There are two, easy to explain reasons, why taxing the very rich at the same rate as others is morally wrong.


1. Very rich people are wealthier than they "deserve" if you measure what they deserve by seeing how hard they worked, how much they sacrificed, and what kind of risks they took. Those criteria may indeed indicate that some people might be deserving of moderate wealth but not extreme wealth.


2. Marginal utility. People who pay ten times as much for a Rolls Royce get about twice as much happiness as they would from a new Acura. But if instead the money was used to give nine people as well as themselves Acuras, happiness increase would be nine times as great. Super wealthy do not morally have the right to deprive the rest of the world that much increased happiness so they can get a small increase. Especially given the fact that most of their wealth came from luck.

Black would-be scholars aren't the only ones accused of acting white and risk being ostracized by their peers if they're caught reading a book or doing homework.

My wife taught in the inner city of Milwaukee for almost 15 years and saw it daily. I could go on forever with stories from the trenches.

Speaking just for the Milwaukee Schools, I think it's a discipline problem first, and a smart-shaming problem second. Teachers are expected to educate kids while giving 80% of their time and attention to the 20% of the class that flat out refuses to participate in their own education no matter what and actively prevent everyone else from being educated.

The article linked above talks about how much worse the "acting white" problem gets when you increase the diversity of the school population. That means you can't even always escape the hell that is inner city public schools by busing out to the suburbs.

Generations of kids are being left to rot in an uneducated wasteland. It's a problem that can only be solved from inside those communities. No amount of grant money or white women with half a dozen PHDs and massive consulting contracts are going to fix it. But we can't even have an honest conversation about it because it's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable when faced with reality, so we blame institutional racism and lack of funding. Meanwhile, many of the poorest-performing schools spend significantly more per student than their much higher achieving neighboring districts. Why? Because it's not a spending problem, despite what you're constantly told.

It's true that some areas of the country underpay teachers though. Looking at you, every single state in the South and California.

Grunching

#3 is already happening on a much more prolific scale than you want due to campaign finance law. The super wealthy control infinitely more of how money is spent than the huddling masses.

#8 would lead to worse people in office and those people would not gaf about governing well when they’ll be gone in a couple years anyway

This sounds like indy is referencing executive extra legal actions like DACA.

How so?

Emphasis mine.
What is the reality? It seems like you are beating around the bush.

I don't know that it's a holistic statement. I've heard plenty of people say that heroin users, white or black, should just die, but whenever Republicans do mention people who have been given the short end of the stick and something needs to be done to help it's almost always a white person.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/...t-gap-debunked

He spelled out it pretty succinctly. Did you even read the post?

What wasn't clear in that post? Inner city schools at least in Milwaukee are an absolute disaster and stopped being viable places for education many many years ago. Our teachers are glorified prison guards and have received no meaningful help from the administration because actual discipline would hurt DPI scores even more.


Did you read that entire article? It's the very definition of putting your head in the sand and pretending everything is okay.

I liked the last paragraph the most:

Which led me to this gem: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/810128...iscipline-race

At no point did anyone who wrote either article actually speak to a teacher on the ground or spend a week observing classrooms. Much easier to write a story about faceless statistics and continue parroting the party line about racism.

I'm not worried about whether or not inner city schools are good or bad. They're not good. The issue that's being brought up is about the "deservered-ness" of the people in bad situations. For Trump and the nationalist right, the implication is a stark contrast between the rural exurb Americans who are "lost" and "in pain" and "forgotten" by the "coastal elites". They're real Americans who's needs need to be catered to and whose issues need to be resolved. But for African Americans and other minorities, usually euphemistically referred to as "urban", the bad situations they're in are self inflicted, caused by their inferior culture, and are used as a counter point to the superior "non urban" culture.

You can see how quickly this changes when Trump is talking about how well he's done for the African Americans, but then when anyone pushes against him African American areas are "sh*t holes", "infested", etc. The implication is clear.

So you don't actually care, unless there is political capital to be gleaned. Fair enough, at least you are honest. Maybe that is the disconnect between you and Inso. He is focused on the people and suggesting solutions to actually help the people, and you are playing politics.

So you don't actually care if the "solutions" you support do anything productive (or even if they do the opposite). The important thing is sticking to the party script and not giving an inch to the opposition.

That's a pretty uncharitable reading of Hue's post, IMO.

Hue's point is that the politics (really meaning the political framing, i.e. the assessment of blame) plays a big role in what kinds of solutions people look for and how willing they are to support different kinds of interventions.

Well, it seems like a big problem (and a recipe for never solving anything) when you can't even entertain ideas from people like Inso (who actually has an experienced viewpoint), because of strictly political concerns.

I thought his point was more about internal vs external locus of control and how the administration shifts that around based on race.
But I think when Trump talks about how rural whites have been failed and then calls inner cities ****holes--I'm not sure there is actually a different argument there like Hue implies. They can both be failed by politicians.

I will say I am surprised this turned into a (arguably) interesting thread, given the OP was so LC and trolly and written from a probable dupe account.

