Thread: 1 in 2 Americans Now Poor or Low Income

Originally Posted by USCitizen

With the rare exception of Steve Jobs or Warrent Buffet, which of our current meisters doesn't come from a wealthy enough background to beat out the common competiton?
And byt the way, do I have story about Buffet and GEICO and lobbying to destroy the competition.

That is the art of business is it not? Who wants to compete? Nobody. So the idea is how can I beat and if all possible eliminate my competition. Some businesses are just large enough to have politicians pull strings for them.

Originally Posted by USCitizen

Actually not.
In fact, MHP actually created a thread to show how full of sh!t Cons are when it comes to this "uneeded regulation" sound-bite.
You didn't even post ONE.
I know plumbers, electricians, contractors, bankers, MDs who can't name regulations that in one manner or another didn't come after the abuse.
All one line sound bites with no specificity.
But then again, Cons are not very good when it comes to specificity.

But then again Libs are not very good when it comes to ... well, the list would be too long. I guess you missed this one USCit:

Originally Posted by Mahasattva

I heard an interview with this gentleman last week and thought it would be interesting for some to read about a different point of view. The question should not be to regulate or not to regulate.

Excerpts from: Results-Based Regulation: A Blueprint for Starting Over
Philip Howard on the Need for Results-Based Regulation | Common Good
By Philip K. Howard
This past summer county officials closed down a children’s lemonade stand near the U.S. Open golf championship in Bethesda, Maryland—because the children didn’t have a vendor’s license. Officials decided not to compel the children to go to court, and issued a summons instead to their parents. Local television crews were soon on the crime scene, interviewing the kids who had organized the enterprise as a way to raise money for pediatric cancer. The incident was too ridiculous not to garner national attention, and the bureaucracy soon backed down. But the retreat was tactical, not a sincere acknowledgment of bureaucratic overkill. The regulations, after all, have no exception for young vendors. Indeed, the incident prompted a wave of sidewalk shutdowns over the summer by diligent officials in Georgia, Massachusetts and several other states.
Regulation promises to be a central theme in the 2012 election. Americans instinctively know that it’s hard to invigorate a weak economy when almost any activity has regulatory risk. Approvals often require trips and applications to multiple agencies with inconsistent requirements. Farmers and factory foremen spend hours filling out forms that no one will ever read. Small businesses get nicked by inspectors who have no sense of proportion or priorities—for no reason other than that’s what the rule requires. Government looms over the most ordinary activities, a hydra-headed dragon repelling common sense solutions with disgusting bureaucratic breath.

But the question was asked, "What regulations?" I have included any of the regulations he mentions and include most, but not all, of his ideas of how to address the problems of our current regulatory system.

To Regulate or Not to Regulate, That Is the Wrong Question
Earlier this year, the Colorado Department of Human Services propsed new rules for day-care centers. Government oversight of day-care seems like a good idea—you wouldn’t want children cooped up in an airless basement—but this proposal went far beyond basic health and safety. The new rules would dictate exactly how to do just about everything: how many block sets (“at least two (2) ... with a minimum of ten (10) blocks per set”), where the children can play with the blocks (on “a flat building surface” that is “not in the main traffic area”) and when caregivers must wash their hands (before “eating food,” “after wiping a child’s nose,” etc.).
This is the way regulation works in America: Regulators try to imagine every possible mistake and then dictate a solution. The complexity is astounding. Under a recent federal directive, the number of health-care reimbursement categories will soon increase from 18,000 to 140,000, including 21 separate categories for “spacecraft accidents” and 12 for bee stings. There are over 140 million words of binding federal statutes and regulations, and states and municipalities add several billion more. There’s hardly any activity in society that isn’t covered by a detailed rule.

Micromanagement at its worse. How many billions, if not trillions, are wasted on complianing to these regulations.

