Seriously thoughtful US/Europe Cultural Divide -- Musings

[Greg Anos]

Currently in the US, the top 10% of earners pay 70% of all income tax. This is not enough?

The US is based on equality of opportunity, not equality of results.

What do you do about people who aren't even interested in trying? (I, perhaps, have a more experienced viewpoint that most posting here, having spend most of my formative years in a Barrio. I was constantly surrounded by kids my age who sole goal in life was to get a basic job, play softball, drink beer, and enjoy the opposite sex. School? Why, you didn't need it for a construction job. Years later, having done without for education, hard work for many years, and a modest level of affluence from the above, I'm supposed to share with those who didn't care?)

[Lady Blue]

Originally Posted by tirsales

I apologize if my statement was sounding, as if "bigger classes" would mean an automatic failure - this was never my intention.
A smaller class makes it easier for teachers to adopt to pupils (thus providing more help for weak pupils) - you can learn (quite literally) the same stuff in a large class then in a small one.

I will not respond to the rest of your post - not out of disregard, but simply out of lack of time. Just wanted to clarify the above part.

No apology necessary. I didn't take it that way. Many people have said that smaller class size is better for learning, but I've never seen it that way.

When I was in school (long, long ago and far, far away), like I said, we had large classes. The teacher always made time to work one on one with weaker pupils, during class, and not to the detriment of the rest of the class either. Other students would also help the weaker ones without being condescending toward them. It just worked.

[Lady Blue]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Damn. Are you sure you aren't a teacher? You have nailed it, Lady Blue. This is what I see every day. You just forgot one thing.

The only thing worse than being disciplined at school "then" was having to go home and tell your parents.

I'd also like to add that there are still teachers out there who raise the standards. I am so fortunate to be working with one.

She accepts no less than the very best from each student. Bullying, whining, excuses are not allowed.

If work is turned in messy, or directions are not followed, she has no qualms about making them do it over.

Printing is legible.....and they do it until they get it right.

She exposes them to math at the second grade level.....and guess what. They can do it. And, they "get it".

Reading is something to be joyously embraced, not just learned.

Rewards are for good behavior, bad behavior means disapproval from her and you'd better believe they'd rather not do it again than risk that.

They love her to death, and I'm extremely fortunate to have learned so much from her.

Oh, and did I say this was a kindergarten class??

You're exactly right. You just stated more of what I also wanted to say (before getting so tedious and bored with myself.)

Another thing I failed to mention (that is so sad) is that around here there has been much talk of making the completion and turning in of homework a voluntary thing that is no longer graded. And if you miss or fail a test, you'll have much time and plenty of chances to make it up/do it over.


WHAT?????


Sometimes I wonder why the powers-that-be don't just present each newborn with a high school diploma along with a birth certificate. Then we wouldn't have to bother with all this fussy educational nonsense.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Lady Blue

Another thing I failed to mention (that is so sad) is that around here there has been much talk of making the completion and turning in of homework a voluntary thing that is no longer graded.

My son's treat it that way. They have mathematically determined that even if they don't do homework they can still get a very good grade.

Although I have mixed feelings about homework. The school day is much longer now than it was when I was a kid. Also, my kids all go to magnet schools which means they spend about 1hour on two buses to get to school and the same coming home. So, they are up at 5AM for the buss and get home about 4:30. From there dinner, showers, etc. There really is just no time for homework other than loosing sleep. I just don't see how loosing sleep to do homework benefits them.

BOb

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

The US is based on equality of opportunity, not equality of results.

Pithy. Too bad the "equality of opportunity" is something that's only true when you look at it through a specific pair of spectacles.

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

What do you do about people who aren't even interested in trying? (I, perhaps, have a more experienced viewpoint that most posting here, having spend most of my formative years in a Barrio. I was constantly surrounded by kids my age who sole goal in life was to get a basic job, play softball, drink beer, and enjoy the opposite sex. School? Why, you didn't need it for a construction job. Years later, having done without for education, hard work for many years, and a modest level of affluence from the above, I'm supposed to share with those who didn't care?)

Imagine how useful those kids might've been if y'all hadn't had such a hangup about specific types of indoctrination. Of course, i'm saying this tongue in cheek, but there does seem to be something wrong when you all accept that parents raise their kids this way.