Well, as with most things, the truth is probably some of both.

So if you can never accept there is any internal locus of control because you are worried it is giving too much oxygen to bad actors like Trump, you are probably boxing yourself into failure.

Yeah. I probably shouldn't have said "the" point.

Also (this is to kelhus) I didn't mean to suggest we should entirely dismiss Inso's experience, fwiw. I just don't think it's fair to read Hue's post to imply that he doesn't care about finding solutions at all.

Race is a complicated conversation. Why is the student 'refusing to participate in their own education'?

It's very likely because their parents internalized the message that nothing they do will ultimately matter because they'll just have it taken from them. This is a very common perspective among poor people because historically they do in fact get looted rather a lot.

Why work hard and save your money if someone is just going to come along and steal it from you in the end? Why try to save up money to solve your long term problems if your short term problems are going to consume every dollar you don't spend today literally tomorrow?

This is a very common viewpoint among poor people of racial group IME. My wife is white, but grew up even poorer than I did, and she absolutely struggled with the impulse to spend money before someone vanished it (in her case her family) all the way into her mid 20's.

Black people in this country have an entirely different experience than whites. For generations if they rose too high they could very reasonably expect to be struck down by the system. Instead of mortgages they got contracts that were designed to steal everything they had invested. Instead of police protection they have experienced police predation (where cops patrol their neighborhoods looking to generate fine revenue while actual crimes are met with indifference and never get solved). And their schools and infrastructure are terrible. It's a perfect breeding ground for very nihilistic personal philosophies.

What I think is missing from a lot of 'they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps' narratives is any sense of empathy for just how few chances they get and just how severely any step out of line will be punished. Or any empathy at all for how screwed up a person would be if their family had been treated like livestock for hundreds of years and second class citizens from then on. Getting over the trauma is an extra weight they have to carry that most of the rest of the citizens simply don't. That isn't to say that there aren't people of every race who have had truly hard lives (I know quite a few), but the %'s in the black community are very different.

Inner-city schools suck and can only be fixed from within, without external funding? Is that what you think he means by uncomfortable reality? You bother to post but still don't spell it out either. What is the uncomfortable part? It's uncomfortable for tax-and-spend libs to not be able to throw money at the problem? It's uncomfortable for us to face the reality that those people have not been able to help themselves from within yet?

Why don't you consider deleting more posts before clicking post.

What isn't clear to me is what you specifically meant by uncomfortable when faced with reality.

I thought research indicated that lower class people (of all races) probably buy too much into the rags to riches American dream story; which allows elites to manipulate them into voting against their own class, by warning them that when they finally "make it" the government will come take all their money if they support wealth distribution now.

The lower classes actually feeling hopeless and having nothing to lose would actually be very dangerous to the elites, because then there would be a real concern for revolution.

Circling back to some earlier conversation:

I don't think that's quite right? I think the graph of parent vs. child income rank was intended to be a counter-argument to this claim:

If any strong version of this were true, you'd expect the data to look somewhat different. Instead, the data definitely suggest that social structure plays an important role in shaping outcomes, and lots of studies confirm this. I believe the above chart comes from an earlier paper published by Raj Chetty, but his recent work on neighborhood level impacts is also worth looking at, as far as establishing this point.

Philosophically, the debate about the relative importance of "social structure" vs. "individual agency" is a false dichotomy in much the same way "nature" vs. "nurture" is in general -- they clearly both matter and can be shown to matter. But I do think American conservatives (particularly those of a libertarian bent?) tend to underestimate the importance of social structure, and lagtight's succinct statement of principle is a good example of that.

(and the counter-point is that sometimes the solutions proposed by liberals pay too little attention to unintended consequences related to individual agency? Perhaps, the outcomes associated with "ban the box" laws provide an example of the difficulties)

It's also true that just evaluating the truth of the claim in #9 only takes you so far towards proposing solutions, but I do think it's helpful to have a more complete understanding of the issues, including the importance of structural factors.

The data I've seen suggest the need for more targeted interventions, and the importance of promoting desegregation and reducing the concentration of poverty in specific neighborhoods. Perhaps tangentially related, it reminds me of this article I linked in the gun control thread about neighborhood-centric policing efforts. Or this one on the impact of school segregation.

One thing I hope those articles convey is the idea that it's not necessarily just about "throwing money at a problem" in an unfocused way; more targeted interventions can touch on all sorts of policy decisions, from school zoning to policing.

Why on earth would anyone argue that a country should be run in a similar fashion to a household? Last time I checked most households perform staggeringly poorly, racking up monster debt and bad decisions based on silly motivations, usually raise the kids poorly, and end in divorce and horribly joint custody agreements almost half the time.

Same goes for running a country like a business, when something like 70% of businesses fail within the first two years or whatever. Makes no sense at all.

Also, the notion that 'the government' makes bad decisions with taxpayer money needs to have some work shown. It's always been a right wing talking point that has no real basis in reality.

I expect this statement is going to generate some heat and that you might need to walk it back completely.