If only this applied to bankers too, I wouldn't mind. :-/

You make this sound like it's a BAD thing. Are you saying we should not attempt to prevent people from dying entirely because it's expensive? Do we need an actuary to calculate how much more expensive healthcare will be if we reverted to a "Let their bodies line the streets" style healthcare approach? Because something tells me that when we have a vast and impoverished underclass that predominantly handles our food and already has largely no legally mandated sick leave that we would end up paying far, far more for healthcare even if we only consider the life and health of the affluent as mattering.

You mean the Swiss Model? Yes, that MIGHT work, but it'd require far far more government regulation than I think anyone here could stomach. Currently the Swiss have the only viable alternative to single payer that still makes sure everyone gets coverage and they do it by meticulously watching the insurance companies as well as the hospitals.

Um, not all nationalization is a bad thing either; or do you not believe in Public goods?

There are a great many things that while they serve the entire nation, like roads, police and fire departments, are simply impossible to sufficiently fund through a model of voluntary contributions. At least not in a society where income and wealth inequality rivals some Banana Republics. We use taxes to fund these things because making them available to all the people too poor to pay use fees ends up netting our society vast cumulative benefits.

These things need to be nationalized, because otherwise they would cease to exist in any useful way and we'd end up seeing our economy slowly revert back to the Gilded Age. So while you're definitely free to argue whether or not something should be a public good, please don't be so disingenuous as to imply that these things are unilaterally good or bad. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between.

Actually it's closer to thirty years now. Since about the Mid Carter administration real wages for all but the top 1% have either stagnated or gone lower. While the top 1% of the economy has increased its real income by about 247%. Tech work represents one of the few remaining high-paying fields that don't depend on your having a thousand wealthy social connections and doesn't force you to go into possibly inescapable debt to finance your education. If the software you write is good enough (and there are plenty of opportunities for you to learn to write good software on your own time) you don't need college, and that right there represents an existential threat to company bottom lines.

It's an avenue of productive work technically available to anyone that doesn't have the disposable nature of either menial labor or middle management in that anyone can be taught to do it well enough. Bad software means security risks, which could mean data breaches, lawsuits, etc. You simply can't afford to run your business on shoddily made software for any number of reasons, which means you have to invest in top grade talent and retain top grade talent. The only people who we currently treat like THAT are EXECUTIVES...The H1B program actually makes sense when you look at it that way; and that's why fighting H1Bs is important.

It highlights the glaring hypocrisy of our current society's economic system. We treat CEOs and executives like kings who must be paid deference each year through ever-rising salaries, fantastic not-linked-to-real-performance performance bonuses, etc. Yet for any other worker? Even if they ARE just as irreplaceably valuable to the company bottom line, we'd still rather deal with the problems of poor software than DARE to disrupt the ecosystem where only CEO pay and CEO bonuses are sacred, and all other workers must suffer to ensure the "Gods of finance" are placated.

That's the point, because it's subjective there's no guarantee people are going to share what you value, which means that while you can certainly persuade people to do things which hold subjective value to others, ethically I think coercion of any type is out of the question for anything that does not give objective value to the society.

This assumes everyone who is technically eligible would wants to become a Doctor, or that there were room for everyone to be doctors or other high-value service professionals. Obviously there are still going to be important service jobs even in a post scarcity society so long as we ourselves lack the capacity to understand and create intelligent agents with cognitive capabilities similar to our own. But in such a situation are we realistically going to say the entire population MUST hold a job that provides objective value? Isn't there such a thing as TOO MUCH redundancy?

If we require people to hold jobs that provide others with only subjective value how do we make that sort of a system equitable and accessible to all? If we're just rating people's ability to satisfy the meaningless but pleasing desires, how do we truly rate, measure or rank that? Because if we're going to coerce compliance from the greater society we owe it to them to guarantee that their compliance in this system will make each and every individual equally happier as fairly as possible. Right now I don't think humans know enough about themselves to truly do something like that.

Maybe it does for you, okay, bad example. My point was the value you get from slashdotting (outside of the occasional insightful/informative/funny posts which have slight chance of altering your perception by introducing new information into your mind) is still equally subjective. Yes, factors in your life influence your specific enjoyment from it. However the point is that no amount of these factors changes the fundamentally that the satisfaction you get is based on the unique configuration of your person and isn't actually tied to you doing anything substantially productive, at least no more or less productive than just spending an hour or so a day checking the news anywhere else.

