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[wierd]

It was an exercise in "Excessive use of the Canvas element" in my estimation. The kind of thing that used to be done with flash, and just as annoying.

[SalmonGod]

Thanks for the link about millennials, MSH.  I feel vindicated that it zeroes in on exactly the year I graduated college (2008).

I actually liked the format, but it ran really smoothly on my browser.  I just clicked my mouse wheel for smooth scroll and pulled down slowly.  It played like an animation.  And was there supposed to be sound?  Because it didn't play any for me...

As for Ispil's bit... I like to point out to people that my parents were a rags to moderate riches story.  They met in college and had me.  My dad kept going to school until he got his Masters.  My mom dropped out and supported the family on a single McDonald's income.  I totally understand and appreciate that it was hard.  They lived paycheck to paycheck, juggling bills and worrying about utilities getting shut off in the middle of a Wisconsin winter.  It was hard, but it was POSSIBLE.  And at the end of it all, my dad was recruited into a job in medical research shortly after graduation in the mid-80s.  He didn't even have to look, and the job he was offered didn't even exactly match his degree.  It wasn't a super high paying job at first.  I remember growing up poor until my mid-teens... being hungry a lot, wearing the cheapest sneakers imaginable until they hurt, moving a lot between homes that were either cheap because they were small or cheap because they were falling apart (I spent the largest chunk of my childhood in a 130 year old house that had a giant hole over my bed that let in a hefty draft from outside).  But he's been able to work himself up through the same company for 30 years, and has been offered benefits that no one from my generation can even dream of beneath an executive level.  I've gotten the "We know what it's like - we had it rough too" speeches from my mom many times. 

But the thing they just cannot seem to grasp is that the opportunities to work your way out just aren't there anymore, except for a vanishingly lucky few.  You've either got insanely lucky friend/family connections or you're world-class in an uncommon skill... and that's about it.  Hard work alone doesn't do it.  You need hard work + luck.  Otherwise, there is no in to a job with advancement opportunities that won't find some unreasonable cause to get rid of you within a few years.

[McTraveller]

So how would you folks "fix" the problem?

As a bonus challenge, how would you do it without resorting to overt property confiscation and redistribution?

[hector13]

Depends how you define property confiscation and redistribution. If that involves taxes and sensible welfare? Kinda ruins any shot at it, you filthy libertarian

[McTraveller]

I was actually looking for actual ideas, not just the usual "if you can't do it through taxes, it can't be done" kind of thing.

I mean, could something like the Mana (short story) approach work, where every citizen gets one and only one bank account and every year the balance is reset to (say) $50k, along with abolishing loans?

Could you do it by mandating that a condition for incorporation that 10% (so it's not a controlling share) of a company's stock must be owned by the country and all companies must issue a minimum dividend, so that you can fund UBI based on actual productivity of companies instead of by some other arbitrary taxation scheme?

[RedKing]

That universal dividend one is a rather nice idea, as long as the payout cannot be modified by the corporate board of directors.

Makes for an incentive for more corporations to set up shop in the US, as that would theoretically increase the payout to all Americans. Of course, requiring even a 10% government stake would be decried as a slippery slope to nationalization and Communism.

One problem I can see with it is a propensity to exaggerate natural peaks and ebbs of economic cycles. If the economy is going gangbausters, dividends will be paying out well, Americans would have more ready cash to spend, and so the economic growth becomes a self-accelerating cycle, potentially an inflationary one.

And if the economy goes into a major recession, dividends could largely drop to zero, suddenly plummeting citizens' incomes and spending, further deepening the spiral.



I'm more of a Keynesian myself, seeing the government as a large piggy bank that should save (and help contain economic growth to sustainable levels) during the good times, and then spend that accumulated wealth during bad times to kickstart economic activity again.

[smjjames]

Isn't Keynesian economics what led to the same sort of rural/urban divide and inequality with wages that we've seen with globalization? Not sure what -sian -ics -omics sort of economic model exactly, other than just saying globalization, led to the sort of problems in both Europe and US that were being done by liberals.

[McTraveller]

I think the issue is that "people" didn't have the willpower to save during the times of plenty, and instead increased their spending levels.  This meant that when a downturn did come, there was no longer any savings on which to fall back.  Of course, it's not surprising that this happens at high levels of government when the majority of the population doesn't even have $500 in savings.  (And yeah I know that would be hard for some portion, but not the majority...)

[Frumple]

Isn't Keynesian economics what led to the same sort of rural/urban divide and inequality with wages that we've seen with globalization? Not sure what -sian -ics -omics sort of economic model exactly, other than just saying globalization, led to the sort of problems in both Europe and US that were being done by liberals.

The short answer is no. Fucking with keynesian economics has helped exacerbate a good bit of that, though.

Also no, issues with savings isn't much of what did it, either, save certain pieces of shit on the higher end of things doing too much of it.

So how would you folks "fix" the problem?

As a bonus challenge, how would you do it without resorting to overt property confiscation and redistribution?

