Sure, why take your frustrations out on your spouse when you can take them out on your mistress. Instead, you could just say, “Honey, look, I don’t want to argue this with you,” and go meet your mistress and have it out with her instead and then if there’s anything you didn’t cover with her, your wife will be there at home for you to finish off your critical arguments about whose turn it was to wash the dishes or pick up the kids from school or pay the monthly porno bill.
Economic mobility is the ability of people to move up in the economic system, to see their income increase, allowing them to live in freedom without the government benefits that Sean Mcelwee talks about in his column in The New Republic today. They can pay for those things themselves and decide where they get those services because they have the resources and the options to choose how to get the services that they need to live well.
I agree that it is a good thing that Republicans, especially House Republicans and a few Senate Republicans, are talking about social mobility and are finally putting some serious proposals on the table as they relate to the Earned Income Tax Credit. Even though I wouldn’t say this is the cure-all to solving the income gap problem, a term I prefer over income inequality, I wouldn’t just throw out everything they are talking about and put it in the garbage either.
When you talk about the income gap and, more broadly, poverty in America, you must first decide whether you believe in social mobility, because you can’t be in favor of creating more public benefits and telling people in poverty that the taxpayers will take care of them and on the other hand believe in social mobility and empowering people to be able to take care of themselves so they can move up the economic ladder on their own. That means providing education, job training, and work experience so people at the bottom can acquire the skills needed to become socially mobile.
For people to become socially mobile, they need additional skills to get themselves another good job, perhaps in a different field. They need job training and education, and people on welfare who aren’t working and have paper-thin resumes, if that, also need job experience, even at a entry level job, so they can gain the experience they need to move up in that field.
If you are not interested in social mobility and would like to see a grand welfare state where government provides most of the benefits for people, especially on the lower end of the economic ladder, then you aren’t talking about social mobility and the ability of people to move up on their own without public assistance. You are talking about an expansive welfare state social democracy, which is very different.
For anyone who’s not a math junky or a professional accountant or statistician who understands more than numbers and stats when it comes to sports and is actually interested in what goes on in football games and how plays happen and what the offense has to do to be successful and exactly what the defense needs to do to stop the offense, I’m going to explain why Jim Brown, the former great Cleveland Browns running back, is the greatest running back of all time, if not the greatest football player of all time. And then I’ll even throw in some numbers for the younger stats-addicted generation as well.
To look at Jim Brown, sure, you could look at his numbers and say they were very impressive, especially considering he only played nine seasons and 116 games and rushed for over 13,000 yards, averaged 5.1 yards per carry, and scored over 100 touchdowns. He averaged over 100 yards a game rushing in his NFL career as well but that still wouldn’t be enough to give Big Jim all of the credit he deserves, and you would need to go much further than that.
Another way to look at Jim Brown would be his size and physical talents: 6’2″, 225-230 pounds, 4 or 5 percent body fat. He could outrun not only a lot of receivers back in the 1960s but also outrun a lot of receivers today. He ran a 4.2 or 4.3 40-yard dash; I mean, he was literally a human horse with all of that power, size, and strength constantly going up against defenders; he was not only stronger, bigger, and faster than another man of that size and and speed coming right at you, but you had to stop him and that meant tackling him.
The way I look at Jim Brown is the way I look at all running backs; that is, what do defenses have to do to stop him? Based on that alone, forgetting about the stats for a minute, Jim Brown is the greatest running back of all time because he was simply the hardest to defend against and was always one broken tackle away from scoring because of his size and speed. There are plenty of running backs with that quality but no other running back was a bigger threat to score than Jim Brown.
Charles Manson has made a couple of admissions of guilt. I’m not a lawyer but this is what it sounds like when he says perhaps he should’ve killed more people. I’m paraphrasing here, but that is pretty close, and perhaps the closes, he’s come to taking responsibility for the brutal Manson Family murders of 1969 of people the Manson Family didn’t know or had ever heard of. The interviewer asked a basic straightforward question and got a fairly straight answer from Charlie.
