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Javier E

Obama's War on Inequality - The New York Times - 16 views

www.nytimes.com/...obamas-war-on-inequality.html

inequality Democratic party gop great depression New Deal obama obamacare

shared by Javier E on 20 May 16 - No Cached
  • what can policy do to limit inequality? The answer is, it can operate on two fronts. It can engage in redistribution, taxing high incomes and aiding families with lower incomes. It can also engage in what is sometimes called “predistribution,” strengthening the bargaining power of lower-paid workers and limiting the opportunities for a handful of people to make giant sums.
  • We can see this in our own history. The middle-class society that baby boomers like me grew up in didn’t happen by accident; it was created by the New Deal, which engineered what economists call the “Great Compression,” a sharp reduction in income gaps.
  • Obamacare provides aid and subsidies mainly to lower-income working Americans, and it pays for that aid partly with higher taxes at the top. That makes it an important redistributionist policy — the biggest such policy since the 1960s.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • between those extra Obamacare taxes and the expiration of the high-end Bush tax cuts made possible by Mr. Obama’s re-election, the average federal tax rate on the top 1 percent has risen quite a lot. In fact, it’s roughly back to what it was in 1979, pre-Ronald Reagan, something nobody seems to know.
  • What about predistribution? Well, why is Mr. Trump, like everyone in the G.O.P., so eager to repeal financial reform? Because despite what you may have heard about its ineffectuality, Dodd-Frank actually has put a substantial crimp in the ability of Wall Street to make money hand over fist.
  • these medium-size steps put the lie to the pessimism and fatalism one hears all too often on this subject. No, America isn’t an oligarchy in which both parties reliably serve the interests of the economic elite.
  • Money talks on both sides of the aisle, but the influence of big donors hasn’t prevented the current president from doing a substantial amount to narrow income gaps — and he would have done much more if he’d faced less opposition in Congress.
Steven Young

Demography and the Future of Secularism - Boston.com - 1 views

articles.boston.com/...edim-ultra-orthodox-secularism

demography religion religious fundamentalism secularism

shared by Steven Young on 25 May 12 - No Cached
    • Steven Young
      Steven Young on 25 May 12
       
      The American Enterprise Institute is one of the leading conservative think tanks. The AEI, and the conservative movement in general, have an interest in a more religious population, since religious voters are more likely to vote Republican and for conservative parties elsewhere in the world. Therefore, one needs to skeptical of research emanating from a think tank with a strong ideological bias; especially when that research serves the interests of the institution.
  • Across the world, "population change is reversing secularism and shifting the center of gravity of entire societies in a conservative religious direction." The same will be true here in the United States, where religious families have more children than non-religious ones.
  • It's easy to underestimate the role that population change can have in social change, Kaufmann says, but it can have a huge role, especially when differences in values drive differences in fertility
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • -- demographer
  • Americans and Europeans
  • Americans and European
  • the fringe of ultra-Orthodox pupils in Israel's Jewish primary schools in 1960 has ballooned: they now comprise a third of the Jewish first grade class. They are gaining power: in Jerusalem, Haredim rioted in late December, demanding the right to segregate women on buses, and have already elected the city's first Haredi mayor.
  • the ultra-Orthodox may form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050
  • In the United States, Republicans have a similar values-driven fertility advantage -- an advantage, Kaufmann argues, which will outweigh the Democratic advantage of increased immigration, in part because many immigrants are conservative on social issues and maximalist in their family planning.
  • "In Seattle, there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19 percent more kids than dogs.”
  • Steven Young on 25 May 12
     
    Summary of article from the American Enterprise Institute journal, "The American", that claims that future of the U.S. is more religious than secular due to the large family size of religious fundamentalists.
jmcminn0208

There's No Place Like Home - 22 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...keillor-text

shared by jmcminn0208 on 11 Jun 14 - No Cached
    • jmcminn0208
      jmcminn0208 on 11 Jun 14
       
