The Distribution of Wealth [W:446] (1 Viewer)

[imagep]

Really...and talks of eliminating private schools so that people that go to them don't have an unfair advantage aren't common?

I've never head a discussion on that. Ever.

 

[TurtleDude]

I've never head a discussion on that. Ever.

there was such a thread on this board recently

 

[Cardinal Fang]

We're talking about the effects of welfare. In reality, all it does is perpetuate poverty.

There are no data to support such a claim. For one thing, assistance programs are diverse and are not susceptible to such lump-them-all-together commentary. WIC and SSI for instance have very different characteristics and serve very different populations. And neither of those is a close relative of Section 8 or the EITC. For another thing, safety net programs are obviously used more often during times of economic decline. That's part of their function and purpose. Any statemnt about assistance levels has to be qualified for economic conditions of the time. Meanwhile, no one seriously questions the fact that assistance programs provide an effective bridge during downturns, or that they both keep and lift people out of poverty in general. The questions are over what more could be done to increase the pace at which people are able to move off of assistance and decrease the pace at which people become newly or again eligible for it.

 

[Cardinal Fang]

If we would institute a NST rather than an income tax, pimps, druggies etc would pay far more taxes than they pay now

And the wealthy would pay less. Just another scheme to dump tax burden onto the middle and upper-middle classes.

 

[imagep]

there was such a thread on this board recently

That discussion had nothing directly to do with "fairness", it had everything to do with incentivising the rich and powerful to leverage their power to improve schools for everyone. Maybe some posted something about fairness, I seem to remember a number of people suggesting that forcing rich kids into public schools was unfair, but I don't recall anyone suggesting that we do that for the purposes of evening out any unfair advantages.

Anyhow, I have seen thousands of threads on this forum and thats the only time that the topic has ever come up to any extent at all (that I remember anyhow).

 

[Cardinal Fang]

Yes, your positions on many legal matters are not something those of us trained in the law are familiar with.

Legal training typically covers Article VI, employment rights, and the concepts of prior and superior claim. I guess that's not a hard and fast rule though.

 

[mac]

I've never head a discussion on that. Ever.

I'll tell ya a secret....you should look around DP.

Shhh...

 

[Cardinal Fang]

Really...and talks of eliminating private schools so that people that go to them don't have an unfair advantage aren't common?

Not common enough that I have ever heard of such a thing. They aren't coming to get your guns or bibles either. And when compared on the basis of standardized populations and other factors, there is no statistical advantage to private over public education.

 

[mac]

Not common enough that I have ever heard of such a thing. They aren't coming to get your guns or bibles either.

Well, they can have my bible....the guns they'll have to work for.

Pretty much everything that gives "the rich" an assumed advantage has been on the table in recent years. Private Schools being just one of them, and the first that came to mind.

 

[Cardinal Fang]

Tell me, why does one of the most oil rich, and socialist, countries in the world have an excessive poverty level and extremely high crime rate?

So you didn't realize that your source was actually suggesting that more and broader resources be put into the War on Poverty. Pretty much what I figured.

 

[Cardinal Fang]

Well, they can have my bible....the guns they'll have to work for.

Again, they are NOT coming. People who don't come aren't going to end up with anything.

Pretty much everything that gives "the rich" an assumed advantage has been on the table in recent years. Private Schools being just one of them, and the first that came to mind.

The poor beleaguered rich??? That's a bit of a twist.

 

[mac]

So you didn't realize that your source was actually suggesting that more and broader resources be put into the War on Poverty. Pretty much what I figured.

No, not more....different. There's a difference. Regardless, why does a socialist country with the largest reserve of the worlds most sell-able (legal) product have high poverty, high crime, low education and a very low standard of living?

"The failed policies of the past" are socialism and communism, my friend.

 

[mac]

Again, they are NOT coming. People who don't come aren't going to end up with anything.

I know they're not coming. Why are you obsessing?

The poor beleaguered rich??? That's a bit of a twist.

That's what you got out of that? You see "rich" and all sorts of nonsense springs to mind, eh?

 

[TurtleDude]

Legal training typically covers Article VI, employment rights, and the concepts of prior and superior claim. I guess that's not a hard and fast rule though.

YOur rantings tend to be long on arrogance, short on relevance to the topic.

 

[Missed AB]

Not common enough that I have ever heard of such a thing. They aren't coming to get your guns or bibles either. And when compared on the basis of standardized populations and other factors, there is no statistical advantage to private over public education.

