Pot Holes in Our Future?

John Gapper on the U.S. "infrastructure inadequacy":

On the pot-holed highway to hell, by John Gapper, Commentary, Financial Times: If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness.

You might have expected that investing in US infrastructure would be a hot political topic this year. Well, no. Hillary Clinton spent the final week of her Indiana campaign standing on the back of a pick-up truck arguing for a temporary suspension of the “gas tax”, the fuel duty that pays for highways. ... Mrs Clinton suggested cutting its source of funds (which she claimed could be made up by a tax on oil companies). It was more important to give Americans a summer break from $4-per-gallon petrol.

At times I wonder whether the world’s biggest economy has the will to solve its challenges or will end up wandering self-indulgently into the minor economic leagues. I expect it will get serious when the crisis is too blatant to ignore...

Perhaps that is a bit unfair. Some leaders have recognised the problem for economic development, as well as safety. They include Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ed Rendell, governors of California and Pennsylvania, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York. The trio have allied to press for the states and Washington to act. ...

There are lots of ways in which infrastructure inadequacy matters to the US but I would focus on two.

First, it imposes a drag on economic growth. The private infrastructure is poor enough – broadband speeds lag behind other countries and mobile coverage is spotty. But much of the public infrastructure is unfit, a fact that was becoming clear even before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and a Minneapolis bridge collapsed during rush hour last year.

Second, it presents an awful image of the US to investors and other visitors. The state of transport and communications infrastructure is a symbol of a nation’s economic development and the US is starting to look like a third world country. In fact, scratch that. Many developing countries look and feel better.

Of course, they are in a different phase of development. The US invested 10 per cent of its federal non-military budget in infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s...– at the time, the envy of the world. While US investment has fallen to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, China has been matching its double-digit postwar record.

The bigger problem is that, unlike European countries including the UK, the US shows little sign of finding the will or the funding mechanisms to maintain what it has or to build anew. Mr Schwarzenegger spoke enviously [at the Milken Global Conference] of public-private partnerships in both Canada and the UK that have enabled these countries to start redressing their inadequacies.

In the US, the Highway Trust Fund is likely to run out of money next year and the voters’ tolerance for tax rises is strained. ... Meanwhile, people are finding it hard to accept that if they do not pay for roads and rail links through taxes, they will have to stump up in other ways. Indiana’s politicians ran into a backlash after ... an Australian-Spanish consortium ... took control of a state highway and raised the tolls on those using it.

But cutting taxes, balking at tolls and, in the case of California’s public sector unions, opposing public-private partnerships on principle will not get the job done. The bill will have to be met, whether through increases in federal and state spending (in a more lucid moment, Mrs Clinton suggested issuing infrastructure bonds) or higher user fees and tolls.

Americans may not like the sound of that, but they cannot expect the US to maintain the economic dynamism of the late 20th century in the 21st unless they buckle down. Sooner or later, wishful thinking is going to crash into financial reality.

I met John Gapper at the Milken conference and, along with Felix Salmon and Yves Smith, spent about an hour talking to him. He was such a nice guy that now I'll have trouble taking him to task. Fortunately, I'm in agreement with the thrust of his argument about infrastructure, we need to do better.

Let me add this. If we don't solve the problem of rising health care costs, covering these costs will put so much pressure on the federal budget that issues such as infrastructure will be difficult to address. If we want to have any chance of meeting our needs in infrastructure, education, social insurance, and so on, we have to find a way to solve the health care cost problem. As I keep saying, rising health care costs will severely limit our ability to address other needs, and this is one of the reasons some people put so much emphasis on reforming our health care system.

Comments

[swells]

I agree. Unless health care costs can be constrained in some acceptable manner, everything else is going to be stressed to the hilt if not beyond. It seems to me that the highway trust fund is a good idea and ought to be a kind of model for many other issues. How insulated is the highway trust fund from being raided for other purposes? Do we have any similar trust fund for things like developing alternative energy sources? Are there other similar trust funds for other infrastructure needs like mass transit or agricultural research?

[JeffF]

"Some leaders have recognised the problem for economic development, as well as safety. They include Arnold Schwarzenegger..."

Huh?