And the point is that it's these myriad of factors which created psychologically the mechanism that gives you pleasure from reading slashdot or whatever other tech news sites you go to. This means that if you had not grown up as you, you wouldn't possibly like slashdot at all. This MATTERS when it comes to job assignments. This is what I meant about subjectivity, are we going to force people to post on slashdot because you and I enjoy it? Even if THEY hate it? How would we compensate those people to ensure the pain of their having to come post on slashdot was somehow reimbursed through their own equally subjective ways? How do you maintain that kind of an exchange?

Now, you can say that making games and making art has value to more people than just you and while this is tempting to use as a scale to measure desires against one another I am entirely unconvinced it is a fair way. If we are at the point where the bulk of the population cannot do productive work: Doctoring (and related medical professions), Lawyering (and related legal professions), Spying, Soldiering, Diplomacy, Research, and Engineering. and that this leaves them with a handicap where, for whatever reason, since we have to ensure they ALL GO DO SOME WORK EACH DAY we must put them to work doing things to enrich the happiness of the general population.

However, if we have to deal with forces of social jealousy so strong that we must force everyone to work, even if they hate it, every day, to keep our social cohesion going, then by creating a track of subjective work where everyone's aware that they're just doing busy-work to make other people happy then that's only going to transform that jealousy and make it so that the people whose desires were never fairly met by this system (remember, if you're optimizing for value to others that means you're not allowing a certain segment of the population to access to their possibly much more private, intimate desires, and leaving them out of the job rotation entirely. They'll always be workers and never be the one being satisfied by workers.) become the resentful, angry, disgruntled ones instead of the people who already work in productive jobs.

Of course, I question very much that we truly have enough people with a punitive/moralistic streak we'd have to force the entire civilization to work.

It really depends on who you talk to about education. At first I was sufficiently confused by the subject since the funding can sometimes be so hard to see past. There are a lot of studies however that have been done to figure out what creates the gap in education. And, while yes, school funding does play a level the single most important thing in predicting a child's educational success is their home life. If their parents come from good socioeconomic backgrounds, there's no abuse, and the parents are involved, the child will probably do pretty well. But if not? Well, the numbers for all those poor school districts bear that out.

But it's an interesting answer to what had seemed like a chicken-egg problem. Poor (usually minority) students do a lot worse in school, especially poorly funded schools that might not have the best teachers, because their home life is calamitous enough (food insecurity is a real hell of a problem.) they just don't have the time, energy or perhaps even the willpower (how would they have Internal motivation if no one teaches them why education is valuable? My own parents loved to get off on their own authority with "Because I said so!" style proclamations and I know that if they hadn't been so hard involved on doggedly keeping me in school I might never have even graduated myself because of everything else going on at the time. But for people on the lower end of the scale with less involved parents it's easy to see why a lot of kids don't value school...even moreso with all of the college grads flooding unemployment rolls.) necessary to change any of those things for long enough to make it up a rung or two.

But those are the exact problems a certain segment of society least wants fixed. At this point there's little question that a majority of our ills are being caused by the effects of our incredibly high economic inequality coupled with low social mobility. The pie is divided incredibly unevenly and many people are priced out of reach of the things they need. While yes in many cases there are help, the help varies region by region and many people aren't even taught how to properly apply for it, have to content with hostile environment when applying for benefits, and can often get caught in various coverage gaps if they do accept help that might prevent them from advancing further up the ladder either (such as with public housing.)

The reality is, the only solution long term is to fund a series of smart investments in public works (like an infrastructure bank) through a series of progressive tax reforms. If we did that then it's possible that we could resolve this issue given enough time (our present situation took 30 years to get this bad.) and political will. Of course, we never ever will, too much money invested in us doing otherwise and too many people who would rather we become the next Somalia than allow Uncle Sam to put $1.00 into the hands of a single poor person (they didn't earn that! They don't deserve it! To hell with the economy!)