Regulation is deliberately designed to avoid human discretion—to create a regulatory code that is self-executing. This is its core assumption—unquestioned even by those who call for regulatory reform. This theory of regulation-as-instruction-manual arose in the 1960s when America woke up to abuses of racism and pollution, among others. By making rules as precise as possible, we hope to avoid bad judgment. The unfortunate side effect has been to preclude good judgment. Modern regulation doesn’t just control undesirable practices—it indiscriminately controls all the work of regulated entities.

In other words, government enacted a policy and programs which have caused other problems that have made matters worse. Does this sound familar?

Taking responsibility is basically illegal in the modern regulatory state. The president can’t authorize a new power line without a decade of bureaucratic review. A governor comes to office and finds that 80% of the budget is cast in legal concrete—without any ability to cut a little here and there. A teacher can’t maintain order in the classroom without filling out forms and facing a potential legal hearing. Judges sit on their hands, letting people sue for almost anything. An inspector feels that he has no choice but to shut down an unauthorized neighborhood lemonade stand—a rule is a rule.

An "unauthorized neighborhood lemonade stand"? That's regulations here in America.

At this point, after decades of writing laws to be as precise as possible, there is almost no room for decisions aimed at getting to the desired results. Modern democracy is not actually run by the people we elect. Democracy is run by dead people who wrote all this law.
America is suffering from a crisis of authority. No one is in charge. No one is accountable. No one can make choices needed to get out of this mess. Government is beyond anyone’s control. Business is making plenty of choices to adapt to global economic forces, but on a legal platform of unquestioned assumptions. Government and business are just bobbing in a stream, rapidly being swept towards a precipice.
Regulation by Results
America needs a radical regulatory overhaul. The goal is to re-empower humans to take responsibility to deal with current challenges. But how? Trying to make sense of the bloated bureaucracy would take a thousand lifetimes.
Almost all that bureaucracy would disappear, like air from a punctured balloon, if we abandoned its core assumption: that regulation should be an instruction manual. It is far more effective to give “general instructions about … the ends to be achieved,” economist Friedrich Hayek observed, and “leave it to the different individuals to fill in the details according to the circumstances.”
Between deregulation on one end, and regulatory micromanagement on the other, is a more sensible option: Results-based regulation—simpler rules tied to the results they produce and not the paperwork or bureaucracy they create. Regulatory codes must be rewritten as an open framework of goals and guidelines, built on this guiding principle: Replace bureaucracy with human responsibility to achieve regulatory goals. This is not a radical concept. Until the last 50 years or so, this is how most law was written.
The Constitution is barely 15 pages long. It doesn’t specify the detail of when, for example, government can enter our homes. But we know that its prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures” protects us against unwarranted police intrusions, and that judges see it as their job to maintain those boundaries in accord with prevailing norms of right and wrong. The First Amendment is 45 words (“Congress shall make no law …”) and, in those few words, protects our essential freedoms—religion, speech, press, assembly, petition—the foundation of our democratic system. Without the need for thousands of pages of explanatory rules, these constitutional principles let people generally know where they stand.

Yet Congress has no problem passing and enacting laws that are over two thousand pages long. He presents four points that he believes would help reform regulation.

Here are some other regulations he mentions:

The federal worker-safety laws now include some 4,000 rules dictating precisely what equipment can be used and how facilities are built. Some are embarrassingly self-evident, like the rule that stairwells shall be lit by “natural or artificial illumination.” ...

Consider our federal special-education laws, passed in the mid-1970s to end the shameful neglect of the small percentage of students with special needs. Special ed has now grown to consume 20% of the total K-12 budget in the U.S. Programs for gifted children, by contrast, get less than half of 1%.

And what is needed, besides logic ...

Regulation must be tethered to human judgments about right and wrong, not mindless legal compliance.
There is only one cure to our broken regulatory system—restore human responsibility to achieve regulatory results. Real people, not rules, make things happen. That’s the only way America will be able to meet its many challenges. “Nothing that’s any good works by itself,” Thomas Edison remarked. “You’ve got to make the damn thing work.”

tashi deleks,

M

P.S. In a following post I provided this: For those interested check out Consumer Protection which is a long page of links to articles about the silliness and harm that regulations have caused for consumers.

