2012 Election Season

[Lilith]

amusing fact: a bunch of conspiracy theorists are buying up old zimbabwean currency under the belief that it will regain its value one day

[Slawbug]

Yeah, that's not a futures contract, there was no future involved. It's just an exchange that involved only goods, rather than money.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

Yeah, that's not a futures contract, there was no future involved. It's just an exchange that involved only goods, rather than money.

To elaborate: a futures contract is a standardised exchange-traded contract for a transaction where payment and delivery both occur on the same day, at some set date after the contract is written. Even if your contract were drawn up in such a way that you were paid (in whatever goods you're being paid in) at the same time you delivered the sugar (rather than you being paid now and being expected to deliver the sugar later, as in the original example), it'd simply be a forward contract rather than a futures contract, since it's not traded on an exchange.

[VCH]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

 

tl;dr: GDP = [Consumption] + [investment] + [Net exports] + [Government Spending]. The first three can't be fixed beyond minor tweaks, and current conditions are letting the US borrow money for a steal. There is absolutely no non-political reason that the Government shouldn't step in and try and fix things now, full stop. It is eminently possible to borrow and spend out way out of this almost-depression, and it is in everyone's best interests that we do so.

 

Thank you for killing the 3 hours of my day that I spent reading about this stuff. I see your point. I'm still not entirely comfortable with all the different theories being proposed simultaneously. In science (Ecology any way), older models of how things work don't seem to be dredged up as often as they are in economics, or at least that's my impression and experience. Progress in scientific theory seems to be more analogous to a staircase or at least multiple staircases that eventually join, whereas economics seems more weblike.

 

~So do we need to spend on the same scale as we did during WW2 to fix things?

 

~Also, could you suggest a good book on macroeconomics.

[JamesMighty]

We need to keep the government from spending while encouraging Americans to invest in the Stock Market.

[Lauren CW]

Lol, war on drugs...

The money they spend on the war on drugs is less than 10% of what the marijuana industry ALONE generates. The war is OVER, they lost. They might as well call it the war on minding your own business and money.

[Dintiradan]

My issue after reading about stuff like this is that I'm reminded of one of the final scenes of The Lorax, where he lifts himself up by the seat of his pants and flies away. Look at any specific interaction between two components of the macroeconomics machine, and it makes sense. But the moment I step away and look at the system as a whole, it just seems absurd on some level.

[JamesMighty]

If we understood everything about everything we wouldn't be humans. We would be robots or something

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: JamesMighty

We need to keep the government from spending while encouraging Americans to invest in the Stock Market.

No. That is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing.

Originally Posted By: JamesMighty

If we understood everything about everything we wouldn't be humans. We would be robots or something

To be fair, of the stuff out there that's "knowable" in the broad sense, we do already either know most of it or know enough about it to generate approximations with enough predictive validity to serve a good purpose. Biology, chemistry, and physics are all nailed down to a fine enough theoretical grain to serve us well enough 99.9999% of the time in our daily lives- now it's just ironing out the kinks and figuring out how to get things to work together 100% of the time- and you only need to look at the Higgs Boson thread to know how devilishly tricky that is.

Also, robots are awesome. If somebody offered me a chance to become a superhuman cyborg human/robot hybrid, I'd take it in a second.

Originally Posted By: VCH

Thank you for killing the 3 hours of my day that I spent reading about this stuff. I see your point. I'm still not entirely comfortable with all the different theories being proposed simultaneously. In science (Ecology any way), older models of how things work don't seem to be dredged up as often as they are in economics, or at least that's my impression and experience. Progress in scientific theory seems to be more analogous to a staircase or at least multiple staircases that eventually join, whereas economics seems more weblike.

Frankly, a lot of the economic models that are dredged up shouldn't be. As I mentioned before, liquidationism is experiencing a resurgence among certain people (Rajan, for instance), and Austrian economics is still managing to hang around with the crazy people who think that stuff like "empirical evidence" and "predictive validity" aren't necessary things for dictating macroeconomic policy.

Originally Posted By: VCH

~So do we need to spend on the same scale as we did during WW2 to fix things?

~Also, could you suggest a good book on macroeconomics.