Schwarzenegger is selling the same tax cuts, free lunches, and cutting "waste" that have been the core of republican policy for decades. His, and my, state has a 20 billion dollar budget gap this year and he proposes filling it with more "across the board" cuts.

He came into office during another budget crisis (the budget is in more or less permanent crisis) by promising to cut car tab taxes, yet somehow magically fix the deficit. It turned out the magic was going into debt.

The only revenue he does seem to want to raise comes from selling off infrastructure and expanded gambling.

When he proposes some tax increases I will consider taking him seriously.

[robertdfeinman]

"If we don't solve the problem of rising health care military costs, covering these costs will put so much pressure on the federal budget that issues such as infrastructure will be difficult to address."

Militarism is a cancer on society and unlike health care there is no public benefit associated with the spending. And like cancer it eventually kills its host.

Health care will be solved, there are already enough people talking about it, it's just a matter of time and political will. There are no discussions from pols or pundits about cutting militarism, in fact all the candidates are falling over each other with proposals on how to spend more.

I just read an essay which suggested that the fall of the Soviet Union was speeded up by their ill-fated adventure in Afghanistan. Both Dems want to increase activity in Afghanistan and McCain wants to combine this with "winning" in Iraq.

[d_rumsfeld]

I second Robertdfeinman's statement. Our country spends more on our military than the next 20 countries spend combined. Most of those countries are our allies. That is craptacularly wasteful. It is time for a second peace dividend. If we want a balanced federal budget, cutting military spending and socializing health care are the way to go.

[Cynthia]

There's no doubt that our lousy infrastructure is a huge drag on the economy, but our lousy healthcare system is literally killing us!

And had we not opened the public spigot to pour hell into Iraq, today we'd have a lot less hell here at home!

[kthomas]

Just give all our problems to Haliburton, in one giant contract. The private sector will take care of us.

[Jim]

The tax revenue is there, it is a matter of priorities. We spent half our Federal budget on defense in the 50's and still built infrastructure. We spend a much smaller fraction on defense now. Look to the ever widening sinkhole of entitlement spending for the infrastructure missing funding.

[Cyrille]

Oh, of course, it's got to be the entitlements. It can't be, say, that there have been lots and lots of completely irresponsible tax cuts since.

"We spent half our Federal budget on defense in the 50's and still built infrastructure."

And the point is? Half of a federal budget is more than all of a federal budget that has been reduced by a third. How is the fact that in the past, with responsible taxation, it was possible, a proof that after years of Laffer nonsense it would be?

[Patricia Shannon]

swells, do you think people should be able to opt out of federal gas taxes if they never use federal highways?

[mrrunangun]

In 4 years the 1947 birth cohort of 3.5million will become eligible for medicare. Four years later the 20million strong '51 cohort becomes eligible and there will be c.15 to 20 million more added to the rolls every year until the '56 cohort gets a little smaller. Then we are also talking about a program to cover c.50 million currently uninsured people we have now. What kind of medical care are we willing to plan to give all of these people? Where are the additional trained personnel goingto come from? Where is the infrastructure needed to provide all of this additional service going to be? It is hard to face,but it looks like some hard choices will have to be made and our political system is allergic to hard choices. Our congresspeople believe that we elect them to bring home the bacon and to avoid hard decisions and experience has not proven them mistaken.

[Jay]

"In 4 years the 1947 birth cohort of 3.5million will become eligible for medicare."

It gets worse. There is a report coming out that studied the baby boomers compared to previous generations. While most people were responsible and flattened out their real spending during peak earning years, saving money for retirement, the irresponsible baby boomers continued increasing their spending and never bothered saving like the more responsible humans that preceded them. An estimated 70% of baby boomers are not financially prepared to afford retirement at their current living standards. Of course it should be no surprise that a generation that grew up on entitlements would spend as much money as they could as fast as they could, never thinking about saving for the future, and they will demand/expect that the government steal more money from their children so that they can continue to over-consume like they've been doing since day one.

[gordon]

There are entitlements and entitlements. I know that the term is mostly used for welfare-type payments, but what about subsidies, tax breaks and earmarks? Aren't those a sort of entitlements too? What about cutting some of those? And Angry Bear has been fulminating (also here) about poor defense-related accounting and consequent waste. What about cutting that? I suspect that if the definition of "entitlement" was changed to incorporate some of those types of spending, the whole landscape of the argument would change.

