6 ms·

Ironically, it could be this very abundance of ideas which is so paralyzing. The more choices you have, the harder it is to choose. That being said, I agree t

Ironically, it could be this very abundance of ideas which is so paralyzing. The more choices you have, the harder it is to choose. That being said, I agree that this problem has its roots in corrupt politics.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
That's why reform has to start at a local level. Solutions that work brilliantly in Massachusetts have no guarantee of succeeding in Mississippi. Whatever ends up working broadly should be adopted by the federal government. Perhaps they could provide a block grant to each of the states to experiment with reforms and study the effects.
- ashark 11y ago
  Lots of things probably won't work very well at the state level, but might nationally. Consider what could happen if just a single state offered universal basic income, for instance.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    That's a good point. I find it hard to imagine the system not straining after a while within a single state. Perhaps as a reach I could offer Massachusetts and its model health care system as an example. It's a high tax state with a great health care system right next to an extremely low tax state (New Hampshire). Many people who live in MA travel to NH to shop without sales tax, but very few who work in MA live in NH. So if MA instituted basic income, it might have the effect of bringing people to the state to live off the dole, but things are expensive there and some might find it easier to either work to have a higher standard of living than one with the basic dignities of food and shelter, or some people will commute from neighboring states. UBI has been experimented with in many locations, from Canada to Namibia, and they often showed the same effect: some people dropped out of the labor force, others did so but to be homemakers, volunteers, and so on, and for many of the rest, their incomes improved because they had a reliable safety net and worked to increase their earnings so they could live better, as we all do. We can consider till the cows come home, but people have put up with debate for too long. They need action.
  - jerf 11y ago
    "Consider what could happen if just a single state offered universal basic income, for instance." Roughly the same thing as one country that offers universal basic income but doesn't control its borders, for the exact same reason? Also, UBI isn't magic. If it would not work in a state individually, it does not become practical by banding 50 states it doesn't work in together. In fact, with the size of most US states, that's just generally true; it is not possible for something to not work in a state due to resource contraints but suddenly become possible when 50 insufficiently-resourced states band together.
    - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
      I know I'm contradicting my previous point, but a federal program would inhibit tax-paying citizens and corporations from moving to the most convenient nearby location to do the same business but for cheap. One example to look at would be the cities of Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington. A lot of people choose to live in Vancouver because Washington has no income tax and spend their time and money in Portland, which has no sales tax. So one could argue that the insufficient resources of a state are a function of the expected tax base exodus if it is cheaper to move and keep doing business than to stay and pay.
      - selimthegrim 11y ago
        They also spend their time and money in Portland because Vancouver is a hole. And I used to live in St. Johns (AKA Tweakville) so I know whereof I speak.
  - paulpauper 11y ago
    Entitlement spending is so high that it almost acts like a UBI. http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/2014/12/CP-Federal-Spending-by-the-Numbers-2014-08-1-anti-poverty_HIGHRES.jpg http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/2014/12/CP-Fe... The lowest quintile of households have a negative effective tax rate.http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/images/2008/03/01/totaleffectivetax.gif http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/images/2008/... A UBI without preconditions would just compound existing spending.
  - drjesusphd 11y ago
    Single nations and even single cities in the EU are adopting universal income as we speak. I'm sure they found a credible (though perhaps not not guaranteed) way to make it work. In any case, we can learn from their experience.
digi_owl 11y ago
I think it is more that this time round, economics as a "school" is quite a bit more entrenched. Keep in mind that during the great depression you had fascists in Italy and Germany, and communists in Russia. Now the fascists have gone underground, and the communists have imploded. All this gives the current mainstream economic thinking an air of correctness that it didn't have back then, by "virtue" of being the last system standing. Sadly what is happening now is the rearranging of deckchairs on a sinking ship. The big names of economics are arguing about where, if at all, the "frictions" are to be found in their models. This while basically ignoring that the world right now is in the biggest private debt hole since the great depression, because they think that debt and savings are one and the same (and therefore sum to zero).
- davesque 11y ago
  Maybe the answer is somewhere in between all these failed, xenophobic systems. It always frustrates me when I see good ideas shot down in the public discourse because they sound too much like Communism or Socialism. There is a middle ground that we can't ever get to as long as politics are so polarized.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Nordic social democracy? Sadly its being rapidly dismantled, much like Thatcher did to the UK.
jerf 11y ago
I think it's more in the increasing centralization of power. The central power is bigger and thus harder to move by sheer inertia, more risk-averse, and also more able to simply implement whatever it likes regardless of what anybody else thinks because it is isolate from the trenches. I think one of the top-3 issues facing the US right now is we need a lot more power devolved back to the states... not out of a "state's rights" sense of the argument, but out of a sheer engineering argument that trying to run a large and diverse country from one city is not working in practice, and there's no theoretical reason why it should work. Diversity and central control are, if perhaps not necessarily "incompatible" in the strictest sense of the term, still at great odds with each other; the central authority is forever tempted to homogenize diversity to make central control easier.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  I doubt that shifting power to the states will solve many problems; after all it's the states that want to force Christianity on students, ban the teaching of science, deny healthcare to those most in need of it, lower standards for students so many HS grads are still illiterate, defund universities, and hand monopolies to oil, mineral, and telecom companies.
  - aswanson 11y ago
    On top of that, the states horrifically manage what should be simple agencies such as the dmv.
    - jerf 11y ago
      As with my other reply... do you somehow imagine that all Federal agencies are wonderfully and wisely managed? By what mental gymnastics are you maintaining that belief? Have you ever been critical of Homeland Security? Ever thought our government was too responsive to concerns about terrorists? Ever thought they were responding to climate change incorrectly? Think Obamacare is not everything it should be? Nobody really believes in the existence of this Federal government that you and nitrogen are hypothesizing for solely rhetorical reasons. It's just an argument picked up briefly to advocate for more government, then discarded in the next moment, because you're not willing to live by the rest of its implications (namely, that where you and the Federal government disagree, the Federal government must be correct; if you are not willing to say that clearly, this argument falls apart). It is not rational to compare real state governments to hypothetical federal governments.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