Unfortunately "Something valuable" is meaninglessly subjective in most cases. Unless there's a crisis facing the present civilization then "something valuable" in a post scarcity society is synonymous with: "Something some arbitrary number of people arbitrarily consider not a waste of time." If your physical needs are all met and society only really has general "needs" for are either high-end knowledge workers, or potentially extremely dangerous physical service work, like soldiering/security; then you have only a minuscule chance of ever doing what might be considered "valuable, productive work" (producing public goods or performing essential services that keep society running.)

You spending all day reading/posting to slashdot contributes exactly as much as someone who spends their days making art, video games, designs cars, etc. At that point since all you'd be contributing would be aesthetics/luxuries, your work, while it might still be personally enriching, would still be practically useless towards advancing anyone towards achieving any practical goals. Only those who wanted to spend decades schooling themselves and doing the hard business of science would be societies "Producers." Well, unless we hadn't fully automated maintenance work, if we hadn't the maintenance workers would certainly be one of the only other "productive" (advancing goals of the greater society/civilization/species) class outside of soldiers, scientists, spies, and diplomats (though the last two are only separate jobs some of the time! ;p.)

And yet, when I even went so far as to specifically ASK for the full description...you did not provide it, and your attempt to rephrase the question again betrays this. So I shall restate myself: What was the lie? What was the premise, why was the premise false or misleading, and what evidence do you have that I was being intellectually dishonest or otherwise purposefully misrepresenting facts in the statement you claim I made which was a lie?

Either you can answer these questions and "describe" my lie, or you cannot, and you were just throwing mud at random to see what stuck. But please, enlighten me! ;)

And you obviously haven't even read any of them. As can be evidenced by the fact your post is devoid of any and all complimentary/supplementary details describing any of the specifics of what it was you read. You're just being intellectually lazy and trying to cover it up by making a blanket "Tehse sources r 4ll b4d! b3cUz!" accusations; After all if you were serious then you would've explained in full WHY each and every source I used was wrong or otherwise did not support what I was saying. Just like how earlier when you said I was lying, and I asked you what the lie was, why it was false, etc. and you ran away form that statement with your brain between your legs, pretending I didn't write it. Because, you knew you couldn't back that shit up.

You don't just get to slap random labels (like Liar!) down thar buddy, they don't work that way. Adjectives are meant to describe something that already exists, you don't just call something a name and suddenly change what it is. It has to already be what you call it (and you need to be able to explain in detail why it is) for that to work. ;p

And this is why I'm just laughing at you. You're not even a smart troll. Every single thing you've said is superficial nonsense that betrays either you're retarded and don't have the brains to comprehend what I write; or you're an intellectual coward who thinks they can practice selective reading while I'm around and have me take them at their word. Game. Set. Match. ;D

Says the guy who can't bother to make on Citation when I back up what I say with sources. You never even tried to seriously dispute them. No, it was you who insulted me first by refusing to abide by the burden of proof in a debate. You were the one who claimed all of these things were possible and yet you have refused to offer any proof. I'm only making it plainly obvious to everyone else what the actual sentiment contained behind your words is. ;p

Well gee thar buddy, if that's the way you want to play it, go right ahead. ;p
But you know like Mitt Romney, you could've cleared this one up really quickly, especially since you don't have such a good track record with how you've been dodging things I've been saying. Like how the Tax Calculator was supposedly off on payroll taxes...but no, please proceed.

Just because everyone gets to go to school does not mean everyone learns there. Both the quality of the school AND the quality of the home life of millions of Americans living at or near the poverty line can create calamitous conditions which make it very difficult for children to stay involved and want to learn. Poverty is often a generational trap with one generation after another spreading dysfunctional behavior that without intervention of some kind will just continue on and on.

SNAP is not always available to single individuals and the benefit is rarely enough to feed a family. The minimum benefit is around $200 a month, and not everyone has been personally taught or equipped with how to make that money last the most. Here's another example of the same principle at work with college.

When you grow up in those circumstances no one often tells you at all or makes all of the information available in the manner you might need to make sure you can even do things like get aid paperwork in on time. These situations breed people who are uniquely unaware of how to obtain the proper help even when it's available to them.

Which is of course Asinine because you're treating all regulation and all expenses as equal when they are inherently not. Simple Econ 101 tells us that different investments have different money multiplier effects on the economy. You generate more wealth when you invest smartly, and in many cases the biggest investments are poverty programs like Food Stamps ($1.83 generated for every $1 spent) and Unemployment Insurance.

