[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by plschwartz

Mulder:
I suggest that the siyuation in the US is not the best there can be.
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...+ceo+pay&hl=en

In 1988 US Ceo pay was ~ $750000 twice that of the average of other industrialied nations
By 2003 the rest of the world CEO pay doubled but US tripled (and that is w/o total compensation.

But http://www.usatoday.com/money/compan...otal-chart.htm
Suggests that with options total pay is 10x to 20x base pay

The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay at that company AVERAGES 407 times http://www.faireconomy.org/press/2005/EE2005_pr.html

Other studies have shown that CEO pay and increasing profits are not well linked.

You might also want to look at GINI a comparision of wealth inequality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ncome_equality
data is not great but perfectly adequate to show that our position is not with industrialized democracies but with third world countries below cambodia and above turkimenistan

My God how many times do I have to keep debunking this nonsense? The US has the best standard of living in the world--of course the inequality is going to be dramatic because other countries don't have the wealth we have--but this is the same old tired liberal argument that anyone with half a brain understands is incorrect. Why are you liberals so easily fooled? Have you ever actually thought about the math? If the "poor" earn $10,000 and the rich earn "1,000,000" in 1980, there is a "gap" of $990,000. Are we agreed? Now if poor guy in 2000 is earning $20,000 and the "rich guy" is earing $1,100,000, the gap is "1,080,000" and the liberals come out of the woodwork with headlines "Gap between rich and poor is increasing!!!" in big bold letters and all the Moore-Ons eat it up. However, the poor guy's income actually doubled in 20 years (increased by 100%) while the rich guy's income increase by only 10%. The poor guy has more purchasing power than the rich guy did relatively speaking. So "gap" between rich a poor is a liberal socialist trick--its is completely meaningless unless you look at in context. Those statistics you cited are "deliberate"--they know before they do it that the "wealth" gap is going to be large because there are so many wealthy people in the US. In other words, they use our success against us and you fall for it hook line and sinker. Use your brain, my friend!

You are always posting from the New York Times--why don't you read this and actually try to understand it!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/op...eberstadt.html

The most widely quoted federal statistic on deprivation and need in modern America is the "poverty rate" - a measure tracking households with annual incomes below a "poverty threshold" established at the beginning of the Johnson administration's "war on poverty" in the 1960's and adjusted over time for inflation. According to the latest poverty rate estimates - released by the Census Bureau on Aug. 30 - the total percentage of Americans living in poverty was higher in 2004 (12.7 percent) than in 1974 (11.2 percent). According to that same report, poverty rates for American families and children were likewise higher last year than three decades earlier.

On its face, this momentous story should have shocked the nation. After all, it suggested (among other alarming things) that Washington's long and expensive campaign to eliminate domestic poverty has been a colossal failure. So why did that poverty rate report end up mostly buried deep inside daily papers?

Maybe because many news editors, like policymakers in Washington, know the dirty little secret about the poverty rate: it just isn't any good. Truth be told, the official poverty rate not only fails to calculate trends in impoverishment with any precision,it even gets the direction wrong.

The profound flaws in our officially calculated poverty rate are revealed by its very intimation that the poverty situation in America was "better" in 1974 than it is today. Those of us of a certain age remember the year 1974 - in all its recession-plagued, "stagflation"-burdened glory. But even the most basic facts bearing on poverty alleviation confute the proposition that material circumstances in America are harsher for the vulnerable today than three decades ago. Per capita income adjusted for inflation is over 60 percent higher today than in 1974. The unemployment rate is lower, and the percentage of adults with paying jobs is distinctly higher. Thirty years ago, the proportion of adults without a high school diploma was more than twice as high as today (39 percent versus 16 percent). And antipoverty spending is vastly higher today than in 1974, even after inflation adjustments.

In the face of such evidence, what do you call an indicator that stubbornly insists that the percentage of Americans below a fixed poverty threshold has increased? How about "a broken compass?"

The soundings from the poverty rate are further belied by information on actual living standards for low-income Americans. In 1972-73, for example, just 42 percent of the bottom fifth of American households owned a car; in 2003, almost three-quarters of "poverty households" had one. By 2001, only 6 percent of "poverty households" lived in "crowded" homes (more than one person per room) - down from 26 percent in 1970. By 2003, the fraction of poverty households with central air-conditioning (45 percent) was much higher than the 1980 level for the non-poor (29 percent).