That's why reform has to start at a local level. Solutions that work brilliantly in Massachusetts have no guarantee of succeeding in Mississippi. Whatever ends up working broadly should be adopted by the federal government. Perhaps they could provide a block grant to each of the states to experiment with reforms and study the effects.

ashark 11y ago
Lots of things probably won't work very well at the state level, but might nationally. Consider what could happen if just a single state offered universal basic income, for instance.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  That's a good point. I find it hard to imagine the system not straining after a while within a single state. Perhaps as a reach I could offer Massachusetts and its model health care system as an example. It's a high tax state with a great health care system right next to an extremely low tax state (New Hampshire). Many people who live in MA travel to NH to shop without sales tax, but very few who work in MA live in NH. So if MA instituted basic income, it might have the effect of bringing people to the state to live off the dole, but things are expensive there and some might find it easier to either work to have a higher standard of living than one with the basic dignities of food and shelter, or some people will commute from neighboring states. UBI has been experimented with in many locations, from Canada to Namibia, and they often showed the same effect: some people dropped out of the labor force, others did so but to be homemakers, volunteers, and so on, and for many of the rest, their incomes improved because they had a reliable safety net and worked to increase their earnings so they could live better, as we all do. We can consider till the cows come home, but people have put up with debate for too long. They need action.
- jerf 11y ago
  "Consider what could happen if just a single state offered universal basic income, for instance." Roughly the same thing as one country that offers universal basic income but doesn't control its borders, for the exact same reason? Also, UBI isn't magic. If it would not work in a state individually, it does not become practical by banding 50 states it doesn't work in together. In fact, with the size of most US states, that's just generally true; it is not possible for something to not work in a state due to resource contraints but suddenly become possible when 50 insufficiently-resourced states band together.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    I know I'm contradicting my previous point, but a federal program would inhibit tax-paying citizens and corporations from moving to the most convenient nearby location to do the same business but for cheap. One example to look at would be the cities of Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington. A lot of people choose to live in Vancouver because Washington has no income tax and spend their time and money in Portland, which has no sales tax. So one could argue that the insufficient resources of a state are a function of the expected tax base exodus if it is cheaper to move and keep doing business than to stay and pay.
    - selimthegrim 11y ago
      They also spend their time and money in Portland because Vancouver is a hole. And I used to live in St. Johns (AKA Tweakville) so I know whereof I speak.
- paulpauper 11y ago
  Entitlement spending is so high that it almost acts like a UBI. http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/2014/12/CP-Federal-Spending-by-the-Numbers-2014-08-1-anti-poverty_HIGHRES.jpg http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/2014/12/CP-Fe... The lowest quintile of households have a negative effective tax rate.http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/images/2008/03/01/totaleffectivetax.gif http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/images/2008/... A UBI without preconditions would just compound existing spending.
- drjesusphd 11y ago
  Single nations and even single cities in the EU are adopting universal income as we speak. I'm sure they found a credible (though perhaps not not guaranteed) way to make it work. In any case, we can learn from their experience.

