Ayaan Hersi Ali, one of the bravest and most important writers today has an excellent but chilling piece on how multiculturalism is hurting the victims of abuse among European Muslim communities:
The biggest obstacle that hinders Muslim women from leading dignified, free lives is violence–physical, mental, and sexual–committed by their close families. Here is only a sample of some of the violence perpetrated on girls and women from Islamic cultures:
- Four-year-old girls have their genitals mutilated: some of them so badly that they die of infections; others are traumatised for life from the experience and will later suffer recurrent infections of their reproductive and urinary systems.
- Teenage girls are removed from school by force and kept inside the house to stop their schooling, stifle their thinking and suffocate their will.
- Victims of incest and sexual abuse are beaten, deported or killed to prevent them from filing complaints.
- Some pregnant victims of incest or abuse are forced by their fathers, older brothers, or uncles to have abortions in order to keep the family honour from being stained. In this era of DNA testing, the girls could demonstrate that they have been abused. Yet instead of punishing the abusers, the family treats the daughter as if she had dishonoured the family.
- Girls and women who protest their maltreatment are beaten by their parents in order to kill their spirits and reduce them to a lifelong servitude that amounts to slavery.
- Many girls and women who can’t bear to suffer any more take their own lives or develop numerous kinds of psychological ailments, including nervous breakdown and psychosis. They are literally driven mad.
- A Muslim girl in Europe runs more risk than girls of other faiths of being forced into marriage by her parents with a stranger. In such a marriage — which, since it is forced, by definition starts with rape — she conceives child after child. She is an enslaved womb. Many of her children will grow up in a household with parents who are neither bound by love nor interested in the wellbeing of their children. The daughters will go through life as subjugated as their mothers and the sons become — in Europe — dropouts from school, attracted to pastimes that can vary from loitering in the streets to drug abuse to radical Islamic fundamentalism.
Ms. Ali is quite correct in pointing out that if young Muslim women in Europe spend every day being treated as little more than chattel, then the European Union is refusing to uphold their own standards and is betraying the very concept of human rights. Throughout Europe, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of young female Muslims are being stripped of even the most basic human rights — and the authorities seem to have little interest in interfering with this slavery. Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered in the streets of Amsterdam for daring to expose this system of brutalization and oppression.
If Europe is to live up to its civilized values, if it is to show that it truly cares about human rights, it must not allow these inhuman practices to continue. Islam does not give anyone the ability to abuse the human rights of another. The governments of Europe have shown dangerously little wherewithal in trying to fight those who would live in Europe but not share in the most basic of Europe’s values.
It is one thing to deny one religious expression; but when that religious expression involves harming the innate human rights of another, all claims to freedom of expression end. Yet Europe’s commitment to its values is simply too weak to allow them to speak out.
As Ms. Ali continues:
European policy-makers have not yet understood the huge potential of liberating Muslim women. They are squandering the single best opportunity they have to make Muslim integration a success within one generation. Morally, governments need to eradicate violence against women in Europe. This would make clear to fundamentalists that Europeans take their constitutions seriously. Now, most abusers simply think that Western rhetoric about the equality of men and women is cowardly and hypocritical, since Western governments tolerate the abuse of millions of Muslim women when they’re told it’s in the name of freedom of religion.
Europe has already surrendered much of its territory to a system of values which is incompatible with human rights. If we truly believe that violence against women is always unacceptable, if we believe that young Muslim women deserve a chance to have an education and choose the course of their own lives, then we must join with Ms. Ali’s courageous call. The fact is that if we are not willing to enforce the values of equality and freedom, then we are hypocrites, and those values will surely be eroded away into nothingness.
Are the comments getting through now?
Jay, you want to explain to these lovely people why you’ve been deleting anything with my name on it?
I haven’t.
I use Askimet for de-spamming comments, which sometimes generates a false positive.
Jay:
Your beloved moderate Northeastern Senator is getting trounced by the radical wing of his party, and you are staying completely quiet.
Except this time it’s in the GOP primary in Rhode Island, where Steve Laffey leads Chafee 51-34 in a recent poll. And presumably, the stakes are a lot highter in Rhode Island–the GOPers are willing to make a statement about “conservative values” at the risk of losing a shot to keep that seat.
Where are the rants about moderation? Why are you not whining about Chafee’s principled leadership at the expense of the wing-nuts? If it’s wrong for the Democratic Party to do something, it surely must be wrong for the GOP to do the same, right?