Besides these living trends, there are what we might call the "dying trends": that is to say, America's health and mortality patterns. All strata of America - including the disadvantaged - are markedly healthier today than three decades ago. Though the officially calculated poverty rate for children was higher in 2004 than 1974 (17.8 percent versus 15.4 percent), the infant mortality rate - that most telling measure of wellbeing - fell by almost three-fifths over those same years, to 6.7 per 1,000 births from 16.7 per 1,000.

The poverty rate is out of step with all these other readings about deprivation in modern America because it was designed to measure the wrong thing. The poverty rate has always been derived from reported household income. (Exigency played a role here: at the start of the war on poverty 40 years ago, those income numbers were already available from the Census Bureau.) But a better gauge of a household's material deprivation is not what it earns, but what it spends. When we look at spending patterns, we immediately see a huge discrepancy between reported incomes and reported expenditures for low-income Americans.

In the Labor Department's latest Consumer Expenditure Survey (2003), the average reported income for the bottom fifth of households was $8,201, while reported outlays came to $18,492 - well over twice that amount. Over the past generation, that discrepancy widened significantly: back in the early 1970's, the poorest fifth's reported spending exceeded income by 40 percent.

Unfortunately, economists and statisticians have yet to come up with a clear explanation for this gap (which is not explained by in-kind payments like food stamps or other assistance). The divergence may be in part a measurement problem: partly a matter of income under-reporting, partly a consequence of increasing income variability in our more "globalized" economy. But whatever its cause, it does drive home the unreliability of using reported household income as a benchmark for poverty.

For now, however, we should recognize that America has already achieved far more success in the war against want than our sorry poverty rate can admit - and that we need much better guidance systems for the anti-poverty battles still ahead than this one, arguably the single worst measure in our government's statistical arsenal.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a researcher in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, is the co-author of "Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis."

Do you understand that? There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the poor are worse off--all the evidnece is that they are much better off. Of course since income tends to increase proportionately, the "gap" between rich and poor is always going to increase in the absolute! However, you have to look at the relative increases--not the absolute increases.

Perhaps you need to go back and pull out a 3rd or 4th grade mathbook and learn about percentages again.

[combsdon]

Originally Posted by Mulder

. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the poor are worse off--all the evidnece is that they are much better off.

.......yup and you probably believe Rosa Parks was a Republican too.......

[plschwartz]

Mulder:
You are a lawyer answering the wrong question.

1. For some time it has not been true that the US has the highest standard of living but that is an aside

2. I believe the discussion centers aroun d the question of benefits of these excessive CEO salaries. Does it help our economy? how? Do you know of any studies showing the economic benefits to the shareholders of high CEO pay and perks? Does it help the average citizen.Would taxing then heavily hurt the rest of us??
There is no a priori right or wrong here but obviously the money paid to CEOs comes from somewhere and could I believe go somewhere else without hurting the economy or the average citizen

I believe that all of mystatistics were ratio data, not absolute numbers as you facilely try to suggest. And the number of the poor has increased I remember seeing.

BTW what about a thread tomorrow on the tax proposals?

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by plschwartz

Mulder:
You are a lawyer answering the wrong question.

1. For some time it has not been true that the US has the highest standard of living but that is an aside

2. I believe the discussion centers aroun d the question of benefits of these excessive CEO salaries. Does it help our economy? how? Do you know of any studies showing the economic benefits to the shareholders of high CEO pay and perks? Does it help the average citizen.Would taxing then heavily hurt the rest of us??
There is no a priori right or wrong here but obviously the money paid to CEOs comes from somewhere and could I believe go somewhere else without hurting the economy or the average citizen

I believe that all of mystatistics were ratio data, not absolute numbers as you facilely try to suggest. And the number of the poor has increased I remember seeing.

BTW what about a thread tomorrow on the tax proposals?

No, the poor has not increased, it has decreased--its about the lowest its ever been. You can find no statistic to prove the poor has increased (other than minor fluctuations relatively during recession periods). The number has signficantly decreased from 20 or 30 years ago.

But what are you advocating? If you are advocating cutting pay, how can you do that? You can't limit CEO pay. If you want to tax them more, you can't single out CEOs, you have to tax everyone above a certain income level. And you cut out your own legs with your argument. The number of high paid CEOs is miniscule--its irrelevant--you could cut their pay by 90% and it wouldn't make a dent in raising the standard of living for the poor. And I already showed you how reducing their pay would actually end up resulting in less tax revenue to give and extra few hundreds bucks to the poor.

