Fun With Arithmetic

We started with $800 and ended up with $1300, so my enterprise is $500 to the good - please loan me money on my sterling record of profitability.

I netted $400 on 2 transactions, and that's what I'm reporting on my tax records - please adjust what I owe and refund me accordingly.

And that, folks, is a pretty good look at how Yacht Buyers get the rest of us to pay at least part of their share of the maintenance on USAmerica Inc.

Today's Class Assignment

Yeah, OK, I'll go ahead and try to shame y'all (ie: get all manipulative and shit) by saying "Watch this or don't watch this. Learn something or don't learn something. I can't make you care about the important stuff."

So here's David C Wilson, Dean, Goldman School of Public Policy:

The guy's "quiz", starting at about 25:30 is pretty interesting. He meant it to be about how we gauge merit and "deservingness", but it looked a whole lot like a rightwing push poll to me.

I think I may need a little break from all this.

Overheard Revisited

Whenever I hear "conservatives" whining about "how do we pay for all this stuff?" - and how providing help for regular people is going to "ruin the economy" - I just substitute "rich people's yacht money".

"How can we possibly respond to the pandemic without sacrificing rich people's yacht money?"

"Saving the environment sounds great, but what about rich people's yacht money?"

"Medicare For All would complete destroy rich people's yacht money."

"Yes, we all want good schools and broadband for everybody, but all that federal spending will cut into rich people's yacht money."

By The Numbers

Social Progress Index

"Highlights":

• USAmerica Inc is #1 in Quality Of University Education, but we're #91 in Access To Quality Basic Education
• USAmerica Inc is #1 in Medical Technologies, but we're #97 in Access To Quality Healthcare

Get the picture?

Here's a cheery little stick bomb from Nick Christof at NYT:

This should be a wake-up call: New data suggest that the United States is one of just a few countries worldwide that is slipping backward.

The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

“The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation, and we hope it will be a call to action,” Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and the chair of the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index, told me. “It’s like we’re a developing country.”

The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being — nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more — to measure quality of life. Norway comes out on top in the 2020 edition, followed by Denmark, Finland and New Zealand. South Sudan is at the bottom, with Chad, Central African Republic and Eritrea just behind.

The United States, despite its immense wealth, military power and cultural influence, ranks 28th — having slipped from 19th in 2011. The index now puts the United States behind significantly poorer countries, including Estonia, Czech Republic, Cyprus and Greece.

“We are no longer the country we like to think we are,” said Porter.

The United States ranks No. 1 in the world in quality of universities, but No. 91 in access to quality basic education. The U.S. leads the world in medical technology, yet we are No. 97 in access to quality health care.

The Social Progress Index finds that Americans have health statistics similar to those of people in Chile, Jordan and Albania, while kids in the United States get an education roughly on par with what children get in Uzbekistan and Mongolia. A majority of countries have lower homicide rates, and most other advanced countries have lower traffic fatality rates and better sanitation and internet access.

The United States has high levels of early marriage — most states still allow child marriage in some circumstances — and lags in sharing political power equally among all citizens. America ranks a shameful No. 100 in discrimination against minorities.

The data for the latest index predates Covid-19, which has had a disproportionate impact on the United States and seems likely to exacerbate the slide in America’s standing. One new study suggests that in the United States, symptoms of depression have risen threefold since the pandemic began — and poor mental health is associated with other risk factors for well-being.

Michael Green, the C.E.O. of the group that puts out the Social Progress Index, notes that the coronavirus will affect health, longevity and education, with the impact particularly large in both the United States and Brazil. The equity and inclusiveness measured by the index seem to help protect societies from the virus, he said.

“Societies that are inclusive, tolerant and better educated are better able to manage the pandemic,” Green said.

The decline of the United States over the last decade in this index — more than any country in the world — is a reminder that we Americans face structural problems that predate President Trump and that festered under leaders of both parties. Trump is a symptom of this larger malaise, and also a cause of its acceleration.

