I don’t want to side with the fucking NY Times. But all these Bernie AOC Mamdani types RAIL against the wealthy. Constantly. All they do really.
But now… even the rich, who can pay for social services, get free social services that less wealthy need? Isn’t that, uh, contradictory to bullshit democratic socialism?
I love this cheeky bad-faith question people concern-troll with, and of course there's a parallel analysis that happens in a lot of Americans.
"Would it benefit people who are of a race, gender or sexuality that I don't like?"
And that—friends—is why we can't have nice things. Or at least why Democrats have to bow and scrape and ground out every inch, graudally to get us nice things.
Thank you, Dok, for including the link to the Trabant article. I was living in West Germany when the wall came down and very shortly thereafter you saw Trabis all over the autobahn. Abandoned all over the autobahn that is. I don't think I ever saw one actually running.
I thought A-1 Stake Sause was going to replace all the canceled DIE/Wokery-pokery Chidren Cares an Edumacasihunalismzez? Now how brown chikka brown cow will all those poor, starving military industrial complexes get their juicy tax dollars for to replace all the esplodeyed bombs if'n they gets spent instead on bringing up bratty babbys???!!!
It’s important to point out that childcare is considered free women’s work (aka slavery), which is why people would rather eat shit on a stick than pay fair wages to childcare educators (my sis has a *college degree* in early childhood development and ed., makes less than Starbucks). Clearly, giving children attention and constructive activities is valuable and not an inborn skill of male nor female of the species.
I saw this excerpt on another blog. I didn’t realize it is from the NYT.
“East 65th Street, in one of New York City’s wealthiest ZIP codes, offers a bounty of goods for its residents to enjoy.
There’s the $34 double cheeseburger with thick-cut bacon at the popular local restaurant the East Pole, the $2,250 leather shoulder bag lined in lambskin at the Versace outpost on Madison Avenue and a $28 million four-bedroom condo with private elevator available in the Giorgio Armani Residences a block from Central Park.”
That’s true for the block by Central Park. The daycare will be on the other side of the Upper East Side which is much more middle class to upper middle class.
A hit piece. They know how they’re slanting coverage with that opening.
Edit: Eight paragraphs down from the above opening:
“The Upper East Side is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the United States, and more than 40 percent of the households in the ZIP code that encompasses the child care center make more than $200,000 per year, according to census data.
But the neighborhood is also more socioeconomically diverse than its stereotype. It is home to many renters and city workers, and it contains the gradations of wealth that make the city’s current affordability crisis so complex.”
Well…the only reason we have social security today is b/c Roosevelt agreed to let the wealthy have it too…figuring they could get that changed later on.
Oops. Imagine if (a) they eliminated the earnings cap, and (b) capped income eligibility for receiving it. It was supposed to be a safety net, not another savings account for the wealthy.
In my other country, Canada 🇨🇦, they call it social INSURANCE, as it should be.
Canada has capped income eligibility for receiving it? I'm all in favor of eliminating the earnings cap, but not saying that people who paid into can't receive it.
As Milton Friedman used to say, it’s a bad tax, and a regressive tax that punishes lower income working class people the most. On the other hand, FDR said to his brains trust that every generation would not realize that the tax they paid (I really dislike saying people “paid into” Social Security, but I give up; people paid the tax when they were working, and the next generation pays the tax when they are working, and widows and children and the disabled deserve to be given something to live on so that they don’t starve to death like the Irish did during the 1840s potato famine.) had been spent, and so they would holler bloody murder if they weren’t paid when it was their turn.
The trust funds were running low in the early 1980s, and a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission chaired by Alan Greenspan recommended tax increases (no complaints that the 1973 indexing of payments to the Consumer Price Index was dumb, because 75 year old widows were testifying before Congress that $200 a month wasn’t enough to pay rent and buy food and medicine and pay for heat. These were wives who had stayed at home and raised the kids while the husband worked, and what was Congress supposed to do..let them die like the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto?), which restored solvency to the funds.