Talking about investment, Gapper says: "The US invested 10 per cent of its federal non-military budget in infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s... While US investment has fallen to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, China has been matching its double-digit postwar record"(my emphasis). Angry Bear recently put up a graph showing US fixed investment currently running at over 14% of GDP. Different sets of figures?

[Patricia Shannon]

Golly, I feel so guilty, forcing my parents to have me at the start of the baby boom. Why was I so selfish.

Some of these comments sound like the results of the spoiling of younger people nowadays. How horrible that they might need to help out their parents, like their parents helped out their own parents.

I notice that the same people who have previously rhapsodized over the way parents used to live with their children when the parents got old, are now claiming that all those old folks were able to save enough money so they were no burden at all.

What have you complainers done that would give people reason to think that your generation would have done better under the same circumstances? What wonderful contributions have you made to the world?

And while you are advocating throwing your parents and grandparents out on the snow to starve, they continue to help you when you need it. When the baby boomers graduated from college, they moved out and took care of themselves, not like the young people today who are staying at home, with free rent and board, so that their parents money is going to supporting them, istead of saving for retirement.

[Jay]

"Golly, I feel so guilty, forcing my parents to have me at the start of the baby boom. Why was I so selfish."

Patricia: I have done a lot for my parents, who didn't save enough but did a lot to help me out earlier in my career. The thing is I did it voluntarily. Its those on the left that don't have a problem with slavery (although they use the euphemism social contract) that bug me.

Any chance you have statistical proof of this...
"When the baby boomers graduated from college, they moved out and took care of themselves, not like the young people today who are staying at home, with free rent and board, so that their parents money is going to supporting them, istead of saving for retirement."

Or is this a religious belief of yours?

[zinc]

The US has spent the last thirty years growing our asset light, financial based economy. Sell off all assets, ship the heavy industry over seas, support the John Birch republican libertarians win their battle for America. Get rid of all pesky regulation.

Now what were we whinning about ? Oh yea, infrastructure development. Too expensive. We have billionaires who need taxpayer support here, you selfish welfare king.

[gordon]

OK, you're right, the Angry Bear graph was total investment, and it's likely that Gapper was referring to only Govt. investment. Except that the graph "Ratio, Investment to Gross National Product" from the BEA
here (.pdf) shows Gross Govt. Investment at about 4% of GDP. So Gapper must be using a net Govt. investment number in order to say "1 per cent of GDP". I wonder where he gets that number from?

Who says blogging isn't educational?

says...

Zinc: Have you not paid attention to federal government expenditures the past 30 years or even the past 100 years? To say the the "libertarians win their battle" shows your complete ignorance of the current state of affairs. But I understand your argument, we haven't advanced the degree of socialism in our society enough (at least to the degree in old Europe) and that is indubitably the cause of all our problems.

[Jim]

Assume that Federal spending holds at its historical average of around 18% of GNP. How should that be spent? Investing in infrastructure, or buying votes? Hmmm, let me ask a politician...

[JAC]

I have actually thought a lot about this issue lately. I was part of the baby boom generation that enjoyed our parents willingness to invest in infrastructure. I had a great public school education--all the way through college, thanks to California--I enjoyed fantastic family vacations courtesy of our highway system and our national parks, and I've had some comforts (early on, at least) thanks to getting into a state funded benefits system. (But I'm not gloating about this, since it is disappearing before my eyes, just as I'm contemplating retirement!)

Now why is it that I enjoyed all these public benefits, and my children are already experiencing the decay of these public goods? Historically, it seems a multi-causal phenomenon. Is it because of declining U.S. economic dominance? Foolish public policy? U.S. warmongering and imperial "overstretch?" Selfish conservatism and the growing gap between rich and poor? Declining world resources and environmental destruction? Given this list, I guess the question is probably why my generation had it so good! But still, its a conundrum to try to reverse. At this point, I really am willing to sacrifice--whether it be via taxes or other privileges--so my kids and their generation can lead a decent life. But what should I be especially advocating? Thinking of the list above, it seems pretty daunting.

[CathyG]

Jay - Throughout the entire length of the careers of baby-boomers, real incomes have been essentially flat and incomes for college-educated men have actually declined. And this despite huge productivity gains made by the American worker and record corporate profits year after year.