David G. Blanchflower, a Dartmouth economist, has new research showing that the share of Americans reporting in effect that every day is a bad mental health day has doubled over 25 years. “Rising distress and despair are largely American phenomenon not observed in other advanced countries,” Blanchflower told me.

This decline is deeply personal for me: As I’ve written, a quarter of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus in rural Oregon are now dead from drugs, alcohol and suicide — what are called “deaths of despair.” I lost one friend to a heroin overdose this spring and have had more friends incarcerated than I could possibly count; the problems are now self-replicating in the next generation because of the dysfunction in some homes.

You as taxpayers paid huge sums to imprison my old friends; the money would have been far better invested educating them, honing their job skills or treating their addictions.

That’s why this is an election like that of 1932. That was the year American voters decisively rejected Herbert Hoover’s passivity and gave Franklin Roosevelt an electoral mandate — including a flipped Senate — that laid the groundwork for the New Deal and the modern middle class. But first we need to acknowledge the reality that we are on the wrong track.

We Americans like to say “We’re No. 1.” But the new data suggest that we should be chanting, “We’re No. 28! And dropping!”

Let’s wake up, for we are no longer the country we think we are.

The Full Rant

John Oliver excerpted from this at the end of his show last night - it's good to hear the whole thing.

Kimberly Jones:

Faux Nobility

Eventually, Capitalism comes down to rich people spending less time doing the actual work, and more time concocting a reasonable-sounding rationalization for being self-centered rent-seeking assholes.

Veronika Tait, PhD - Psychology Today:

Republicans and Democrats explain wealth in different ways. In a survey by Pew Research Center, participants were asked why a person is rich. The majority of Republicans said a person is rich because they worked harder, whereas most Democrats said that it was because they had advantages in life. On why a person is poor, most Republicans attributed it to a lack of effort, whereas the overwhelming majority of Democrats said it was because of circumstances beyond control. So which is it?

Recent findings show that only half of today’s 30-year-olds earn more than their parents. However, 90% of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents. Rather than the ‘rags to riches’ fairytale so many of us want to believe in, opportunities vary widely depending on the occupations of one's parents. Researcher Michael Hout found that social mobility is far from the norm.

Some may argue that the current generation experiences lower ambition and greater entitlement compared to generations past. However, the data indicates that millennials earn 20% less than baby boomers did at the same stage of life, despite achieving higher levels of education. While business leaders work hard, it’s difficult to defend the jump in the ratio of pay between a company’s CEO and their average worker at 30:1 in 1978, skyrocketing to 299:1 in 2014.
- and -

With ideals of meritocracy reinforced in American culture, it is tempting to assume that those who are wealthy have worked hard and fairly earned their affluence. But that wouldn’t tell the whole story. One study from 2017 found that 60% of wealth is inherited rather than worked for. There are also stories of executives exploiting workers, such as Jeff Bezos, who recently purchased the most expensive home in California and whose workers reported peeing in plastic bottles because they could not use the bathroom during their shift. 

Some advantages had by the successful are less visible. For example, I worked hard to receive academic scholarships and ultimately earned a Ph.D. in Social Psychology with no debt. However, it would be unfair for me to not also acknowledge my own privilege at play in my accomplishments. My parents never handed me a wad of cash, but they did raise me with clean water and sanitary living conditions, adequate nutrition, a stable environment, a strong support system, quality healthcare, and a lack of childhood trauma.

Evidence suggests that simply having wealth, whether earned or by luck, increases one’s justification for it. Also known as the Just-World Fallacy, those who are on top of the social ladder, that is, those with money, power, and influence, believe the world is just. Those in the middle think the world is somewhat just, and those at the bottom believe the world is unjust.

Researcher Paul Piff cleverly demonstrated this by giving some participants a clear advantage in a game of Monopoly such as giving them extra money. When he asked participants why they (inevitably) won, they described how they had made smart decisions, and downplayed their privileged position.

Those who believe the world is just, that is, believe you get what you work for, are more likely to justify inequality and victim-blame. If those who are wealthy are automatically seen as good, it is assumed that the poor must have done something to deserve their misfortune.

Sarah Kendzior:"When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live."