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Currently in the US, the top 10% of earners pay 70% of all income tax. This is not enough?

Hard to say, as I can't pull comparative figures out of google, but the first thing that I notice when I look at the dutch national budget is that the total raked in through corporate taxation is about 50% of the amount received through income taxes (and socsec etc.), wheras in the USA corporations account for less than 20% of the "income tax+socset etc" figure.
That might be an explanation.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Pithy. Too bad the "equality of opportunity" is something that's only true when you look at it through a specific pair of spectacles.

It's still the basis, even if the reality doesn't always match. But unlike many places in Europe, I'm not tested and tracked, whether I like it or not, into a pathway for my education.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Imagine how useful those kids might've been if y'all hadn't had such a hangup about specific types of indoctrination. Of course, i'm saying this tongue in cheek, but there does seem to be something wrong when you all accept that parents raise their kids this way.

Hmmm. Who determines how parenting is done? And who enforces it? And what happened to liberty...

Was I, as a 12-15 years supposed to lecture to my peer's parent about how badly they were shortchanging their kids? Really? I did try to motivate peer-to-peer and going nothing for my efforts but sneers and the occasional bruise.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Hard to say, as I can't pull comparative figures out of google, but the first thing that I notice when I look at the dutch national budget is that the total raked in through corporate taxation is about 50% of the amount received through income taxes (and socsec etc.), wheras in the USA corporations account for less than 20% of the "income tax+socset etc" figure.
That might be an explanation.

Who actually pays corporate income tax? Why the customers, of course. It's a cost of business just like labor, and advertizing. it's not even progressive, except in the sense that luxury products are bought by rich people...

[tirsales]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Currently in the US, the top 10% of earners pay 70% of all income tax. This is not enough?

Dont know - which part of the total income do they have?

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by TheLongshot

Not mine. Empire BCBS is for profit. The previous time I had BCBS it was Anthem, which is also for profit.

Fascinating. Empire BCBS is indeed a for-profit these days -- seems weird to me, 'cause all the Blues I've ever dealt with were non-profits. See this paper for a fascinating discussion of how the conversion from non-profit to for-profit came to pass for Empire BCBS.

Anyway, my BCBS insurer is non-profit as are most (but not all) such.

Originally Posted by TheLongshot

Which tells me that there is something out of whack and it isn't just Uncle Sam that is to blame. Maybe if we do go to single source, maybe we can get to the equalibrium, if it is where the economist thinks it is.

The point of his/their analysis is that the high prices on the non-government side are an inescapable consequence of the under-payment on the price-controlled side of the health-care system. The fact that it's Uncle Sam doing the underpaying doesn't actually matter to the analysis -- the effect would be the same due to underpayment by any very large player that can require providers to deal with them in spite of underpayment.

Dropping back to that equilibrium would not fix the entire problem, however, even assuming that the economist calculated it correctly. We still have plenty of other problems to address as well.

Originally Posted by TheLongshot

[SNIP discussion of payment times & hassles]
Some do as you say, but I do think there are some that try to take advantage of the system, since the motivation in capitalism is to try to get as much profit as possible for your shareholders (for those companies that have shareholders, that is.) Certainly, doctors are mostly trying to get by and are the ones paying a lot for the byzantine system that we have now. While they certainly make money, it comes at a lot of pain that some just don't want to deal with. There are plenty of articles out there about the low job satisfaction of doctors.

Things do need to change in this country about health care and I think there is a lot to be learned from other countries about how they take care of the health of their people.

Here's a simple change that might help -- provide easy access to information on costs and outcomes of various procedures and therapies. That information needs to be in a form that can be compared across providers, too!

Have you ever attempted to compare either prices or outcomes on health-care choices? I have. It's incredibly difficult to get the information you would need to make rational choices! Regardless of how much you might want to make sensible use of healthcare resources, it's tough to make decisions in an information vacuum.


Xenophon

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by tirsales

[on income tax distribution]Dont know - which part of the total income do they have?

Using wikipedia's numbers 'cause I'm lazy (here).

It seems that the top 5% earn 33.4% of income and pay 57.1% of the tax.

Xenophon

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Hmmm. Who determines how parenting is done? And who enforces it? And what happened to liberty...