The answer is clear that it will do nothing good to cut the pay of the CEOs, which is impossible to do. The other option, raising the tax significantly would be disastrous--we already went through that in the 60s and 70s--it was actually Carter that first cuts in the tax rates to try and right the ship--we had the worse recession in history due to high tax rates. Reagan cut them and we had the largest increase in the economy in history.

[plschwartz]

Mulder:
If you do feel so in need of being chastised please spare me and go whip yourself with nettles (yawn)


http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/pover...4/pov04hi.html
# The official poverty rate in 2004 was 12.7 percent, up from 12.5 percent 2003.

# In 2004, 37.0 million people were in poverty, up 1.1 million from 2003.

# Poverty rates remained unchanged for Blacks (24.7 percent) and Hispanics (21.9 percent), rose for non-Hispanic Whites (8.6 percent in 2004, up from 8.2 percent in 2003) and decreased for Asians (9.8 percent in 2004, down from 11.8 percent in 2003).

# The poverty rate in 2004 (12.7 percent) was 9.7 percentage points lower than in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available (Figure 3). From the most recent trough in 2000 both the number and rate have risen for four consecutive years, from 31.6 million and 11.3 percent in 2000, to 37.0 million and 12.7 percent in 2004 respectively.

[bassetman]

Originally Posted by plschwartz

Mulder:
If you do feel so in need of being chastised please spare me and go whip yourself with nettles (yawn)


http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/pover...4/pov04hi.html
# The official poverty rate in 2004 was 12.7 percent, up from 12.5 percent 2003.

# In 2004, 37.0 million people were in poverty, up 1.1 million from 2003.

# Poverty rates remained unchanged for Blacks (24.7 percent) and Hispanics (21.9 percent), rose for non-Hispanic Whites (8.6 percent in 2004, up from 8.2 percent in 2003) and decreased for Asians (9.8 percent in 2004, down from 11.8 percent in 2003).

# The poverty rate in 2004 (12.7 percent) was 9.7 percentage points lower than in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available (Figure 3). From the most recent trough in 2000 both the number and rate have risen for four consecutive years, from 31.6 million and 11.3 percent in 2000, to 37.0 million and 12.7 percent in 2004 respectively.

Out damn facts!

[stormylin]

Originally Posted by Mulder

Well, there is more to what the courts do than to interpret the Constitution. In fact, far more often they are interpreting laws for their intent and application that has nothing to do with the Constitution. But the Constutution is far too general to apply it with no interpretation at all--that would be an exercise in futility. I agree that some courts and judges go too far--finding rights that don't exist in the plain text, but interpretation is necessary to some extent because different people have different view of what different phrases mean. As an example, people here often miscontrue the 4th Amendment as requiring a warrant to conduct a search and that's not what it says at all.

How do you propose applying law without interpreting a meaning or intent?

For one get Rid of the majority of all these laws. At the stage we are at now, with all of these laws, Everyone is a lawbreaker. Two, if the law is not completely clear as to it's intent, then it should be sent back to the drawing board or flat out discarded.

Recently my husband was watching Bill Maher a political comedienne on HBO. I could hear the show in the background, though I was only half listening.

Bill Maher brought up that if you are a bank teller, you have No Problem getting it exactly right. I think we can use this analogy with law as well. In a bank they don't say, well, here is $7,000.00 it is pretty close to $8,500.00 so that will do. In law, the standards should be no different. If the law isn't exact and precise, then it should 'not be intended' in anyway to mean anything other then what it states. There is no reason language shouldn't meet the same precise standards as money.

If you give a note to your kid that says, go to the A&P in Toleda and buy milk. The fifty dollars is in an envelope on the table. (You didn't have anything smaller then a 50 dollar bill) Put $5.00 in your gas tank and buy milk. Then bring the change home to me. Then if your kid comes home and says, well Dad, in my interpretation I thought you intended the milk to go with something. So I bought 4 boxes of ring dings, a dozen donuts, and several boxes of every junk cereal in the aisle. I'll bet Mulder would say, if I didn't specifically tell you to do X, Y, or Z with my money, then I intended nothing but what I gave you very specific instructions to do on that note. Now little Mulder you are grounded for a week!!!!

Law is nothing but language. If there is a circumstance that is not written in the law, even if it relates closely to it, the same quality should apply in the language of law as it does for the teller in the bank, and what you 'intended' your child to spend the money on. If the quality of the language written in a particular law forgets something, then it is not relevent. Like I stated, it simply doesn't apply if it is not specifically stated in the law.

I reject that this would make law too cumbersome. On the contrary, if laws had to meet the same standards as a profitable corporation, we sure would have a lot less of them and they would be done right the first time. There is absolutely no excuse for vague language in law or elsewhere.