 

Let's Do Some Pie

Wealth inequity is the surest way for rich people to fuck themselves out of being rich.

Over time, wealth (and the power that always goes with it) migrates upwards.  More and more money and power are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, until just a very small number of plutocrats are running the whole show.

In order for that to work, less and less money and power has to be shared by more and more people, until folks come to understand that they've been left with nothing more to lose.

That's when the man on the white horse rides in, riles 'em up and they crash the plutocrats' party in the most unpleasant ways - all in the name of goodness and patriotism and Making America Great Again.

To be sure, there's a righteousness about trying to even things up - trying to get equilibrium back into the thing. But when a system is as badly out of balance as it is in USAmerica Inc, people get desperate. And desperate people do some pretty crazy (ie: stoopid) things - like following the wrong guys who talk them into doing some really fucked shit.

Trump is the deceiver.

If I ignore what I consider the silliness of people who believed in gods and demons and a geocentric universe, and look to the basic human circumstances that seem to prevail no matter the place or time, I can get pretty cozy with the warnings of a mad monk in a cave 1800 years ago, trying to suss out why so many rich people act like such dicks, and why it's so easy for them to sucker so many normal everyday otherwise-clear-thinking folks.

It is a wonderment.

BTW - looking at Trump as that false messiah helps explain the fucked up "logic" of American Evangelicals.

And also too - the parallels with Nazi occultism are getting really freaky.

Happy Now?

Fortune Magazine: 

The United States is the unhappiest it’s ever been.

The 2019 World Happiness Report says that Finland remains the happiest country on Earth for the second year in the row, while the U.S. drops to No. 19, its worst ranking ever (it was No. 18 in 2018 and No. 14 in 2017).

- and -

Researchers with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network have been creating the annual happiness report since 2012, based on global data from Gallup. Countries’ happiness scores are determined by six main variables on a three-year average:
GDP per capita

• Healthy life expectancy at birth
• Social support from friends and family
• Freedom to make life choices
• Generosity in the form of donations to charity
• Perceptions of government corruption

1. Finland (7.769)
2. Denmark (7.600)
3. Norway (7.554)
4. Iceland (7.494)
5. Netherlands (7.488)
6. Switzerland (7.480)
7. Sweden (7.343)
8. New Zealand (7.307)
9. Canada (7.278)
10. Austria (7.246)
11. Australia (7.228)
12. Costa Rica (7.167)
13. Israel (7.139)
14. Luxembourg (7.090)
15. United Kingdom (7.054)
16. Ireland (7.021)
17. Germany (6.985)
18. Belgium (6.923)
19. United States (6.892)
20. Czech Republic (6.852)

"Conservatives" and the Plutocrats in Washington are always yelling about how miserable it is to live under the horribleness of "socialism", but the countries they love to shit on are right there at the top of the list of Happiest Places To Live, while we're losing ground.

And well down the list is the place those guys apparently want us to emulate - Russia at #68.

Public Econ 101

The system of Corporate Welfare because of the revolving multi-dimensional doors between Congress, the Executive, and the Private Sector - all of that has to be squashed.

It's hard not to go along with the "radical left" when they tell me there's only the illusion of choice - a false image of democracy - here in USAmerica Inc.

Do your reading:

We have some real problems, and pushing back against those who want to keep this thing under a Minority Rule regime will take decades - generations prob'ly.

But we know how to start.  Because we have started - we gave ourselves a fair start last November. We know we've finally got the thing going, even as we struggle with fully recognizing that we've actually begun anything.

Yeah, OK, that last bit was a little weird and wishy-washy. The point though is that we've taken the good first step in that Confucius-ey journey of a thousand miles.

• HR1 is a solid message, and a great place to start the 116th Congress.
• AOC's proposal to raise the marginal tax rate is a good one.
• Bernie's ideas on Single Payer Healthcare are good ones.
• Hillary's approach to a graduated minimum Wage Raise is a good one.

We didn't fuck it all up yesterday. We're not going to get all of it unfucked by tomorrow.