Duno. All that seems to follow from your example is that it's done badly by quite a few people, and worse in some places than others, so there's got to be something some of those parents could learn (from other parents or through another avenue. Further, unchecked liberty is just as stupid as totalitarian planning. Also, I get the feeling it's used as an excuse for any parental wrongdoing, as well as to absolve the rest of society of all responsibility when it comes to explaining why so many kids turn out bad.
If you've got 10-40 million people who are hardly trained to do any work at all, you're wasting lots of good bodies for nothing.

Who actually pays corporate income tax? Why the customers, of course. It's a cost of business just like labor, and advertizing. it's not even progressive, except in the sense that luxury products are bought by rich people...

Don't be silly. With all those companies posting billion dollar profits? The only ones who might get less are the shareholders, but *shrug*.

[slayda]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I am hesitant to get into this topic, but things have been civil for 4 pages, now, so I'll dip in a toe.

The most effective predictor of academic success in the US is socio-economic status, i.e. the financial status of the family of the student. This is a very uncomfortable fact for American educational researchers. The proposed explanations vary from nutritional support (which affects brain development at an early age) to lack of safe environments in which to study to working-class parents not having enough time to read to their young children (the second most significant predictor of academic success). People will toss around ideas about cultural values of different groups in the US, too. I don't think the explanation is simple, and research has not supported any single explanation so far.

But the implication is that people don't really get an equal start here in the U.S., and although we certainly have "rags to riches" stories about people who made it big despite humble beginnings, if we look at the statistics, the children of the poor tend to remain poor (or get poorer).

Let us hypothesize that an education of equal quality for all children could minimize this difference between the starting points of individuals, to somehow create a perfect meritocracy (or at least a closer approximation of it). What I often hear people say is that they don't want to have to pay for the education of other people's children. They want the best for their own children, to make them "able to compete," and though they rarely say so out loud, one gets the sense that if the "other" children don't have as many educational opportunities, so much the better for the kids lucky enough to be born into "good" families.

I don't feel comfortable with this social setup, but I don't have the answers, either. To me, this seems like the sort of thing government exists to deal with. But I expect others will feel differently.

Neko, IMO a large part is not what happens in the school environment but what happens in the home environment. I agree that there is a correlation between family wealth and a child's education, but I don't think it is a direct correlation. I think you have to look deeper and see the correlation between the parents education and the family wealth. The true (maybe I should say the proper) correlation is between the education level of the parents (or whoever keeps the kids when they are at home) and the child education because that is who sets the child's life expectations and those expectations are what's of vital importance. Yes, sometimes that person might be a non-family member, e.g. an exceptionally good teacher, a minister or priest, a neighbor, but most often is the person or persons who spend the most time with the child.

When my wife taught 5th grade in rural Mississippi, we found that most of her class's expectations were to grow up to drive a gravel truck, work in a factory or beauty parlor. It was all they knew to expect.

On the other hand, when I grew up (poor) in rural Mississippi, my (college educated but poor) grandmother was an intimate part of my life. Both my father and mother went back to college. My mother was a college drop out but my father went on to get a master's degree. Because of all this, education was shown to be very important to me and I achieved a good education and a nice middle class income as an engineer.

So what is needed, IMO, is to instill a breath of possibilities for a child to choose from and to let them strive for their own goals in life.

[wodin]

There were a total of sixteen of us in my graduating class in high school, and that was after consolidating school districts with the neighboring town.

Didn’t help me a bit! I still slid by with minimum necessary effort!

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Using wikipedia's numbers 'cause I'm lazy (here).

It seems that the top 5% earn 33.4% of income and pay 57.1% of the tax.

Xenophon

Punishment for success?

[tirsales]

Originally Posted by wodin

Punishment for success?

Not necessarily - but this discussion would go way offtopic, dont you think so?

[wodin]

Originally Posted by tirsales

Not necessarily - but this discussion would go way offtopic, dont you think so?

I think that would depend on if your perspective was from a position of being successful or not being successful.

And how would discussing differences in the tax systems of US/Europe be any further off topic than discussing the differences in education or medical treatment or capitalism vs. socialism. It seems to me to be part and parcel of the same thing.