better prioritize our complaints or accept that attempts to fix the first problem is often just flushing people's money that they may need. Perfection is not a requirement, just some level of mediocrity could be enough to restore some trust.
There are political choices behind the decline in infrastructure.
It costs NYC $2.1B per mile to build the Second Ave subway while in Europe it costs $200-500M per mile. There's California High Speed Rail, and then there's just the cost to build a condo in San Francisco (see the "historic" laundromat in The Mission).
You have interlocking legislation, many reasons and opportunities to sue, esoteric work rules. Regardless of the validity of each element the structure as a whole is patently absurd and abhorrent.
Then you have government spending. A university does not need much beyond some blackboards and some professors to teach most everything from Philosophy to French to Advanced Data Structures to Topology. Certain PhDs need more equipment but essentially all the expensive equipment should be paid for by research grants or contracts.
Over the past decades more and more classes are taught by adjuncts at Starbucks level wages. Meanwhile the percentage of staff and spending on administrative functions has climbed dramatically. Adjusting for inflation, from 1947 to 1995, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent. Instructional spending, by contrast, increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase.
Obama promised to invest in "shovel ready jobs". There was a backlash because so much money was being spent on construction and thus, due to the current makeup of construction workers, the vast majority of money would go to men. Spending was adjusted to include other projects so that the gender balance of spending would be more palatable.
So to get $1 in new infrastructure spending you need an additional $1 in net new other government services. Or possibly much more than $1, depending on the various worker populations. This in an environment where you're getting only 25% to 10% of your initial money's worth.
So $1 in net new infrastructure costs $20 or more.
> As a result infrastructure is poor, toll roads are increasing, privatization of prisons, intelligence gathering, war, etc. are rising too.
I wouldn't bundle military expenditure with the rest of public spending. Our military budget currently stands at a staggering $639bn (that's billion) for FY2019.
In fact, there's a good argument that if we diverted some of these enormous funds to invest in other areas, those problems you mentioned (infrastructure, etc) would be fixed.
> The situation is easy to fix in economic terms but not in political terms.
The article is about defined-benefit pensions. Nobody has those anymore, not in the US. This is a large group of privileged individuals, who years ago got themselves a sweetheart deal as employees of the state. It's basically another case of the previous generation mandating extremely comfortable benefits for themselves, and passing the bill to the next generation.
These are people who worked for the government their entire lives. They may not be rich, but they were generally comfortable, and certainly not the neediest part of the population. They can stand a modest cut to their pensions.
Otherwise, your argument is that all of us should pay substantially higher taxes to bankroll these lucky few individuals who got themselves a sweetheart deal thanks to their affiliation with state and local government. In most places, you'd call that "corruption".
You could fix infrastructure by slashing the US military down to a reasonable size (~2.5% of GDP), there are no other large problems you can fix with that money. The scale of the entitlement problem, healthcare cost problem, etc. is far beyond anything that $150b-$200b per year will solve long-term.
I have no interest in seeing Chicago fix its pension problems by using funding taken from the US military. Chicago made its bed by intentionally, dramatically over-promising, it gets to sleep in that bed. National high speed rail? That would get my vote, so to speak.
We could throw some money at the university cost problem. However that's not lacking funding at all. In fact it has far too much funding, we need to deprive it of the federal slush money and legally mandate how funds can be spent (ie restrict admin spending). It's a massive theft cartel run by the admins at the universities, they're the ones that have universally benefitted by perpetually raising the cost. You can see that represented in the charts comparing the extreme expansion of admin cost & employment at universities, vs the employment of eg professors, over 30 years.
> I have no interest in seeing Chicago fix its pension problems by using funding taken from the US military. Chicago made its bed by intentionally, dramatically over-promising, it gets to sleep in that bed.
Taxpayer money should be not be used to fix any of these over-promised pension problems, and certainly federal tax money should not bail out corrupt, irresponsible local governments.
> Instead of asking why they have no pensions they seek to equalize status by falsely believing we can't afford any sort of pension.
More accurately: we can't afford the pensions we've promised with the taxes we're willing to pay. It's not a normative argument but a descriptive one.
And within the American free market, there is little incentive for people to pay more taxes to close that gap. Why pay more taxes to Illinois--and not get any increased public services from those taxes, because the money is going to people who have already retired--when you can move to Tennessee or Texas and pay less?
I believe at some point in time California and other wealthy states will want to secede. They are subsidizing the poorer states and at some point they may question the benefits of the union.