Small business owners screamed at the time that they were being raped by the Greenspan commission’s fix, but the problem was fixed. The taxes were supposed to be front loaded into the trust funds so that as demographics of the “Baby Boom” changed the ratio of retirees to workers, the larger demographic would still be taken care of. But Republicans had discovered the joys of deficit spending and high inflation, and the size of the deficit was masked by the accounting trick of using the payroll taxes to keep the actual increase in the debt from being apparent, as the nation went, in 8 short years, from being a net creditor nation to being a net debtor nation, under the eyes of “fiscal conservatives” who believed in big military budgets and low income taxes.
Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton, tried in their own way to restore the fiscal system to a sound basis, and Clinton, by cutting defense spending after the fall of the Soviet Union, was able to achieve a budget surplus. Al Gore famously said that the surplus needed to be saved “in a lockbox” for when Social Security would need more money to pay for the retirement of the Baby Boom generation. George Will, among others, famously said the the surplus showed that the nation was “overtaxed”, and so the horrible Bush tax cut, which gave 80% of the benefit to 5% of the taxpayers, was ennacted, and all the Baby Boomers that wanted to be taxed at 19% of GDP while receiving services of 23% of GDP were overjoyed to see taxes go down, and spending go up.
No investment was made for energy independence using solar and wind energy. Rush Limbaugh, Dick Chaney, and oligarchs laughed at the protestations of fiscally conservatives, who increasingly found a home with the Democratic Party, as a sane and sensible party.
After Obama tried to restore sanity to the nation’s budget, fought at every budget by Mitch McConnell and the “Young Guns”, who wanted Obama to fail more than they wanted the nation to succeed, the Boomer Generation again elected an even more mendacious and fiscally responsible Congress that passed an even more horrible tax cut, so that the US looked even worse on its balance sheet than Weimar Germany and 00s Greece, once again leaving a mess for Joe Biden to clean up.
And the Boomers and Generation X and Generation Y and Generation Z and the Millennials once again elected Republicans and the “trickle down” tax cuts that once again, and forever, have never paid for themselves. Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan and the Chicago School of Economics stand exposed before history as being to macroeconomics what TD Lysenko was to genetics.
So, Goddamn! The Oligarchs have enjoyed half a century of obscene wealth. The only way to restore fiscal balance to the budget of the country is to tax the wealthy, because that is where the money is. Whatever amount of tax it will take on the 938 trillionaires to pay Social Security benefits is what it is going to take. And no one, not religious pastors and clerics, not firearms enthusiasts, and certainly not fiscal conservatives, should find any reason to complain about higher taxes, because, pace George Will, the American people (at least the top 0.1%) have been undertaxed for the last 46 years. It’s time to get the house in order.
We should have elected Ross Perot and Al Gore when we had the chance. That’s on all of us, but especially on conservatives.
But a "sliding scale fee" requires giving out your financial information to strangers. Ok, maybe with the military, you can just set it by the rank or civil service rating of the parent and estimate from that, but it's nobody's business who is poor and who is not. Those kids are gonna learn the hard lessons of class differences soon enough.
I don’t want to side with the fucking NY Times. But all these Bernie AOC Mamdani types RAIL against the wealthy. Constantly. All they do really.
But now… even the rich, who can pay for social services, get free social services that less wealthy need? Isn’t that, uh, contradictory to bullshit democratic socialism?
Nope.
I love this cheeky bad-faith question people concern-troll with, and of course there's a parallel analysis that happens in a lot of Americans.
"Would it benefit people who are of a race, gender or sexuality that I don't like?"
And that—friends—is why we can't have nice things. Or at least why Democrats have to bow and scrape and ground out every inch, graudally to get us nice things.
Thank you, Dok, for including the link to the Trabant article. I was living in West Germany when the wall came down and very shortly thereafter you saw Trabis all over the autobahn. Abandoned all over the autobahn that is. I don't think I ever saw one actually running.