The stagnation of income happened while we had to take on MUCH higher expenses than our parents ever faced, particularly in the areas of education, energy and housing and in massive cost shifting from corporations to individuals in funding health care and pensions. See, among many others: http://youtube.com/watch?v=QCu-XnVxhfk

To provide the same standard of living to our children that we received from ours, we have had fewer children, put both parents to work, have sacrificed savings and have taken on more debt than previous generations.

Maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe we should have just recognized that the deck was hopelessly stacked against us and maybe we should have just accepted a lower quality of life for ourselves, our kids and our aged parents. No vacations, music lessons, soccer, rooms to yourself, quality pre-school, college, home care or assisted living. That's a choice, I guess, but it's not the one most of us made.

Were we selfish? No. Were we suckers? Very likely.

[Betsy L. Angert]

Dearest Mark . ..

This article takes me to a topic I intend to discuss in a tome already begun and yet, the missive is not finished. In the United States, we have access to all creature comforts. Immediate gratification is, for us, customary. We are satiated, and satisfied, so much so, we do not think to change. We epitomize, The Story of Stuff. Americans are so absorbed in possessions, they do not truly consider what we have done to the planet.

Mother Earth; Story of Stuff or The Seventh Generation

"At times I wonder whether the world’s biggest economy has the will to solve its challenges or will end up wandering self-indulgently into the minor economic leagues. I expect it will get serious when the crisis is too blatant to ignore..."

I fear for Americans, self absorbed, cozy and comfortable with what is they may not notice how dire the situation is. We are not Number One, unless the rank refers to consumption.

America, World Superpower?

Last year more than one bridge fell and still, Americans applaud when the candidates say, "No new taxes." No one seems to consider we get what we pay for. If the people do not contribute to the community, the price will be far greater.

Your closing thought on Health Care is as I experience and believe. Recently, I disclosed what is true for me. I may not fit the stereotype of the uninsured; yet . . . When I posted this earlier essay at Daily Kos, I discovered others were willing to come out of the professional persons without health care closet.

I invite your review and reflections on . . .
Health Care in America; Uninsured, Underinsured, Universal Woes

Betsy L. Angert
BeThink.org

[baileyman]

Mark says: "If we want to have any chance of meeting our needs in infrastructure, education, social insurance, and so on, we have to find a way to solve the health care cost problem."

Yeah, but we also have an insatiable urge to spend treasure on foreign violence. Either one of these sinks us.

[OhNoNotAgain]

"An estimated 70% of baby boomers are not financially prepared to afford retirement at their current living standards. Of course it should be no surprise that a generation that grew up on entitlements would spend as much money as they could as fast as they could, never thinking about saving for the future, and they will demand/expect that the government steal more money from their children so that they can continue to over-consume like they've been doing since day one."

Propaganda, and bad propaganda at that. There's so much wrong with the above paragraph, that I don't even know where to start.

1) What is the percentage of that 70% that have seen defined pension benefits gutted or reduced by their employer ? How about the percentage that have lost their job and their pensions, along with having to accept lower pay ? Without an income history for the 70%, the figure is virtually meaningless.

2) What entitlements are you referring to ? Are you trying to say that most of the baby boomers received Medicare or SS during their lifetime, but prior to their retirement age ? If not, then what the hell are you talking about ? The baby boomers spent their entire lives paying into the SS system, and have borne the brunt of the increased FICA contributions after the 1983 increases.

3) The government would have a balanced budget and a positive financial situation if it weren't for the Bush tax cuts and the increased spending on Iraq since 2000. And, as much as you like to characterize it as so, the government has a right to tax its citizens to pay for services. Don't like it, then go live somewhere else or vote for lawmakers that support less services. Calling it "stealing" just makes you look like a fool.

4) Over-consume ? Prove it. Show me the figures indicating the reduced savings rate is due to over-consumption instead of stagnant wages. Elizabeth Warren has run the numbers, and the spending on discretionary items is just not there. The numbers show that the biggest reason for the reduced savings is increased costs for things like health care, food, and housing combined with stagnant real wages. Most discretionary items have actually become cheaper in the last 20-30 years, thus making them a much smaller portion of a family's budget.