Sadly, Science disagrees about the rational part. ;p

I'm just taking this space to laugh at you again. Because I was trying to show you the numbers and you just went and said all my numbers were wrong, because you said so. So much for Mr. Superior Rational Mind. ;p

Do you remember the Social Mobility stuff I pointed you to? This is largely the case today for EVERYONE regardless.

Which is like saying that the answer to Rape/Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence is to get government out of peoples domestic lives...despite the numbers going against that belief in just about every instance. Humans aren't machines and trauma causes the rational mind to break down or at the very least malfunction in some pretty horrendous ways.

Couldn't have said it better myself! ;p

And you can't even tell me what I got wrong or why. I posted numbers, you said they were wrong, and refused to elaborate. Do you care to correct this or shall we just end the discussion now? I think it's pretty obvious to anyone else where you stand. ;D

And so what? Your ability to spend less than $1,000 a month now may have been predicated on some entirely exotic arrangements you were able to make with other people out of sheer luck/privilege. You need to do more than say "I did it myself! why is everyone else so darned lazy?!" I make a lot of money right now because I was lucky enough to develop skills in high demand and figure out a way to market myself. I was lucky, not everyone's in the same boat as me. For all I know you only spend $1,000 a month because your Rich parents bought you a condo and pay for any of your emergencies. You again have failed to do your work here in trying to explain how your situation represents a series of choices that are universally available to everyone. Claiming something is true is not the same thing as proving it is, in fact, true.

And how are those investments going to get made? You were perhaps not understanding my larger point regarding education. Those who live in poverty simply do not get a good education, food insecurity makes learning harder, uninvolved and/or stressed out (possibly even abusive) parents also works against this as does the fact that our current model of funding education entrenches privilege by allowing the wealthy to cloister their children. Their development and access to opportunity is cut short from the start.

No, you really just need to understand my larger point. It is simply impossible to give people a basic education on anything if they're regularly worried about being shot, possibly by their own parents, and can't guarantee they'll even get a next meal (let alone have any idea how they're going to get it.) The type of psychological despair that is unique to the impoverished stunts their development and in every study we've born out this link between poverty and education outcomes.

It's not that people are lazy; it's that they're too busy trying to solve problems the rest of society doesn't ever deal with. This is why they seem to be so un-motivated or uninvolved, because they're living in a very different, far more insecure world and experiments on learned helplessness prove that this is what can happen to people if they grow up living under those sorts of conditions.

Send their children to America to work on a farm to exploit the currency exchange rate so that they can finally make enough money in Mexico to eat?
Something tells me this strategy isn't going to work again...

First you need to give some examples of people who can survive admirably on low wages with dignity. You can't just insinuate that people are able to live like that well without even the slightest shred of proof that is, in fact, the case. Not after I just posted links showing the crushing poverty many face. That's like saying "I'm going to pretend your evidence does not exist, because I simply don't like it!"

No, I mean if you get into a serious accident and have to spend two days in the hospital that the hospital bill alone if you have no health insurance will be $40,000. Yes, normally you have liability in the case of cars but people perform hit and runs every day so that means not everyone has their bills paid for but everyone who gets hit has to go to the hospital if they get injured. That right there is a classic example of how a single bill can destroy someone's earnings.

Secondly, $250 a month is not do-able for everyone. I even went so far to lay the math out to explain it, but apparently you do not like to give credit to anything which disagrees with your position regardless of its potential veracity.

LOL, your critical mistake is assuming these people have sufficient starting capital to make investments. Not all investments are created equal and you yourself should know that access to top funds with high returns is only available to the major players who have a considerable pot to invest. Not only that we have to deal with the consequences of low socioeconomic status, which often result in poor education outcomes and little interest that would even lead someone down the path of making proper investments let alone guarantee they would be able to pick smart long term investments to make for 45 years.

Remember that whole 2008 crash? Yeah, a lot of those middle-class investors like you're trying to encourage here lost their entire life savings because Goldman Sachs was able to pawn off all of its toxic assets onto pension funds and other investment vehicles predominantly used by America's non-mega-wealthy classes. Your advice does not in any way guarantee the outcome you assert and omits a great many determining factors which would work to prevent this outcome from being universally achievable.

