Don't know if I want to [re-]open this retro can of worms, but I was chuckling because that little snippet of yours reminded me of...

From The Big Book of Chuck: "If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death."

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"Compassionate Conservatism"?!?! That is a stupid phrase. Conservatism is inherently compassionate. It is liberalism that is cruel for the sake of maintaining a constituency.

Quitchurbitchin, we've done just great by the country and everything's rosy. If you're finding the going tough it's because you're either lazy or inferior and probably both. We're doing great, Fuck you.

Now I ask you, if you found yourself in a down situation would you vote for anyone who told you that?

The most obvious sign of desperation, and the most certain harbinger of ignominious defeat for a political entity or candidate is when they start denigrating the public for not appreciating what a sterling job they've done and blaming them for all the problems the country is having. True or not, calling people assholes and 'whiners' is not the best way to get them to vote for you.

Impugn, if you don't mind, I'd like to take your original post and hang it everywhere I can. Once I got to the pix, I was in hysterics. You are SO right and SO politically incorrect, and SO offensive to the libs, I might have to adopt you.

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Wow...now that I read that, I guess I could have made the OP a lot shorter...

I tend to vote for the people most likely to:

A) Fuck with their peers who won't leave me the fuck alone
B) Leave me the fuck alone

Yes, job #1 is doing whatever it takes to prevent leftists from getting their way. This applies to every conceivable issue of which you can think.

Job #2 is the secondary, self-interested priority. Construe it any way you want, but keep #1 in mind.

If I found myself "down" the government is just about the last possible place I would expect to find help. In a sense, I'm already "down" because they tax the piss out of me and seem intent on destroying the culture of America. I don't see them as an ally in this regard...quite the opposite.

Used to be that people of the stripe profiled in the OP were shamed into being a silent minority. Then the Great Depression happened and the various programs that support turds like that became entitlements. What the OP morons have, that they shouldn't, is self esteem. Somehow they, themselves, manage to not appear on their own "Big List of What the Fuck Is Wrong with My Life". It's everybody and everything else, apparently. This is a disease.

There is a huge, concentrated effort to not only make entitlement programs available, but to, somehow, also make them dignified. This is insane. "Oooh...poor food stamp people ashamed of using funny money, so we'll give them food stamp debit cards!" "Oooh...some kids opting out of reduced price school lunch because it's 'not cool', so we'll create a quarter million dollar anonymous biometric checkout program!" (Seriously...this one was motivated by the fact that the administrators knew that X number of people were eligible, but only Y were participating. They somehow thought that was a "problem"...under-utilization of a social program! *PSST* - It's all about developing a constituency! Saw that in some genius' autosignature once!)

Now, I'm not saying that you should be kicked in the face if you have hard times, but I am saying that making it in any way "comfortable" leads to loser douchebags like the people in the OP. Ideally, we'd compromise and, say, your initial foray into food stamps would be as comfortable, dignified, and pleasant as possible (i.e. can pay by nondescript debit card). As time goes on, it becomes less and less comfortable. Increase eligibility requirements (proof that subject is trying)...by, say, year 10 of that shit, they should be absolutely humiliated to be on the program (i.e. have to pay with neon telethon-sized checks).

I could go on about my personal demands on my government, but, fuggit, I'll go on about it. Let's see. Ok, I contacted the government when I was entertaining making a run at the Naval Academy. Seems that the system is set up such that you need references from them or no dice. I wrote to my U.S. Senators from PA to ask them to not dismantle Napster, once. I contacted a local committeeman because my relatively new back neighbor was about to tear down my fence...the shared part was mine and he refused to believe it. Um. I had my local PA congressman run my license renewal shit to the capital for me...it's free and faster than the paid couriers (this is pre-Internet days). That's about it.

This lack of contact was not for lack of access...trust me.

This is not hard to understand. If you do not allow people to feel the pain of failure, success will mean absolutely nothing to them - well, nothing but resentment that success doesn't come as easy as their ongoing failure.

