Well done, Mr. Dionne.

I don’t agree with all of it, but that’s fine.  This is real journalism.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still getting most of my news from The BBC, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Peace,
Bob Bennett
Lick Skillet, AL
http://thespiritandthestone.squarespace.com/

According to the Borgen Project and World Bank:
Annual Cost of Improving the World
• $19 billion: Eliminates starvation and malnutrition globally.
• $12 billion: Provides education for every kid on earth.
• $15 billion: Provides access to water and sanitation.
• $23 billion: Reverses the spread of AIDS and Malaria.
The Cost in Perspective
• $522 billion: U.S. Military budget this year.
• $340 billion: Cost of Iraq War thus far.

When you think that fnding doesn’t make a difference in the fight against poverty, remember that malnutrition has been cut in half in the past 20 years. Of course ending global poverty and providing education will come at a great cost and require very well planned action, but the process of ending global poverty really needs to begin in order to tackle all of the issues facing the world and the U.S. today: terror, disease, inequality, genocide, etc.

In my opinion, the U.S. should redirect a fraction of its $522 billion military budget to the UN Millennium Development Goal to end global poverty. Regardless of whether you are a cynic or an optimist when it comes to poverty issues, poverty needs to be addressed and it would be a lot more successful than the failed war we are fighting.

In response to:

#68122 by Novista on 5/04 at 8:07 am

“I’ll tell you about poverty. It’s my parents working for “a dollar a day” during the Great Depression, before I was born. No handouts in those days, root, hog or die!

They prospered, by hard work and saving, and had a modestly good life.”

You say, “modestly good life” and then talk about “root, hog or die!” What are you comparing the “modestly good life” to?  DEATH!  I’m so sick of hearing of how wonderful it is for people to matyr themselves for a dollar and then glorify it.  Maybe you don’t know how your parents really felt about suffering just to have food.  What are you thinking?  That we should all just “get tough” and “root, hog or die!

Yes, in one of the richest countries in the world we definitely CAN afford social programs that work.  Number one, this is TAXPAYER money and should go back to the people.  There are numerous benefits to society as a whole to have health care and other social programs available.  One of the most ruthless campaigns yet is definitely what we have done to the struggling young adults of our country, the 18-24 yr. olds.  They’ve made higher education extremely hard to attain, unless they have money.  If they have a child they qualify for healthcare programs but not if they don’t. 

We call students attending college, “COLLEGE KIDS” but when it comes to the less-advantaged, this same age group are called “ADULTS”!!!  As such, they better get their arses out there and work.  It is a sick and degenerate ideology to endorse this, but our policies do.  This double standard ensures that there will always be the those available to be abused.

SHAME on any person, corporation or organization who hires ANYONE for ANY position for less $10.00 an hour.  You have denied your fellow human being the right to have at least one of the necessities of life: food, housing and healthcare, WITHOUT WHICH PEOPLE CAN AND DO DIE!

Here is some UNcommon sense.  The key to increasing economic well-being is increasing labor productivity (automation).  When workers produce more per hour, everyone can either work as long and have more stuff, or have as much stuff and not have to work as long, or some of both.  However, since workers are only paid when they work, automation produces the paradoxical result that workers are worse-off even as there’s more wealth, and the business owners, mostly the rich, walk off with the extra wealth because their labor costs have fallen.  Therefore, the key to increasing economic well-being is automation PLUS leftist economics that ensure that everyone gets a fair share of the increasing wealth and/or leisure.

Leftists tend to be for more jobs, for work instead of a “handout”, but they should be for less work.  Some people truly love their jobs, but for many, it is wage slavery for most of their waking hours.  Promoting a form of slavery is anything but leftist.  They should instead be asking, “How LITTLE work could it take to produce everything that people buy?”

Much of the work in our economy is make-work that doesn’t actually produce anything, a form of lower productivity.  There are advertising wars, healthcare bureaucracy, financial services, litigiousness, our insanely complex tax code and the accountants to deal with it, and of course, war.  Since workers are only paid when they work, there is a tendency to produce more make-work as an EXCUSE to pay them.  Any attempt to get rid of make-work is fought tooth-and-nail by workers and industries trying to keep their jobs and businesses.

If we got rid of all the make-work, we could probably reduce the work week to 20 hours, maybe even 10.  On the other hand, all those people who claim to love their jobs and would never want to retire, or who do volunteer work, would do some amount of work voluntarily, maybe 10 hours a week on average, maybe even 20.  Most people would probably get bored just watching TV all day.  So there might be enough people to do all the work voluntarily, no one forced out of economic necessity, especially if we concentrated on getting rid of the unpleasant work such as janitor and garbage pick-up, which is doable.  And if not yet, increasing technology keeps automating away more work all the time.