Currently? We print it, and despite the unrelenting shrieks of the Austrians we have not had any runaway inflation even with three rounds of QE AND ongoing QE. "Money" in abstract is a tool for commerce, it represents liquid value for trade and it's an entirely abstract concept. Gold is not money, Silver is not money, Platinum is not money. All of those things are precious metals that while highly "Valued" are not universally valuable to everyone. So while Gold, Silver, and Platinum may be somewhat useful mediums of exchange they are nothing like the guarantees we have on requiring people to exchange paper dollars. With paper dollars even if someone has no use for Gold, Silver, or Platinum (even to trade with someone else) they can still buy and sell the items they want to customers who want them.

Why is it the Federal Government's job to ensure you get a return on your contribution? Why does our system of self-government have to be subordinate to our economic system? I'm not even necessarily saying that the government shouldn't try and make sure you can earn money that way. Merely that your ability to make money should be entirely secondary in relation to Government's primary mission of securing liberty and wider prosperity in equitable proportion to all citizens. You shouldn't be able to make money doing things we can prove are harmful to the wider society. Like the financial collusion which fostered the crash of 2008. That was the banks making their buck on the backs of pensioners and taxpayers, I hardly think we should pay "The Market" the kind of deference that allows those situations to happen.

The raw size of our debt doesn't matter so long as inflation keeps interest payments manageable. We can effectively "Borrow money" forever. You see, the error here is that you're comparing personal finances to Fiscal Policy of a nation state that prints its own money and borrows in its own currency. We are also the world's reserve currency, which gives us a pretty sweet deal when it comes to issuing bonds. Interest rates are so low right now people are effectively PAYING US to hold their money because of the week economy.

Now tell me again, what exactly is the means with which this debt is going to be an insurmountable problem? Can you actually do the math to show me how catastrophe is going to materialize? Because if not then you're no better than the Austrians who keep insisting that Weimar Germany and Greece are hiding around every corner.

Did you not read what I just wrote? They DO if people are too poor to pay to get themselves good food or medical care. Those people, are much more likely to get sick, and because we don't mandate paid sick-leave that means they're also the most likely to spread disease to everyone else. Similarly if they die, and they can't even afford a funeral plot, what exactly happens to the body? I mean it might get taken care of eventually, but by whom?

All of these things cause public health and sanitation issues because all of them contribute towards fostering an environment ideal for the unchecked spread of contagious disease. This occurring entirely because you decided to deny the poor proper access to the healthy food, medicine necessary to stay well, and in some cases the education necessary to even know how to take care of themselves at all.

I lied? What was the lie? What was the premise, why was the premise false, and what evidence do you have that I was being intellectually dishonest in making that statement? Secondly, are you telling me with a straight face that it will not create a public health hazard to have a very large underclass of poorly educated people who can't afford healthy food and can't afford proper medical care, and who probably can't afford to take off from work when they get sick? That won't contribute to the spread of disease? My point is that overall public health is determined by the general population's education in living healthy as well as their access to necessary resources such as food or medicine. Cut off a very large segment of the population from both of those and you significantly increase the risk of spreading disease because you are now forcing people to eat, live and work in unhealthy conditions. Do you wish to dispute this? Then please do so directly.

I'm financially illiterate? LOL, you couldn't even tell me why the paycheck calculator's numbers were wrong. By the way, I've gotten official pay stubs from multiple jobs and can assert therefore with at least some confidence that their payroll tax numbers have never been off. (State and Federal withholding do vary though but we were talking exclusively about Payroll taxes at the time) If you wish to say they're wrong you don't get to avoid the hard work of proving them wrong. After all, if the math is bad shouldn't someone so financially literate be able to refute that with THE CORRECT MATH? ;)

Like me? LOL! I make over 50K a year, and am easily going to be making over 100K per year when I retire. I do App development for a major advertiser and can easily get a referral to any number of large companies looking to pay around six figures for what I do. The only reason I'm not making six figures already is because I love where I work and value more in life than just dollar signs. I also happen to know what being poor is really like much more than most because unlike most of the spoiled children whose parents paid to send them to Ivy League schools I moved out on my own with money I had earned and started my life for myself over 350 miles away from where I was born with nothing other than a suitcase full of clothes and some personal knickknacks after high school.