Originally Posted by USCitizen

With the rare exception of Steve Jobs or Warrent Buffet, which of our current meisters doesn't come from a wealthy enough background to beat out the common competiton?

Actually most of them. The canard of inherited wealth has been an outdated stereotype for a very long time.

And byt the way, do I have story about Buffet and GEICO and lobbying to destroy the competition.

:rolleyes: So what? The actions of individual businesspersons neither damns or is representative of free market capitalism. If government refrains from trying to pick winners and losers the efforts of the politically connected would be futile.

I'll address your other post when I have time.

tashi deleks,

M

Originally Posted by Mahasattva

Actually most of them. The canard of inherited wealth has been an outdated stereotype for a very long time.



:rolleyes: So what? The actions of individual businesspersons neither damns or is representative of free market capitalism. If government refrains from trying to pick winners and losers the efforts of the politically connected would be futile.

I'll address your other post when I have time.

tashi deleks,

M

Several years ago I read the Forbes(?) issue on the top 100 Interbet entrprenuers.
One Linus Torvalds, inbentor of Linux, did NOT start off as or become become a muti-millioniare.
One.

BTW, I'm NOT referreing to people working their a$$es off to make 20 million a year; those people do indeed work their a$$es off.
I'm referring to those magnates who have inherited their wealth and use it to manage congress.

I know a number of people, both accredited and not, who run day care centers.
Ever try breaking up a dozens or so fights a day.
It is easy to scoff at the number of blocks a center must have but try dealing with the irate parents who kids coming running and crying into their arms when they didn't get enough play time.
These moronic regulation usually come AFTER the issue comes up enough to cause a problem.

As far as no one to answer to...
The no-nothing voters know nothng about the people who take their tax money and what they do with it.
Yes, this is a MAJOR problem.

As I've stated previously, I know plenty of electricians, plumbers, etc and the regulations come after the injuries, deaths, fires and floods.

Multiple forms in non-convergent departments?
An incompetent career departmetn head who wants to validate his pointless position.
Automation will NEVER be done correctly because every vendor bribes the comissioner and a $100,000 project becomes a $50,000,000 project and I wish I was joking.

Originally Posted by USCitizen

In reply to: Originally Posted by Mahasattva
[color=red Please explain how our governnt's overspending and the debt we owe to China because of that overspending has anything to do with free market economics, free trade, or globalization? [/color]

We created an artificial environment of slow, but steady, unemployment via off-shoring and business visas.

I have already presented and linked to multiple sources that show that the off-shoring/visa argument is baseless and without merit. You and others have ignored those sources, dismissing them without considering them. That’s cool. Its what the blind ideologues who refuses to acknowledge empirical data and history do. Unemployment was not a problem until Obama began his idiotic Porkulous-CrapCare-Dodd-Frank and Crap and Tax through the back door (of the EPA) policies. The average unemployment rate under George Bush was 5.2%. Look up the average unemployment rate for Obama. Many have complained that the “big corporation” are sitting on trillions of dollars refusing to hire new workers, well why would they with Obama in office and without knowing what stupidity he’ll do next. And yet, who was the biggest receiver of campaign contributions from Wall Street? Obama. The one good effect of corporations holding on to those trillions is that it has kept inflation in check.

The illusion of wealth via cheap goods

Cheaper goods gave Americans more purchasing power. There is nothing illusory about greater purchasing power.

accompanied by not auditing financial institutions,

You are partially right, but miss where the fault lies. Banks where audited, but auditing the books would not and did not reveal the real risks in the bundled mortgages that banks were forced to accept for Congress’ affordable housing dream. The few that understood the risks sought to spread it around, so they wouldn’t be left holding the bag when the house of cards fell. At the same time the Fed was (and is still) doing its easy money low interest game setting the stage for a liquidity crisis.

who were selling non-profitable stocks and bonds, and even non-existent instruments giving ALL strata of America PLUS Europeans the illusion that there was something backing up their investments.

