George Rebane
Politically incorrect and nationally syndicated economist Dr Walter Williams offers his thoughts on ‘Why Capitalism is Morally Superior to Socialism’. The short essay is worth a read, as are some of its leftwing comments.
The US poverty level has been a political football for years. The Left keeps upping it regularly in order to bolster their agenda for increased taxation and regulation based on the narrative that America is the leader in wealth and income inequality. For example, today I just heard from a KVMR regular that “40% of Americans are poor”; the statement passed without challenge as if it came down from the mountain on stone tablets. For a new data-backed analysis of this issue, take a read of Cato’s Policy Analysis #839 ‘Reassessing the Facts about Inequality, Poverty, and Redistribution’. From its executive summary we read –
Many U.S. politicians are promoting policies to reduce income inequality and poverty by increasing taxes and transferring more income to lower-income households. These proposals rest in part on claims that income inequality in the United States is greater than that in other Western democracies and is growing, and that poverty persists at high levels. … The usual statistics invoked to support those claims, however, are misleading. Those statistics exclude about $1 trillion in annual transfer payments to lower-income households and do not account for the effects of taxes. When those transfers and tax effects are included, income inequality in the United States is lower than that in many Western democracies and has grown at rates similar to income inequality in other nations. Improved estimates of poverty show that only about 2 percent of today’s population lives in poverty, well below the 11 percent to 15 percent that has been reported during the past five decades.
[31may18 update] TBS’ Samantha Bee called First Daughter Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt” for posting a picture of herself hugging her toddler son, blaming her for the fallacious reports that “the Office of Refugee Resettlement lost track of 1,500 immigrant children in the last three months of 2017.” (here) Ms Bee is unscathed, but imagine what would have happened had a conservative media person so labeled an Obama or Clinton daughter. The progressives do indeed live in a privileged world of their own.
AI encounters problems in being adopted by the medical industry which kills over 200,000 patients annually through medical mistakes. For example, deep learning algos are daily discovering new, effective, and super-human diagnostic methods for early detection of diseases. But their adoption is being stymied by authorities who reject them because their workings cannot be explained to humans – they just work and save lives. The EU is doing a double dummy in this when it “implemented a regulation requiring all algorithms to be “explainable” by human engineers”, something that is impossible for most deeply learned algorithms from large datasets. Again, government is guilty until proven innocent. (more here)
[1jun18 update] Hilary Hodge as a county supervisor??!! From all available evidence, the woman has nothing in her record to recommend her for the position, especially when it comes to promoting business and economic development. To my knowledge she has never even held a job that required someone to take money out of his own pocket to pay her – the concept of for-profit enterprise is foreign to her. And a perusal of her political provenance and promoters predicts that the lady will attempt to ‘help’ the county by enthusiastically amplifying the regulatory, tax, and fee burdens that come down to us from Sacramento.
[5jun18 update] Barabara Ross, Nevada Joint Union High School District Scholarship Coordinator, is retiring. Since the news is now public, I want to express my gratitude for all the work over the years she has done, in addition to her other NJUHSD duties, as the Academic Chair of SESF’s TechTest. She has administered the annual TechTest, coordinated the pre-test seminars, supervised the grading of the tests, and awarded the scholarship checks at the annual awards ceremonies. In the 2007-18 running of TechTest, SESF has awarded more than $150,000 in merit scholarships to Nevada County’s brightest STEM-bound graduates. I have had the pleasure of working with Ms Ross all these years, and we will miss her greatly as she heads out of state for greener pastures with her husband for a well-deserved retirement. Thank you Barbara!
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