I Didn't Have Time To Protest Today

Well said, Sam.

Today reminds me about a story in the Bible where a land-owner hires people throughout the day, to work in his vineyard. Long story short, he decides to pay everyone the same wage, from the one hour worker, to the twelve hour worker, and the twelve hour folk are a bit upset. The farmer says: Isn't it my right to pay as I see fit, considering the money is mine? (I paraphrase) Much grumbling, but everyone goes away with a day's pay.

Today, there has been a new factor to consider. There seems to be a group, who refused to come to work, who, due to something called 'entitlement,' allows the non-worker, not only to demand equal pay, but actually demand that only the twelve hour workers pay the expense. Hmmm. Something wrong with this scenario, folks, but somehow, while the others were working, the non-workers got someone in government to guarantee that they were entitled to equality, no matter the cost to the others.

We truly need to get mad, and demand that our representatives in government recall the Constitutional direction our fore-fathers began for us. We are supposed to assist the less fortunate, but nothing says we have to adopt them so they can enjoy being 'less fortunate,' more than we toil for our 'more fortunate' situation? No one is entitled to demand that which you work so hard for.

In our Messiah, His Shalom, and protection. Arley Steinhour

I have to agree with Sam on this one. I just hate those expecting a handout at every turn. The forty thousand should skip a year of paying taxes and then maybe people would figure it out.

Sam there's no need to dispute the numbers on your blog. We all read them in the newspaper last week. However, this whole notion that all those people were looking for handouts is a crock.

What you fail to mention is that those 50 thousand people protesters were teachers, health care workers, and members of various community groups.

Something else that isn't quite right is that these folks aren't begging for handouts, they simply don't want money ripped from their own hands. The folks who are protesting are going to be some of the hardest hit by the new budget....$2.5 billion cut from education and $3.2 billion from health care (not to mention the other cuts from service organizations to the elderly, disabled, and mentally ill).

So to openly taunt these people who are out fighting for their jobs and the causes they believe in is simply cruel.

I don't know what has happened in your life to make you hold such a superiority complex over certain groups of people (namely liberals and college professors), but you should probably cut some slack to people struggling to maintain their jobs.

If there were truckers protesting to save their jobs, there's no way I would openly mock them. I'd have the decency to keep that to myself...

Sam,

You want to argue the facts of what you presented.

Firstly, you did not cite your source. I assume it was either Rush Limbaugh or the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (the two prominent outlets I saw running this story today).

Or perhaps not, since the quote (that came from the mayor) put the figure at 40,000 people paying 1/2 of the taxes, NOT 2/3. A minor quibble, I suppose. There is still a relatively small amount of people paying the lion's share of the taxes. Though I'm not sure why you would have misquoted him.

Such a small number of New Yorkers are responsible for 1/2 the taxes because of the progressive income tax (higher tax rates for making more money). They are responsible for so much because of the income inequality existing in New York City. There are many INSANELY wealthy people who live there (think, Wall Street). There is also a VAST population of people living below the poverty line. This drastic income inequality leads to a realtively small number of people paying the majority of the taxes (because of the progressive income tax).

There are good arguments for the progressive income tax.

-Practicality. We need more money, the lower/middle classes have little to no disposable income, the upper class does. Therefore, we take money from the upper class.

-The wealthy have a disproportionate interest in maintaining societal goods supported by taxation (specifically defense and infrastructure), because they have much more to lose if they fail.

-It is an income stabilizer. If you suffered a loss in income, it would be offset marginally by being moved to a lower tax bracket.

-It is an economic break. It helps stop the runaway accumulation of wealth that can precipitate market collapses (sound familiar?)

-As income levels rise, marginal propensity to consume drops. It follows that shifting tax burden to the wealthy is economically stimulating.

Of course, there are convincing arguments AGAINST the progressive income tax as well. I'd recommend you try THOSE instead of marching out some outlier statistic and claiming the democrats want to give money to lazy people who refuse to work.

(HINT: Start with tax fairness, incentive for emigration, and income disincentive).

And please, EVERYONE (democrats & republicans) agrees that lazy people don't deserve a "handout". This assertion that democrats want to give the lazy people your hard earned money is as ridiculous as the assertion that republicans want poor people to die in the gutter. Those are both "straw man" arguments (misrepresenting your opponent's position in order to make it weaker and easier to attack).

You're a conservative, and when you see these people protesting, you see lazy slackers looking for a handout. Worthless losers who haven't worked a day in their lives, who want to stay on welfare forever, and have everyone else shoulder their burdens.

I see it differently (maybe because I'm a "liberal").

I see a father of two, who has been laid off. He wants to support his family by working, but he can't find a decent job. His unemployment checks don't even keep his bills paid. His food stamps barely feed his kids. He's protesting because these services are going to be cut.