Democrats lost elections when they waged a war on poverty because they had the middle class, the vast majority of voters, pay taxes for it, and they came to resent it.  Back then, the total wealth of the rich was relatively small, so taxing them didn’t produce much revenue, and they had to tax the middle class.  But no longer.  Now, they could win elections by raising taxes on the rich to 40 or 50% of their income, eliminating corporate welfare, and using the money to give massive tax cuts to the middle class, even eliminate all their taxes entirely.  Then they could combine all entitlement programs (Social Security, unemployment insurance, welfare) into a simple graduated “negative tax” for the lower middle class and poor, the less they earn the more they get, with a guaranteed minimum income for those at the bottom.  If there’s little or no work we must coerce people to do, what’s wrong with giving “handouts”?  Since the bottom 99% of voters would have more, I find it hard to believe Democrats wouldn’t win elections with landslides, even with Republicans bombarding the airways with ads screaming, “socialism!” to try to scare everyone.  All Democrats would have to do is keep their message simple enough for everyone to understand: “Vote for us, and you will have MORE MONEY!” Total elimination of taxes for almost everyone instead of higher taxes—that certainly wouldn’t be more of “the failed old liberalism”!

The ideas above may be “utopian”, but the half-measures this article promotes partially perpetuate the conventional way of economic thinking that really makes no sense.

If we begin with the publication of the Wealth of Nations, Capitalism is only 230 years old. It is now metastasizing into its global variant, revealing ever more clearly its logic of inequality. Adam Smith himself observed that for every rich man there must be 400 poor men. Bad principles fail of their own success. The conservative ideology of inequality is failing… an attempt at a replacement is at http://www.democraticcritique.us. Comments are hoped for.

Like cooking rice ...

Heat the water to a boil, pour in the rice, thermal shift ... the tiny grains lie quiescent, docile even, until the water heats, and then they jump around wildly.

Years ago in Cincinnati, I read the Wall St. Journal concurrently with the Daily Worker. Ha!

Anyway, back in the mid 60s, the WSJ published a list of ‘millionaires’ that paid NO tax. Once I ‘ran the numbers’ using government statistics on the economy. For a flat tax, NO exceptions, wveryone would be paying a few percent.

At some point, the maximum tax on ‘a rich person’ was 91%. I’ve been one to look at either end of a bell curve, make up scenarios:

If this is viable, it should be valid for one who is a devout Christian and does tithe. Therefore 91 + 10% = sunk well below the poverty line, living on his capitalm. Is this rational?

OK, hypothetical example. I’m sure no wealthy person ever paid 91% tax. Therefore, I conclude a graduated tax table is produced to fool us.

Here in the land of oz, a media mogul, Kerry Packer. I don’t think he ever paid any tax. I worked at a facility once his, but sold off. Even so, every employe there got a Christmas hamper the next holiday season. Of course, he employed lawyers and MBAs to look after him.

Otherwise they would have been on the street. [grin]

Some years back, the Australian Tax Office thought they ‘got him’! It ended up in the Victorian Supreme Court for some paltry sum. The ATO lost.

Ghod knows how much that exercise cost the Australian taxpayer.

As an American born before World War 2, I look on notions of ‘social good’ with skepticism. I got my Social Security Card when I was 12 years old. The government Lies of the Times led one to believe this was a sure investment for one’s final years.

Now, with baby boomers starting to run scared, we are called “unearned eaters”. Guess they are shaky about their turn at the trough?

Fact is, we were living a lie we never chose. It took years for me to understand the true perfidy of the system.  All I know is, I and my parents lived through WW2, like honest poor folk, obeying food rationing and so on.

Like Tricky Dicky’s 1971 price-and-wage freeze. A follow-on from OPEC, allegedly. Only, there were oil tankers along the eastern seaboard with full cargo - and nowhere to discharge. Because every storage facility was already full.

People died in the cold that winter, no heat because no fuel.

Upward mobility, early education for all, no child left behind, youth unemployment, all talking points for a country that forgot where it came from. We once had a Constitution, some people even acknowledged it.

Now, we have no common sense. Teachers that call the cops when an eight-year-old has a tantrum. Border police doing their job, thrown into prison on the immunity testimony of the Mexican drug smugger they shot in the arse.

Social do-gooders who think, if only the guvmint woulda done the right thing. Well, boys’n’girlz, where the bloody hell you think the money comes save from y’all???

All a shell game, monopoly money being redistributed from some to some others. With the federal bureaucracy sliming off the top.

I’ll tell you about poverty. It’s my parents working for “a dollar a day” during the Great Depression, before I was born. No handouts in those days, root, hog or die!

They prospered, by hard work and saving, and had a modestly good life.

Now, tho’ EJ rabbits on about GDP, no one saves. GDP is monopoly money anyway. Keep watch on the housing bubble, the hedge funds/derivatives/stock market unregulated, unrestrained, AND led down the garden path by the Federal Reserve phony System {private banking corporation} has led us all into the valley of death. No social welfare scheme is going to pull the U.S. out of bankruptcy.

When the bubble bursts, it’ll be back to reality.

Unfortunately E J forgets the rage and resentment the upper class has for the those in the poverty level. You can hear it all through the President’s administration and even from the religious right. The phrase is: “ These people don’t wanna work”. The only thing that gets their attention is the thought of revolution. Lucky for the wealthy that the poorest are so docile.And too, it is a shame that the poverty level is so far from actual reality. It is worse than what is considered poverty. A single person is in poverty with $10,210.00 per annum. That is not poverty that is not even existence. A couple making $13,890.00 is next..again this is not existence. These are but two examples of deceit. People cannot sustain their lives on these meager amounts.Even with programs to help those in the poverty level, life is unbearable.