I believe a borderline silly question has to be asked of Charlie Manson: Do you feel responsibility or remorse for the murders? It is a silly question because you know what he’s going to say: Remorse for what, what murders, what about everything you’ve done to me and so forth. It has to be asked because he’s the one man who knows exactly how many people he’s responsible for killing and you are looking for new information here and, if nothing else, to get a new reaction out of him.
This is not much of an interview but certainly entertaining. The interviewer is not asking many questions but really just letting Charlie do his shtick, his routine, and letting him go off on the world and what he thinks of things and letting him speak and make up for lost time spending so much of his time not just in State prison but in solitary confinement, during which the world that is still fascinated by the man gets to see how he is doing and what he is thinking.
I can feel a certain sympathy for Charlie Manson because it is easy to see why he is so pissed off at a society that provided only the corrections system as an early home for him. Never knowing his biological father, with a criminal mother who rejected her son, being shipped around from aunt and uncle to aunt and uncle, and then ending up in reform school, he received no encouragement as a child or the emotional and physical skills to tackle life’s demands.
I am not excusing Manson’s crimes, but many career criminals in the United States emerge from similar rough beginnings. Ted Bundy would be an exception to that, as well as Manson’s soldiers, but the life of Charles Manson is a lesson for society that it shouldn’t give up on the younger generation, because it could come back to bite them if young people end up looking for an avenue to express their resentment or hatred for the society that neglected them.
I’m not sure there’s someone more qualified than Charlie Rose to interview Charlie Manson, because of his intelligence, the work he puts into his interviews, and his vast knowledge about so much that is news-related. His interviewing skills are unmatched. He knows when someone is being straight with him and knows when they are leaving out important facts. His bullshit radar is superb, and Charlie Manson found himself up against someone who was more than his match in Charlie Rose in this interview.
The Manson Crime Family, which is what I call it instead of a cult, because of all the crimes they committed and people they either seriously hurt or killed, is one of the worst crime families of all time with regard to their large number of victims. Charlie Manson, the leader of this family, was a professional criminal and, until he put the Manson Family together, wasn’t a very successful criminal because of all the time he had already spent in prison.
Charlie Manson, even though he was not an educated man (I believe he didn’t even make it to high school) is very intelligent and talented, has a quick mind, and knew how to use his mental skills, charm, and narcotics to make people do exactly what he wanted them to do as in the case of middle class, talented, educated, and intelligent people like Tex Watson and the Manson women.
Charlie Manson felt he had been screwed his entire life and searched for a way to express his anger and get his payback. He found the perfect cast of characters to do his evil work, a group of people who felt lost, didn’t fit into the establishment, and were looking for a leader. They found Charles Manson instead and he led them to ruin their lives and those of the victims and their families. ABC News: 20/20 Diane Sawyer- 1994 Special on The Manson Family
Bob Garfield in his column in Slate today was explaining what he loved about big government and laying out a lot of the things that government does and calling them big government. The problem is that not all government is big and all civilized developed countries have a certain level of government that collects taxes to fund the operations that the people need government to do. Having a government does not necessarily mean that the government is big.
“Big” government actually is government trying to do too much and trying to make decisions for those qualified to make them for themselves, whether these decisions are economic or personal. The safety net, the Postal Service, the military, law enforcement, homeland security are not big government, but trying to replace successful private industries with these agencies in the safety net or eliminating privacy with law enforcement, homeland security and defense would be big government because people would not have the freedom they need over their own lives.
There is small government that leaves almost everything up to the private sector. There is big government that basically tries to manage the economy even if it does not own the entire economy, but at the very least tries to manage the people in the economy for their own good. But there is also big government that tries to eliminate personal choice and privacy because it does not trust the people to make decisions about their own lives. And these would be the differences between big government and a limited government.
I somewhat covered this last week with a blog on retirement and unemployment accounts for people so they can save for retirement and not have to burn those accounts when they are unemployed, especially for long periods of time like as we have seen in the Great Recession. But Senator Ron Wyden, the incoming Chairman of the Finance Committee, taking over for Max Baucus as he leaves the Senate to become U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, would like to empower all Americans, especially lower end middle class workers and low-income workers to save for themselves but also to start what would essentially be trust accounts for their children. He has a good idea and I hope he will push it.