      This is literally two sentences. I found it very difficult to read through the first one... as it was itself one whole paragraph
  • And it is distressing to come home and not know where I am
  • Superimposed over that geography, like a Jackson Pollock painted on a fishnet, is the geography of a man’s life, the griefs and pleasures of various streets,
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  • We attended church at the Grace & Truth Gospel Hall on 14th Avenue South, where a preacher clutched his suspenders and spoke glowingly of Eternity, and I grew up one of the Brethren, the Chosen to whom God had vouchsafed the Knowledge of All Things that was denied to the great and mighty. The Second Coming was imminent, we would rise to the sky. We walked around Minneapolis carefully, wary of television, dance music, tobacco, baubles, bangles, flashy cars, liquor, the theater, the modern novel—all of them tempting us away from the singular life that Jesus commanded us to lead.
    • jmcminn0208
      jmcminn0208 on 11 Jun 14
       
      What did he get from this? How has he lived his life based on this childhood staple?
  • There were the neon lights of Hennepin Avenue and the promise of naked girls at the Alvin Theater, which our family passed on Sunday morning on our way to church, but that was lost on me, a geek with glasses, pressed pants, plaid shirt, a boy for whom dating girls was like exploring the Amazon—interesting idea, but how to get there? Writing for print, on the other hand—why not? And then came the beautiful connection: You write for print, it impresses girls, they might want to go on dates with you.
  • For days after Frankie drowned, I visited the death scene, trying to imagine what had happened. He was paddling a boat near the shore, and it capsized, and he drowned. I imagined this over and over, imagined myself saving him, imagined the vast gratitude of his family. I don’t recall discussing this with other boys. We were more interested in what lay ahead in seventh grade, where (we had heard) you had to take showers after gym. Naked. With no clothes on. Which turned out to be true. Junior high was up the West River Road in Anoka, the town where I was born, 1942, in a house on Ferry Street, delivered by Dr. Mork. That fall of seventh grade, he listened to my heart and heard a click in the mitral valve, which meant I couldn’t play football, so I walked into the Anoka Herald and asked for a job covering football and basketball, and a man named Warren Feist said yes and made me a professional writer. Ask and ye shall receive.
  • down to work at 4 a.m. to do the morning shift on KSJN in a basement studio on Wabasha and then a storefront on Sixth Street, the house where I lived next to Luther Seminary and the backyard parties with musicians that inspired A Prairie Home Companion at Macalester College, the dramatic leap to home ownership on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul, where I’ve lived most of the last 20 years, where you drive up from I-94 past Masqueray’s magnificent cathedral, whose great dome and towers and arches give you a momentary illusion of Europe, and up Summit and the mansions of 19th-century grandees and pooh-bahs in a ward that votes about 85 percent Democratic today.
  • Pride goeth before a fall, so deprecate yourself before others do the job for you
  • I drive down Seventh Street to a Twins game and pass the old Dayton’s department store (Macy’s now but still Dayton’s to me), where in my poverty days I shoplifted an unabridged dictionary the size of a suitcase, and 50 years later I still feel the terror of walking out the door with it under my jacket, and I imagine the cops arresting my 20-year-old self and what 30 days in the slammer might’ve done for me
  • She was a suicide 28 years ago, drowned with rocks in her pockets, and I still love her and am not over her death, nor do I expect ever to be.
  • “There’s no point in a bunch of rubberneckers standing around gawking.”
  • That’ll be the day, when you say goodbye / oh, that’ll be the day, when you make me cry,”
  • She says, “Tell me a funny story”—my daughter who never had to fight for a seat. I say, “So ... there were these two penguins standing on an ice floe,” and she says, “Tell the truth,” so I say, “I like your ponytail. You know, years ago I wore my hair in a ponytail. Not a big ponytail. A little one. I had a beard too.” And she looks at me. “A ponytail? Are you joking?
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