The occasional politician with guts comes along and is able to fix things a bit (hysterically translated as: TURN BACK THE CLOCK!). Unfortunately, the only way to get that done is to, paradoxically, inflict misery on the successful to motivate the dismantlement of the entitlement culture. You see, we successful people tend to forget about those turds until either A) Their bitchin' gets too loud - or - B) They get too expensive. Stories like the one above definitely satisfy "A"...couple it with some "B" and we have a mandate for change.

Heh...very nice of you to say. Thank you.

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"Compassionate Conservatism"?!?! That is a stupid phrase. Conservatism is inherently compassionate. It is liberalism that is cruel for the sake of maintaining a constituency.

You would really be better off hitting yourself in the head with that shovel instead of digging yourself deeper. The mistake you are making in arriving at $192,500 is that you didn't weight it properly for the number of people making each salary.

What you did was this:
$10,000+$20,000+$30,000+$40,000+$50,000+$1,000,000 =$1,150,000
$1,150,000/6=$191,666.67 (which you rounded off to $192,000)

If you had a clue what you were doing, you would know that he proper way to calculate is is as follows:
($10,000x5,000)+($20,000x2,500)+($30,000x1,250)+($ 40,000x1,000)+($50,000x200)+($1,000,000x50)=$237,5 00,000
$237,500,000/10,000=$23,750


The total income distribution in your example is top heavy, but the distribution of individual's incomes is extremely botton heavy.

Your graph looks like this (sorry for the size):



Notice how the distribution of the sampling across the horizontal axis is so much more weighted towards the lower-end than the actual real world numbers in the previous graph.

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

FWIW, Marcus, there might have been a math error or something, but he tabulated the total sum of the workers at ~192 million, which couldn't possibly have been achieved from simply adding the various salaries alone.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Your right, in all likelyhood what he did was to multiply the $20,000 income by only 250 rather than 2500 (bringing it to 5,000,000 rather than 50,000) but then he still used the total of 10,000 people (rather than 7,750) as the denominator thus compounding the error. Funny how it comes out so closely to the result he would have reached just doing the average of the 6 incomes.

Bottom line, he is still wrong, although now it is just his math and critical thinking skills called into question rather than his basic grasp of statistics *grin*

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

That's what I did, as Dr. Goodtrips pointed out. I did make an error, probably entering things in the calculator. The procedure I followed was correct.

In any case, the correct figure makes my point as well as the one I presented: Over 75% of the population in the sample makes less than the average income.

As for the weighting at top or bottom, I believe you are parsing a difference between the bottom 5,000 people and the next level up which I don't intend to be significant, and perhaps equating my fictitious dollars to actual U.S. dollars 2008 in value, which I also didn't intend, so that you think of this bottom 5,000 people as living in poverty. Rather, the example was intended to convey (and I think succeeded in doing so) the picture of aggregate income grabbed by a few privileged people at the top of the scale, not of masses living in squalor.

In that respect, our current reality is far more lopsided than the hypothetical. Think of those bottom 5,000 people as making a typical working-class income, which in California runs around $9-$12 an hour (less in other states). That's not poverty, but it IS kept lower than it could be, and is declining in constant dollars over the last few years, so that an increasing share of the wealth can be accumulated by those at the top of the tree.

The rules of our economic game do not dictate who will be a winner and who will be losers, but they do dictate how many of each there will be, and how much will be won or lost. For most Americans, things are not looking very good. For a few, to be sure, they have never been better.

It just doesn't reflect reality

Parsing? You have 50% of the people making the lowest amount, that just does not square with reality in any way, shape or form. The distribution of incomes is much less skewed towards the bottom in reality.

How exactly is it "kept lower than it could be", who is 'keeping' it there?

It does no such thing, otherwise the number of "rich" would not have been increasing. There are more millionaires per capita than at almost any time in our history.