We aren't in it as bad as we were in WWII. In the US at least (I'm not very comfortable dictating specific solutions for Europe beyond "Dude, cut it with the austerity. I mean, what are you people thinking?") the problem could be largely remedied by picking up state unemployment. Large federal block grants to states to re-hire laid off workers would go a long way, as would federal mortgage assistance programs (Self-interest alert: As a person employed in the construction sector, I have a vested interest in getting it going again). Eliminating federal guarantees for student loans might also help, or at least some mechanism for eliminating their debt. Also, federal programs to increase infrastructure through things like roads, high-speed rail, new airports, etc. wold help a lot in stimulating in the short-term and adding copious value to the economy in the long-term. Eisenhower's expressways were ridiculously expensive by any stretch of the imagination, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a single person who would argue that they haven't paid for themselves and beyond by their impact on increasing the movement of goods and services around the country.

As for macro textbooks, Krugman has written an intro to macro textbook that, given the quality of his other work, should be quite good and not heavily technical. Then again, I haven't read it, so that's just a totally uneducated opinion. If you want a less academic overview, End This Depression Now by the same is basically a book-length argument of what I'm saying here, only he has a PhD and a Nobel and I am a random dude on the Internet without formal training in economics.

[Slawbug]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Also, robots are awesome. If somebody offered me a chance to become a superhuman cyborg human/robot hybrid, I'd take it in a second.

[JamesMighty]

Da fuq?

[Actaeon]

The CoC DOES prohibit profanity, even veiled. Again, just FYI. Not a mod.

[Dantius]

Yeah, Slarty does so weird stuff sometimes- he posts NES screenshots, single-line bolded Courier New sentence fragments, starts projects and abandons them halfway through, etc, etc. You'll get used to it.

[Slawbug]

That was an SNES screenshot.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

That was an SNES screenshot.

That's totally within acceptable margins of error, and you know it. My post stands.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

That was an SNES screenshot.

NES, SNES, that's an mistake anyone can make, Slarty.

[Slawbug]

Dantius: agreed; that was my implicit point.

[Lilith]

a snes is a kind of nes

 

you know, like how a truck is a kind of car

[Goldengirl]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

As for macro textbooks, Krugman has written an intro to macro textbook that, given the quality of his other work, should be quite good and not heavily technical. Then again, I haven't read it, so that's just a totally uneducated opinion.

I have read it. Coming from no macroeconomic background whatsoever, it was perfectly clear, coherent, and comprehensive. It's a bit spendy, but that's because it is a textbook. Here is a link to get you started looking through it all.

Krugman also has a textbook introduction to microeconomics, if you're interested in that. He even has versions of the text with both of them together!

[Lauren CW]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

That was an SNES screenshot.

NES, SNES, that's an mistake anyone can make, Slarty.

No it is not. It is wholly unacceptable.

[JamesMighty]

What? That's totally acceptable.

[Dantius]

This thread proves too valuable to abandon a second time...

 

So, in breaking news, Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan to be his VP running mate. Or, as the Onion puts it, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan To Awkwardly Hug, High Five For Next Three Months.

 

I'm very surprised. It's been clear for a while at least that Romney has a structural gap in the polls that is refusing to close (You know you have a problem when Fox polls Obama at +9 points), so he couldn't go for a safe choice, but I would have bet money he would have gone for Rubio to help win Florida and maybe narrow the Hispanic vote to slightly less embarrassing margins. The fact that he's decided to try and reroll the entire election by picking Ryan says something about where he thinks he is. At least now nobody can claim that Romney's plans lack specifics- Ryan is nothing if not exactingly specific on what he's going to cut and by how much.

[Enraged Slith]

I don't see how this helps Romney. If anything, it's going to scare the opposition into voting.

[Randomizer]

It's like McCain picking Palin where the candidate wants to shore up the support with hard line conservatives rather than reach out to possible new voters that aren't likely to vote for you anyway. Republicans are counting on disenfranchising Democratic voters through election roster purges and just the general low voter turn out due to dissatisfaction with all the candidates.