We could do this simply by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is the tax credit that goes to low-income workers to get them off of the Federal income tax rolls. We could expand the eligibility to individuals earning up to $30,000 a year and couples earning up to $40,000 a year and stop taxing savings completely up to, let’s say, 10 percent of one’s income so people could afford to save but also encourage employers to match what their workers put away for savings and also perhaps have a Federal match of the worker’s savings as well for workers who are earning up to $100,000 a year.
I suggest allowing Americans to open two types of savings accounts that would be separate from their retirement and unemployment accounts and allow for middle class and low-income workers to for both themselves and their children and put money away that would be matched by their employers and the Feds as well. That would be tax-free as long as it is not being spent for non-emergency reasons and this would allow all Americans to build up nest eggs and not wipe out their retirement savings or consume so much in public assistance during economic downturns.
As a liberal I believe in the notions of equal opportunity and justice for all. Without those two concepts liberalism simply doesn’t mean a hell of a lot and it would just be a class philosophy. Taking from the few to care for the many is what separates liberalism from socialism. Liberalism is about empowering everyone, at least everyone who needs freedom, not taking from one pot to take care of everyone else, but expanding the pot for everyone.
Affirmative action, or what is called affirmative action, which means affirmative action for African, Asian, and Latino Americans, as well as Caucasian women who have fallen behind Caucasian men in the economy and education system, goes against the rock-solid liberal values that make liberalism the great philosophy that it is. Instead of punishing people for doing well, give them payback for discriminating against others.
Affirmative action denies one group of Americans economic and educational opportunities because of their race, and because of the fact that so many members of their race, and in some cases race and gender, already have those opportunities, it is simply unconstitutional and if we didn’t have so many judges with socialist notions of equality at all cost, affirmative action would have been thrown out as unconstitutional 40 years ago.
As a liberal I also believe you can’t achieve equality without liberty. For people to be as successful and as free as possible in society under a Rule of Law system, they must be able to achieve their full potential if they choose to and that is just one more problem with affirmative action: That if you want to empower the people who’ve been left behind in society (and in some cases at least it does have to do with their race, ethnicity or gender) the simple way to do that is to empower them and give them the tools they need to be as successful in society as possible.
The way to achieve liberty and equality for all, equal opportunity, and justice for all is first to throw out affirmative action, or at least reforming it to the point that it only benefits people who come from poverty regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender, but my preference would be to throw it out and replace it with a system of strong civil rights enforcement, so you hit bigots in the economy and education. system in their wallets, so it would be in their economic disadvantage to deny people access because of race, ethnicity, or gender. You would have an education system for students where everyone regardless of income level can go to a good school in this country and that means having educational choice and a universal job training system for low-skilled adults.
The best tribute to Marilyn Monroe because it perfectly sums up Marilyn Monroe’s life is that she was a candle in the wind that blew out far too soon and left a huge hole that no one else could fill, or has filled since. She was the best looking woman who has ever come from Hollywood and also a good actress and a hell of singer. She was also very funny, and a lot of that humor was intentional, and even though she is stereotyped as a dumb blond bimbo, she had a quick wit and mind but many inner problems as well.
Marilyn Monroe was dead at 36 in 1962 from a drug overdose. It was a probable suicide but in a lot of ways summed up her life perfectly about a woman so perfect on the outside with so much talent but not much going on in the inside with regard to the ability to manage her talents and abilities. She was a woman who could attract the President of the United States and the U.S. Attorney General but was incapable of managing her own affairs.
She was a goddess on the outside but on the inside thought of herself as a loser without self-confidence and someone who apparently didn’t see much point in living and didn’t enjoy life. She had the talent and ability to work for anyone but a childlike inability to manage her life. She was lost outside her crib and could not manage life in the real world.
“President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday that Ukraine has to confront the possibility of losing its dignity or risking the loss of a key partner as it figures out how to respond to a U.S. peace proposal to end Russia-Ukraine conflict. (Produced by Elaine Carroll).” Source:Associated Press with a look at President Volodmyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. […]
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