I'm no Horatio Alger character, but I've actually lived at multiple ends of the socioeconomic spectrum and I am eternally grateful for the compassion living like that has taught me. Granted, I don't know what the truest despairs of crushing poverty are because I could have at any time called for outside support, I simply chose not to out of pride.

Oh, I do have plenty of angst, but it's nothing to do with my retirement savings. As for the compelling argument? That's easy, EMTLA requires the emergency room to treat anyone who has a serious health problem. This means that like it or not you are ALREADY paying for their mistakes, only, you are paying a lot more than you have to because you're only paying for the expensive surgeries and treatments that have to take place late into someone's condition because they were not able to start seeing a Dr. early and get proper preventative care.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and the numbers do bear this out in a lot of cases. So by agreeing to pay for everyone's healthcare we all actually save more money over the long term because we can smartly levy the taxes to make them as painless as possible for everyone, and also by putting the entire country into a single risk pool Uncle Sam is in a much better position economically to negotiate drug prices and the price of services in hospitals. This means that in many cases the ridiculous markups (over 400% in many cases) can be done away with, and since everyone is paying in who can afford to individual contributions are all much lower than they are now.

So really, you're not even debating about whether or not to pay for their mistakes you're merely negotiating on price. Now tell me, why would someone so smart and "financially literate" want to pay what could be 10x the cost? Sounds a little bit like a paranoid fear of Government is over-riding that sound judgement of yours. Of course I'd love to hear you explain how any of the above is still not sufficiently convincing (by bringing up additional verifiable problems I had not considered in my above statement.)

Your move. :)

Going to actually TRY to back that up with more than your own opinion or do we get to hear about how you, too, are "The Voice of God" who merely hath speak to fashion thine words into truth? ;p

Assuming you CAN save 10-20% per month. Tell me, how are wal-mart workers trying to support a family on minimum wage going to do that? They can only starve themselves so far before it cuts into their productivity after all. Not everyone has something to cut, hell even people who make more can get saddled with massive medical or student loan debts. Student loans, by the way, are non-dischargeable, which means you get the carry that lovely saddle to your grave no matter what happens.

Really? I can save $40,000 to cover an emergency hospitalization because a drunk driver just performed a hit and run on me? And I can do that making minimum wage?

Really? Even these folks here? (I can start quoting stories if you really aren't going to bother trying to understand my point here.)

Or your parents, damn them for being born poor! right?! ;p
Seeing as socioeconomic mobility is at its lowest levels ever.

LMAO! Here's an example (From a tax calculator) of what your average 40 hour minimum wage job paycheck is going to look like after withholding.
Bi-weekly Gross Pay $660.00
Federal Withholding $46.64
Social Security $40.92
Medicare $9.57
California $3.72
SDI $6.60
Net Pay $552.55

Now if you add up all the payroll taxes and multiply by 26 to get your yearly payroll tax cost? That's $1,581.06. That might be enough to cover regular preventative checkups if you're healthy and some prescriptions if you get sick. That's not enough to cover the cost of a serious disease or even a single 24 hour hospital state. Remember, not all insurance lets you get away with a quick co-pay, in many cases you have a deductible that has to be met first and that can be even higher than the number I gave above. Mine on my current plan for instance is $1750.

Now, if you were working SEVERAL jobs and managing 80 hours per week at three places total (which is what your typical minimum wage worker is doing) then yes, you MIGHT be able to afford healthcare IF YOU ARE SINGLE. Try doing that with a family to support. Rent for a two bedroom will easily run you at least $1200 anywhere reasonably populated, add on top of that food for several people, gas, essential toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc and that number gets stretched thin very quickly. Yes if you work three jobs you can probably still manage to survive, but you are effectively one disaster away from financial catastrophe.

More cost-effective compared to what? Letting poor people slowly starve to death on the streets until their rotting corpses choke our gutters? Oh certainly not! It's much cheaper to let the masses deal with the huge variety of public health and sanitation problems caused by creating a massive underclass who cannot even afford to eat or get treated for diseases and to refuse to pay to even haul the bodies off somewhere they don't regularly expose massive numbers of people to any number of contagious diseases! No, far cheaper to force everyone to deal with every problem ON THEIR OWN! and if they die? It was all THEIR FAULT for being stupid, the BEGGARS!