 

I'm still trying to decide if it's worth the effort to vote in my heavily Republican district against VP Quayle's son. Looking at the campaign poster of him, his wife, and baby, all I can think is my God they are still breeding more of those idiots.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Republicans are counting on... low voter turn out
[...]
I'm still trying to decide if it's worth the effort to vote

Um, yes?

Dikiyoba.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Republicans are counting on... low voter turn out
[...]
I'm still trying to decide if it's worth the effort to vote

Um, yes?

Dikiyoba.

Due to the nature of the electoral college, Diki, there are vast swathes of the country where voting for national office is an exercise in futility. There's no more chance of Wyoming or Utah going for Obama than there is of Vermont or Illinois swinging for Romney, so if you're heading out to vote there, it's only for the purpose of state or local offices- and if you don't care about those, why bother?

It is, of course, a tragedy that by and large the leader of the most powerful republic on the face of the planet will be picked by a million or so largely politically apathetic voters in a half-dozen swing states, but eliminating the Electoral College is something that everyone likes to talk about and nobody likes to do, since each party is terrified that doing it will permanently tip the balance in favor of the other guys.

[keira]

I thought it interesting that at one point Ryan voted for something that was not kill the homos. Seems rather...out of character.

[Harehunter]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Is is, of course, a tragedy that by and large the leader of the most powerful republic on the face of the planet will be picked by a million or so largely politically apathetic voters in a half-dozen swing states, ...

I second that emotion.

[Student of Trinity]

It should probably be done better. They took a guess in the 18th century about how to run a democracy. It was a good guess for the time, but it hasn't scaled all that well.

 

But is this really a major issue? The merit of democracy has never been that it provides optimal government, but rather that it provides the strongest safeguard against really bad government (like totalitarian tyranny). Really bad government is not a grave threat for Americans at present, but if it were, American democracy would reject it pretty quickly. In choosing among the relatively decent options that are available, American democracy may not be all that efficient. If most Americans don't care enough about this issue to try to fix it, though, it can't really be such a big deal.

 

First World Problem:

"My competent and honest government might not be the one I should have had!"

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

First World Problem:
"My competent and honest government might not be the one I should have had!"

Let's see... the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, no universal healthcare, and one of the presidential candidates just chose a VP candidate famous for wanting to decimate Medicare and food stamps. Yep. That's the hallmark of a competent and honest government. No problems there. Wealthy first world countries should always lock people up at the slightest provocation (usually for having too much melanin) and want their poorer citizens to suffer by forcing them to go without basic necessities. That's right. After all, we're not one of those commies or corrupt third world countries, so we must be fine.

Dikiyoba.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Due to the nature of the electoral college, Diki, there are vast swathes of the country where voting for national office is an exercise in futility. There's no more chance of Wyoming or Utah going for Obama than there is of Vermont or Illinois swinging for Romney, so if you're heading out to vote there, it's only for the purpose of state or local offices- and if you don't care about those, why bother?

I am well aware of that, thank you. But even if the practical effect of a single vote is nil, it still has some symbolic effects. They may be small and unknowable, but they are there. (And they exist for local and state elections just as much--if not more--as for federal elections.)

For instance, I grew up knowing that the registered voters in my town cared more about their convenience and money than they did the safety of myself and 450-odd children, since the measures that would authorize bonds to renovate the town's school buildings to ensure they would withstand a major earthquake (And it's Oregon I'm talking about. It's located right on the Ring of Fire. There are faults everywhere. Earthquakes happen. Mostly small, but one day there's going to be a big one. One of the small ones damaged the school cafeteria, forcing it to be turned into a storeroom and a new prefab-type building to be brought in to replace it.) failed every time they came up. That's a harsh lesson to teach a kid, and I'm sure it's not what any voter intended to say when they decided not to vote or decided to vote no, but it's what I learned. The voters who did come down to vote taught me that I mattered, that my peers mattered, that other people mattered, even if the yes-to-the-bond side lost. That's a symbolic reason to vote, even though there wasn't much practical reason to vote.

Back to Randomizer's comment: if the Republicans are counting on people not to vote even though they aren't happy with what the Republicans are doing, then voting for another candidate, even if that candidate has no chance of winning, says "I am at least sort of paying attention, and I do not like what the Republicans are doing, and I want things to be done at least a little bit more like this instead." That's got to be a better gesture than not voting at all, because that just says, "I have already given up" or "I don't care. Do whatever you want." I don't see why anyone would want to go for the latter instead of the former.

