Boobs

Interesting discussion led by Harvard Professor Sendhil Mullainathan on the irony of poverty.

The whole idea of the poor requiring more resources to educate themselves on making better decisions in order to get them out of the loop of making bad decisions that keep them in poverty. Yeah, I could phrase that better. Basically, you need resources that you often don't have access to to pull yourself out of doing things that keep you in your status of being "in poverty." You are trying to get out but you need resources to educate you and help you along the way. These are resources that are not there.

Okay, so this was what I was trying to tell Bob a few days ago and this discussion pretty much discusses the big idea behind my justification for Obama's tax plan. The "spread the wealth" plan sounds heinous when you describe it as taking money from someone and giving it to someone else. I'm not adept at tracking the historical shifts of how welfare has been implemented, so I cannot comment on how this resembles welfare, if at all. Painting Obama's comment as a negative thing often includes the comparison of his tax plan to socialism and a welfare state where the sedentary poor feed off the hard-working. The people drawing these comparisons are the ones who feel entitled to all of their income, or at least to all of the benefits of their money, whether it be in the form of government services funded by taxes or personal, private spending or investment. I would not call them delusional, but they certainly cling on to the idea that they have worked hard for every dollar (that's fine) and every dollar should directly be spent on something that benefits them (that I have a problem with).

On the one hand I don't want to denigrate the actual effort and time that got the middle- to extreme upper-class where they are. Ideally, everything should be considered on a case-by-case basis: cultural, biological, genetic, and every specific detail scrutinized and placed in context to create a frame of either YES YOU ARE WORTHY or NO YOU ARE NOT WORTHY, those two labels exactly.

Going back to the taking money from one person and giving it to another person. This is not exactly the case because the extra percentage of gross income going to the IRS is often quite immaterial to the high-income taxpayer. What exactly is another $30,000 to a person who has been consistently making $1 million for the past 10 years? You're bumping the marginal tax rate for top income earners by around 3%. Chances are that no matter what sort of wild lifestyle these top dogs have been living, they can still maintain their routine and still have enough leftover to buy whatever they want to buy before: umbrella racks, statues, photos of rare people... I don't know what rich people buy.

The logic behind the comparison is really ridiculous when you look at it. The critics grow incenses when you boil it down to a tableaux of taking money from someone and giving it to someone else. The unfairness is amplified or even pulled out of thin air and the direct effect is created from summarizing what is actually happening, eliding the details for rhetoric.

In the long run, I think taxing the wealthy at a slightly higher rate makes so much sense. Why do you take from those who don't have much? The cleavage ever-widening is a testament to the rich keep getting richer. You can do more with more.

The psychology experiments discussed in the Edge discussion is great. Mischel's marshmallow test, the implicit association, and the exhaustion of resistance to giving into temptation are ripe for the picking. They show how the poor are fucked the way things are now.

So much to type about. This paragraph is barely coherent. It's like smoking and being afraid of a plane crash. You're more like to get cancer than dying because of a horrific jet engine malfunction x 4. But you're looking short term and I guess for some short term is all they can consider since they won't have many years left. The old vote. Look long-term and helping the people at the bottom will benefit society as a whole when they are educated and even more productive members of our daily grind.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/class5.html
(from kottke)

Also, upon writing the word "cleavage" I searched for cleavage in Wikipedia expecting photos and it delivered one wonderful photo.