And if we go back to a discussion of the Constitution, and you claim it is vague or broad then only because people are so dumbed down and their language abilities are substandard to what it was 200 years ago, then a very controlled, revision could be done. Though, I reject that this is necessary due to the fact that the federalist papers explicitely detail the 'intentions' behind the Constitution.

It is just this simple, there is absolutely no reason that a law should ever be passed if the language isn't completely specific as to what it states. And if something isn't written in that law, noone should ever have the right to 'read into it' something they felt was 'intended' in the law but wasn't written. If it wasn't written, then the law doesn't cover it. Case closed.

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by stormylin

For one get Rid of the majority of all these laws. At the stage we are at now, with all of these laws, Everyone is a lawbreaker. Two, if the law is not completely clear as to it's intent, then it should be sent back to the drawing board or flat out discarded.

Recently my husband was watching Bill Maher a political comedienne on HBO. I could hear the show in the background, though I was only half listening.

Bill Maher brought up that if you are a bank teller, you have No Problem getting it exactly right. I think we can use this analogy with law as well. In a bank they don't say, well, here is $7,000.00 it is pretty close to $8,500.00 so that will do. In law, the standards should be no different. If the law isn't exact and precise, then it should 'not be intended' in anyway to mean anything other then what it states. There is no reason language shouldn't meet the same precise standards as money.

This ought to be fun.

GB is going to help me out here.

Ok, your assignment stormylin is to draft a statute of limitations for a legal malpractice case. Give it your best shot to make it exact and precise.

Then we can discuss all the exceptions that will come up!

Honestly, you have to be a lawyer or very familiar with the law to understand why what you are asking is outright impossible, literally. In order to be exact and precise, you have to account for every possibility and the more you try to do that in a statute, the more convoluted and inprecise it becomes.

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by plschwartz

Mulder:
If you do feel so in need of being chastised please spare me and go whip yourself with nettles (yawn)


http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/pover...4/pov04hi.html
# The official poverty rate in 2004 was 12.7 percent, up from 12.5 percent 2003.

# In 2004, 37.0 million people were in poverty, up 1.1 million from 2003.

# Poverty rates remained unchanged for Blacks (24.7 percent) and Hispanics (21.9 percent), rose for non-Hispanic Whites (8.6 percent in 2004, up from 8.2 percent in 2003) and decreased for Asians (9.8 percent in 2004, down from 11.8 percent in 2003).

# The poverty rate in 2004 (12.7 percent) was 9.7 percentage points lower than in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available (Figure 3). From the most recent trough in 2000 both the number and rate have risen for four consecutive years, from 31.6 million and 11.3 percent in 2000, to 37.0 million and 12.7 percent in 2004 respectively.

Did you read the New York Times Article? The whole point of it is the "poverty rate" is a joke--it is totally inaccurate. To give you and example, if a person who owns a million dollar home has no income this year (2005) he/she will be included in the poverty rate! If a business man (sole proprietor) has a loss (on paper) he/she is included in the poverty rate.

Do you actually know how its calculated? Have you taken the time to understand that?

Finally, I told you you are going to get minor fluctuations in recessions--the poverty rate would be expected to increase from 2000 (the first recession year) forward. And we are talking about very minor fluctuations relatively speaking. The key part of what you cited is this statement:

The poverty rate in 2004 (12.7 percent) was 9.7 percentage points lower than in 1959

You liberals are constantly squaking about how the poor are so much worse off and they are much much better today than they ever have been. How do you explain the fact that the poverty rate has been cut in half since 1959? Its been on its way down since then on a steady decline. Yes, you will see minor ups and downs, but if you graph it overall, it shows a steady, significant decline since the 50s.

Let me ask you, do you want to talk about this intelligently or are have you just convinced yourself you are correct despite the statistics that clearly show otherwise? If so, I might as well debate bassetman.

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by bassetman

Out damn facts!

You don't have the IQ to even begin to understand what those statistics mean, how they are arrived at, or how they should be analyzed. There is an old saying that you can keep you mouth shut and have people guessing about whether you're a fool or open your mouth and let them know for sure--you should take heed of it!

[linskyjack]

Do you actually know how its calculated? Have you taken the time to understand that?



Of course, obviously you don't. Check this out before making a claim:

http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/05poverty.shtml

[stormylin]

Originally Posted by Mulder

This ought to be fun.

GB is going to help me out here.

Ok, your assignment stormylin is to draft a statute of limitations for a legal malpractice case. Give it your best shot to make it exact and precise.

