Daedalus wrote:You're misinterpreting what I said. If there was a way to fix poverty, nearly all people would gladly do it.
I must continue to disagree on that point - I've met far too many people who consider (or like to say they consider) poverty, inequality, etc. as signs of "fairness" in our society, since they believe that those at the top without exception are simply more skilled, harder-working people than those at the bottom, and scoff at anyone who suggests that the playing field might be titled in the former's favor to begin with. I seriously wonder if they'd be willing to do ANYthing to "fix" poverty even if a foolproof solution was ever discovered.
This is simply wrong. We are not trying to solve "unfettered corporate greed". We're trying to prevent the insolvency of major American companies.
That's exactly it - it was likely inevitable that we needed to cough up some cash to prevent a "ripple effect" or whatever you care to call it, I won't argue with that. However, as you say, we're not doing much of anything about the real root of the problem, namely corporate bigwigs who are able to take any stupid risk they want and use other people's money to do it - my question is, why aren't we?
But it's a fallacious argument to say, "Well we spent money on X, therefore we have plenty of money to go around."
That's not what I was suggesting - what I meant to say was that we've spent a lot more money on far stupider things than trying to give the neediest a leg up, and to this day refuse to put any sort of spending limit on any of those ventures - as soon as someone suggests spending money in a manner that would help more than a wealthy few, "sorry, nothing in the till!" But of course when McCain proposes not only to make the Bush tax cuts for the rich permanent, but to FURTHER cut them, no one says boo.
I am curious, since you seem to have such a strong love of socialism.
I can't help but chuckle to myself how in this country anything to the left of Pat Buchanan can still be labeled "socialism" with a straight face.
Exactly how much money do you think we need to spend to fix our poverty, health, and environmental issues? And how would you suggest allocating it?
As you could likely already guess, I'm not an economics expert, and am not about to present some super-detailed plan that will fix everything. That said, I do believe I'm within my boundaries, especially after the past eight years, to suggest that what's needed is a change of emphasis, a change of philosophy, in the way the government spends its money and its efforts - instead of giving huge amounts to private enterprise in the form of tax breaks and such and then taking their hands off, trusting them to sort everything else out and "do the right thing" because the market will inevitably sort the "cheaters" out (does anyone seriously still believe that?), they need to keep a closer watch and a tighter lid on what's going on. Do I have specific policy proposals to offer? Not off the top of my head, and I don't have the luxury of spending enough time and money to become informed enough to craft them. But my simple point is, before ANY change in this area, either in spending habits or other things, can happen, the prevailing ideology of "the government is always the problem" (i.e. McCain saying that
too much regulation got us into this mess, and not being laughed out of the room for it) needs to be dispelled, and fast.
Is more money always the solution? As you say in your example of the school district, obviously not (though not requiring districts to buy their supplies from a single supplier that can charge any stupid price it wants might be a nice perk, among others) - however, simply saying that half-assed past "bailout" efforts haven't worked, and now we're just going to rule out ANY financial help at all, isn't likely to produce much fruit either. Obviously there's more to it, and additional money by itself is pretty much never the solution - as with almost any effort of this kind, however, it's still got to be on the table.
Not all jobs are equal, and I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess you don't do anything nearly as complex as managing the third largest insurance company in the world (the largest in the US).
You're correct on both counts - however, you seem to bypass the fact that whatever job you're hired to do, "low-end" or "high-end," you're expected to a) Be equipped to do it competently, and b) use that equipment to earn the salary that comes with that job. The CEOs and their ilk have constantly crooned that they make such ridiculous amounts of money because they're infinitely smarter than the rest of us, and can manage stuff that we could never dream of. If they actually lived up to their own hype I might not be so contemptuous of the fat severance packages they're getting (more money than I'm likely to see over my lifetime), but when they fail to perform and yet continue to insist that they're entitled to the GDP of a small nation in compensation, sorry - they can kiss my dirty Commie ass.
EDIT:
Point taken, though as the guy himself says, that's not a defense of Bush's far more profligate spending habits. Some of the guy's positions (no man-made global warming, "anti-Palin" media bias, privatized social security) make me wonder where he's reporting from...can't be Earth.