I see a twenty two year old girl, who is on her own. She works in a convienience store 50 hours a week for barely above minimum wage. She is on a government subsidized health care plan because her job doesn't provide any medical benefits. She's protesting because her health care is about to be taken away.

I see a college student. A studious learner who is trying to put himself through college. He want's a degree so that he can make a good living, and be a productive member of society doing what he loves. College costing what it does, the only way he can possibly afford it is with tuition assistance from the government. He's protesting because the funding for that program is being taken away.

You see, I know all of these people personally. (No, they don't actually live in NYC, but they have all been in the situations I described). I see people who work hard, and still come up short. People who want to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", but don't have any boots. People who deserve a little help from the rest of society, and rightly receive government assistance.

I know, I know, I'm a bleeding heart liberal. Right? But it's a point of view. I see the best in people. Hardworking American's who need help from the rest of us. You have a harsher stance. You see the worst in human nautre. Lazy slobs sucking at the teat of the rich. (Personally, I'd rather live my life with a more positive view of human nature).

But I suppose my personal experience makes me biased, as does my general outlook on the human condition. So lets look at facts, as you requested.

- A General Accounting Office summary of 100+ studies (1975-1995) determined that welfare does not generally reduce people's desire to work. Primarily because welfare payments typically don't cover the necessities of living.

Source: Joe Davidson, "Welfare Mothers Stress Importance of Building Self-Esteem If Aid System Is to Be Restructured," Wall Street Journal

-Overwhelmingly, welfare is a transient program. Fewer than 20% of all people on welfare remain on the program for less than seven months. Another 20% remain for 1-2 years. 27% 2-5 years. Only about 20% of welfare recipients remain on welfare for more than 5 years.

Source: http://www.ehow.com/about_4675101_welfar...

-But how many welfare recipients are there? Surely there are multitudes? According to the TANF website (TANF = Welfare), there were on average 3.8 million people on welfare each month last year. About 1% of the population.

Source:

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/data...

(of course, there are other programs that I'm sure you would consider "sucking at the teat", these are just welfare/TANF statistics)

And please don't misrepresent my previously stated positions about the additional burden the stimulus bill will place on our national debt. The point that I had attempted to make was that the past three "fiscally conservative" presidents (Reagan, Bush, & Bush) have racked up the vast majority of the national debt (with Clinton admitidlly not doing much better). They racked up the debt with tax cuts and defense spending.

My point was, that I am more comfortable with Obama adding 2 trillion to the national debt investing in our own country, than I am with Regan/Bush/Bush racking up 7 trillion in national debt via tax breaks and defense/war spending.

Source: http://web.whittier.edu/academic/math/jm...

(graph leaves off the last 4 years of the Bush administration, where the debt reached 10.8 trillion.)

I'm not sure how to test one's godlessness, but it is amusing that the state with the highest average reading comprehension score on the ACT doesn't buy into a book written by monks 2,000 years ago.

Ok, maybe I wasn't clear enough before. I didn't say you had a grudge against professors, I said you had a superiority complex.

But you and G5 are correct, there are a lot of liberal professors, and there are a lot of classes that deal with "white guilt" (though when I went to school it was called The Minority Experience or Native American Literature). If you don't like what these colleges are doing I suggest that you do not donate to them.

The only real beef I have with you Sam is that you think that students follow everything a professor says in the classroom. Give them some credit...students have the ability to think for themselves, in fact most of their political ideology was established by the time they made it to high school.

And if you spend most of the day on your butt, I wouldn't tell people to grab a shovel and do real work for a change.

Keep the faith in Rush,

The Constitution is his to,

Twist, contort, and rape.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert...

I do not agree with cutting money from healthcare or education, I would protest that, but I am too busy working as well. My view on the healthcare is that I want to keep these people healthy enough to go to work, then I will save money when they buy there own healthcare coverage like the rest of us. The only problem with this is, when a government program starts to do the job it was intended to do and save some money, the money usually gets hidden away in one form or another so they can justify the request for more funding the following year. I have seen this before, you would be surprised how well some people can pencil whip the books.

I dont believe in cutting the spending on education either. I want my kids and your kids to have as many doors open to them as possible. I dont like the educational system either, but I do agree that it is the fastest way to success. I think a bachelors degree will give you about 30 credit hours of information that you can use to build a successful career, and the rest is just BS that the school sold to you to make money. And I dont even want to get started on the book store scam. I think that in some cases a college degree is a bit over rated. I work in the energy field and have for some time. I earned all of the necessary tools to work at any level through experience and alot of overtime. It was very difficult for me to break in to the senior management level, because all of the senior management at the time thought that a man or woman couldnt possibly do this type of work without a degree, and they were all looking for a pedigree(college degree) they could sell to a board or a banker. The skills and abilities of an individual were not as important as the pedigree. I was fortunate enough to prove them all wrong. I have been to college(unrelated field, and I have seen the college try to convince kids that they have very little chance at success, unless you buy what they are selling. I dont like it.