But, it is certainly much more empathetic than forcing everyone else to deal with the problems YOU created by hoarding all the wealth to yourself through your business practices which over generations CREATED THE POOR UNDERCLASS that now is too sick, feeble and week to take care of itself because you took away their only sources of food or medicine in the name of "cost cutting."

You sound like a kid who doesn't even know what the hell he's whining about. You have no numbers, no sources and I just managed to without even having to dig that deep refute about everything you just had to say on the matter. We are worse off according to what measure? You can't just say we're all worse off if you can't even explain quantifiably HOW we are worse off. You just said we're worse because: "Big Mean 'ol Uncle Sam wants to take care of those STUUUUUPID POORS, and I CANT STANDS IT RAAAAAAAAAGGHHHHH!!!"[/Golem]

You haven't actually explained fully what the harm caused by the program is and why the alternative is not only realistic but eminently achievable even in the worst scenarios of poverty. But you certainly wasted no time CLAIMING these things are so. You usually need to offer more than your own beliefs in your opinions as evidence that they are true. ;p

F@*!K The last sentence got trimmed. That was a link to a site that offers good historical analysis of the verbiage in the 2nd Amendment by looking at the writings of the Founders to explain what those words meant at the time. This is critical to understanding how the words have evolved since then, and how the problems we face have changed.

So glad you asked! The Guardian probably has the best full summary and charts but I can give you the same data a few ways. Sadly there's no report of guns per household but you can see the trends. Overall gun ownership is on the decline or stagnant while gun purchases are going up. Seems to suggest this quite strongly, yes?

Holy selective reading Batman! I think we're facing our arch-nemesis again ....The Straw-Man! The point is that you've can't even manage an actual intellectual defense the purpose of the 2nd amendment. You remind me of how at the opening of Starship Troopers Casper Van Dien's character just banally quotes the textbook about the difference between a citizen and a civilian (when asked by the professor) without understanding what those words mean. Later near the end of the movie after most of his friends have died he realizes the true nature of the sacrifice those words entail and he gives a proper answer as if he were there.

You come off just like that: You can quote your civics textbooks but I doubt you'd know true Public Virtue if it bit you in the ass. You're just trying to defend your own pre-existing opinions by very poorly attempting to claim they're constitutionally justified. When challenged you'll spew any quote or sound bytes that at least superficially seems to support your point without ever trying to understanding what those words truly mean. As Inigo Montoya would say: You keep using these words...I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Here we go again. What the hell am I citing here? I'm not QUOTING SOMEONE I am explaining what appears to be an evident principle regarding the evolution of our constitutional principles with regard to the present situation. If you want to claim my assessment is wrong you are perfectly free to. But that requires you to explain IN FULL WHY I AM WRONG. Which means highlighting the specific error I made, explaining why it is an error, and THEN giving your own answer with an explanation of why it is more correct. My point in the previous post was that even IF IT WAS originally meant to stop a Rogue government, even IF it was meant to offer us this protection. It does not and will no longer suffice for billions of obvious reasons, the most important ones I gave directly in my last post. Of course seeing as you've decided to edit out all of the paragraphs I spent EXPLAINING EXACTLY WHY THIS IS SO it sure does SEEM crazy.

Good work thar buddy, sadly I notice these things! ;p

You can't just cut all of the wheat out of my field (context out of my posts) so you can snipe at all the scarecrows (create a series of easy to target straw men to knock down.) I'd say it's you who's obviously out of your element. IF YOU HAD OBVIOUSLY STUDIED THIS then YOU WOULD EASILY BE ABLE TO CORRECT ME. You, however, have not done this. You've said I'm wrong without ever explaining why. You're speaking in short sound bytes rather than talking in paragraphs and falling back on the convenient defense of asking for evidence whenever I make an assertion in hopes that I wouldn't have done my research and you could defeat me without having to ever actually prove anything yourself.

I am explaining that according to my understanding of the 2nd Amendment and constitutional principles; they were all adopted to serve practical purposes. These purposes however do not remain static, they're created to solve problems at the time but as the world around us changes so do the problems we face. This I would hardly think is a controversial idea. But if it truly is then why can you not do the dignity of explaining why since you're obviously oh-so-educated on the matter? For someone claiming to know so much you sure seem averse to demonstrating that superior knowledge you have.

LOL, says the guy who couldn't even refute one thing I said formally in his response. Hahaha, I http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndmea.html