And one election don't mean jack shit if we go back to letting the bad guys keep us divided. If we let the Bots and the Trolls convince us that our fellow travelers are the enemy. That it can only be a choice between Perfection and Nothing-At-All.

I'm not against the BernieBros - I'm not fed up with the HillBots - Im not going to shit on Left-Leaning Libertarians - just because I don't align perfectly with everything they say.

I'm even going to work on being more OK with Republicans for that matter - as long they're not completely fuckin' crazed, and there's some common ground that I think I can find.

I'll not be perfect in this quest. It's more than a little likely that I'll be as combative and caustic and asshole-ish as I've always been. I won't be withdrawing from the field and ceding the outcome to anyone. But I'm going to try to be more aware that I need help from as many people as possible to get the things on my agenda done.

A Disney Princess

Real life Disney Princess Abigail Disney talks about tax cuts and the fact that inflation and the cost of servicing our national debt are rising faster than the increases in wages and employment.

The economy is booming - but not your part of the economy.

This Disney heiress is here to tell you exactly what the 1% did with Trump’s tax cuts pic.twitter.com/k8q67yz7lU

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 12, 2018

SuperYachtInvestor.com

Something To Remember

Median Net Worth in USAmerica Inc last year was about $80,000.

Average Net Worth was about $180,000.

There are about 550 billionaires, and something like 10 million millionaires up in this joint.

Some basic arithmetic makes it pretty easy to imagine how fucked up American Wealth Distribution has become.

Bill Gates walks into a soup kitchen, and the average net worth of the people in that room goes up into the hundreds of millions.

But you've still got Bill Gates and about 100 stone broke homeless people.

This is not a particularly rich country when 99% of the people are doing all the work while the other 1% get all the goodies.

The Buzz Man

You've heard it before, and here it is again:

Of all the wealth generated in the world last year, 82% of it went to the Top 1%.
None of it - NONE OF IT - went to the bottom 50%.

And there's a very good rundown of what's been happening in the Mueller investigation, and the bit about the use of bots and American social media.*

Buzz Burbank - News & Comment:




*BTW -

Why Fake News Targeted Trump Supporters - The Atlantic from last year.

‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests - NYT this month 

(I think this guy's conclusions are a bit silly, because we know that moving even a low percentage of voters makes a huge difference)
Here's the study

Abstract: 

Though some warnings about online “echo chambers” have been hyperbolic, tenden- cies toward selective exposure to politically congenial content are likely to extend to misinformation and to be exacerbated by social media platforms. We test this prediction using data on the factually dubious articles known as “fake news.” Using unique data combining survey responses with individual-level web tra c histories, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October 7-November 14, 2016. Trump supporters visited the most fake news web- sites, which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption was heavily concentrated among a small group — almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news web- sites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets. We also find that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news and that fact-checks of fake news almost never reached its consumers.
Happy Friday!

Not Just Another Dumb Jock

Gregg Popovich struggles at times to find the words, but if this is at all representative of how people in positions of influence are thinking, then we're doing better than I thought.

And Steve Kerr talks about the Warriors taking a pass on their White House visit - making a very solid statement on values:

BTW - nobody is protesting the national anthem, and nobody is protesting the flag.

BTW2 - stop telling me 45* has accomplished something positive. You might as well say it was a good thing those 300 passengers were killed in just about the most gruesome way imaginable because we got all these great new data points on how to improve airline safety.

Cornered

Christopher Cantwell - Alt-Right, Smug-White, Fucking Nazi Ass-Wipe - the guy they spotlighted in that VICE piece on HBO a few days ago.

It's the Age Of Poor Poor Pitiful Me.

Something that just got clearer: these jagoffs talk trash all the time about how "all those people" are getting everything for free, and they're a burden to society, and honest tax-paying Americans always have to pick up the tab, and blah blah blah.

But Cantwell's not bitchin' because somebody else is gettin' the goodies - he's bitchin' cuz he's not gettin' the goodies.