Dikiyoba isn't saying that anyone must vote instead of not voting (or convince you how to vote if you do decide to vote, at least not in this post), just that trying even when you can't reasonably expect to win still matters in small, subtle ways.

[Callie]

competent and honest government

 

hahahaha

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

I am well aware of that, thank you. But even if the practical effect of a single vote is nil, it still has some symbolic effects. They may be small and unknowable, but they are there. (And they exist for local and state elections just as much--if not more--as for federal elections.)

Wouldn't you be able to achieve those same symbolic effects more efficiently by just telling people you voted, while spending the time you would have spent voting campaigning for political change in other, more effective ways? If the time it takes to vote could instead be spent changing the vote of at least one other person from a candidate you hate to a candidate you like, then voting yourself doesn't make sense.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

First World Problem:
"My competent and honest government might not be the one I should have had!"

Let's see... the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, no universal healthcare, and one of the presidential candidates just chose a VP candidate famous for wanting to decimate Medicare and food stamps.

I quite agree that American society is plagued by some crying evils. I just don't buy the excuses that these things are all there, in the world's richest country, just because of that awful old electoral college, or gerrymandering of congressional districts, or the two-party system.

Americans mostly don't want universal health care, mostly do want to put lots of people in ghastly prisons for very long terms, and mostly don't care much about the education of anyone else's children. If that were not so, those things would not be, the electoral college and all the other inefficiencies notwithstanding. Since that is so, no change to the electoral college and whatnot is going to suddenly bring about justice.

The American system of democracy works quite well in giving the people what they want. They want competence and honesty, and they mostly get those. The system's failures in these regards are first-world problems. The fact that American society is plagued by horrible injustices is not the fault of the system of American democracy. The American people, collectively, just don't seem to want justice.

It's not the system that's broken. It's the society. I'm not part of the society, so I can't personally do much to change it, and there's a limit to how much criticism of it I have a right to make. It's up to Americans to get their house in order. I don't see that reforming their electoral rules is the place to start.

But okay, maybe I just haven't thought about it enough. The ten years or so I spent living in the US left me baffled, and maybe I've just gotten discouraged about understanding the place.

Is there a hypothetical scenario, under the current American system, in which 51% of the American voting population might be keenly in favor of universal healthcare, greatly reduced incarceration rates, and greatly improved public education ... yet somehow have their will thwarted by the other 49%?

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

First World Problem:
"My competent and honest government might not be the one I should have had!"

Let's see... the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, no universal healthcare, and one of the presidential candidates just chose a VP candidate famous for wanting to decimate Medicare and food stamps. Yep. That's the hallmark of a competent and honest government. No problems there. Wealthy first world countries should always lock people up at the slightest provocation (usually for having too much melanin) and want their poorer citizens to suffer by forcing them to go without basic necessities. That's right. After all, we're not one of those commies or corrupt third world countries, so we must be fine.

It's not a sense of "We're fine! No problems here!" so much as it is "Our problems are so much smaller compared to the problems facing people around the world as to be almost insignificant!" To borrow your examples, you claim that Ryan wants to cut Medicare/aid and food stamps. There are millions countries around the world that not only have no such programs whatsoever, but are so desperately poor that they make the US definition of poverty look like a joke. For instance: A family in the 25th percentile in the US makes around $20,000 a year. A family in India at the 25th percentile makes $272, or around 1/75th of what their American counterparts receive.

Oh, you mentioned healthcare. Well, it certainly is a massive problem in society that people are forced to spend vast quantities of money purchasing insurance, or else run the risk of taking on crippling debt that will quite possible ruin your life and force you into bankruptcy (IIRC medical debt is the leading cause of Chapter 7 in the US, correct me if I'm wrong). Fortunately, I am quite sure that the US will have a single-payer system in my lifetime, so that's good news. But you know what's worse than crippling debt that ruins your life? A preventable and treatable medical problem that kills you because there is no health infrastructure in your country at all, which is what happens to billions of people around the world who lack the option of taking on debt in exchange for living. In fact, there are many people across the globe that are even so poor that they are denied the most incredible triumph of Western medicine in history, vaccines- they are still getting diseases that even some of the most disadvantaged Americans don't even have to worry about. (Ironically, in the US it's upper-middle class people, or more specifically their children, who are dying of preventable causes because of refusal to vaccinate. But that's a whole other kettle of fish).