For most americans things are just fine, for some it is always "not very good" not because of anything wrong with the economy or our economic system, but because of their own failings and choices. And for an even smaller few, things are temporarily bad (and there are always a very small portion of the population who are not chronically poor who hit upon temporary hard times)

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

By taking actions such as agreements which encourage the migration of capital overseas to third-world countries with oppressed labor forces, looking the other way at illegal immigration, and failing to support labor regulations. The first two increase the supply of labor, thus driving wages down, and the third makes it more difficult for workers to organize, thus reducing their bargaining power. The government is keeping it there, under the influence of corporations which desire this outcome.

That does not follow.

The second sentence is correct. The first is incorrect, or only half correct. People's "own failings and choices" (or their own successes and choices) determine which economic niche a person occupies, along of course with luck. But these things do not create the economic niche in the first place. The niches exist because our economy is structured so as to provide a huge share of the national income to the biggest winners. Everything else is a consequence, although partly influenced by the decades of labor struggle that have led to certain modifications of the old sweatshop system of the past. What's left after the truly rich (which I doubt includes you, by the way) collect their share, is divided among the rest of us according to certain rules, partly in law, partly in custom, partly in market consequences, which dictate the incomes of people in various occupations and the demand for those occupations. Obviously there is a significant distinction between the six-figure income enjoyed by a typical trial lawyer and the wages made by a typical working-class person, but that difference is nothing compared to the difference between the lawyer's income and that of the CEO of a major corporation. There's the very rich, for whom the system is designed, and there's the rest of us, who divide the leavings.

When wages are driven up, the leavings are more, and the share garnered by the very rich (although not necessarily the absolute amount) is less. When wages are driven down, the leavings are less, and the share garnered by the very rich is more. We had the first situation, more or less, from the end of World War II until 1980. We have had the second, with some minor fluctuation, ever since.

Many of the standard economic indicators are misleading for that reason. It matters not only whether the economy is growing, but also how broadly or narrowly that growth in wealth is shared. We are not technically in a recession at present, although the economy isn't doing very well even by the standard indicators. But for most Americans, things are getting worse. For those with professional incomes, things are getting marginally better. For the really rich, they're getting a lot better. But those statements don't conflict.

BTW, Marcus, in re our conversation about legal costs, I have discovered something in private business that may largely rectify the problem. I think describing it here openly might violate the forum rules (it should anyway), but if you (or anyone else) wants to know about it, give me a PM.

I was hoping you would be willing to spell it out for people.

I guess I WAS ASKING TOO MUCH TO ASK YOU WHAT YOU REALLY THINK.

I apologize for asking you to clarify your views.

You are right, we are in a time where the rich are prospering and most other people are struggling.

How did we get here?

Well, you see, back in the old days a bunch of guys figured out that if you allow people to deposit gold, or money with you and then give them a note which shows they have this money on deposit with you, it is then possible to give out more notes than you have on deposit all because the people will never take out all their money at once, so no one will ever know that your are scamming them.

This scam, today we call it banking, led to the control of most of Europe. These men, these bankers, have had kings and rulers at their mercy, since fighting wars is a favorite past time of kings and rulers and fighting wars is very expensive.

Later, the bankers decided that controlling to world's money was not enough.

They decided they wanted to ensure their power for all time, where it could never be taken away, or challenged.

So, these bankers got together with some other "intellectuals" and decided to start taking control of governments.

This has been going on for centuries.

In the US it has resulted in GATT, NAFTA, the loss of millions of good paying American jobs, manipulation of economic data, control of the media, control of public education policy, the total brainwashing of the American public.

All of this is being done in order to move the US towards a world government, as we were too powerful economically in the past, so we had to be beaten down economically so that we would be more able to be merged with other countries that aren't as strong as ours.

Your precious world government has created most of the problems we have in this country and the ones they didn't create, they made worse.

Yes, you can thank the CFR, the foundations and the bankers for where we stand today economically.

Of course, you can go to the CFR website and they will not admit to intentionally destroying the US economy, which apparently is enough evidence for some people to swallow hook, line and sinker.