Bucketloads of ways to make things better, really, with few to none being a knockout and many helping. Work towards unfucking the welfare system, with similar efforts in healthcare/infrastructure/housing, so employees have a more universally solid baseline for employment negotiations and whatnot. Reverse efforts to degrade worker rights (fuck at-will into the ground and string up any bastard that tries to defend it, ferex) and/or reinforce what's there. Actually bring out the knives on the income equality bullshit -- you don't have to go overt immediate redistribution or confiscation, but maybe any overtly rich fuck that doesn't start moving to fix the problem ends up without a varyingly metaphorical head.

Whole slate of increasingly energetic things in that vague direction that would pretty certainly bring improvements. It just might take lynching most of the GOP party establishment to get it rolling.

[Sheb]

I'm more of a Keynesian myself, seeing the government as a large piggy bank that should save (and help contain economic growth to sustainable levels) during the good times, and then spend that accumulated wealth during bad times to kickstart economic activity again.

Frankly, that's one of the biggest thing that surprise me about the US tax cut debate: there is barely any discussion of the fact that it's hugely pro-cyclical. The right defend it saying it'll create jobs and boost the economy (when employment is already down to less that 5% and the economy is going along nicely) and the left rightly point out that it would redistribute to the rich, but says nothing about the pro-cylical effect. Right now, the economy is doing well, it's time to reduce the deficit and give the government fiscal room for the next downturn. Instead, the GOP is adding to the debt (which is particularily blatant when you think of how they complained about the deficit under Obama when a stimulus was needed).

[SalmonGod]

My take is that capitalism is obsolete.  It served a purpose at some point, but it doesn't apply well to our current situation.  Any approach that ignores this is only short-term, because the incentives inherent in capitalism are to create exactly the situation we're in.  Whatever progress we make will just be undone again in the future.

[smjjames]

I'm more of a Keynesian myself, seeing the government as a large piggy bank that should save (and help contain economic growth to sustainable levels) during the good times, and then spend that accumulated wealth during bad times to kickstart economic activity again.

Frankly, that's one of the biggest thing that surprise me about the US tax cut debate: there is barely any discussion of the fact that it's hugely pro-cyclical. The right defend it saying it'll create jobs and boost the economy (when employment is already down to less that 5% and the economy is going along nicely) and the left rightly point out that it would redistribute to the rich, but says nothing about the pro-cylical effect. Right now, the economy is doing well, it's time to reduce the deficit and give the government fiscal room for the next downturn. Instead, the GOP is adding to the debt (which is particularily blatant when you think of how they complained about the deficit under Obama when a stimulus was needed).

By pro-cyclical, you mean it perpetuates the boom-bust cycle? I thought that was a mostly natural cycle. It can be mitigated and the effects reduced, yes, but it's a mostly natural cycle.

[McTraveller]

Bucketloads of ways to make things better, really, with few to none being a knockout and many helping.

Specific examples would be nice.

For instance, I would say things like:

• No more brackets for things, for instance "you get $500 a month in support if your income is below X, but $0 a month if it's X+$0.01".  We have computers dammit, just make things a continuous function. You'd ideally want the function (whatever it is) to always make it better to earn an additional dollar of income than lose an additional dollar of income.  Hell just "your benefit is max(0,$500 - 1/2 your income)" would be simple and have those properties.
   1/2 your income
• No more allowing benefits as an "all or nothing" thing based on "if you work at this single employer more than X hours a week". Similar to above, have it be a sliding scale where you get some benefit per hour worked, no "on/off" switches.  If this means separating (health, retirement, etc.) benefits from employment, that's probably not a bad thing.
• While on the health care thing - get rid of crap like "if you have a company with less than 50 people these rules apply, but as soon as you add one more person and get to 51, then this massively larger and more expensive set of rules applies."
• Make things like mortgage insurance benefit the consumer, not the lender.  Or do something else that makes it far less likely for people to lose their homes if they lose a job for a short period of time.  Even a 15 year mortgage is a ridiculously long time to pay for something, let alone 30.

[Sheb]

Bucketloads of ways to make things better, really, with few to none being a knockout and many helping.

Specific examples would be nice.

For instance, I would say things like:

• While on the health care thing - get rid of crap like "if you have a company with less than 50 people these rules apply, but as soon as you add one more person and get to 51, then this massively larger and more expensive set of rules applies."

That one is problematic, you can't have a function making a fraction of the red-tape apply as a function of employee numbers, so you'd either have all small business smothered under red tape, or large business likely being under-regulated (If only because they're the one who can afford to pay lawyer to go through loopholes). [/list]

[McTraveller]

@Sheb, yeah, I don't know how to make that one "continuous" - the idea is, how do you avoid a disincentive for a small but growing company to grow past that threshold?  I mean if your company can pull in revenue of $200k an employee, but adding that next employee is going to cost you $1M, why would you ever do it?  It means you have to be able to have the business to add probably something like 15 additional employees to cover the incremental cost of that regulation to make it worthwhile. So you have this weird deadband in the growth curve where you have a bunch of businesses with 50 employees, almost none with between 51 and 64, then a bunch at 65 and larger.

You might not be able to do it on the paperwork side, but you could surely put a continuity function in the level of benefits you offer. So instead of saying "at 50 or fewer employees, you can have plans that cost X, but at 51 or more you need plans that cost X+Y" so the price of adding that next employee is 50*Y + (X+Y), not just X+Y.