But, keep on blaming the victim with your smug little certitude that you've got one up on those lazy, asshole baby boomers. I'm seeing this more and more in comments from younger people, and it really makes me sad. You've been deluded by others into thinking that people that are your fellow citizens are your enemy, when in fact the enemy are those that continue to push such nonsense on you. The only way they survive is by pitting younger against older, white against black, man against woman. It keeps us busy with trivial shit while they loot and pillage.

And, for the record, I'm 38.

[Patricia Shannon]

I never heard a baby boomer castigate our parents generation for having so many babies, which caused problems with careers. What we did protest and change were racial segregation, legal discrimination against women, unchecked pollution that caused burning rivers.
When I was a kid, almost no one, including my family had air conditioning - not at home, in our cars, in our schools, in our school buses. Until I was in high school, I shared a room with my sister. We hung our clothes to dry on the clothes line. We had no dish washer. We weren't deprived, this was normal. (Of course, our parents had had even less technology when they were our age).
We didn't expect to get high wages when we started working, knowing that we had much to learn.
The reason I don't have much savings is that when I was middle-aged, I, like many others, found it increasingly difficult to get work because of age discrimination by the generation who is castigating us for not saving. What a bunch of jerks.
The young people are such crybaby wimps. If they have to wash dishes by hand, they think they are abused.

OhNoNotAgain is right that this attitude is being encourage dby propaganda for the benefit of the super-elite, but it could only work on people who are already selfish, lazy, ignorant jerks.

[CathyG]

I agree totally with Patricia except for one point. In the 50's, my parents DID have a dishwasher, clothes dryer and remote control. They were called kids.

[Holly W.]

I have a theory that countries that think of themselves as poor, make themselves poor.

As Reason and others have frequently pointed out here, no discussion in the US seems to center on a vision for our country and how to achieve it. Instead, all we focus on is taxes, and how any taxes are too much because none of us can "afford" to pay them. When we can afford nothing, there is no public will to get anything done.

(The only reason we can "afford" the Iraq war is because it was shoved down our throats with very little talk about the costs.)

So long as our national dialog about taxes consists only of how little they can possibly be, with no effort to unite people on what kind of country we want to live in, I don't see much hope for improvement in our infrastructure.

[CasualObserver]

Holly,

I will try to give you just a little different perspective.

The reason there is not serious discussion of the "vision" of this country is because the people that will ultimately be able to provide the resources to attain the "vision", don't agree with it. I am not talking about politicians, I am talking about taxpayers. I am not also talking exclusively white rich republican evil empire dudes.

Granted, that is an over simplification, but it is pretty accurate.

If you have ever ran your own business or known successful business owners or had your kids in private school or known people that have sent their kids to private school you will know what point I am trying to make.

[Brooks]

There is one other possibility. People don't want to pay more taxes.

[Patricia Shannon]

CathyG, same for us.

Holly W, excellent points.

[Mark L.]

The problem is that the US notion of "infrastructure" infrastructurally contains too much pork.

For example, why should I be paying higher taxes so that people can destroy local forestland to achieve their high-consumption class pretensions by driving between a city job and their house in newly inflated suburbs that used to be performing ecosystem services and now are nothing but a drain on everyone, for the high-consumption class pretensions of the few?

And what's all this about potholes? Slow down, and drive around them, till we figure out how to put together a local approach to fixing them adequately. One that doesn't involve billion-dollar construction contracts. I'm sick of this idea that roads have to be baby's butt perfect so that morons can zoom around the planet, which does nothing but make local communities passive. And rightly so, because most communities that highways were blown through are poor ones, and why should they care about who's driving, because they never did and never will.

I'm sick of paying for services I don't use. Schools for other people's kids who can't afford kids so want others to pay for them because apparently adding more people to the planet is such a great idea you don't need to check the economic or environmental balance sheet first. Highways so people can blow the atmosphere and land to hell with their fossil energy use for whatever rushed fantasy they have today. Water systems to pump aquifers dry for California dreamin'.

Now I'm supposed to mortgage my own present and future, to bail out people who thought of nothing all their lives but their whims (I refer to Baby Boomers, and Gen Xers) and whose idea of civic involvement is jetting around the planet to march in the streets. People who thought that a pension plan was going to exempt them from the history that was inevitable because of how their generation lived, consuming more than any other generation in history, and expecting things always to be that way.

