Entitlements - what's so bad about them?

Someone I know was laid off, and his job got moved to two people in India.They couldn't handle the workload, so they hired 4 more people to do the job.And they STILL suck at it, since they don't have the skills. In consequence, the system he was taking care of dies quite frequently, and there is a loss of production for several hundred people at least once a week, costing a lot more than paying this guy.

And, in my experience, the I/T from india tend to be poorly trained, bad communication skills, and for the most part, don't give a crap. The project managers , rather than manage a project, just call meetings, and expect everyone else to do their job. While there are exceptions, that is my general experience. It makes working with them very frustrating.Even 5 years ago, the project managers had to get through a certain level of certification. Now, they abandoned that to save money, and it costs them MORE money due to errors. The bean counters don't care though.

They got transferred and got bonuses for running a branch of the corporation into the ground? When these shrill, Democrat talking points make no sense, I tend not to pay too much attention. The way you've described this one certain scenario, the people responsible for this mismanagement didn't get any more hurt financially than the common employees because this was only one branch of a much larger corporation. It's far more common for a 60 to 80 employee company to be completely self contained, with the owner taking a life destroying bath if he runs it in the ground. He's an example of the vast majority of small business owners all across the U.S., someone who's honest and treats his employees fairly. He takes the SAME HITS as the top 1% income bracket that you and just about every other evolutionist hate, as you try your best to saddle them all with more and more government regulation. That happens in some companies, but in some companies, it goes the other way. I knew a fairly well off owner of a residential roof truss manufacturer, about 40 employees. The recent housing bubble burst probably cost him more than his 40 employees combined. They all went out and got other jobs - he lost about everything he had. "Because of tax laws"? written by government interests? The buying up and trashing of companies game is a very small part of the entire U.S. economic picture.

Solutions for what? While it's true that the U.S. doesn't produce much in the way of raw materials anymore because of government regulations, and has to borrow millions of dollars per day to fund its handout programs, it's still an okay place to live. There are still more people who try to get into the U.S. than try to get out. All too often, government "solutions" cause far more problems than they solve. The best way for them to react to unjust corporations is stop buying its products. Not possible in the case of oil companies, power companies, auto companies? Maybe it would be possible, if government wouldn't regulate out competition for these entrenched monsters. I don't claim to know what a level playing field is for every company in every situation. But just going by life's experiences, I know that women sometimes appreciate the flexibility to take off work for a while for things like childbirth, taking care of a sick child, working from home, keeping irregular hours, many other things that working mom's appreciate. Some women like to do things that men normally do, even though they know full well that they can't do it quite as quickly or efficiently as a man because of physical strength issues. When government strips companies and their employees the ability to negotiate these things among themselves, companies are going to do the logical thing, hire more, (or all) men, and leave the women unemployed. Then the unemployed women get a handout, and vote for Democrats! It IS the issue, government mandates controlling it affects everyone, the prices of goods and services everyone has to pay for, and the companies who produce them. It's not the government's business to involve itself in this type of thing. It's not constitutional, and it's far from being the only problem that many people must deal with daily in their private lives. But you're advocating the opposite! The authoritarianism of government is what you advocate, as opposed to the un "authorized" freedom of working, running a business etc on one's own decisions, not decisions from government. They're free to base those decisions on any religion they want, or no religion at all. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, people can easily compare the liberty and constitutionalism they advocate as opposed to the ever increasing government authoritarianism of Obama. Off topic. I'm no advocate of huge military spending, but like it or not, the U.S. is the policeman of the world, and the world is a better place for it. But this topic is wealth re-distribution.

When these shrill, Republican talking points make no sense, I tend not to pay too much attention. Other than to laugh at the misinformed blindness.It isn't hate marc9000, it is wanting justice and fairness. Talking about people that make a million or two a year is not talking about the 1% - not even close.What hits does he take? Yep, but it wasn't a branch, it was a private company that had been bought out by a branch of a large corporation (Johnson Worldwide is a branch of Johnson industries - you know Johnson and Johnson wax yes?) Actually they were hurt less than the employees. It wasn't mismanagement in their view -- they had maximized the profit they could suck out of the company. That's what it was before it was engulfed by Johnson Worldwide, and a very profitable one as well. And yet they still exist, and they exemplify the difference between sucking money out of a corporation and creating the wealth -- the point where we started here, with the misconception that just because some people had or made a lot of money that they must be "the producers" when the reality is that they are just people that take money out of the system whether they contributed to the production in any way or not.Very clearly imho the two examples here show someone taking a large share of the profits from a company that was producing and selling a lot of new products, and someone taking excessive profits out of the company and contributed nothing to the production process or made negative contributions.Successful production in a company does not entitle the CEO to take excessive profits when that production is based on the work of employees.That is why unions are useful in making sure that a fair share of the profits also go to the workers that create that profit.When you hire a carpenter it is likely because he is better at doing carpentry than you are -- are you entitled to pay him less than you would pay yourself to do that work?When you start a small company you end up doing a lot of jobs because there is no one else to do them. When you hire some to do some of those jobs are you entitled to pay them less than you would pay yourself to do that job?When you hire people to do work you cannot do or are not qualified to do are you entitled to pay them less than you pay yourself?When you start a partnership are you entitled to pay your partner less than you pay yourself?Is an hour of an employee's life really worth less than an hour of the CEO's life? Why is a CEO entitled to 300 or 400 times the pay rate of their average worker?Really?If you want small government, then you necessarily want small family run businesses ... yes?