There's a lot of weirdness rattling around in my brain about all this - economic pyramids, and wealth disparity, and Maslov's Hierarchy, and the downward pressure of that Supply Side crap, and what always happens when there's too much power in too few hands and too many people with nothing more to lose.

The kicker is - I wasn't expecting Cantwell to be so scared. You don't cry like that if you're not scared.  And that's quite the odd little wrinkle.

AHCA

75% of us are on record saying we don't want ACA repealed. We want it fixed and strengthened.

What's the big bugbear according to Business "conservatives"?  Uncertainty.  

You really can't make a case that AHCA does anything at all to make Americans feel more certain. Especially the way the Repubs are going about it.

But, hey at least they've given us a chance to see it before they jam it up our collective ass. 

The AHCA was released today - in all it's 142 page glory.

I haven't slogged all the way thru it yet, but so far, it's a little like the old bit about watching the original Star Trek - everybody knows the young guy you don't recognize (usually a Red Shirt) will be dead before the opening credits.  And 4 or 5 minutes after that first commercial, you'll know the gist of the story because there's only a handful of themes (kinda like this little blog here), and it always works out just fine for the Executive Elite (not at all like this little blog).  Which frees you up so you can go do something worthwhile - like picking fly shit outa your pepper shaker.

Anyway, so it is with practically everything these GOP boneheads come up with.  They put a nice face on it, but it's pretty much always about taking tax dollars from you and me, and putting them into the pockets of their in-laws, their lobby pals, and their campaign contributors.

It's money laundering. Why do you think the GOP in congress is doing nothing about 45*?  When it comes to washing money, he's one of the best - they're too busy taking lessons from this jagoff.

If you wanna know about a problem here in USAmerica Inc, look to who benefits from the continuing existence of the problem, or who profits from "solving" it. 

If you work it just right, you can get a 2-fer, like The War On Drugs and Coin-Operated Prisons.

AHCA is off to a good start in that regard. The Insurers get to go back to the bad ol' days of a Pick-n-Choose customer base, plus they get to siphon bunches of dollars out of the Treasury by playing in the High Risk Pool.  And that's just the shit I can see from here.

The rich get richer and the rest of us get fucked with our pants on.

Today's Tweet

There's so much we're not paying any attention to while we're playing high school fuck-around with 45*, how do we keep track of it?

White & black Americans use drugs at same rate (12%), but African-Americans are 6x more likely to be sent to prison for it. @VanJones68 pic.twitter.com/BJiy6mhuUK

— Our Revolution (@OurRevolution) January 19, 2017

The Wealth Gap Just Gets Worse

Both Bernie and Hillary tried with this, but the message was never enough to cut thru the frenzied clutter of the Trump Chaff Machine, plus the Voter Suppression that the GOP has been working on for 20 years, plus the Kremlin, plus the FBI, plus the Rat-Fucking and the Fake News and and and.

From The Institute For Policy Studies:


Key findings

Just 100 CEOs have company retirement funds worth $4.7 billion — a sum equal to the entire retirement savings of the 41 percent of U.S. families with the smallest nest eggs.

This $4.7 billion total is also equal to the entire retirement savings of the bottom:

• 59 percent of African-American families 
• 75 percent of Latino families 
• 55 percent of female-headed households 
• 44 percent of white working class households

On average, the top 100 CEO nest eggs are large enough to generate for each of these
executives a $253,088 monthly retirement check for the rest of their lives.

Among ordinary workers, those lucky enough to have 401(k) plans had a median balance at the end of 2013 of $18,433, enough for a monthly retirement check of just $101.

Of workers 56-61 years old, 39 percent have no employer-sponsored retirement plan whatsoever and will likely depend entirely on Social Security, which pays an average benefit of $1,239 per month.

With nearly $3 billion in special tax-deferred accounts, Fortune 500 CEOs stand to gain enormously from Trump’s proposed tax cuts on top earners.

If President-elect Donald Trump succeeds in cutting the top marginal tax rate from 39.6 percent to 33 percent, Fortune 500 CEOs would save $196 million on the income taxes they would owe if they withdrew their tax-deferred funds.