Or take the incarceration example. (Also, a quick aside: Racism is pretty much endemic in every human society- even progressive and liberal Europe has levels of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant xenophobia that the US doesn't. The goal of policy should not be something impossible like "Stop people from thinking like racists!", because that's probably evolutionarily hardwired into us, but rather "Stop people from acting like racists!"- how you think is irrelevant, but how you act matters a great deal.) Black and Hispanic ethnic minorities are statistically over represented in US prisons, true*. But let's travel to Darfur now or back the the not-so-distant 1990's to Kosovo or Rwanda and see how they treat ethnic minorities there! Oh wait. We know how that went. So, we see again, there is a suboptimal point in US policy- but compared to vast swaths of the rest of the world, it's still so obviously better than some of the alternatives it's remarkable.

Plus, of course, the US still has things like a functioning economy at a decent percent of full capacity, rule of law including nifty things like habeas corpus, price stability, domestic tranquility, defense from invasion, free public education, infrastructure, elected democratic institutions, religious freedom, a constitution, a decently structured and regulated capitalist system, and all the sorts of stuff that we tend to take for granted that in reality are anything but.

tl;dr: Focusing on US domestic issues, which are in bad shape relative to the past/other first world countries now, does tend to lead to a worldview that exaggerates the US's flaws out of all proportion. While in many respects the US is far behind other "first world" countries, the gap between the first world and the worst off is so incredibly vast that it's stupid to pretend that the US is in some kind of primitive backwards exploitative racist oligarchy like people sometimes make it out to be, when the vast majority of people in the US are much better off than 90% of the world's population. One study I read fairly recently stated that a person in the bottom decile in the US would be at around the seventieth percentile worldwide- which certainly goes to show just how much better off we are than just about everybody else.

tltl;dr;dr: SOT is absolutely, 100% right here, and people should recognize that fact.

[Callie]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I quite agree that American society is plagued by some crying evils. I just don't buy the excuses that these things are all there, in the world's richest country, just because of that awful old electoral college, or gerrymandering of congressional districts, or the two-party system.

Although changing electoral rules would require a drawn-out constitutional amendment process, it's still seemingly more feasible than trying to alter people's behavior or the underlying culture.

As far as the two-party system is concerned: the system really does prevent certain issues from coming into light, because if both parties agree on an issue (often, I argue) then any meaningful opposition is thrown under the rug in favor of political expediency. If a certain idea becomes popular then one party will begrudgingly adopt it for a while until it's forgotten about. This is problematic because the two-party system represents a narrow set of viewpoints.

[keira]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

text wall

Just because it could be worse does not mean it can't be better.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Americans mostly don't want universal health care, mostly do want to put lots of people in ghastly prisons for very long terms, and mostly don't care much about the education of anyone else's children. If that were not so, those things would not be, the electoral college and all the other inefficiencies notwithstanding. Since that is so, no change to the electoral college and whatnot is going to suddenly bring about justice.

When polled, about two-thirds of the US population do, in fact, want universal health care. They just don't seem to trust anyone to actually implement it.

[Callie]

Originally Posted By: Future Wonderbolt

Originally Posted By: Dantius

text wall

Just because it could be worse does not mean it can't be better.

Dantius isn't disagreeing with that, but rather, Diki's use of hyperbole.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

When polled, about two-thirds of the US population do, in fact, want universal health care. They just don't seem to trust anyone to actually implement it.

I'd say that amounts to not really wanting universal health care, the way that wanting a car that can carry six people and their luggage five hundred miles at high speed, has zero net CO2 footprint, and costs under $10,000, is not really wanting a car.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Excalibur

Dantius isn't disagreeing with that, but rather, Diki's use of hyperbole.

