Hi waveduke,
"we should put forward equal effort to maintain the road – even if my side of the island was nicer because I made it so!"
1. we tax progressively because the rich have more surplus income available.
2. you didn't make your side of the island nicer: we all did. society is made up of collective effort, a good deal of luck and often unequal rewards. even in your paradise, you rely on the fact that i choose to agree on a common system of property rights and a common currency. otherwise, if you annoy me, i will sit on your beach, throw my garbage on your lawn and have a ball at your expense. who are you going to appeal to in order to have me leave?
in general ...
aren't you both relying on statistics (unsustainable social programs looking forwards) and disqualifying them (in regards to the past and comparisons) in that post?
not meaning to be unpleasant, but i think perhaps you disqualify the statistics that are inconvenient to your theory of how things ought to work, but don't.
and thus, in your model, whatever you wish to be so, may be. the poor are lazy, the rich deserve all they have, people vote on the basis of self-interest rather than public advantage etc.
but there are, after all, many models of wealth distribution between one which gives enormous benefit to a very small class of winners (via low or flat taxes), and a system in which equality of income and tax rates are required.
in general, americans have a sense of a progressive share of income slope they think is fair. it doesn't look quite like the current distribution. nor is it flat. and heck, it may even generate more wealth by providing a higher income for the job creators, aka the middle class.
http://pps.sagepub.com/content/6/1/9
or this for a simple commentary with a nice chart
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2010/09/theoretical_egalitarians.html
you seem to see social programs as a kind of charity model. there are the producers and the spongers. but investing in the education of a population, for instance, is a social program. it also tends to result in a wealthier society in the long run.
is this an example of something you find temptingly addictive. and maybe we should prefer the kind of model that educates according to means.
or do social programs actually sometimes offer benefits as well as costs?
perhaps you would accept it is sometimes the latter.
or maybe this is not what you mean when you talk about social programs. and you are just talking about unemployment, the elderly and other groups of vulnerable people whom we cannot afford to help?
perhaps we should prefer to help the very wealthy from avoiding any social obligations to support them. even though it turns out these folks have been gobbling all the returns from productivity increases. and their tax rates have halved since 1960.
and that this has meant the economy is no longer growing the way it has done. which in turn means the us cannot afford its social programs. or do we see the vicious circle for what it is. and perhaps consider raising tax rates on upper income folks to ameliorate the harms visited upon other groups at this time.
at any rate, in an economy in which demand is weak and few jobs are being created, i am sure you would agree that an argument about lazy people waiting for welfare leans republican.
the social safety net is not overly generous in the us. very few people would find it enticing to live on welfare. I have found that when talking to folks who are out of work, they have been less than convinced by the argument that they are happy with their circumstances. let alone addicted to them.
when the economy functions effectively, it seems that around 5% of working age people remain unemployed. i suggest the surplus over that is obviously down to the economic environment.
when we get down to 5%, we can argue the toss over which of the remainder is a bum.
as regards borrowing - austerity during a depression is a disaster of a policy. shrinking demand leads to reduction in growth, which in turn leads to deficits and calls for yet more austerity. i call europe as my first witness. the time to pay down debt is when the economy is strong. the time to stimulate the economy is when it is weak.
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