Having said all of that, as much as it irritates me, I still believe that education is the key to our future and should not be short changed. I just dont like the way it is packaged and sold.

Good grief, Sam, why would you waste your time responding to these guys?

Here Samster:

If you want to continue to stand against moochers and an administration that wants to declare war on success, do yourself a favor and check out Atlas Shrugged, or just watch this video.

Just trying to help out.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert...

Responding to the other points:

*His first call to any head of state as president was to Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Fatah party in the Palestinian territory.

AND

* His first one on one interview with any news organization was with Al Arabia television.

The administration has made it clear that they are going to engage more diplomatically in the middle east than their predecessors. The idea is to reach out to not just the governments in that part of the world, but the people there as well.

Many people in that part of the world are raised to believe that America is the "great satan". Military action on our part helps reinforce this belief (though, I admit it is sometimes necessary). And we do nothing to change that belief unless we engage diplomatically with the people and governments in that region.

* He ordered Guantanamo Bay closed and all military trials of detainees halted.

* He ordered all overseas CIA interrogation centers closed.

These were campaign promises. They helped get him elected. They were the will of the American people. It's not like he closed them secretly, or promised to keep them open during the campaign, he promised the exact opposite and it helped him get elected. That is how democratic elections are supposed to work. The people want something, the candidate promises to do it, the people vote.

* He withdrew all charges against the masterminds behind the USS Cole and 9/11.

The Pentagon withdrew the charges. They did it to comply with Obama's 120 day stay of military tribunals for detainees. Al-Rahim al-Nashiri has not been released, and the charges were "dropped without prejudice", which means they can be reinstated at any time (like after the 120 stay of military tribunals). It's not like Obama pardoned him and let him out of Gitmo.

* Today we learn that he is allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refuges to move to and live in the US at American taxpayer expense.

Already debunked...

Resilient Justice,

I agree. We have an obligation to accept refugees.

I was recently at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and was shocked to learn that America (along with most of world) refused to accept jewish refugees before the holocaust began.

Of course, once the extent of the horrors was uncovered, the developed world began accepting jewish refugees. But think of how many innocents could have been saved if America and the rest of the world had accepted them right from the beginning. We must learn from the past, and make sure that we do not ignore the suffering and persecution of other peoples.

G5,

I understand the point you're making with the syllogism, although I would argue that a syllogism is about the particular, rather than about a generalization or about 100% of the population. We cannot undermine the significance of a particular case. So, in the case of Socrates, in this particular case, it turns out that it is true that if a=b and b=c, then a must equal c. Socrates is in fact mortal (and the syntax bears out the proposition). There is no reason to look further and generalize or stereotype across a lager population or sample. That is not logical. In fact, it's dangerous territory and negates Socrates's experience of being mortal, and as much as I like numbers and statistics, I find that the particular case is sometimes more compelling and less likely to cause us to create false, generalizable "truths" or categorizations. Indeed, that would make us all fools.

One thing I've learned from the controversial debates about Wittgenstein's work is that when we ask, "what is truth" or when we impose our subjective "truths" unto the world, we enter into what he calls a "language game." In doing so we may lose all meaning as we engage in meaningless word play, and we ought to be careful of that as we attempt to solve problems, such a poverty, or racism, or economic hardship, or lack of health care, or defense systems, or wars. We simply cannot fall into a trope of meaninglessness when real people are involved and are suffering or are exploited or harmed or discriminated against. We cannot lose sight of the particular. I think that this is what your antagonists on this blog have been arguing.

I also think that you equate formal logic with rationality, with people's tendency to rationalize their decisions, even bad decisions. Rationalizing our misguided beliefs and ideologies just causes more oppression and sadness. One of the worst examples of the rationalizing away of people was Hitler's Mine Kampf. Another example of rationalization, and this one relates to creating more accountability in public school systems, was some of the policy related to NCLB, which did not account for how students actually learn and how teachers teach -- we really lost sight of the particular in classrooms during the past 8 years. I suggest that we cannot rationalize our way to a truth if our goal is to improve everybody's quality of life...that is indeed a word game with dire and unacceptable consequences.

I sense that you're trying to be funny on this blog, G5, but I often find your humor misplaced, hence the seriousness of my response. I simply cannot LOL with you when "[you] never make mistakes."