Unlike ordinary 401(k) holders, most top CEOs have no limits on annual contributions
to their tax-deferred accounts. In 2015 alone, Fortune 500 CEOs saved $92 million on their taxes by putting $238 million more in these accounts than they could have if they were subject to the same rules as other workers.

Michael Neidorff, the CEO of Centene, a provider of health plans to Medicaid recipients and other low-income Americans, has nearly $140 million in his deferred compensation account, up 658 percent since the 2010 launch of Obamacare.

The retirement asset gap between CEOs mirrors the racial and gender divides among ordinary Americans.

The 10 white male CEOs with the largest retirement funds hold a combined $1.4 billion, more than eight times more than the 10 CEOs of color with the largest retirement assets and nearly five times as much as the top 10 female CEOs.

Confirming What We've Known

I got your Equal Opportunity right here, motherfucker.

This is not news to any of us who've been watching things like this - and it's certainly not news to anybody who's been on the short end their whole lives.

What continues to be news is that so many of us are still hot to swallow the malarkey that "we" have to lose everything in order to make it possible for "them" just to get one lousy shot at winning any-fucking-thing at all.

The more money the "unwashed of the low-born" have in their pockets, the more money they're likely to spend on whatever weird shit you carry in your little hobby-career boutique solidly entrepreneurial job-creating noble-rich legacy-schmuck powerhouse bidness.  

So grow the fuck up, Dilbert.

And Now For Something Different

This whole campaign cycle is a freak show without the tent, and so the only thing that could possibly occur that would seem odd is if somebody actually came up with a policy idea on what we might try in order to make a few improvements - and wow, look at that, it's Hillary Clinton, trying to get us to talk about something other than what Donald Trump is doing with his tiny orange hands.

Vox:

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton unveiled what is arguably among the most important policies she’s announced during her entire presidential campaign. It is an ambitious but politically attainable plan that will lift huge numbers of families with children out of poverty. It is targeted exclusively at the poor, and the extreme poor in particular, with no money spent on the middle class or rich.

Specifically, Clinton is calling for a change in the refundability threshold of the child tax credit. Those sound like technical changes, but it has tremendous ramifications. Currently, the poorest American families can’t claim the credit, which is a mainstay of the tax returns of most middle-class families. That’s because households that make less than $3,000 a year — the truly, desperately poor — are excluded entirely, and households making under $9,666.67 can’t get the full credit.

Clinton would change the law so that families start getting the credit with the first dollar they earn. That would effectively increase the tax refunds of the poorest families with children. In addition, Clinton would double the credit for children 4 and under, something that helps both poor and middle-class families with young kids, and she’d make the credit phase in much faster for families with kids in that age range.

I make no claims to knowledge of such things beyond the single Econ course I barely muddled thru in one of my abortive attempts at going to college, but I managed to learn that the more people who can participate in an economy, the better that economy works; and that the best way to circulate money thru an economy is to pump it up through the roots instead of sprinkling it on the leaves.  It's basic Keanesian stuff and it's what works best - which seems like a fairly simple concept, but it's something that's proved to be a little elusive for the average "conservative".

I'm a Bernie guy - and I think Bernie'd be good with an initiative like this because it means his challenge for the nomination showed HRC that moving her agenda a little to the left is a good and appropriate and politically safe thing to do, plus it signals Hillary's willingness to fix one of the big problems created by the Welfare Reform thing in the mid-90s, which is something Bernie kept hammering her on. 

So - yays all around.

Today's Tweet

#PhilandoCastile #AltonSterling #Me pic.twitter.com/ynpiYuPjSS

— rootwoman123 (@rootwoman123) July 7, 2016

It's like we never have a chance to get past one shitty thing before the next shitty thing happens.

Alton Sterling

Philando Castile



What happens if somebody starts an effort to build a memorial wall in DC to list the names of all the black folk who've been killed by the cops?

Actually, here's a design suggestion: Let's build a memorial that has all the dead white people listed on one wall, and all the dead black people listed on a wall facing that one.

I wonder which one gets all the names, and I wonder which one gets all the attention.