EquALLity wrote:
I promise to try very hard not to start a debate.
I should be fine. I really don't think I'm going to disagree with you to the extent that I would feel compelled strongly enough to do it while trying very hard not to.
I'm just curious.
The other main sticking points would be things like minimum wage:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/don ... imum-wage/
The evidence just isn't there -yet- but setting minimums at the federal level is NOT the way to learn (there's no control). We need different states with radically different policies, so we can see what works and what doesn't.
What really stimulates jobs and improves the economy?
According to CBO, hiking the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would increase wages for some 24.5 million workers, lifting some 900,000 people out of poverty. But the agency also found that a $10.10 minimum wage would eliminate the equivalent of 500,000 jobs.
In terms of economy, 24.5 million workers having more disposable income is really good (particularly for China's manufacturing sector, from which these people will buy more junk to dispose of their incomes), but that means little to nothing in terms of ethics and quality of life.
Having more money to waste (as long as you had enough before) doesn't make you happier. Dietary surveys also reveal that people tend to eat more animal products when they have more money (and less grain), which won't necessarily make them healthier either.
The bolded numbers are what are important.
Being lifted out of poverty is
potentially good. Being unemployed
really sucks -- being
unemployable is worse.
Is it better that 1.4 million people have shitty jobs that have them barely scraping by in poverty, or that 0.9 million people get to live large above the poverty line, and 0.5 million can go fuck themselves?
That is something of a legitimate moral dilemma, and reasonable people can answer it differently.
I can tell you isn't not as simple as those 0.5 million people just disappearing though. Those people will be on unemployment for a while, some of them on welfare, and a large portion of them (in frustration, and running out of options) will turn to crime, and a lot of them will end up in prison (being supported by the state in one way or another). If we had better systems, and free education, to support these people and make them employable again, the equation might look quite a bit different.
Liberals who blindly carry on about raising the minimum wage like it's the best idea ever are just not living in reality; a reality where it's nowhere near clear (economically OR socially) that raising the minimum wage is a good idea. Maybe it is. But that's a faith based proposition that I can't get on board with.
Being scientifically minded, I want to see different states and different districts enact different policies rather than these policies be set blindly and without any experimental controls at the federal level, so we can collect actual data to understand how these policies affect the economy and overall quality of life (which I've said before, and that the PBS article actually mentions at the end -- smart writer).
Also, I strongly suggest reading the whole article, since it's a good overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage
There are a lot of important points on economics there, as well as surveys (that show the division is mostly ideological), and alternatives.
You may look at the subject differently when you learn more about it.
Try going back over those questions, and answer the quiz again thinking in terms of what makes a better experiment to gather data, try to remove the rhetoric and ideology and stick with the facts, and you'll get something closer to my answers.
That said, Sanders was still the closest fit at 77%
I think Sanders is an idiot (or he's lying and he's just pandering to his base, which is par for the course for a politician), but the rest of them are even more idiot (or pandering even harder, it's difficult to tell the difference), so I'll go with the least of idiots.
Also, I care much more about the environmental aspects than the economy (which would be hard for me to care less about at this point, I don't really have a horse in that race), and Sanders is
relatively sensible on those points. Bush (W) was a huge nuclear supporter, you won't hear me praise him often but sometimes even the biggest idiots are right on some points. The warmongering was kind of unforgivable though.
Bush said that his plan to expand nuclear power would curb emissions contributing to global warming and would provide an "abundant and plentiful" alternative to limited energy sources. Bush called the nuclear sector an "overregulated industry" and pledged to work to make it more feasible to build reactors.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02072.html
I would have loved him if he wasn't such an fundamentalist asshole on other topics.
