Just to say I strenuously object to the misappropriation of a Peter Paul and Mary lyric in discussing a Tom Friedman column.

It's the hammer of justice,
It's the bell of freedom,
It's the song about the love between the brothers and the sisters,
All over this land.

I'm going with Ceres and Vesta. You guys can have the other ones.

Well do you then think that we shouldn't try to reverse the trend? I think it's clearly preferable to have a middle class, rather than to have an upper class, a lower class, and few conduits between. The existence of a middle class is what brought a lot of talented and driven people to the shores of the USA over the last fifty years. Those kinds of aspiring immigrants are a boost to our economy and a renewable resource.

I don't think my definition of middle class requires a white collar. My dad was a machinist who did quite well for himself and put three kids through college (though it was never easy). I do think it's becoming harder to be middle class without a higher education now.

Ugh I can't not respond to this.

"The big failures are in areas where government interferes: housing, automobiles, and health care are not getting cheaper and better, precisely because they are highly regulated." Do you truly believe that a housing market or a health care market with no regulation would be fairer to the consumer? That you would want to work or live in a building that met no safety standards? Or use meds that hadn't been tested? If housing were to follow some Moore's Law in the absence of regulation, shouldn't houses be several orders of magnitude cheaper, bigger, better, somewhere where those conditions exist?

This kind of thinking, blaming US regulation for anything you think inefficient or expensive, is magical thinking that dissappears with any kind of knowledge or curiosity about other parts of the world.

"If you leave it up to market mechanisms, things will automatically adjust accordingly: products will get so cheap that people, with very little work, will be able to afford them. We're already seeing that, with everything from phones to TVs costing less and less and doing more and more." This ignores the effects on displaced workers. The post is not about how great your TV will be in ten years; its about what happens to workers that get displaced by automation. Unemployed workers aren't going to be buying many TVs.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/middle-class-really-three-decade-slump

http://www.businessinsider.com/decline-of-theus-middle-class-2013-10

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/labor/news/2013/09/17/74363/latest-census-data-underscore-how-important-unions-are-for-the-middle-class/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/14/college-costs-median-income_n_3443806.html

http://www.aarp.org/research/ppi/security/impacts-of-rising-healthcare-costs-AARP-ppi-sec.html

I think quoting a single statistic without anything else to compare it to is disingenuous. More people surely are enrolling in college now than they were in my parents' generation. My parents, going to a state school, essentially carried no debt when they finished, and had good middle class jobs waiting for them. It was more likely in my parents' generation that one could be middle class all the way through to retirement without a college degree, as well.

The price of a college education has risen at a rate entirely inconsistent with median income. That's not just for Harvard or MIT - that's for all American college education.

Similarly, health costs have gone up without regard to income levels. Likewise real estate anywhere where jobs exist. Likewise daycare, or elder care. Pensions that were commonplace a generation ago are nearly extinct now, and vilified by a large segment of the population.

Sure, people can afford to have computers and DVD players and game consoles that didn't exist a generation ago, but the essentials of a middle-class life are getting more and more expensive relative to a middle-class income.

It would be an awesome first step if we could all just agree that the middle class (at least in America) is in decline from what it was one generation or two generations ago, and that that has several bad consequences, and that we should try to think of ways to reverse this trend.

I think it would be reasonable to admit that it does look as though a lot of currently-existing good-paying jobs (and even notso good) are being automated away, and that we don't really have much sense of what jobs all those displaced workers might be doing a decade or two in the future. I can easily google up lots of examples of current attempts at automating away whole classes of workers - bus drivers, teachers, care-givers for seniors, farm workers, guards and night watchmen, legal and actuarial staff. Logically, if the costs per unit output were more for these automated methods, (once the design, support, IT etc was included) than for the labor-intensive solution, then no one would be pursuing them. I don't see anything in recent economic history that leads me to believe the higher profits yielded by these automated techniques will be shared with the remaining workers. I doubt that too many of the displaced bus drivers or farm workers are ever going to be retrained as robot maintainers (or whatever new jobs are created.)

Most likely outcome: management is going to develop and use automation wherever it can, let go as many workers as the automation allows it to, and keep the profits. Productivity goes up, but the remaining workers don't get much in higher wages. Economic value (e.g. money, capital) continues to be concentrated at the top of the economic pyramid, where it is stockpiled and rendered useless.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/bitcoin-clampdown-continues-as-federal-judge-says-its-a-currency/

Pretty soon the federal government is going to reach out and definitively regulate Bitcoin. That is one of the functions of a central government.
Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates the powers of Congress, among which;

"To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;"

Why would you vote into Congress someone who seems not to have read, or seems not to agree with, the founding documents?

"Bitcoin's lack of regulation is not a Bitcoin deficiency, but rather a legal one. Blame government for treating Bitcoin as a commodity instead of as a currency, subject to the same laws as cash. Oh, wait, it basically is subject to the same laws as cash, [...]"

Bitcoin is not legal tender in the USA. This means that no one is obligated to accept it to clear debts. Other commodities, like say gold, or even cheetos, have some inherent value.

"the government can't create more of it out of thin air (which is a good thing, if you want your money to have the same or better purchasing power tomorrow as it did today)." I think this is a fair argument for anyone who has a fair chunk of cash in a savings account. But I don't see anyone having ever made an effort to change this through political means. If you don't like something your government is doing, a patriot would try to change what the governement is doing. If instead you try to undermine the government and the value of our mutual resources, that's not being a patriot - in fact, it's the opposite.

Google creates and then discards so many little initiatives at such a quick cadence - you'd have to be a fool to wire your house up with one, without some guarantee as how many years it will be supported.

TL

APL should get the top honors - but they hadn't invented the expression WTF what that was still in use.

If your working ~35 hours/week, you're really not applying your full attention to a university education. The idea is to go there, full-time, and invest your effort and intellect in learning. If the experience is adulterated by all of this $10/hour work, how can it be sufficiently rigorous that you can come out of it ready to compete with the 'best and the brightest' students in the world?

I sense a reasonable pride in having gotten through, and having earned some of the $$ in order to do that, but if you were a parent of a kid looking to get an education, you'd much rather they be studying full time (and sufficiently challenged to do so) rather than washing dishes, installing modems, laying cable, minding the circulation desk, whatever kids do for money.

... of rats.

Everybody uses the word 'draconian' but nobody uses an actual dragon.

This is not a vote on an amendment to the Constitution, but instead a vote on an amendment to an appropriations bill in the House. The OP could be much clearer.