This is dishonest. Nationally, the outcomes may be the same as an average. However if you live inside the district of a bad school, you will then appreciate a private school. A private school that has poor success rates goes out of business. Public schools that have a poor success rate send graduates high schoolers to remedial classes in college. It is very rare to hear stories of the worst private school I went to...

About 90% of private school grads go on to college.

The study shows that an African-American student who was able to use a voucher to attend a private school was 24% more likely to enroll in college than an African-American student who didn't win a voucher lottery.

Chingos and Peterson: A Generation of School-Voucher Success - WSJ.com

Percentage of teachers in 2007-08 who reported that a student...
Public Private
threatened them with injury 8.1 2.6
physically attacked them 4.3 1.9

CAPE | Benefits of Private Education

Also if you are an involved parent, you can influence how teachers teach a lot more in a private setting. In other words if your child has a crappy teacher in public school, he or she may not get the best education for that subject and there is little the school can do about it because of tenure etc. If your child has a crappy private school teacher, they are going to be much more receptive to the parents voices. As was the case for my son.

Also I am not a religous person, but there are many things public schools cannot teach that private schools can. To you an me, this form of education may be wasteful, but to others it may be important.

My personal experience, I went to both private and public school. K - 1 in private school. I was learning french every day, was able to long divide, learned script, I remember a science experiment where we learned about the meniscus of water in a graduated cylinder and the sticky properties of water - how many pennies until the water comes over the edge. In High school after we moved, I spent 10th grade in private school again. I was behind the rest of the classmates. We were making recombinant ecoli DNA and running it through agarose gel, we had a physiology class that involved the 4 week disection of a cat. We had an economics class that involved studying companies and applying matrix formulas to earnings.

You are quite off base here, and are only repeating talking points without critically looking at the information.

 

[RGacky3]

So if someone built a house with his own sweat and blood and I decided to move him out and move myself in it's only "bad" if deemed so as a social construct? Does the builder not have a natural right to his own labor? Or is he just a slave to the taker? What's the point in having a right of property in one's own labor if he doesn't have the right to enjoy the fruits of it? Call me dense, but I don't see one.

No you don't ahve a right because he build his house for himself to live in ... and society should protect that, but that isn't the same thing as claiming ownership over a swath of land, nor does it mean that if you move out of your house and move away that soceity should protect your ownership of that house no matter what.

Also for him to move in he'd have to voilate your other personal rights, like the right to autonomy.

Either way, youv'e been obviously ignoring all my previos arguemnts.

You guys CANNOT seam to understand things other than black and white, Its not either absolute capitalist property rights or absolutely no rights of stewardship or whatever.

 

[Xerographica]

I am more than familiar with the concept and do not at all require your attempts to expound upon the topic.

You're more than familiar with the opportunity cost concept...yet you don't see the value of allowing 150 million taxpayers to consider the opportunity costs of their tax allocation decisions in the public sector. How do you explain this disparity?

What I am still not at all familiar with is any rational defense of your earlier claims of some successful "vetting process" operating in the private sector but not in the public sector.

The private sector operates on the basis of individual economics while the public sector operates on the basis of representative economics. The vetting process works in the private sector because consumers get to choose which private goods they spend their own money on. The vetting process does not work in the public sector because taxpayers do not get to choose which public goods they spend their own taxes on.

You have only confounded your problems here by complaining that opportunity costs as perceived by an individual cannot be accurately reflected by an individual's Congressional representatives. They aren't supposed to be. For one thing, an average Congressperson represents more than 700,000 citizens, many of whose "opportunity cost" jusgements will cancel each other out. For another, the information and knowledge necessary to any sound decision-making process are not well or evenly distributed. The judgements of uninformed people are not to be given the same weight as those of more knowledgeable individuals. Finally, the job of a Representative is to represent the INTERESTS of a constituent, not his or her OPINIONS.

How do opportunity cost judgments cancel themselves out in the private sector? That doesn't even make any sense. My opportunity costs decisions reveal my priorities...just like actions speak louder than words. What would it mean for the priorities of uninformed people to be wrong? It would mean that they would spend their time being unproductive. If they spent their time being unproductive then they wouldn't be taxpayers. So your critique was completely uninformed and irrelevant.

The Cold War ended a couple of decades ago. You have meanwhile provided no basis at all for assuming that resources are not efficiently allocated either to or within the public sector. Indeed the fact that nearly every other significant economy in the world has chosen to allocate a great deal more of GDP to the public sector than we do suggests that we are somehow losing out on social benefits that we would in fact value more highly than the relatively worthless crap that the private sector offers at the margin.