Unlike Lieberman, Chafee is significantly outside the mainstream of his party. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a primary challenge, they happen all the time. What is notable about Lieberman is that he’s a former VP candidate who is being punished for the audacity for stating that he values country above party.
Chafee isn’t being trounced by the “radicals” in the party – the Club for Growth is hardly a “radical” organization by any means – he’s being trounced because his overall record is extremely poor. Chafee’s voting record is well to the left of the mainstream of his party, and he’s been an ineffective Senator during his term in office. The GOP voters of Rhode Island are taking a risk by supporting Laffey, but it’s their right to do so.
The Club for Growth is hardly radical? Well now I know why you think it’s perfectly ok for Laffey to challenge a Chafee and it’s an example of the radical communists taking over with their puppy-killing values when it happens from the other side.
Jay, the Club for Growth is every bit as “radical” as the worst offenders of the Netroots. To say they’re “hardly radical” just shows your cartoonish bias. Defending Laffey while constantly assaulting Lamont is example #1284 of why you’re a hypocrite.
Calling the Club for Growth “radical” is something only a member of the far left could do. The Club for Growth concentrates solely on economic issues, and they endorse candidates who promise to uphold fiscal discipline and low taxes.
The fact that so many Democrats find that idea patently “radical” is a sign not of the Club for Growth being a part of the radical right, but a sign of how far left the Democrats have gone.
If the Club for Growth wanted to cut taxes for all people and/or in a fiscally responsible manner, that would be understandable. But the mantra that tax cuts are always good and that tax cuts should only focus on the wealthiest people is nothing short of radical. The fact that so many Republicans get on board this wreckless and irresponsible bandwagon shows that the radicals are controlling the party.
Which is fine, except for the part where the Club For Growth doesn’t actually believe those things…
Now Jay, Islam is the religion of peace isn’t it?
The Club for Growth agenda:
he is also talking about extending and expanding the tax cuts he introduced in his first term; he is talking about allowing wealthy Americans to shelter much of their income from the I.R.S.; about using the tax code to curtail the government’s role in health care and retirement saving; and, ultimately, about a vision that has entranced but eluded conservatives for decades: the abolition of the graduated income tax and its replacement with a levy that is simpler, flatter, and more favorable to rich people.
The “left-wing blogosphere” agenda:
A change of course in Iraq.
You’re gonna have a harder time selling the latter agenda as the “radical” one compared to the former.
Which wouldn’t happen in a flat tax…
If you depend on the government to save for you, you’re a complete and total idiot. We’re talking about a government than can lose a billion dollars without sweating an eyelash. Only a fool would trust it to provide for one’s retirement or healthcare. At this point, someone who won’t draw from Social Security until the system begins collapsing in 2017 would be better served socking their cash away in a passbook savings account – they’d end up getting a better rate.
No, it would be dramatically less favorable to rich people, because rich people are the people who can exploit the loopholes in the current tax code. If all of a sudden all the myriad tax shelters that the ultra-wealthy use to shield their assets from taxation were gone, there’d be a hell of a lot of very rich people with a significantly larger tax bill than before.
Now, I’m not convinced that the flat tax is a bad idea, as some of those tax shelters encourage the wealthy to invest money in productive ways, but it’s hardly a grand sop to the rich. The rich have the least to gain from it, as they already have ways of shielding their assets that the rest of us don’t.
Ah, I love the euphemism of “a change of course.” It sounds so much better than “surrendering to terrorists” — although it is nowhere near as accurate.
Jay–could you please name one part of the Club for Growth agenda that wouldn’t be a windfall to wealthy people? What does the Club for Growth think about getting rid of regressive taxes? Why doesn’t the Club for Growth advocate getting rid of taxes the primarily affect working people, such as payroll taxes, vehicle registration and licensing, tolls on public roads or sales taxes on food? If they are so pro-business, why don’t they advocate for a single-payer universal health care system? Why does the Club for Growth spend so much time on dividends and stocks and estates for the insanely rich? If the Club for Growth is so moderate, why is it that only one Democrat has ever been endorsed (and that was in a contested primary where there will be no Republican opposition in November). In fact, if you look at endorsements, the Sierra Club, NARAL and every single labor union is more moderate than the Club for Growth. This is a ridiculous argument even for you.