"And, of course, means testing requires a level of bureaucracy that will use funds that could better be used to provide the service to more people."
It also requires more than a little time and effort to convince those same bureaucrats that you qualify.
But if it is free for everyone then you qualify without having to prove it. Saves a lot of time, effort and money in bureaucratic paperwork.
The Fucking New York fucking Time's belief is that if everybody can have free day-care then nobody is special and that's just wrong.
CA is being stupid. Just the savings from administrative costs can probably make the program universal.
What else can you expect from the NYT?
What they are really afraid of is rich kids mixing with and making friends with the poor. That leads straight to empathy.
I thought A-1 Stake Sause was going to replace all the canceled DIE/Wokery-pokery Chidren Cares an Edumacasihunalismzez? Now how brown chikka brown cow will all those poor, starving military industrial complexes get their juicy tax dollars for to replace all the esplodeyed bombs if'n they gets spent instead on bringing up bratty babbys???!!!
It’s important to point out that childcare is considered free women’s work (aka slavery), which is why people would rather eat shit on a stick than pay fair wages to childcare educators (my sis has a *college degree* in early childhood development and ed., makes less than Starbucks). Clearly, giving children attention and constructive activities is valuable and not an inborn skill of male nor female of the species.
I saw this excerpt on another blog. I didn’t realize it is from the NYT.
“East 65th Street, in one of New York City’s wealthiest ZIP codes, offers a bounty of goods for its residents to enjoy.
There’s the $34 double cheeseburger with thick-cut bacon at the popular local restaurant the East Pole, the $2,250 leather shoulder bag lined in lambskin at the Versace outpost on Madison Avenue and a $28 million four-bedroom condo with private elevator available in the Giorgio Armani Residences a block from Central Park.”
That’s true for the block by Central Park. The daycare will be on the other side of the Upper East Side which is much more middle class to upper middle class.
A hit piece. They know how they’re slanting coverage with that opening.
Edit: Eight paragraphs down from the above opening:
“The Upper East Side is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the United States, and more than 40 percent of the households in the ZIP code that encompasses the child care center make more than $200,000 per year, according to census data.
But the neighborhood is also more socioeconomically diverse than its stereotype. It is home to many renters and city workers, and it contains the gradations of wealth that make the city’s current affordability crisis so complex.”
They’ve covered their ass, I guess.
Armani? Seriously, a designer condo building?
They love class warfare when it suits their purposes.
NYT is probably why AI is still so dumb.
Well…the only reason we have social security today is b/c Roosevelt agreed to let the wealthy have it too…figuring they could get that changed later on.
Oops. Imagine if (a) they eliminated the earnings cap, and (b) capped income eligibility for receiving it. It was supposed to be a safety net, not another savings account for the wealthy.
In my other country, Canada 🇨🇦, they call it social INSURANCE, as it should be.
We live in the stupidest country ever.
That's the reason we still have Social Security.
As opposed to???
As opposed to not having it.
Nononono. Once it is not universal, it becomes easy to defund it and then eliminate it.
Sure…better the shit we have, because it could be worse. All those other countries are wrong.
Canada has capped income eligibility for receiving it? I'm all in favor of eliminating the earnings cap, but not saying that people who paid into can't receive it.
As Milton Friedman used to say, it’s a bad tax, and a regressive tax that punishes lower income working class people the most. On the other hand, FDR said to his brains trust that every generation would not realize that the tax they paid (I really dislike saying people “paid into” Social Security, but I give up; people paid the tax when they were working, and the next generation pays the tax when they are working, and widows and children and the disabled deserve to be given something to live on so that they don’t starve to death like the Irish did during the 1840s potato famine.) had been spent, and so they would holler bloody murder if they weren’t paid when it was their turn.
The trust funds were running low in the early 1980s, and a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission chaired by Alan Greenspan recommended tax increases (no complaints that the 1973 indexing of payments to the Consumer Price Index was dumb, because 75 year old widows were testifying before Congress that $200 a month wasn’t enough to pay rent and buy food and medicine and pay for heat. These were wives who had stayed at home and raised the kids while the husband worked, and what was Congress supposed to do..let them die like the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto?), which restored solvency to the funds.
