birdog1960

i don't think that's necessarily true. for example, the mercenary military contractors often get away with way more shite than the regular military http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_Worldwide In his testimony before Congress, Prince said his company has a lack of remedies to deal with employee misdeeds. When asked why Andrew Moonen had been "whisked out of the country" after the shooting death of the vice-presidential guard, he replied, "We can't flog him, we can't incarcerate him."[147] When asked by a member of Congress for financial information about his company, Prince declined to provide documentation, saying "we're a private company, and there's a key word there – private."[148] Later he stated that the company could provide it at a future date if questions were submitted in writing.[149][150] When the term "mercenaries" was used to describe Blackwater employees, Prince objected, characterizing them as "loyal Americans

from the limited number of folks i've known in gov't, i agree. that's why it shocks me that few are complaining about private insurance companies knowing their intimate health details while having kinniptions at the thought of the gov't having access. ideally, neither would have them or they would be available without names attached.

this is providing the nsa a huge and unwarranted benefit of the doubt. what evidence do we have against malicious intent? the irs targeting is an example for it. lets remeber that there are people looking at this data, some of which is quite titilating and some quite valuable. whether or not we trust the organizations, why should we trust the individuals?

they've been drummed out as RINO's. the extremists have caused their extinction.

nobody does it better than you can do on your own. have had numerous lawn guys including independent local guys and national co's like chem lawn and tru green. none of them really gave a sh#% how the lawn did. very little attention to detail. now that i have a bit more time, i weed and feed at the right time with the good stuff, cut at proper heights and differing angles, water when needed and don't cut when it will do harm (hired guys NEVER do this). pulling shrubs, i'd hire somebody but replant myself. landscapers in general are overpriced imo. hire the odd jobs guy that plows driveways in the winter and that the neighbors recommend. .

wanna bet? http://www.ibtimes.com/gop-nomination-odds-2016-jeb-bush-favorite-marco-rubio-most-popular-bet-1793430. rubio has better odds for the gop nomination than the bills do of winning the sb but that's not saying much. i suspect you can at least double those odds to win the prez election. must admit, they're better than i thought however. also interesting: http://www.predictwise.com/politics/2016RepNomination

a very good piece. proof that greenwald and oliver are top of the pack. it's all true. no one here challenges any of the points except to call greenwald treacherous. i wasn't aware he is accused of treason. i like his commentary on the subject here as well: http://www.salon.com/2015/02/23/stupid_and_irresponsible_glenn_greenwald_slams_neil_patrick_harris_treason_joke/ “I’m just gonna go ahead and treat it as a joke. I thought it was pretty pitiful, given Hollywood’s fondness for congratulating itself for doing things like standing up for McCarthyism and blacklists. So to just casually spew that sort of accusation against someone who’s not even charged with it, let alone convicted of it, I think is, you know, stupid and irresponsible.

no need. tax his wealth later.

. yes, correct, waves and particles....it was an example of a somewhat obscure concept in everyday life that someone can conceptualize without possessing intimate knowledge. but ya'll take it literally which is your m.o. but you've made my point. i don't need to be able to demonstrate the evidence without googling if, at one time, i was convinced by my studies that it is in fact, likely (yes, likely) to be true. if i needed to google it to defend it from attack by naysayers, then i would, same as for pikkety's conclusions.

http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/mendel.htm a quick search reveals the term to be widely used: http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/w/wave-particle_duality.htm

'likely" is an admission of the uncertainty and relativity of nearly every belief and opinion. very few things are certain. i can't produce a mathematical proof for light wave duality, nor can most that have taken undergrad physics. that doesn't mean that i (or they)can't grasp the concept or accept it as a satisfactory explanation for observed physical phenomena. i trust the experts to fight out the details just like in climate change or wealth distribution economics.

i'm discussing a paper that concludes that massive wealth inequality is the natural and inevitable result of our current economic system and that things will only worsen without intervention.

the link from the boston economics conference documents that an entire session was devoted to piketty's book with him giving the final lecture. it occurred in Jan 2015, after the dissenting paper linked above was published. it seems an entire conference of leading academics in the field disagreed that the merits of the books conclusions have been settled.

