[Professor S]

Originally Posted by Xantar

Well yeah. I myself said that the polls I cited were meaningless. All I said was that Obama or Edwards winning against a Republican is within the realm of possibility. It's way too early to actually make a prediction on who will win.

You asked me if I could imagine Edwards beating Giuliani or Obama beating McCain. I said yes, because some polls show that it could happen. That's all.

To be honest, I think I confused my points here. My belief that Obama and Edwards would get killed have more to do with their weakness in experience (Obama) and debating (Edwards) rather than premature polls. The polls threw me into another tangent all together, and as we know, I'm never prone to tangents...

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You missed my point. I was saying that the wage increase enacted by Congress is little more than a meaningless token gesture. Maybe you're right and raising the minimum wage destroys jobs. But to really have an appreciable impact on the job market, you have to do a lot more than raise the minimum wage by a few dollars. Just like to really raise people out of poverty (if it can be done by raising the minimum wage), you would have to raise the minimum wage drastically high. Going from $5 to $7 isn't going to cut it.

Think beyond the immediate effects of the economy and think long term. If those jobs are eliminated, how will it affect the youth? Growing up is a learning experience, and we learn ethics and the value of work all along the way. We can already see how the increased affluence of young people is beginning to affect their view of the world and many argue it is extending childhood well into people's 20's. Now take away jobs from the one's that want and need to work in order to pay for a used car, insurance or just for movie tickets, and not only are you removing that opportunity to develop life skills but your doing it to the people who need it the most.

And I just think raising the minimum wage to fix poverty is rediculous (not saying that you believe it would fix it), especially with the increase in illegal immigration providing a nice source of cheap labor (and a ready made lower caste, but thats another thread) that doesn't need to be reported. Either that or even more employers will pay citizens under the table, reducing their overhead for not only wages, but disability and unemployment expenses. So you'll have more low skilled labor that will be leeching from our healthcare system because they aren't covered adding to the leeching being done by the increase of illegals due to the demand for underground labor. Meanwhile you'll have many workers not contributing to Social Security, which will damage that albatross even more.

Its nice to think that raising minimum wage will help, but its possible reprocussions greatly ourweigh any improvements.

I take a much more expansive view of education reform than people typically understand when they hear the term. Public schools in middle- to upper-class neighborhoods are actually pretty good. It's the ones in poor neighborhoods that are failing, and that doesn't mean just the inner city but also many rural areas.

I'm sure you would agree that a big part of this is parental involvement. In rich neighborhoods, if kids are ending up with gaping holes in their knowledge, then the parents raise hell until the school fixes itself. In poor neighborhoods, schools are basically a place to park your kid while you go to work.

And don't forget that those that have higher levels of eductaion tend to have a higher value on education, and also instill that in their children.

So here we have a problem of culture and attitude. Parents aren't looking after their kids properly. But then how do we fix that? In these kinds of neighborhoods, the parents (or very often, single parent) are struggling just to make ends meet by working overtime or working two jobs. They don't have the time to go over the kids' homework. So part of the problem also seems to be economics.

We attack the increase in single family homes. Remember, it was social programs that CREATED this increase, especially in the black community. For those that don't know, during the depression the NRA (RECOVERY, not RIFLE) started supporting working families, BUT, they also gave familities more money that did not have a father in the home... so the fathers tended to LEAVE so they could get more for their work, creating a generation that grew up not having a father in the home. As we can see, its had devastating effects.

I won't even get into the redlining of districts that created ghettos in major cities...

Philisophically the government is anti-family, because the larger the government and its presence in our everyday lives, the more it tries to replace the family. The more government grows, the more the family crumbles.

And while we're talking about economics, I'll just say incidentally that teachers aren't paid nearly enough. It does matter. My old high school, which actually pays fairly decently, still can't hold on to a decent math teacher.

I actually think that all funds for education should be pooled by the feds and the redistributed to allow for equal pay regardless of district to help attract good teachers to inner cities, but that isn't a fix either. In Philadelphia the public school system was taken over by Edison, a private company, and given rediculous funds by the state to fix the schools... and failed miserably.

Also on economics, it doesn't help that so much of the work force is jailed and then ostracized for possessing drugs. This is especially a problem in poor neighborhoods. I think you and I generally agree that we ought to legalize drugs, so I won't get into that any further.