Then we can discuss all the exceptions that will come up!

Honestly, you have to be a lawyer or very familiar with the law to understand why what you are asking is outright impossible, literally. In order to be exact and precise, you have to account for every possibility and the more you try to do that in a statute, the more convoluted and inprecise it becomes.

Honestly, the fact that lawyers write laws in the first place is the problem. I don't agree that you have to be a lawyer to write law. (In fact I have co authored a bill- but believe me it was a bunch of gibberish). Here it is easy, though shall not throw rubbish on private property that does not belong to you. (And I don't even believe that people should get arrested for throwing rubbish someone else's property. I think they should be made to clean it up, or get a fine). I don't believe there should be such nonsense laws as 'disturbing the peace'. If you don't have the money to buy the luxury of lets say a single family home and your neighbors make noise, if it is excessive it should be up to the homeowner to throw the tenant out, or tell the next guy to move if you don't like it. Noise and kids running over head, or people that are night people doing laundrey at night is just what you have to deal with when you can't own a home. Then when you buy a home, and it is in a little cramped neighborhood, if the dog barks next door that is tough luck. Buy five acres if you don't want to hear anyone else's dog. We can fill up threads and threads of stupid laws. But the point is, there are far too many and they are far too convoluted. The reason law is such a mess, is because a new language was invented to write them. I say, the first way to fix this mess of a system we have is don't Ever let another attorney write a law again!!!

[stormylin]

Originally Posted by Mulder

You don't have the IQ to even begin to understand what those statistics mean, how they are arrived at, or how they should be analyzed. There is an old saying that you can keep you mouth shut and have people guessing about whether you're a fool or open your mouth and let them know for sure--you should take heed of it!

Actually, most statistics are just a bunch of garbage as well. The first thing you need to find out when you analyze statistics is what was the motivation of the person/people that started the study to begin with. For example, was it the Department of Education that dumped gobs of money into research that has a 'biased result' that kids that don't have access to Preschool are less prepared then kids that do for Kindergarten classes with 30-40 children per one teacher? Let's see, this is big research with Lots of statistics and it will all equate to a multibillion dollar business of Universal Preschool. It is all hogwash!! If you need a bachelor's degree to teach a 3 or 4 year old, we have serious problems in this country. The wisest eductor I ever had was a professor that taught us that nearly all statistically data, results and conclusions are pure fiction.

I haven't read all of the posts to the thread, but I recall seeing reported statistics of CEO's (or executives) pay levels going up in percentage and the poverty rate is climbing in percentage. Or something to that effect. Well, we only have to look at unemployment to realize the findings are Never accurate. Unemployment rates only measure people that are collecting- it doesn't measure people that are unemployed but not reporting in anyway to an agency or very underemployed.

The only thing you need to know about statistics is I'll bet over 90% of the time what the study claims they have determined, is fiction!

I am certain Bassetman has the intelligence to look at all of the variables that must be analyzed with statistics. And anyone that has half a brain knows they are believing pure lies if they think that the conclusion, result or findings have anything at all to do with reality.

[plschwartz]

Herr Mulder

Definition of poverty used as I quoted.
Income
used to compute
poverty status:


* Money income

o Includes earnings, unemployment compensation, workers’ compensation, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, public assistance, veterans’ payments, survivor benefits, pension or retirement income, interest, dividends, rents, royalties, income from estates, trusts, educational assistance, alimony, child support, assistance from outside the household, and other miscellaneous sources.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/povdef.html


*Your mystical man who owns a 1G house may not have any income for the year. But does he eat for that year etc??? Where does the money come from for that? Would it not be captured by the definition used above?

*swallowing nettles may not be easy but I think you will find it feels good in the end

[plschwartz]

LIN
The wisest eductor I ever had was a professor that taught us that nearly all statistically data, results and conclusions are pure fiction.

Statistics are a branch of mathemaatics and as such have no truth value. If you are taking of the use of statistical tests well I agree that they are often used by persons who have no idea how to use them. The results are read by persons who have no idea how to interprete them.

Having said that I suggest that the US Census Bureau does know how to use statistics. Mulder usuallydoesn't read much. They website given gives their understanding of the population their are sampling and its limitations.

However the definition used has been used since the 1960's and there is every reason to believe that the Census Bureau has made efforts to keep their yearly data comparitive.

Mulders claim was that poverty is the lowest ever. In fact the lowest was at the end of the Clinton years and it has risen every year since

Mr. Mulder may feel that when 5.4 million people are added to those below the poverty line is a staistical blip.