If I make progress as a person...is it because I always make progressive decisions? Of course not. It's the same way with countries. Just because a country makes progress with a mixed economy in no way shape or form indicates that representative economics contributed to a country's progress. But if there truly is a positive connection between representative economics and progress...then some people would have to see this connection with their own eyes. It would be the height of folly to allow 538 people to spend 1/4 of our nation's revenue on faith alone. If you say that concrete evidence exists...and that sane/reasonable people agree that it exists...then you should have no problem allowing taxpayers to choose for themselves whether they give their taxes to congress or whether they directly allocate their taxes.

The differences between whatever one wants to define as capitalism and whatever one wants to define as socialism might meanwhile make for an interesting discussion, but it would not be the present one. Try to stay on topic -- which is currently still your undocumented "vetting process" claims.

The two topics are one and the same. Capitalism has a vetting process while socialism does not. Well...it does...but it's so ineffective that they might as well not have one. The only effective vetting process is you choosing for yourself how you spend your own money. Adding this vetting process to the public sector would ensure an abundance of efficiently produced, relevant and effective public goods.

 

[Xerographica]

Still waiting.

Here you go...

 

[Cardinal Fang]

No, not more....different.

Read it again. See if you can find the renewed war with new commitments part.

There's a difference. Regardless, why does a socialist country with the largest reserve of the worlds most sell-able (legal) product have high poverty, high crime, low education and a very low standard of living?

Canada is actually much nicer that what you portray it as.

"The failed policies of the past" are socialism and communism, my friend.

Socialism and communism being about as closely related as petunias and vaseline. And the present should be quite enough to have demonstrated (again) the failures of unmanaged capitalism. No pure or extreme form of anything has ever worked. Everything that has ever succeeded has been a pragmatic blend of this and that. Mish-mashers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the stupid demagoguery of the extremists, whackjobs, and ideologues!

 

[mac]

Read it again. See if you can find the renewed war with new commitments part.

"Perhaps it is time for a renewed war on poverty, this time fought with new commitments and different policy weapons."

Different, not more. Different would be jobs....as stated in the report, when the economy goes up, poverty goes down. Jobs tackle poverty, not handouts.

Canada is actually much nicer that what you portray it as.

Canada's economic system closely resembles the US. Venezuela's does not, it's socialist and failing it's people despite huge resources.

Socialism and communism being about as closely related as petunias and vaseline. And the present should be quite enough to have demonstrated (again) the failures of unmanaged capitalism. No pure or extreme form of anything has ever worked. Everything that has ever succeeded has been a pragmatic blend of this and that. Mish-mashers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the stupid demagoguery of the extremists, whackjobs, and ideologues!

Communism has failed everywhere it's been tried, and socialist governments have failed or are failing as we speak. :shrug:

 

[Cardinal Fang]

This is dishonest. Nationally, the outcomes may be the same as an average. However if you live inside the district of a bad school, you will then appreciate a private school.

If it's somewhere else. Public and private schools that are located in similar and proximate areas produce similar results. You all keep hoping for some Magic Wand to appear simply because a school is privately rather than publicly run. You may as well give it up. There isn't any such thing.

A private school that has poor success rates goes out of business.

How could that happen? Unable to compete with the "public option" yet again? Even after carefully selecting only the best and most promising applicants while public competitors have to accept every student who shows up at the doorstep? These people must be REALLY incompetent.

About 90% of private school grads go on to college.

What's the rate for comparable public school students? It's safe to say that I live in a pretty upscale area, but of 12,000+ graduates from our local public high school system in 2011, 92% went on to higher education.

Chingos and Peterson: A Generation of School-Voucher Success

There has not been a successful voucher program anywhere. None of them has delivered anything even remotely approaching what was promised. Even in places such as DC where voucher proponents were given an essentially free hand to design their perfect model system, they have failed.

Also if you are an involved parent, you can influence how teachers teach a lot more in a private setting.

Private schools aren't accountable to anyone. Their teachers do not have to be licensed or certified. Their curricula are not open to criticism or debate. There are no boards of local citizens that you could run for or that private schools in fact must answer to. If you are fortunate, you will be granted access to a private school teacher or administrator. At a public school, it is your right. You only need to walk in and ask for it.