What does redistribution of wealth have to do with science? I know there is no way, because you don't have one. I don't need Christianity to determine that liberalism is destructive to the U.S. as it was founded, I only need the writings of the founders and the knowledge of human nature to tell me that.

I know they can, it's called corruption, and it's a lot harder for them to do if the government is small and defined. I agree 100%. And I understand that with the increasingly complex materials we have to work with, (cars and trucks as opposed to horses, as only one example) government must grow to accommodate those things. But when government redistributes wealth and tell employers what they'll pay female employees, it's gone just a little too far. Or maybe a LOT too far. And penalizing innovators by redistributing their wealth doesn't drive fourth their innovation. Thanks for mentioning them, that's more than any of my U.S. opponents here have done.

I've come to the conclusion over many years that almost no one from either political side has much comprehension of the thought processes from the other side. Sometimes I hear a talk show host like Limbaugh claim that they understand how liberals operate, but I can tell that he's often just as mystified as me about how they can possibly say the things they say.I don't see how you can say that it makes no sense when I point out that government regulations are evenly applied across the board, that greedy business owners, as well as honest business owners, are all required to succumb to government regulations in the same way. Read some of your helpers posts here. (message 50, with 5 green dots)

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when your taxes were used to buy expensive cars, houses and boats by cock suckers who manipulated a system and destroyed the lives of many citizens?

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Listen to Ed Shultz sometime, James Carville. It IS hate. A company that had been bought out by a branch, so it became a branch. That's what I said, and you still didn't explain the rationale behind why a company would reward money loss and failure. (only the government does that, and there's a reason, it does it for Democrat votes) If both involved parties agree to it, YES! It's not the government's, or the general public's business.

Here is the Wiki page listing nations in terms of government spending as a percentage of GDP. Government spendingI am not sure what you mean by small government exactly but unfortunately that phrase has been adopted by free market ideologues and comes with a mass of baggage associated with it. When you talk about small government which nation has successfully implemented the sort of policies and economic model you are advocating?And on tax policy - You seem to despair at the notion of progressive taxation but is there a successful major capitalist economy that doesn’t have progressive taxation to some degree or another? Which country best exemplifies the sort of tax policy you are advocating? But it's not the "innovators" who are accruing the wealth.A book by a guy called Thomas Piketty is currently making waves in economist circles.

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Anyone with the capacity to own in an era when the returns exceed those of wages and output will quickly become disproportionately and progressively richer. The incentive is to be a rentier rather than a risk-taker: witness the explosion of buy-to-let. Our companies and our rich don't need to back frontier innovation or even invest to produce: they just need to harvest their returns and tax breaks, tax shelters and compound interest will do the rest.

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This sort of "rentier" as opposed to "innovation" economy is the kind of thing I am talking about as the difference between good capitalism and bad capitalism. Not all forms of capitalist wealth accrual promote the positive points of innovation and healthy risk taking that good capitalism thrives upon.

"Free market ideologues" versus "big government ideologues" - as a conservative I think the free market ones pose less of a threat to society than big government ones, because they don't seek the same level of political power and coercion. The United States, before, and up to about 1960. Here's a couple of paragraphs from your above link;

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Over the last century, overall government spending in the United States has increased substantially from about seven percent of GDP in 1902 to about 35 percent of GDP in 2010. Major spikes in spending occurred in World War I and World War II.

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When broken down by major function, the history of US government spending as a percent of GDP shows a slow and consistent increase in education spending; it shows the spikes in defense spending during World War I and World War II, and the sustained high level maintained during the Cold War. Spending on welfare shows a clear takeoff during the Great Depression and a modest decline following reform in 1996. Spending on pensions (primarily Social Security) begins to show up in the 1950s. Health care spending takes off after the birth of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s and shows sustained growth ever since.