> Corporations have largely shunted the responsibility for retirement savings onto individual workers. Now said workers have no pensions and have uncertain retirements. Instead of asking why they have no pensions they seek to equalize status by falsely believing we can't afford any sort of pension.
Aren't you ignoring Social Security? For example, average Social Security monthly payments appear to be around $1400/month [1]. Spain, as an example of a high-tax, cradle-to-grave care system, provides pensions that appear to average a little under 800 euros/month ($940/month) [2]. And that's ignoring all of the Roth and 401(k) extras available out there. Am I missing something?
I'm not sure how much I trust these tax rates. My understanding was that government spending is roughly 33% of GDP here in the US. This was true when I was in undergrad, and it looks to be roughly correct today. https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/percent_gdp (not sure how much I trust this site, but it corroborates what I learned in undergrad with only a few minutes of googling). This means that the tax rate must be close to 33%. Else you'd have amazing deficits balooning quite quickly.
Maybe it's ignoring corporate taxes? or ignoring other things on our W-2, like L&I and social security/medicare? It 's also probably ignoring local taxes, a 10% sales tax is hard to ignore.
I once calculated my effective marginal tax rate at 45%, and it stopped me from pursuing a higher paying job, since my take home didn't change enough to be worth the higher stress and the money I'd have to spend to combat said stress.
Federal marginal tax rates for 2018 are capped at 37% if you make $500K ($600K for a couple). If you're hitting that plus 8% for state, then I don't have too much sympathy. And that's a marginal rate, not an effective rate (which it seems you're conflating).
If you earned $500k, and were single/no deps, and just took the standard $12K deduction, your Federal tax would be 29% ($145K). I can't imagine someone with that income not having more deductions or IRA/401 contributions that would minimize the tax burden, but I suppose there's always someone out there completely clueless.
The next table (the one below, right?) shows only the relative percent of where taxes come from. It does not describe tax rates. It merely states that around 50% of U.S. tax revenue come from taxing income and profits. This is not the tax rate on that source.
> shows only the relative percent of where taxes come from. It does not describe tax rates.
I know. But if the US is to raise rates they would raise them on Goods and Services, not on income because the tax is already very heavily skewed toward income.
And regardless of that, the breakdown alone shows that the US tax code is more progressive than other countries.
You raise the other really important consideration, which is that if we were to raise taxes to the same levels as Germany or Sweden, taxes wouldn't go up on rich people and corporations: https://taxfoundation.org/how-scandinavian-countries-pay-the.... The top marginal tax rate for someone in California, even with the Trump tax cuts, is similar to someone in Sweden. The difference is that in the U.S., the 50%+ rate kicks in around $500,000-1,000,000 HHI, while in Sweden it kicks in at the equivalent of around $100,000 HHI. Sweden collects as much revenue from its 25% VAT, which is enormously regressive, as from income taxes.
The US middle class is entirely oblivious to how extraordinarily low its taxes are. Despite having one of the highest disposable income levels on earth, it somehow manages to blow all of its money on consumer crap from China, $300/month cell phone plans, $200 DirecTV plans, etc., instead of saving it. That's despite the US having a lower cost of living than Germany and France.
All the right politicians bleat about lowering taxes - you really can't, the rich are already paying for everything as it is now, we can hardly get more progressive (on income taxes at least). You can't lower taxes on the bottom 75%, it's just pandering. The left bleats about the well-off not paying their fair share, somehow paying for nearly everything isn't a fair share. They're both wrong as usual. More plausibly, to pay for ballooning entitlement costs, infrastructure, expanding healthcare, etc. taxes need to go up on everyone.
> Yet Americans falsely believe they are overtaxed.
Perhaps the observation of government wastefulness is conflated with feeling overtaxed. There are two ways the government can raise more money:
1) Raise taxes
2) Use existing taxes more efficiently
If you look at where the tax money is going, infrastructure is one of the smallest pieces of the pie. Why not divert defense and/or social service tax to infrastructure for a few years?
50 years of Cold War propaganda exacted its price. Communism, socialism, and taxes are trigger words for a large number of Americans aged 40 and over.
One thing I really appreciated about Bernie Sanders was that he did not shy away from the term "socialist". It's engendered a conversation America really needed to start having.
