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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (481839)	10/26/2003 7:05:38 PM
From: Peter O'Brien	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Does that mean that my salary really isn't as high as the number of dollars that I receive from my employer? Shouldn't I be able to report a smaller number of dollars to the IRS, then?

To: American Spirit who wrote (481839)	10/26/2003 9:43:53 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 769667

There's only one problem with your argument: You're lying. Again. ccps.virginia.edu MEDIAN personal income in constant dollars rose 50% from 1980 to 2001. The rest of your argument is socialist hogwash.

To: American Spirit who wrote (481839)	10/27/2003 12:00:36 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

I found your post to be very interesting. A cut above the usual sloganeering. I don't agree with a lot of it (no surprise there, I'm sure), but I'm less tempted than Laz to dismiss it as socialist hogwash and more tempted to address the specifics, though I don't have time to address all of them tonight. If I can distill out some of the major points, they are these: 1. GDP is not an appropriate measure of how well a society is doing because it measures only monetized exchange and not other things which go into making societies good and valuable. 2. GDP measures all transfers of money as positives, even though some things, such as natural disasters and social decay, are negative (yet they are treated as "positive" by GDP statistics because the costs of cleanup etc. are counted but the costs of the disasters are not). 3. The downside of public borrowing is not reflected in GDP. 4. GDP ignores issues surrounding the distribution of income (citing some income statistics -- well, not citing them exactly but mentioning them). 5. The large increase in GDP over the years did not result in a positive benefit on the incidence of poverty in the U.S., hence, GDP does not adequately measure economic performance across all income levels, and serves as a particularly poor measuring stick for economic performance as it relates to those living in poverty. 6. Because GDP poorly measures a nation's economic well being, people who rely on GDP might think we are better off when in fact we are not, which is borne out by the many studies out there indicating we are not as happy as we used to be (or I guess as our parents and their parents used to be). I think that was the gist of it. Correct me if I misstated any of it. I'd like to start with no. 5, your assertion that GDP's significant growth in real terms over the years has not resulted in a decline in poverty. Here is what you said about that: Furthermore the average number of poor people averaged more than 30 million people over the last 40 years in the US, with an average of 15% of the population being poor. In the meantime, the gross national product continued to increase drastically, over the same period. The GDP grew from $400 billions to $10 trillions from 1959 to 2000. This very large increase in the national product did not contribute to the resolution of poverty. More than 30 million people continue to be poor. Hence Capitalism superbly increases the production of products and services, and hence wealth. However this completely fails to resolve the poverty of the individuals. The number of poor people continues to grow. Here is a chart from the U.S. government showing the number of people in "poverty" and the so-called "poverty rate" from 1959-2002: census.gov The number in poverty starts out some 43 years ago at around 40 million, declines to 25 million by the end of the 1960's (note that 1965 is mislabelled as "1955" on the chart). That number levelled off through most of the 1970's, began to increase during the stagflation of the late 1970's and by the mid 1980's was back up toward 40 million. It then declined to the low 30 million range and is presently around 35 million. That's 5 million people less living in poverty than did so in 1959. But that's not the whole story. In 1960, the U.S. population was measured at 179 million people. Now it is around 290 million. That's an increase since the late 1950's of about 62 percent. Yet in that same time frame the number of people in poverty has decreased from 40 million (about 1 out of every 4.5 people in the population) to 35 million (a little less than one out of every 8 people). That looks like improvement to me. If you use the past 30 years as your measuring stick, the rate of poverty expressed as a percentage of the population has remained relatively constant, at a level dramtically lower than it was in 1959. The absolute number of those living under the poverty line has increased, over the past 30 years, at roughly the same rate as the increase in the overall population. Why poverty remains at all is a complex question. Lots of money has been devoted to programs for those below the poverty line; some have helped, but only up to a point. There has been much immigration from poorer neighboring coutries, and that certainly plays a role. Welfare policies which tended in some cases to encourage families under the poverty line to have still more children probably exacerbated the problem to a degree as well, though Clinton's welfare reform (which I thought was a very good policy change for which he deserves credit) did much to remove that as an issue. But to reject GDP as an adequate measure of the economy's overall strength in part because poverty remains a problem doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. It's kind of like saying that a yardstick doesn't really measure 36 inches because I'm not as tall as I'd like to be. It doesn't really say that the yardstick isn't doing the job it was intended to perform; it only says that it doesn't do some other thing it was never designed to do in the first place. (I'll address the other five separately at a later time)