Also I am not a religous person, but there are many things public schools cannot teach that private schools can. To you an me, this form of education may be wasteful, but to others it may be important.

People can send their kids to whatever schools they want. Just don't claim that private schools have any sort of secret formula for success that public schools don't have because it simply isn't so. There are great private schools and there are great public schools. They succeed because they do a good job of educating, not because they are either private or public.

My personal experience...

...doesn't mean anything at all.

You are quite off base here, and are only repeating talking points without critically looking at the information.

Wrong. You are blind to the simplest of facts here and are wed instead to myth and propaganda.

 

[mac]

Private schools aren't accountable to anyone. Their teachers do not have to be licensed or certified. Their curricula are not open to criticism or debate. There are no boards of local citizens that you could run for or that private schools in fact must answer to. If you are fortunate, you will be granted access to a private school teacher or administrator. At a public school, it is your right. You only need to walk in and ask for it.

This couldn't be farther from the truth. All private schools have to be accredited by the state they are in, that includes teacher licensing. The school is directly accountable to the parents, who pay the tuition.

 

[Missed AB]

Public and private schools that are located in similar and proximate areas produce similar results. You all keep hoping for some Magic Wand to appear simply because a school is privately rather than publicly run. You may as well give it up. There isn't any such thing.

Lets assume you are right and they each do the same thing with similar success rates. Then why is half the cost not a better option?

Are Private Schools More Cost Effective Than Public Ones?

Average private school tuition ($6,600) was about 1/3 less than the spending per pupil in public schools ($9,620) in 2003-2004 (the most recent year available), and average Catholic school tuition ($4,254) was less than half of public school spending per student...

Private schools aren't accountable to anyone.

When you are paying them with a check every month, they are very interested in your opinion on how to better the education space. Private schools are accountable to the students and parents. Try changing the direction of a poorly managed class in a public school. Who is it you think the public school accountable to?

People can send their kids to whatever schools they want. Just don't claim that private schools have any sort of secret formula for success

If there was no cost involvement, what school do you want your children to attend?
If there was no cost involvement, and you lived in a district with a "bad" high school, or the option of sending your child to charter school, which do you pick?
If the cost was the same, the best private university Harvard, Yale, etc, or the best public university.

There has not been a successful voucher program anywhere. None of them has delivered anything even remotely approaching what was promised for it. Even in places such as DC where voucher proponents were given an essentially free hand to design their perfect model system, they have failed.

Failed how?

Urban Prep Graduates All College-Bound For Third Consecutive Year
KIPP Bridge Charter School

You are blind to the simplest of facts here and are wed instead to myth and propaganda.

I am not the one touting the company lines... I am supporting the rights of minorities and poor to have an option to the currently failing public school system...
Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West: African-Americans for Charter Schools - WSJ.com

As it turns out, parents in communities with charter schools favor them by a margin of 57% to 16%. Meanwhile, charter support among public school teachers has slipped to 39% in 2010,

Why do you think public school teachers are against charter schools? The word you need to google is "union"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/u...teachers-unions-court-gop.html?pagewanted=all

“If we start giving out vouchers and everything, or the kids go to other charter schools,” Mr. Meier said, “we’re then hurting our district.” Teachers’ unions similarly argue that charter schools siphon away taxpayer dollars and the most motivated students.

What is wrong with motivated students being in the best environment for success and having that money chase success? Seriously, why shouldn't smart motivated students be surrounded by other smart motivated students? Do you somehow think disruptions or needing to backtrack for those who are not motivated is a benefit to those who are trying?

 

[Cardinal Fang]

You're more than familiar with the opportunity cost concept...yet you don't see the value of allowing 150 million taxpayers to consider the opportunity costs of their tax allocation decisions in the public sector. How do you explain this disparity?

There isn't a disparity at all, and I have already explained why the founders built the government that they did and why every sensible person since has been able to understand the logic in that.

The private sector operates on the basis of individual economics...

Yes, you're right on top of things there. It's all the economics of individuals named Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart, Archer Daniels Midland, and the like. Just everyday, ordinary individuals. That's what the private sector is made up of.
---------------
The rest of your post is only further extension of the fact that you have accumulated the gist of a few unrelated pebbles of information and are far too grandiosely attempting to extrapolate from them. You have a great deal of work and study ahead of you before being able to contribute things of actual worth or note. Good luck with that, though I have little reason for any great confidence at this point.

 

[RGacky3]

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INDIVIDUAL ECONOMICS .... economics by its very nature is a social activity.