First, the new data show that the bottom 50% of Americans in income — U.S. households with an income below the median of $44,389 — paid a smaller share of total income taxes in 2004 (3.3%) than in Bill Clinton’s last year in office (3.9%). That 3.3% is the lowest share of total income taxes paid by the bottom half of earners in at least 30 years, and probably ever. The majority of American families with an income below $40,000 pay no income tax at all today, and many of them also get a welfare subsidy from the Earned Income Tax Credit that effectively offsets much of what they pay in payroll taxes.
By contrast, Americans with an income in the top 1% paid 36.9% of all federal income taxes in 2004, down slightly from 37.4% at what was the height of the dot-com boom in 2000. But the top 5% and 10% of earners saw an increase in their tax share over that same period, with the top 5%’s share rising to 57.1% in 2004 from 56.5% in 2000. If this isn’t the definition of a highly “progressive,” aka redistributionist, tax code, we don’t know what is.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115714468338152049.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
First of all, I hope that a .6% reduction in taxes is worth the several trillion dollars in debt we’ve racked up and are racking up. Call me silly, but that .6% for a family making the median of $44,389 amounts to about $266.33. The several trillion in debt that Republicans have created amounts to much more–each additional trillion bucks is more than $1,000 for every man woman and child in America, and that’s before we start talking about this little problem called compound interest. I wasn’t a business major, but if you asked me to give you several thousand dollars in exchange for a couple hundred, I’d call you silly. Or a Republican economist. Or someone with a future at a Neocon think tank.
Second, you say that the median income in the U.S. is $44,389. Then you say that the majority of people below $40,000 pay no income tax. Roughly speaking, unless there are a crapload of people between the $40,000 and $44,389 range, you are saying almost a quarter of all Americans pay no income tax. I’m going to call your crap on that.
Third, taxes can go down, but when prices on everything from energy to health care to property taxes skyrocket at the local levels because there is no money at the federal level, I’m not sure how you can call that a success.
Fourth, you cons love to point out that the rich pay more in taxes than the poor, but you really hate to point out that they pay less than they earn relative to the total wealth. Saying Americans in the top 1% paid 36.9% of income taxes in 2004 sounds impressive, but not so much when you keep in mind that the top 1% owned 39.7% of the financial wealth in 2001 (a figure higher than at any time since just before the Great Depression, by the way) and a whopping 57.5% of capital income in 2003. You can also see that the top 10% own four-fifths of the capital income in America. So yes, they pay more in taxes, but it is still not proportionate to what they earn. Throw in all the fees we pay in our society (tution at public colleges, sales tax, vehicle registration, car insurance, gas taxes, etc) some of which we call fees but are really taxes, and the rich pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than the rich. That, my good man, is the definition of a regressive system.
Fifth, although the share of taxes paid by the rich is rising, this is because the share of the wealth they are accumulating is going through the roof. If a CEO’s taxes went up 5% relative to the share he pays in the rest of the economy, but his ratio of pay compared with the average worker went from 42:1 in 1960 to 531:1 in 2000, it’s a little tough to shed some tears for him, but you seem to do it beautifully. By the way, take a look at the poor, overtaxed people you are defending.
Sixth, I am not willing to pay to read the Wall Street Journal. Either post an article to which everyone has equal access, or don’t reference it.
Seth, Eracus used the same dime-store logic on me last week……that virtually everybody who earns less than $40,000 pays no income tax…..meaning they’re the “new welfare queens”….yet they’re puppets on the strings of the Democratic Party and should be voting for the party calling them welfare parasites…..even though the family income threshold where Republicans take over as the majority party is less than $23,000…..meaning that more than half of Republicans “don’t pay taxes”…..because they’re being bamboozled by the liberal media cabal.
Confused?
So was I.
My advice: Don’t waste any more time on the guy.
Which assumes that the two are related. Bush’s tax cuts aren’t responsible for the increase in the debt, Congress’ fiscal profligacy is. Granted, Bush is far from blameless on that front, but the difference between the Bush Administration and the Democratic Party is that at least Bush pays lip service to fiscal discipline – the Democrats would spend this country into a level of debt never before seen. If you think this is bad, wait until they try to enact universal health care.
That sounds about right. People in the lowest tax bracket have effectively negative tax rates due to the Earned Income Tax Credit. That’s one quintile in and of itself. If even a small portion of the next quintile have a negative effective tax rate, then that statement would be correct.