perhaps you missed that the link was from the booth school and cited several prominent academics at univ of chicago and harvard. the inclusion of the financial times info was meant to support my previous assertion that this book is hotly debated in both academia and business. i did not conflate the 2. do you deny great debate among academics (including economists - https://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2015conference/program/preliminary.php?search_string=piketty&search_type=last_name&association&jel_class&search=Search#search_box) re this book? i don't have access to the arts and humanities citation index but if you publish in the field you likely do. how many times do you guess pikkety's book was cited in scholarly journals last year? the forbes 400, is hardly the definitive reference on the prevalence and importance of inherited wealth. this article (in another business periodical - despite its title) supports pikkety's conclusion on the extent of its importance http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2014/03/inequality. interestingly, america, from which the 400 are collected, is reportedly not very strong on data on the subject of inherited wealth. finally, while you cite a rather enthusiastic critic of the work, there are many prominent supporters: Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called the book a "magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality"[19] and "the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade."[18] He distinguishes the book from otherbestsellers on economics as it constitutes "serious, discourse-changing scholarship".[20] Krugman also wrote: At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesn’t just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame. [...] Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.[19] Steven Pearlstein called it a "triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years", but also added: "Piketty’s analysis of the past is more impressive than his predictions for the future are convincing."[17] Branko Milanović, a former senior economist at the World Bank, called the book “one of the watershed books in economic th…" even assuming a flaw in pikety's algebra does not necessarily result in his conclusions being incorrect. mendel likely fudged multiple experiments in genetics yet he was fundamentally correct.

as i said, there is great debate surrounding this book: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/magazine/spring-2015/how-piketty-is-wrong-and-right being named business book of the year by the Financial Times. The debate has drawn in a host of world-class economists, among them Chicago Booth faculty Kevin M. Murphy, George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, and Robert H. Topel, Isidore Brown and Gladys J. Brown Distinguished Service Professor; and Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard. not everyone agrees. but that speaks to its position as an important work in he field. where there's smoke, there's usually fire,

cool. he goes on to say this: For instance, I point out in my book (particularly Chapters 8-9) that the rise of top income shares in the US over the 1980-2010 period is due for the most part to rising inequality of labor earnings, which can itself be explained by a mixture of two groups of factors: rising inequality in access to skills and to higher education over this time period in the United States, an evolution which might have been exacerbated by rising tuition fees and insufficient public investment; and exploding top managerial compensation, itself probably stimulated by changing incentives and norms, and by large cuts in top tax rates. There are easier and more immediate solutions here. they only require the political will.

you make it sound like being a nyt bestseller makes the work illegitimate. this book has been discussed in virtually all economics periodicals and cited in muyltiple academic papers already and it's relatively new. i suspect there isn't a university economics department in the world where it's merits haven't been debated. it's a major work. oh and my sentence states that the phenomenon is a nearly universal truth. i stand by the statement.

no worship. his thesis explains the ever worsening problem of worsening wealth distribution in a more unified and complete way than anyone elses. hence, the overwhelming popularity of his book. it's a phenomenon that has largely been ignored by theorists despite it's nearly universal truth. what alternative macroeconomic theses would you counter with to his?

to a dualist, those are the 2 choices. except that there are others. we don't live in a pure capatilism and there are no pure socialisms in existence. they're all hybrids. finding the right combination is the key. but yeah, i've mentioned picketty before. just never seems to enter some folks' consciousness here in discussion like this where it clearly should: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/04/24/pickettys-charge/

you're missing the forest for the trees. the issues brought up are common colds as compared to the sepsis that is killing the middle class. what dems or repyugs do or don't do just mildy exacerbates or mitigates the system's inherent mechanisms of concentrating wealth. the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and now the middle class are getting poorer as well. without drastic, fundamental changes, nothing will alter that course appreciably.

no. if you've not heard of him, then you should have.

the "problem" is that this result is by design. our business laws, institutions, election laws and yes, even our tax system makes such an outcome almost a necessity…oh, wait, i think there's a highly debated book about just that. http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491534656 "It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade" i strongly suspect that if you further broke down the top quintile into deciles, most of the increases would be seen at the very top.

been here all along…but attila the hun i'm not.

i realize you all think i'm soft but i deal with this on a daily basis. a medicaid patient complaining that such-and-such drug isn't covered by their insurance. and i dutifully but emphatically explain that it isn't covered by mine either. and while i can afford it, i wouldn't choose to buy it cuz the alternative is just as good and a 10th the price. and they look at me like i'm taking food from their mouths. i'm all for a fairly generous safety net but those at risk really shouldn't be flying recklessly in the first place.

beggars can't be choosers.