Man, you need to do some flipping reading.

Wow, you do get some of what is happening to us.

Now, who made the decisions to get us into these "agreements" to encourage the migration of capital, to not support labor regulations, to look the toher way on illegal immigration?

Let me give you a hint.....

Richard Gardner CFR spokesman..................

"The 'house of world order'," Gardner recommended, "will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault." This would entail the "decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis, as the necessity for cooperation is perceived by the relevant nations. Such institutions of limited jurisdiction will have a better chance of doing what must be done to make a 'rule of law' possible among nations." Calling for "strengthened international institutions at the global and regional levels," Gardner repudiated the older formula of "building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction," such as the United Nations itself.

New world order strategist: thirty years ago Richard N. Gardner proposed a "piecemeal" approach to world government. The internationalist insiders have followed his blueprint ever since | New American, The | Find Articles at BNET

If you have any problems with the US economy you can thank the banks, the foundations and the CFR/TC.

They are traitors and they are the ones who will be in power if world government ever comes into being.

Please do some reading.

You are obviously a smart person, but you are in DENIAL.

Please, I beg you, educate yourself on these topics.

We, people who believe in the truth, need smart people like you to join us and to actually care about the truth.

My parents divorced when I was 1.5 years old and were both remarried by the time I was four.

Growing up we were not impoverished, but definitely not above "middle class".

None of my parents - either "set" of them - are going to leave me any sort of estate or inheritance behind.

I went to public school.

I didn't really read all that much unless I had to do so.

I worked just hard enough in high school (all 4 of them) to graduate.

I earned no scholarships.

My parents "made too much money" for me to be eligible for aid.

I spent just long enough in the Navy to get college $.

I attended college just long enough to realize I was wasting my time.

I have never had any help from any union.

I ask very little of the government.

I have yet to lose any job to an illegal alien...or a legal one, for that matter.

My wife was stay-at-home for over 12 years. I brought her up to speed on office applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc...). She started working again - with a ridiculously thin resume - in October of 2007 (she didn't finish college, either) as an office "temp". By January, she got hired on full time, to a position above her "temp" position - at a salary just below the median household income for my town.

And yet, here we sit. Very healthy T.H.I. Very good FICO. Mortgage well under control. Two cars. Kid in private school. Change jobs whenever I want...last change was in June...went from phone interview to New Hire Orientation in 6 days, flat (for a job that was open/advertised for four months). Currently love the job/company, tons of responsibility, office with a window. Two or three vacations a year. Zero deductible health insurance. Great dental coverage. Blah, blah, blah...

Some time between the end of college and the beginning of the rest of my life I realized I was going to have to work my ass off for what I wanted.

My wife figured things out when she got pregnant.

We ain't that special, so you explain to me why I'm supposed to give a shit about people that just don't get the game of life?

I mean, seriously. Our rise to [our definition of] success is hardly ABC Movie of the Week material, yet, when I read some of you and absorb certain media spew, one might be led to think we're as rare as a woody at a eunuch convention.

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"Compassionate Conservatism"?!?! That is a stupid phrase. Conservatism is inherently compassionate. It is liberalism that is cruel for the sake of maintaining a constituency.

The problem with summary statistics is that they are just that - summaries. And usually presented by people with agendas - the 'liars and manipulators' also referenced here. GDP goes up - which implies we're all doing better, but is it just a few doing Much better? The GDP isn't the same as 'the old GDP', so does that mean the new one is more accurate, or just more rosey? The median household income is down, but does that mean we're generally worse off, or just that people who were postponing a divorce or moving out from their parents or some such now feel confident enough to take action and indvertantly spread the same (or possibly more) wealth across a larger number of households? The rich are getting richer, but are we looking at the same set of rich people in both samples, or have a significant number of people changed quintiles or percentiles or whatnot, meaning that what sounds like bad news for us non-rich actually means there are more and better opportunities than ever? Every seemingly good or bad summary statistic may have underlying causes that mean it's really bad or good, respectively.