Except for the fact that there’s no correlation between the two. For one, spending has gone up in every category under the Bush Administration. Secondly, federal policy doesn’t have jack all to do with energy costs (which are rising because our principle source of energy happens to lie under the most screwed up locales on the planet), or health care costs (which have been rising long before Bush even took office, and local property taxes have absolutely nothing to do with federal policy whatsoever.
Dean tried that same argument during the 2004 campaign, and it has already been convincingly demolished.
Reading comprehension must not be your thing…
Your own source contradicts that. In 1998 (during the Clinton years no less!) the top 1% had 47.3% of the total financial wealth in the country. (In actuality, the better measure is net worth, as financial wealth can fluctuate massively over time.) In 2001, the top 1% of country had 33.4% in net assets. So in fact, the top 1% paid more than their share in taxes in 2001. Financial assets as defined in that paper aren’t accessible until they’re cashed in, and at that point they’re liable for capital gains taxes.
Which means that our economy follows a natural distribution curve.
Except that will always be true. By definition the rich pay smaller shares of their total income than the poor on everything that isn’t on a sliding scale. Unless you want to argue that a steak should be $5000 for Donald Trump and $5 for me. (Although $5 is pushing it for my food budget these days. My steaks usually still have the marks from where the jockeys were whipping it…) That simply doesn’t work economically.
As Megan McArdle so astutely notes, by your definition, life is regressive.
Except the number of CEOs in this country is extremely low. Personally, I agree that most executive compensation packages are obscene these days and most CEOs are blithering idiots who couldn’t find their own asses with two hands, a flashlight, and Google Maps, but that’s entirely besides the point. That’s an issue for the boards of directors to deal with, not a matter of public policy. Unless you want to start setting government wage controls (which is devastatingly dumb in terms of economic health) CEO pay will only shrink once corporations refuse to pay that much.
Again, the figures you cited don’t show that to be true. The top 1%’s share has decreased slightly since the 1980-1990s. The share of the top-most quintile has gone up, but that quintile doesn’t include the filthy rich. While the start of the top quintile started at around $300,000 in 2001, that’s hardly filthy rich — and that figure includes a good portion of the small business owners that end up employing 50% of the American workforce.
Jay, your perception of the Earned Income Tax Credit is based on hearsay and ignorant bullshit GOP talking points designed to raise the bar on “welfare mamas” to include any of “low income” (or apparently at this point, $44,000 a year or lower). I made less than $22,000 in 2004 and had a federal tax burden of nearly $1,500. Last year, my W-2’s didn’t even reach the $12,000 income threshold and I was barely eligible for a $48 EITC benefit. Of course, none of this will matter to you as you will continue to take your cues from your Republican puppetmasters suggesting working people don’t pay taxes. The spreading of such lies is imperative to the Republican strategy of expanding the ranks of “welfare parasites” so that the GOP’s country club base remains enraged about their economic persecution.
Apparently when you don’t have a clue about the facts, you reach for childish insults. The EITC is one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the nation, and the facts don’t lie: the lowest quintile has an effectively negative tax rate thanks to the EITC.
Again, your personal stories are not data. Government figures are. Whether you actually only got that much back in EITC, are simply lying, or didn’t fill out your taxes correctly is irrelevant to the way the system actually works for millions of Americans.
But apparently to some the facts are “ignorant bullshit GOP talking points”…
A single taxpayer with an income of $12,000 is ineligible for the EITC. That’s the fact of the matter Jay. I just barely squeezed in last year in the mid $11,000 range. I filled out my tax form correctly. I had it checked by an accountant friend and I had done them properly, so you’re “Mark is clueless” canard doesn’t fly. You are clueless, married to the GOP talking points that anyone earning less than $44,000 per year are freeloaders who don’t pay a penny in income taxes. Why don’t you see if you can muster up the integrity to check out the facts before calling me a liar. You’ll be surprised by what you find with the way the real world works.
Jay–
Bush’s tax cuts are not responsible for any increase in the debt? Let me explain to you how a debt happens: You either decrease revenues or increase spending. Bush has done both. Both have added to the debt. It is simply amazing that anyone with an American college education would actually say that cutting trillions of dollars from a budget won’t increase debt. Amazing. And when you say that it’s the fault of Congress, I would beg to point out that the “party of fiscal discipline” runs Congress.