Small business owners screamed at the time that they were being raped by the Greenspan commission’s fix, but the problem was fixed. The taxes were supposed to be front loaded into the trust funds so that as demographics of the “Baby Boom” changed the ratio of retirees to workers, the larger demographic would still be taken care of. But Republicans had discovered the joys of deficit spending and high inflation, and the size of the deficit was masked by the accounting trick of using the payroll taxes to keep the actual increase in the debt from being apparent, as the nation went, in 8 short years, from being a net creditor nation to being a net debtor nation, under the eyes of “fiscal conservatives” who believed in big military budgets and low income taxes.
Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton, tried in their own way to restore the fiscal system to a sound basis, and Clinton, by cutting defense spending after the fall of the Soviet Union, was able to achieve a budget surplus. Al Gore famously said that the surplus needed to be saved “in a lockbox” for when Social Security would need more money to pay for the retirement of the Baby Boom generation. George Will, among others, famously said the the surplus showed that the nation was “overtaxed”, and so the horrible Bush tax cut, which gave 80% of the benefit to 5% of the taxpayers, was ennacted, and all the Baby Boomers that wanted to be taxed at 19% of GDP while receiving services of 23% of GDP were overjoyed to see taxes go down, and spending go up.
No investment was made for energy independence using solar and wind energy. Rush Limbaugh, Dick Chaney, and oligarchs laughed at the protestations of fiscally conservatives, who increasingly found a home with the Democratic Party, as a sane and sensible party.
After Obama tried to restore sanity to the nation’s budget, fought at every budget by Mitch McConnell and the “Young Guns”, who wanted Obama to fail more than they wanted the nation to succeed, the Boomer Generation again elected an even more mendacious and fiscally responsible Congress that passed an even more horrible tax cut, so that the US looked even worse on its balance sheet than Weimar Germany and 00s Greece, once again leaving a mess for Joe Biden to clean up.
And the Boomers and Generation X and Generation Y and Generation Z and the Millennials once again elected Republicans and the “trickle down” tax cuts that once again, and forever, have never paid for themselves. Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan and the Chicago School of Economics stand exposed before history as being to macroeconomics what TD Lysenko was to genetics.
So, Goddamn! The Oligarchs have enjoyed half a century of obscene wealth. The only way to restore fiscal balance to the budget of the country is to tax the wealthy, because that is where the money is. Whatever amount of tax it will take on the 938 trillionaires to pay Social Security benefits is what it is going to take. And no one, not religious pastors and clerics, not firearms enthusiasts, and certainly not fiscal conservatives, should find any reason to complain about higher taxes, because, pace George Will, the American people (at least the top 0.1%) have been undertaxed for the last 46 years. It’s time to get the house in order.
We should have elected Ross Perot and Al Gore when we had the chance. That’s on all of us, but especially on conservatives.
You pay for health insurance, but nobody gets their money back if they don’t get sick.
Social Security is not for health. You're thinking of Medicare.
Nothing the NYT is doing, gives me the least bit of a teeny tiny urge, to subscribe again.
But a "sliding scale fee" requires giving out your financial information to strangers. Ok, maybe with the military, you can just set it by the rank or civil service rating of the parent and estimate from that, but it's nobody's business who is poor and who is not. Those kids are gonna learn the hard lessons of class differences soon enough.
I think we should always ask rich people how they would like to be prepared before eating them. It's just being polite.
To the barricades!!
"Are you prepared for me to eated you all up rich persons?"*
* Trick Q! They were already in mah belly by the time I even thought to ask...
You sound like Majinbu or Galactus. Bet those upper class snobs don’t know who those guys are. 😎😎😎
They’ve never heard of what once was the envy of the world public schools? National parks?
Yes, but envy is bad. One of those seven deadly sins, after all. If all public services are lousy, no one will envy them!