The truth is that what made our nation great had nothing to do with any of these things. Our founders lived a very simple life, what would be called a Third World life by apologists for the twentieth century ideal. The 1900s ideal of going forth and multiplying and blowing things up, with atom bombs and rocket cars. Turning the stock market into a casino. Making work and saving and organizing the activities of silly schmucks who haven't figured out that the real way to get rich is through the scam. Pumping up religious superstition to get rich quick.

I refuse to play. If that means the highways fall apart, so be it. I'm capable of slowing down, and of steering a new course, so potholes don't bother me. The stuff I use all comes within a very close radius of where I live. If it doesn't then I figure out how to live without it. I suppose I've taken my Ivy League Ph.D. and gone native or something, I don't know. But I'm sick of these dead-end labyrinths of blame.

Anyone who owns a car or uses jet planes has bought into this stupid system, and when it crashes and burns, don't come crying to me. You chose this. You live with the consequences. A lot of us have chosen something simpler and more sustainable, but we don't get interviewed by Forbes or the New York Times.

The real news is, I don't feel like bailing you out for your choices. It's no wonder so many of us former Democrats are voting for McCain in the fall. This nation was about the right to self-determination, based on one's own labor and character. Not some huge welfare scam, where the hard-working few bail out the self-centered many, or the law-abiding few are expected to throw open their borders to millions of people whose first act in coming here is to break the law.

This nation was about everyone giving 120 percent for the most amazing social and political advance and gift in human history: the Constitution, and its republic. Not a few giving 120 percent and others saying, "Well, if I take 20 percent from five people, I won't have to do a thing!" It's all I see, in every direction, these days. "How will I get mine now that I've squandered my life, others' lives, vast nonrenewable resources, and history itself, to keep from the slow disciplined work of working, saving, and living within one's means?"

I'm sick of hearing how much we all deserve. I want to hear what people are willing to do, to be, to give up, to defer, and to contribute. I'm willing to give up the twentieth century, for the twenty first and beyond. But I'm not about to turn my character or my accomplishments over to a bunch of tin-cuppers whose idea of life is an PBS beg-fest. Don't like the oil companies? Then stop buying fossil energy from them. Don't like corporations? Then don't buy their products. Don't like the mess you find yourself in? Then work your way out of it.

[Mark L.]

I wanted to add one thing. One year when my father got fired from his job as a union represented janitor, I asked him, "Are we poor now?" He looked at me a long time. Then he went to our bookshelf in the room of our apartment that served as our living room and his sleeping area (he and mom gave the bedroom to me and my brother). He took out a little pamphlet-sized copy of the Constitution. He handed it to me and he said, "So long as we have this, Mark, we'll never be poor."

[mikx]

Some leaders have recognised the problem for economic development, as well as safety. They include Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ed Rendell, governors of California and Pennsylvania...

Ah-nold? You got to be kidding.
The Governator came into office after voters recall, because the previous moron-governor had deficit of $15B.
The Governator improved things so much, deficit is $20B now and raising.

All the while saying not a word about immigration that sucks California dry.

Some estimates show cost for CA government of illegal immigration at $10-15B, just about the size of deficit.

And if the Governator has any plans for cutting taxes, I like to see references to them.
The only taxes Ah-nold cut were car license fees.

The reality is with Cultural Marxists running Sacramento, no amount of money will satisfy them, they will find ways to waste any amount money.

Like rebuilding most libraries in the state, some as new as 5 year old and in excellent shape (Cupertino, CA).

Like building modern day palace-like architecturial marvels for CA agencies in Sacramento.

Like providing all SSI recipients (and virtually all elderly immigrants are on SSI) with, what amounts to, a free full time maid.

Do your hardworking elderly parents have a full time maid? Can you afford one?
Come to CA and get on SSI and you will get one.
Don't know how to get on SSI?
There are plenty of attorneys and consultants who can help you. It helps if you don't speak English.

[Patricia Shannon]

Mark L.
Do you have to pay for housing and food? How do you do so?