Raising taxes is not the only way to improve public infrastructure. One can also lower the trade deficits, improve the technology the government uses, and legislate away some of the problems (jails would be less full if drug offenses didn't carry such harsh penalties). Taxation should only be tried when nothing else has worked. With 50% marginal income tax rates in many states, the US leans much more towards the communist than Randian side of the spectrum as it is.
is ayn rand a real influence ? i've seen one interview of her and I can't read her name without being filled with negative emotions. such a free-market fanatic.
> The road to an Ayn Randian paradise in which everyone fends for themselves will lead us to ruin.
It always depresses me to read comments like this. Rand's central themes were about corrupt relationships between pseudo-capitalists and government, the immorality of a desire for the unearned, and the consequences of what will happen to a society that can't be bothered to concern themselves with ethics.
Well, one of these days these chickens are going to come home to roost, and instead of people hanging their heads in shame and regret because they ignored her supremely confident warnings, instead they're going to charge her with the crime. The irony.
"The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash - that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value."
As a cherry on top, while there's still time to recover from mistakes of the past (there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, as they say), rather than eating a little humble pie, listening for a change to those who said "I told you so", and getting our affairs in order, we will actually choose to blaze straight ahead at full throttle on the exact same trajectory. And in the end, we'll end up selling off infrastructure, piecemeal, for pennies on the dollar, some to the very criminals we were warned about, and the rest to other nations who were smart enough to crack a book.
I use Any Randian to describe those who publicly cite her and they tend to have a certain political philosophy that is best described by me as, "I've got mine, fuck you." I'm not critiquing her personally or her philosophy. It's sort of like Ghandi's famous quote on Christianity. He said, "Your Jesus I like. Your Christians, I do not."
> I use Any Randian to describe those who publicly cite her and they tend to have a certain political philosophy that is best described by me as, "I've got mine, fuck you."
a) Do you think it is responsible to be opaque on whom you are attributing the belief to, particularly considering the topic of conversation and the fact that her warnings on the matter were clear?
b) These people you cite, are they Ayn Rand supporters, or critics who "think", despite no actual evidence beyond 4th hand also-uneducated opinions, that Rand's philosophy was anything remotely resembling "I've got mine, fuck you." Here's a fun experiment: try to google up a statement by an actual Objectivism supporter that supports anything near that sentiment, and observe how many false hits you get of the latter in your search.
> I'm not critiquing her personally or her philosophy.
Of those HN'ers who hold an opinion on Rand, you belong to a very exclusive club in my experience. Regardless, your sentiment now being explicit is good enough for me, thanks for straightening it out.
There is colloquial and there is technical usage of terms. I’m speaking colloquially. Like some people generally refer to the US as a Christian nation. They typically mean this in the sense of history or values and don’t necessarily mean to say that a majority of the population fits their personal definition of what a Christian is.
I don't think I can. I gave an example of how people speak colloquially. For instance, one can mention Christianity in a discussion but that term means different things to different people. People will say things like, "Christians believe this..." without it being literally true. Most people speak colloquially and not in a technical sense. The phrase "Ayn Randian paradise" does not imply the sort of paradise envisioned by Ayn Rand. It's a reference to a belief commonly held by people who nominally agree with Ayn Rand's view as they understand it to be.
> It's a reference to a belief commonly held by people who nominally agree with Ayn Rand's view as they understand it to be.
I asked a question specifically about that above, see: (b)
Is asking for substantiation of a claim, an insulting claim at that, now considered improper etiquette around these parts?
Ask yourself this: how do you know this to be true? Can you share where you've encountered Randians in sufficient numbers to form an opinion with high certainty? And, can you no longer find any trace of these people and their words?
As with most beliefs my belief about "Ayn Randians" comes from anecdotal experience. I can't cite a study or source. Just going by my experience with such people.
Some beliefs are based on facts, others on anecdotal experience, sometimes the difference matters and should not be left ambiguous (in case you were wondering where my determination comes from).
Taxes are pretty high in the US for the upper middle class especially.
IMO corporations should be taxed in a way that the more they make with fewer people the more they get taxed relative to other companies who make the same but have more people.
Productivity in the age of digitalization is not what it used to be and I don't think it's a good way to measure anymore as we have way more supply than we have demand.
It's gotten quite bad in the U.S. Common political discourse has devolved into a back and forth of insults, hyperbolic accusations, and sometimes just plain insanity. I agree with you that this will probably be something that will last a while.
If only we could get people to realize that believing something to be true merely because it reinforces a pre-conceived idea or because it's plausibly true is not a path toward finding the truth. How do you have a discussion with someone who believes the political equivalent of a flat Earth?