No correlation between federal revenues being cut and local governments paying more? Again, let’s explain some things to you. If there is less money coming into an area from the federal government and the demand for services is the same, the money has to come from somewhere else. That’s why you get things like local school districts in South Dakota opting out of the state funding formula. Or if there fewer poor people have health care coverage, what happens? The poor wait until an emergency situation arises, and then they go to the emergency room. The cost of that is passed off to consumers through increased health insurance rates. So you have the general public paying for health care for people who can’t afford coverage. Kinda sounds like a tax to me. A really expensive tax. But a really expensive tax that pharmecuticals and insurance providers don’t really mind, which is why the GOP allows it to keep happening.
No one is disputing the fact that spending has gone up under Bush. But the way in which the spending occurs is hurting American working families and handing out money to rich people. For example, Bush could have proposed a perscription drug program that benefitted seniors. Instead, he gave blank checks to pharmecutical companies and lied about how much it was going to cost to Congress. And no one is disputing that health care has been getting more expensive for a long time, but it’s gotten out of hand under the Bush failures. Health care costs have gone up 73% in Minnesota since 2000. That’s just a wee bit faster than other Administrations. (As a side note, that Lowry article you call “convincing” is one of the less convincing and sloppy articles I’ve seen in a long, long time.)
On the subject of reading comprehension, I direct you to table 3. Where, in plain English, you can see that the rich control more wealth now than at any time since 1929. I think we’ve had this discussion before, but you should make sure you are right before you start calling people stupid.
I agree that net assets is a better indicator of wealth than income. But we were talking about income taxes. And so we really wouldn’t talk about the entire picture, but really just income. Let me be spell this out: when talking about the share of income taxes paid by the wealthy, net assets don’t really factor in. Seriously. I feel like I’m explaining things to a fourth grader.
The Pareto principle says 80% is owned by 20%. The data I showed you says 80% is owned by 10% of the people in America. That means that capital income is twice as concentrated in the hands of the rich as what you would call “natural.” Because 10 x 2 = 20. Fourth graders.
At no point did I say rich people should pay more for a steak. I did say that sales taxes should not be regressive. Rich people and poor people should be taxed the same percentage of their income on things bought every day–ideally that would be 0%. And we could make up the difference with a progressive tax system centered aroudn income or wealth.
Life is regressive. But to use that as a philosophical reasoning that therefore taxes should also be regressive…well, now you’re just being silly again. Or boosting your credientials to be a research intern at the Cato Institute.
Except that revenues went up since the 2003 tax act.
Um, reread that sentence. Usually budget cuts are ways of getting rid of debt. Sadly, the Bush Administration has been remiss in cutting the fat from federal spending as they should.
Except one would have to show that direct federal payments A) decreased under the current Administration and B) those decreases were passed on in higher taxes. Since A is not true, the whole point falls apart. The Bush Administration has spend billions on increases to state aid of all kinds – even with the unfunded mandates of NCLB, the amount of aid spend on education for instance has skyrocketed under the Bush Administration.
Except the blame for that belongs squarely on the head of Bill Janklow, who personally destroyed education in South Dakota. But that’s a rant for another day…
Oddly enough, that program is wildly popular with seniors. One can say it’s ridiculously expensive, and be absolutely right, but it’s hardly a sop to the drug manufacturers.
Again, correlation is not causation. The rate of increases have always been high, and the reason is because other countries are acting as freeloaders on medical advancements made here. As a Harvard economist observed “[I]f all countries squeezed profits in the health sector the way Europe and Canada do, there would be much less global innovation in medical technology. Today, the whole world benefits freely from advances in health technology that are driven largely by the allure of the profitable U.S. market. If the United States joins other nations in having more socialized medicine, the current pace of technology improvements might well grind to a halt.”.
We could easily cut our medical expenditures in the same way Europe and Canada does – by rationing healthcare. They cut their costs by cutting access to services and diminishing quality across the board. Of course, that would result in tens of thousands of people dying while waiting for basic services, but at least the costs would be down.
Except Table 3 ends at 1998 – the 2001 figures show that the figure has gone back to where it traditionally has been. Furthermore, what the chart shows is that the wealthy benefit more from upswings in the economy — which is hardly a big surprise since they have more investment capital. Correspondingly, they also take more risk, as their percentage dips dramatically whenever the economy goes into a nosedive.
Furthermore, the whole logic behind the argument ignores the fact that the economy is not a fixed size. It’s not as though the rich’s 32.13% means that there’s nothing left for everyone else. The economy is not a zero-sum game, there is not a fixed amount of wealth that must be divvied up, and the average poor slob in the US today lives like a king compared to the average person even as recently as 1970.
Perhaps you should try that first, then work your way up to someone capable of doing basic research?