digi_owl 11y ago

I think it is more that this time round, economics as a "school" is quite a bit more entrenched. Keep in mind that during the great depression you had fascists in Italy and Germany, and communists in Russia. Now the fascists have gone underground, and the communists have imploded. All this gives the current mainstream economic thinking an air of correctness that it didn't have back then, by "virtue" of being the last system standing. Sadly what is happening now is the rearranging of deckchairs on a sinking ship. The big names of economics are arguing about where, if at all, the "frictions" are to be found in their models. This while basically ignoring that the world right now is in the biggest private debt hole since the great depression, because they think that debt and savings are one and the same (and therefore sum to zero).

davesque 11y ago
Maybe the answer is somewhere in between all these failed, xenophobic systems. It always frustrates me when I see good ideas shot down in the public discourse because they sound too much like Communism or Socialism. There is a middle ground that we can't ever get to as long as politics are so polarized.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Nordic social democracy? Sadly its being rapidly dismantled, much like Thatcher did to the UK.

jerf 11y ago

I think it's more in the increasing centralization of power. The central power is bigger and thus harder to move by sheer inertia, more risk-averse, and also more able to simply implement whatever it likes regardless of what anybody else thinks because it is isolate from the trenches. I think one of the top-3 issues facing the US right now is we need a lot more power devolved back to the states... not out of a "state's rights" sense of the argument, but out of a sheer engineering argument that trying to run a large and diverse country from one city is not working in practice, and there's no theoretical reason why it should work. Diversity and central control are, if perhaps not necessarily "incompatible" in the strictest sense of the term, still at great odds with each other; the central authority is forever tempted to homogenize diversity to make central control easier.

nitrogen 11y ago
I doubt that shifting power to the states will solve many problems; after all it's the states that want to force Christianity on students, ban the teaching of science, deny healthcare to those most in need of it, lower standards for students so many HS grads are still illiterate, defund universities, and hand monopolies to oil, mineral, and telecom companies.
- aswanson 11y ago
  On top of that, the states horrifically manage what should be simple agencies such as the dmv.
  - jerf 11y ago
    As with my other reply... do you somehow imagine that all Federal agencies are wonderfully and wisely managed? By what mental gymnastics are you maintaining that belief? Have you ever been critical of Homeland Security? Ever thought our government was too responsive to concerns about terrorists? Ever thought they were responding to climate change incorrectly? Think Obamacare is not everything it should be? Nobody really believes in the existence of this Federal government that you and nitrogen are hypothesizing for solely rhetorical reasons. It's just an argument picked up briefly to advocate for more government, then discarded in the next moment, because you're not willing to live by the rest of its implications (namely, that where you and the Federal government disagree, the Federal government must be correct; if you are not willing to say that clearly, this argument falls apart). It is not rational to compare real state governments to hypothetical federal governments.