I don't disagree that drugs should be legalized, at least soft ones, but the law is the law. You don't want to go to jail, don't break the law. Once again, a respect for law isn't something that the government can instill, thats the job of the family and to a lesser extent society.

The point is in just this brief time, I've linked problems in our education system to our culture, economics and criminal system. Give me a few hours to research the subject and I could probably draw in immigration and health policy too (kids who get PE are likely to do better academically). I'm not deluded into thinking that the government can fly in and fix such a massive, systemwide problem. Giving more money to buy more books and computers is not going to fix anything. But at the same time, the government does have a role to play in these issues.

You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Our children are not thirsty, and the government can't make them be. If we help to fix the family as a SOCIETY, we'll take the biggest step toward fixing our schools culturally and economically as household income will increase as well as parental support. Saying that the problem is multi-faceted doesn't mean that all the facets are of equal importance or that the solutions can't be multi-faceted as well.

Bad education causes people to feel out of control of their lives because they don't understand the forces shaping their world. This leads to disillusionment and despair as they blame the system because they don't understand how they can get it to work for them (a large segment of the population doesn't even understand how interest rates work). And they pass this attitude on to their kids who similarly give up on achieving anything great for themselves. And on and on the cycle goes. So yeah, doubt and despair holds us back. It's created by a confluence of failed policies across the society and government. We can at least do something about the government part, and I find that much more appealing than just telling everybody to get together and fix their own poverty already.

Because it was just a narrowly based initiative rather than a serious look at the whole system (as I've outlined above). Oh, and we haven't been conducting a serious war on poverty for the past several years.

I hate to break it to you, but we've never had a serious war on poverty.

Wait wait wait. The war on drugs is the result of a leftist view of the world? In which solar system?

I was referring more to governmental policies, not just leftist ones, sorry if I confused the two.

What did they fail at? I wasn't aware that the IRS had any particular agenda other than collecting our taxes. Now tax policies are a different matter, but the IRS doesn't create those.

You should look up some of the horror stories of abuse and intimidation by the IRS. The power of the "random" audit can be devastating. And the IRS can be seen as a reflection of that tax system failure, which I was referring to.

France went too far. Even liberal economists here in the U.S. think so. They made it almost impossible to fire someone from his job, and their education system sets people on a path in life that's almost impossible to get away from once you've fallen into it. This created a society that was extremely rigid, classist and unequal which is ironically the exact opposite of what a socialist society wants. Marx would have been horrified.

You mention that the War on Poverty would have made Marx horrified, and thats absolutely right. Marx was a great societal critic, but as a policy maker he was a clown. His criticisms were dead on, but his solutions forget that human beings are... well... human. His policies demand a fundamental loss of self, and thats something we as a race will NEVER conform to.

In fact, I would hope that Marx himslef would have abandoned his own beliefs after the estimated 100,000,000 people who died trying to adopt his dehumanizing philosophies. The very act of doing so reduces human life to a cog in a machine. Marxist philosophies have been proven unworkable over and over, and the reprocussions of their attmpts leave enough of a trail of blood that we should NEVER try to walk down again. At the very least, the human race is not ready to implement them, and I doubt we ever will (at least not until we evolve into beings of pure light and thought).

None of that means liberal theory is wrong. It just means you have to implement liberal policies that are smart and constantly evaluate how they are working. You're always railing against the evils of liberal policy which raises taxes and inflates the government, but that's a straw man argument. Modern liberals generally regard that sort of stuff as an outdated idea from the 60s. Liberals these days are more likely to try to leverage the power of the marketplace to achieve their goals rather than create brand new, unwieldy government institutions and programs.

And by leveraging you mean dictating profit margins and product costs, right? Because that what your Presidential candidates want to do to the oil and pharmaceutical industries respectively. The list of reprocussions from either of those actions could run as long as your arm. In the end, you would have the government controlling how private organizations run their businesses and watching them like a warden watches an inmate... how is that so much different in the end from traditional socialist philosophy? Its socialism by proxy.

We'll leave that to President Bush.

And I have any love for that man? Just because I agree with his philosophy of the wear on terror doesn't mean I agree with his execution of it or his economic and social policies.

And for the record, I think we should have a political talk show. We could be an intelligent Hannity and Colmes.