Again, as I stated previously, financial assets are generally not taxable unless they’re taken out, in which case they figure as net assets. Income taxes are levied against (most) net assets, not financial assets. Counting financial assets produces a bigger figure for the top 1%, but ignores the fact that those assets aren’t necessarily liquid and are subject to capital gains once they’re made liquid — assuming that the value of those assets doesn’t decrease (which is a very real risk, especially in the case of stock options).
I take it you’ve never taken a statistics class, have you? For one, the “80-20” rule is a dramatic simplification of the power-law curve and not a “natural” function at all. Secondly, the net assets of the top 20% represented 84.4% of total wealth in the country in 2001, not 90%. (And no, financial instruments still don’t count since they’re only wealth on paper – their actual value is indeterminate). That’s right along a normal power line curve, just as expected.
Secondly, that assumes that the top quintile is static — it isn’t. Plenty of people go from the lower quintiles to the higher ones, and an equally significant number of people in the top quintile end up going to lower quintiles.
Third, the top quintile is hardly a bunch of filthy rich people. Yes, $300,000/year is a lot to you and I, but a family of four making that income in an area like NYC or San Francisco is hardly living in the lap of luxury. We’re not even talking about millionaires. Furthermore, the vast majority of people in the top quintile started with little or no inherited wealth, saved assiduously, invested in their educations, and worked hard. The idea that there’s this pool of concentrated wealth in this country simply isn’t true. Take this year’s Fortune list of the richest people in America. What percentage of them started off rich? It’s nowhere near as large as your argument would have it.
Which is different from the status quo in what way? There is no federal sales tax, and we do have a progressive system of income taxation. The problem is that the tax code is so complex that a moderately smart accountant can find a million loopholes for the rich, while most of us don’t have that luxury. Personally, I’d go for massive tax simplification before I’d support a flat tax, but that doesn’t mean that a flat tax would be any less “regressive” than the current system.
Given the intellectual rigor required to get one’s foot in the door at Cato, I’d take that as high praise indeed — although that’s certainly not what you were implying…
The problem with your revenues thinking is that you’re taking talking points from the White House–a player who has a vested interest in seeing the figures go one way or another. And actually, when you take into account some of the economic growth seen in this business cycle, revenues are growing at a lower rate than we’ve seen since WWII. And Mr. Snow conveniently leaves out the fact that there were massive tax cuts in 2001, which then led to a decrease in revenue.
Let’s break a budget down for you into very bite-sized pieces. If you start out with a balanced budget, and then you cut taxes by a few trillion dollars without also cutting spending, then you have a defecit of a few trillion dollars.
Federal expenditures are increasing–but the increase is in sending my tax dollars to CEOs. So when the money for the NCLB goes to corporations that are housing the kids that were kicked out of public schools (since the NCLB gives schools an incentive to get rid of kids who might drag scores down), that does not help people or schools or our kids but makes a lot of money for businessman friends of Bush. Or when the military contracts out to the 25,000 employees of corporations like Halliburton to do civilian work. Or the handouts to the oil industry in the energy bill.
On technology driving pharmacuticals–if huge profits are the driving force for the industry and the Europeans are hindering the development of new drugs, why are half of the world’s largest drug companies European? Why is it the case that “only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of “new” drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called “me-too” drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. For instance, we now have six statins (Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and the newest, Crestor) on the market to lower cholesterol, all variants of the first”? If R&D drives the companies, why do they spend only 15% of their budgets on R&D? Gosh it would be nice to believe everything on Fox News without thinking about it.
I don’t know how to put it to you any other way. We were talking about income taxes. When it comes to income taxes, the richest 1% pay a smaller share of the total relative to their income than the rest of America. You can try to bring in net worth and throw that number in there, but net worth has very little bearing on income taxes. I really don’t see why it is so tough for you to get that through your head.
Again, when it comes to capital income, 10% of the people control 90% of the resources. You can impress us all with the junk you learned in Statistics 101, but it’s not really coming close to an argument that a system that districutes resources like this is just or reasonable or anything but morally bankrupt.
On your class fluidity, did you know that class mobility is declining in the U.S. and that Germany, Sweden, Finland and Canada all have higher levels of economic mobility?
And I think we just agreed that corporations are swindling America out of billions and billions of dollars by getting around tax loopholes and breaking the law. We absolutely should crack down on this. But the Democrats aren’t the ones standing in the way of this. That would be your party.