Hey, my response to SoT was sarcasm, not hyperbole. Nothing I said there was untrue or an exaggeration. Mostly I was responding to the idea that a government can be considered "competent and honest" while failing its own citizens so badly. Just because the US does better than many countries doesn't mean it's not falling short of its ideals.

Honestly, I'm not even sure what Dantius' point is (except that parents in the US who don't vaccinate their children against deadly diseases are shamefully ignorant and misguided). Just because there are people hungry and sick in other countries isn't magically going to make the people hungry and sick in the US feel any better. Heck, we're a first world country. We can help ourselves and other countries at the exact same time.

---

Originally Posted By: Lilith

They just don't seem to trust anyone to actually implement it.

The fact that a fair number of Republicans politicians or pundits have outright lied about universal healthcare (death panels, anyone?) might have something to do with that.

Dikiyoba.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Excalibur

Although changing electoral rules would require a drawn-out constitutional amendment process, it's still seemingly more feasible than trying to alter people's behavior or the underlying culture.

I'm not so sure about this. If you can change people's minds enough to get them to change the system in ways that will not only bring about universal health care, but will also bring an undetermined number of unknown future changes, then why can't you change their minds about universal health care alone?

Quote:

As far as the two-party system is concerned: the system really does prevent certain issues from coming into light, because if both parties agree on an issue (often, I argue) then any meaningful opposition is thrown under the rug in favor of political expediency. If a certain idea becomes popular then one party will begrudgingly adopt it for a while until it's forgotten about. This is problematic because the two-party system represents a narrow set of viewpoints.

If the two-party system is really standing in the way of any given policy, then it can only be because neither of the two parties, each representing about half of the voting population, can be persuaded to adopt the policy. If you can't convince a majority of half the people to believe in your policy, why would you expect to convince a majority of all the people to believe in it, if only the two-party system weren't there?

[Student of Trinity]

I'd argue that American governments are and have long been reasonably competent and honest. Competency and honesty are good, and they ought to be appreciated for what they're worth. They're not everything, and I certainly don't mean to imply that the reasonably competent and honest American government has been ideal. But even if I was really poor, I think I'd much rather live under a mean-hearted and short-sighted government that was competent and honest than a theoretically well-intentioned government with a glorious long-term vision that was corrupt and completely inept.

 

What I'm more interested in now, though, is whether American governments have accurately represented the collective will of the American people. It seems to me that they have done that, though they certainly haven't represented the will of most of the many individual Americans I know, or my own (non-American) will.

[keira]

Where are you getting the idea of what the collective will of the Americans is? Polls, what people say, the cannonmouths on the news?

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Honestly, I'm not even sure what Dantius' point is (except that parents in the US who don't vaccinate their children against deadly diseases are shamefully ignorant and misguided). Just because there are people hungry and sick in other countries isn't magically going to make the people hungry and sick in the US feel any better. Heck, we're a first world country. We can help ourselves and other countries at the exact same time.

My point was, you created a fictitious idealized government that matched you ideologically to a perfect degree, and then proceeded to compare that government to the US (For instance, presumably your government would have universal healthcare and not incarcerate people for their skin color. Also Paul Ryan would apparently not be welcome). Obviously, it was found lacking- the real government was neither as competent nor as honest as your idealized government would be. You then proceeded to declare the government that actually exists neither competent nor honest, based exclusively on your comparison to a government that does not exist.

I compared the existing US government to the other existing governments of the world. By almost all metrics, it is better of than just about any other government on the planet- fairer, richer, income more equitable distributed, more peaceful, less corrupt, less criminal, more democratic, etc. Therefore, I concluded that the US government is both more competent and more honest than the existing alternatives, and that complaining that it does not march in lockstep to your ideology or desires is, indeed, a "first world problem" and you were wrong to deride SOT for suggesting that it was.

[Kelandon]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

fairer, richer, income more equitable distributed, more peaceful, less corrupt, less criminal, more democratic

Wait, uh, wtf are you talking about. Almost none of these things are true.

"Fairer" is too vague to evaluate, so whatever.

"Richer," sure, we have the highest GDP and near the highest GDP per capita of any country.

Income more equitably distributed? You're nuts. Our Gini coefficient is middling at best.