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Seven percent in 1902 - of course society has gotten complex enough for that to go up somewhat by today, maybe double. But not 35% - not much of a free country anymore IMO. The United States, 100 years ago. Maybe not, in every single case. But they are in a lot of cases. Wealth accruers (is that a word?) are just as diverse as any classification of people in the U.S. (or many other countries). That's one of the biggest problems with the political left in the U.S. - they tend to lump them all together as they try to redistribute their wealth. Maybe a small percentage of the "rich" (the rentiers) can afford having yet another chunk of their wealth confiscated by government, but a lot of the other "rich" (the risk takers) cannot, subsequently they take less risk, and innovate less, and employ less middle and lower class. The paragraph you quoted doesn't recognize the existence of those rich risk takers who haven't yet made it that far. Those innovators who haven't yet made it that far are all over the map in their desire to get there at all. Many don't even care about it, and many don't make it there, even if they want to. I agree, capitalism is far from perfect. But there's nothing better. Including appointing elites like politicians or bureaucracies to regulate it all to make it perfect. Have you ever heard of U.S economist Thomas Sowell? Here is one of his many essays that address those who seek to do things like redistribute wealth. I won't c/p it all, but here are a few highlights;

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"Fairness" is one of the great mantras of the left. Since everyone has his own definition of fairness, that word is a blank check for the expansion of government power. What "fairness" means in practice is that third parties -- busybodies -- can prevent mutual accommodations by others.

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and

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Such thinking -- or lack of thinking -- is not new. Back in the 18th century, Adam Smith wrote of politicians who devote "a most unnecessary attention" to things that would work themselves out better in a free market.

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What is conventionally called "the free market" is in reality free people making their own mutual accommodations with other free people. It is one of the many tactical mistakes of conservatives to use an impersonal phrase to describe very personal choices and actions by people when they are not hamstrung by third parties.

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one more

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The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices -- paid by others.

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Millions of people's lives are made worse in innumerable ways, in order that a relative handful of busybodies can feel important and superior. Artificially high land prices in those places where busybodies reign politically, based on land use restrictions, make housing costs a crushing burden on people of average incomes.

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Why do advocates of wealth redistribution have such a huge mistrust of ALL the rich, including innovators, yet have such a blind trust of those who want to do the decision making on just how it will be done? Those who seldom pay a price if their decisions are failures?

It is called taxation, not confiscation. Last I checked, that power was granted to Congress in the US Constitution. You may want to give it a read.

But why be an ideologue at all? Pragmatism suggests that the most successful modern economies are ones where the right balance is found rather than where dogmatic ideology reigns. Big business and wealthy individuals don't seek political power and coercion....? Can you see why some might be cynical of that assertion?At least in a genuine democracy the people can rid themselves of a corrupt or power grabbing government by voting them out. In a plutocracy there is no such accountability. What we have increasingly at the moment is a nominal democracy with plutocratic underpinnings. Governments and faces change but the interests of the wealthiest remain disproportionately the focus of whatever politicians are in office. Because politicians are funded by plutocrats. That is very interesting. Here is Wiki on US income inequality in the period:

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But from about 1937 to 1947 — a period that has been dubbed the "Great Compression" — income inequality in America fell dramatically. Highly progressive New Deal taxation, the strengthening of unions, and regulation of the National War Labor Board during World War II raised the income of the poor and working class and lowered that of top earners. This "middle class society" of relatively low level of inequality remained fairly steady for about three decades ending in early 1970s the product of relatively high wages for the US working class and political support for income leveling government policies.

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Then we had the Thatcher/Reagan era and the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies and big-finance that persist in one form or another to this day. So you are advocating the strengthening of unions and progressive taxation as a method of getting back to a 1960s style economy.....?

If Eisenhower was President today, I expect he'd get about the same criticism as Obama does.

I find it ironic that conservatives often talk about how wonderful the country was in the 1950s. Yet during that timeframe, the tax system was heavily progressive, going as high as 90% on top income tax earners. Additionally, there were far more subsidies for things like education. Tuitions were far lower and were actually free for state residents.So if marc is asserting we should go back to those philosophies, I could not agree more.Oh, and unions had far more influence in the 1950s as well.

That depends on who's doing the calling, what it's used for and who is paying it. And it is a limited power, the 9th and 10th amendments are a small part of a host of proofs of that. These things are called evidence . The word "evidence" doesn't seem to be quite the same favorite word for evolutionists, when they are trying to promote big government in the U.S. It's a brief, concise document, undoubtedly written that way to help control variations in it's interpretation. But after 200+ years, combined with the organization that atheism now has, interpretations of it are reaching amazing new lows. Some of the more honest Democrats today try to say that it's outdated, while some of the funny ones try to claim that it actually supports a massive, unlimited government. It's not that much of a threat, because it's so obviously phony, even to many elementary school science students.