And what kind of garbage is this about complaining about people having children. You exist because your ancestors had children.
I don't have children, but I know that children are the future of our species, much less society. They will be the ones raising our food, and taking care of us in nursing home, when we are old. A society that doesn't value its children should cease to exist. Yes, we have a problem because of over-population. But people have been having fewer children. The reason the U.S. has not joined many other countries in having a reduction in population is because of immigration. And because of being responsible in having fewer, they are being castigated because it means a smaller percentage of workers is coming up. And there are articles about shortages of skilled workers. (I myself love that shortage of skilled workers, because it meant I was able to get back into IT after worker at Waffle House for four years.)

Well, society will cope with this. What is more important is what we are doing to our environment. The baby boomers put effort into environmental protection. The younger generations need to continue this effort. Don't let the psychopathic power structure create a generational divide to distract you from real problems.

[CasualObserver]

Holly,

Mark was right on cue. See what I mean?

And if Mark is honest, that is coming from an ivy league PhD.

I don't agree with some of the things that Mark used to reach his conclusions, but you better believe there are a large number of people across all political affiliations at the median and upper income levels that are reaching the same conclusion as Mark.

That is huge problem for the left.

[OhNoNotAgain]

"They were called kids."

Yeah, and those kids had better not be caught in or around the house on a normal summer's day unless they're bleeding profusely. :-)

[OhNoNotAgain]

"Don't like the oil companies? Then stop buying fossil energy from them. Don't like corporations? Then don't buy their products. Don't like the mess you find yourself in? Then work your way out of it."

Really ? Is this your idea of how the world works ? Sorry if this is harsh, but that sounds like an over-simplified version that an 8-year old might posit.

We have a representative government for a reason. That's how you get things done to your liking. This idea that we can all solve all of our problems by ourselves with no help from anyone else is not only misguided, it's dangerous and destructive to our collective pysche when we constantly fail at such futile tasks. It makes us believe that something is wrong with us, when the issue is that we are being forced to live in a way that is counter to our very core beliefs as US citizens - *we* control our government, not the other way around. Just look at many of the other countries around the world. Their governments are responsive to their wants and needs. If they want universal health care because they think it's better and cheaper for everyone, then they make it happen.

[OhNoNotAgain]

"If you have ever ran your own business or known successful business owners or had your kids in private school or known people that have sent their kids to private school you will know what point I am trying to make."

Yes, because these people are convinced that they can live just fine with a rigid class system in this country. In fact, they think it's just the best thing ever now that they don't have to be around too many dark-skinned people and don't have to pay for some poor kid's schooling that the kid is just going to end up wasting anyways.

Unfortunately, these people are also very, very wrong. And, many of them aren't as far away from falling out of the upper crust as they think they are. We haven't seen any real hard times in this country for a while, and it shows.

[robertdfeinman]

Another libertarian (Mark L.) pops up. "I don't like paying for services I don't use".

We will tell that to the people at the emergency room if you are unfortunate enough to ever need their services. You see since you didn't "use" it, it was shut down.

The way it works in a civilized society is that everyone pays into a common pool and then makes use of the services they happen to need. The alternative is anarchy.

[Jay]

"We have a representative government for a reason. That's how you get things done to your liking."

Really? Is this your idea of how the world works Sorry if this is harsh, but that sounds like an over-simplified version that an 8-year old might posit.

You should first read a intro game theory text with a chapter on voter theory, then read Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter. Then go back and find me one federal government representative that won his/her election by exactly 1 vote.

And if your ideal society happens to be mob rule (which is what democracy is) remember that at one point the mob thought blacks didn't have the same rights as caucasians.

[OhNoNotAgain]

"Really? Is this your idea of how the world works Sorry if this is harsh, but that sounds like an over-simplified version that an 8-year old might posit."

Then tell that to our founding fathers. Apparently you think that they were full of shit and a bunch of simpletons. I think they came up with a pretty good system. And, as always, if you think it's so bad, feel free to try a dictatorship or some other form of government elsewhere, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

And, really, parroting the text of my comments ? That's the best that you've got ?

"And if your ideal society happens to be mob rule (which is what democracy is) remember that at one point the mob thought blacks didn't have the same rights as caucasians."

Man, you just set up all sorts of false scenarios in your head that have nothing to do with what I've said at all. Did I say that we have, or that I desire, a *direct* democracy ?