More peaceful? If you mean that we haven't had a war on our territory since the 1860's, sure, but we just got out of one prolonged war of aggression and are winding down another. There are a lot of other countries that have done better.

Less corrupt? Maybe, but it depends on your definition. I think that a lot of what is legal in the U.S. is corruption, even though it's not officially so.

Less criminal? I think not, unless you have a weird definition of it. Quick Googling yields that our intentional homicide rate is lower than in a fair number of countries, but it's many times typical rates in Europe. I rather suspect that most other crimes follow the same pattern.

More democratic? This, too, depends on your definition, but I think it's fair to say that democracy could be viewed as equality of political power, and again there we lag behind a variety of other countries.

Your point here is tenuous at best.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

and that complaining that it does not march in lockstep to your ideology or desires is, indeed, a "first world problem" and you were wrong to deride SOT for suggesting that it was.

No, I care that people are suffering in the US right now and that the government doesn't do everything it can do to stop it and sometimes does its best to encourage that suffering. (And that it engages in unjustified military conflicts and doesn't provide much foreign aid and so on, but those are different topics we haven't yet drifted to.) So what if other countries fail in the same way? I live in the US, not those other countries. There's not much I can do for people in those countries. But there is a lot I can do in the US. Whether I vote and who I vote for helps determine whether unemployed people get jobs or not, whether people get adequate health care or live in dehabilitating pain until it finally gets so bad they go to the emergency room and fall in debt, and whether people get to go a full month with plenty of food or whether they have to start skipping meals at the end of the month. Those are not trivial issues. I don't care how sustained progress towards solving them are made or who makes them. Democrats, Republicans, a complete rewrite of the constitution and government structure? All fine by me.

Also, Dikiyoba's ficitious idealized government would turn every town into Dinosaur. That's just self-evident.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: ξ

Less corrupt? Maybe, but it depends on your definition. I think that a lot of what is legal in the U.S. is corruption, even though it's not officially so.

We've got plenty of corruption, but we don't have is enough enforcement of the existing laws. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpio in Arizona uses his office to go after his political enemies with greater success than Richard Nixon. It's no secret but between politicians that are scared of him and those that work with him he's about to get reelected again while he's on trial for racial profiling. Voters love him even though his tough on crime is a joke when his department fails to pursue warrants on known criminals and dropped over 400 cases of sex crimes versus children where most had known suspects.

[Khoth]

I like the thread running through this that's treating universal healthcare as some mad impossible fairlyland dream rather than something that's practically a basic requirement for a country to call itself first-world.

 

What on earth is wrong with your country?

[Aran]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Quote:

As far as the two-party system is concerned: the system really does prevent certain issues from coming into light, because if both parties agree on an issue (often, I argue) then any meaningful opposition is thrown under the rug in favor of political expediency. If a certain idea becomes popular then one party will begrudgingly adopt it for a while until it's forgotten about. This is problematic because the two-party system represents a narrow set of viewpoints.

If the two-party system is really standing in the way of any given policy, then it can only be because neither of the two parties, each representing about half of the voting population, can be persuaded to adopt the policy. If you can't convince a majority of half the people to believe in your policy, why would you expect to convince a majority of all the people to believe in it, if only the two-party system weren't there?

That seems over-simplified. The two parties only "represent" half each of the voting population in the sense that half the voting population can stomach voting for one and half the other. I see several problems with this.

First: It gives the parties much more leeway than they should have. Obama literally orders extra-judicial killings, supports incarcerating Manning, opposes meaningful copyright reform and he'll still have my vote because the other guy will do all that and worse. There are similar ideological differences on the other side, I'm sure.

Secondly: Convincing someone not to vote for your opponent is exactly as effective as convincing him to vote for you. This rewards a campaign strategy that casts the opposing party as the ultimate enemy, which makes it impossible to cooperate on any but the most empty or obvious policies.

Policies don't face the greatest opposition because they are considered bad, but because the issue doesn't interest most people enough to base their vote on it. A large party can't unify behind such an issue. A ten-percent party can focus on it, and gain momentum among its own voters. Then they form a coalition with the larger party, whose voters don't strongly support or oppose the issue, and agree on a compromise.

In a two-party system, both sides consider a compromise a pact with the devil, so that doesn't work.