:rolleyes: It wasn’t stocks and bonds that were the problem, it was the bundled mortgages that were about to default that were being sold that caused the problems. Mortgages that would never have been approved if Congress had not forced the banks to lower their lending standards.

You see, economic theory is COMPLETLEY without merit when NOBODY is actually checking inventory and whether or not the suppliers are actually still in existence.

Sorry, the statement above is simply nonsensical.

As for free market lovers, I realize that lying is desireable as long as it's good for the P&L sheet.

:rolleyes: Bullshit empty rhetoric. The problems that have caused our economic woes have absolutely nothing to do with free market principles or free trade. There is nothing and there was nothing “free market” about the machinations of Congress with its “affordable housing dream,” the Fed’s poor monetary policy, or Treasury printing money like crazy.

BTW, the world STILL owes TRILLIONS to a market manipulating communist regime; explain to me how that happened according to free market economists?

:rolleyes: It has nothing to do with free market principles. Lets say for arguments sake, every myth you have put forward was true, it would not make a differences because the government spent more than the tax revenue it received. That is why we have a debt that is trillions of dollars. Lets say for arguments sake, everything thing was perfectly in line with free market principles (they aren’t and haven’t been for a long while), we would still have a debt that is trillions of dollars (though probably not as many trillions), because the government has spent more than it received or could receive in tax revenue.

tashi deleks,

M

Originally Posted by USCitizen

Several years ago I read the Forbes(?) issue on the top 100 Interbet entrprenuers.
One Linus Torvalds, inbentor of Linux, did NOT start off as or become become a muti-millioniare.
One.

So what? There are thousands of companies that open for business and then go broke within a year or two. Restaurant have something like an 80% failure rate the first year they open and that percentage only falls 5% during the second year.

BTW, I'm NOT referreing to people working their a$$es off to make 20 million a year; those people do indeed work their a$$es off.
I'm referring to those magnates who have inherited their wealth and use it to manage congress.

:rolleyes: The majority of millionaires and billionaires in America today earned their wealth. Who are these alleged magnates of inherited wealth you are referring? Please name them.

tashi deleks,

M

Originally Posted by Mahasattva

:rolleyes: The majority of millionaires and billionaires in America today earned their wealth. Who are these alleged magnates of inherited wealth you are referring? Please name them.

The billionaires who seem most intent on influencing congress to implement their vision of America are the Koch brothers who did in fact inherit their money.

Originally Posted by Disillusioned_1

The billionaires who seem most intent on influencing congress to implement their vision of America are the Koch brothers who did in fact inherit their money.

Really? The Koch brothers inherited all of their billions? They may have had the benefit of a lucky birth, but they earned their billions. I'd say George Soros is just as intent if not more to influence Congress as the Koch brothers.

tashi deleks,

M

And although the Kochs are heavily involved in politics, they are not nearly as involved in lobbying. The Kochs spend only a fraction of what GM, GE, and other Democrat-allied companies spend on lobbying.

Originally Posted by buck84

U.S. News - 'Dismal' prospects: 1 in 2 Americans are now poor or low income

You can read this article and see what you think, but I have a hard time believing that especially when I see 7 year old kids carrying iphones. I don't know what their definition of poor is. I'm not disputing that poor people don't exist but unfortunately I don't believe that 50% of the entire country is poor. Sounds more like liberal skewed statistics to me. What do you think?

ahoy Buck84,

me hearty, the person in the picture in the story ye linked looked poor to me.

- MeadHallPirate

Originally Posted by USCitizen

Job listings say the unemployed need not apply | The Lookout - Yahoo! News

Doesn't look like you have a very reputable source to back up you rather ridiculous claims.

Got any proof that one can take seriously?