There are times when I weary of Krugman's scolds ... like today.

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Not on topic, but there seems to be a firestorm swirling through the net this morning from my former home state, now known as Brownbackistan.

http://blogs.e-rockford.com/applesauce/201…

What's the Matter with Kansas, obviously, is that there are so many Republicans living there.

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ND -

What a silly, stupid, thoughtless, juvenile, pointless ad hominem.

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Silverback66, I hope the speaker of the Kansas House got a visit from the Secret Service.

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Norma: Thank you for that retort. It saved me from calling ND a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, one synapse ultramaroon. And, on topic, has anyone asked Wombat or Timmah if Adam had a navel?

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Another factor that tips the scale against equal opportunity is lead in the environment. I heard this on NPR yesterday. Can't find the audio, but here is the written article which is not a transcript. The current standard for lead poisoning is 10-15 mcg per deciliter of blood.

This is a problem primarily, but not exclusively, for children living in poverty because they are more likely to be living in older substandard housing.

"Lead paint in buildings built before 1978 is now the main source of lead contamination, but it can also come from paint on imported toys, jewelry, candy, and poorly glazed pottery."

"Public health advocates have been pushing for this lower standard for 20 years, arguing that exposure to even tiny amounts of lead LOWERS INTELLIGENCE AND INCREASES BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS THAT CAN PERSIST THROUGH LIFE.* And in 2004, the CDC started calling for removal of lead from all family housing."

According to the health expert I heard yesterday, even children below the 10 mcg have permanent changes in their frontal cortex, where,as he said, "executive decisions" are made. One decision he cited is delayed gratification.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/01/05…
panel-wants-kids-limits-halved

*Emphasis mine.

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Silver, wow, just wow. I was aware of O'Neal's "yomamma" comment but not the email citing Psalms 109. "O’Neal wrote: “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president! Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN? AMEN!!!!!!”

In case you don't own a bible, the psalm calls for his children to be fatherless, his wife a widow.

Like some of our trolls, O'Neal seems overly fond of all caps and punctuation. It's a sad state of affairs when trolls are elected to public office in Kansas and elsewhere.

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Of course we don't have a meritocracy, we have a quotatocracy. How can you say that there is equal oppotunity when you have those who receive 'special privileges' because of race, gender or ethnicity? People who meet minimal requirements for a job are given advantage over those who are far more qualified. This has nothing to do with merit. However, I think you are confusing 'equal opportunity' with 'equal outcome'. We have entered a period when the government (Big Daddy) is now demanding that the outcome be proportional regardless of merit.

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Sherlock, is your white male privilege eroding? Old white boys have been on the receiving end of special privileges for centuries. From my feminine perspective, that erosion is a good thing. It can't happen fast enough.

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Also from NPR, the flip side to Krugman's typical bombast.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine…

From the article, "But G.D.P. per capita (an insufficient indicator, but one most economists use) in the U.S. is nearly 50 percent higher than it is in Europe. Even Europe’s best-performing large country, Germany, is about 20 percent poorer than the U.S. on a per-person basis (and both countries have roughly 15 percent of their populations living below the poverty line). While Norway and Sweden are richer than the U.S., on average, they are more comparable to wealthy American microeconomies like Washington, D.C., or parts of Connecticut — both of which are actually considerably wealthier. A reporter in Greece once complained after I compared her country to Mississippi, America’s poorest state. She’s right: the comparison isn’t fair. The average Mississippian is richer than the average Greek."

Which begs the eternal question, where would you rather be, where would you have the best chance? Having been to several countries, and having been involved with many immigrant groups who were estatic to have escaped such ideal paradises as Germany and Finland, I got a very strong idea, from folks that lived in those coutries why they came here, rather than England.

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Rand, spawn of Ron is currently on CSPAN, if anybody cares. Oops! Too late, they just finished up with him. You can catch it later today when the program is re-aired. He is naturally touting Canadian tar sands and the pipeline to get it to southern US refineries, after which the plan is to export it.

http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN/

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Veritas, if you had been paying attention here, you would know that most posters oppose Citizens United in its entirety.

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On your marks! Get ready!

The Bain Bomb!

The REAL Romney.

Set to explode in South Carolina.

Between this and the Romneys' strap-on Lab shitting all over the station wagon roof at 60 mph, a gleeful electorate anticipates many YouTube moments of the Mormon former "stake president" (don't ask, Dr. Seward) going viral as he fights to restrain his notorious authoritarian temper ever-threatening to burst skin thinner than a latex Trojan.

Unless Team Romney just flat-out bars digicams from all future public outings.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/…

That Lab's not the only one shitting himself. So are the evangelicals.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/…

Bombs away!

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My daddy once said about having a portrait made, "The camera can't do everything." Trying to create an environment of equal opportunity for people, with expectations, is like herding butterflies. Some people simply aren't meant to take advantage of the opportunities placed before them. Then you always have the stupidest of the stupid in our impecunious under castes who refuse to go along with programs designed for them by the smartest among us. Dang that free will. It always seems to get in the way of the best of great government programs intended for society's scurf. Just gotta keep legislating and ruling that free will out of existence. Gotta put them on a leash or keep them penned up in their rookeries. No way they can be allowed to run free and screw up things for those who understand things they cannot.

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Steven E, per capita can be a lying thing like any statistic.

If you have $100 trillion dollars and I have none, then on a per capita basis, we both have $50 trillion. Remember that the Walton family has more net worth than the total worth of the bottom 40% of everyone in the US.

A far better indicator of income or any other number-based data is the median, the number in the middle which throws out all the higher income bias and the lower-income bias and actually gives you a figure for the "person" in the middle of all of the incomes in the country. With Americans bankers and money managers getting $50 million + bonuses, I would expect the average in the USA to be higher than any other country where you don't have the great disparity of income.

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Outlier: "And in 2004, the CDC started calling for removal of lead from all family housing."

Who is going to pay for it? Do you have a clue what is included in lead remediation? Remediation is not the same as removal.

I own half a dozen rental houses built before 1978. Based on current EPA regs, to REMOVE all potentially lead-ciontaminated surfaces would cost me about $40 per sq ft per house to gut down to the studs, replace the drywall and outside sheeting, replace the HVAC and piping, bulldoze 3 feet of topsoil off the properrty and rebuild completely. Spending upwards of $320k for houses that together profit maybe $1400 a month is simply unaffordable.

Before you start the attacks, I grew up in houses with lead paint. I have always lived in older houses (with lead paint.) I currently live in a 1973 house with lead paint.

Removing lead is not the same as lead remediation. A significant option is to encapsulate the existing lead paint by overpainting with a stong latex-based primer followed by lates paints. This is allowed by law today and is required. If you take a lead test kit into any of my houses today, it tests negative. Note what I said: negative. That's because I followed the law and encapsulated the lead.

If the government wants to force older houses to be LEAD-FREE... to gut and rebuild the houses... the government needs to pay for it.

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I appreciate the wisdom of Krugman.
Yesterday I questioned a niece about what she wished for on Facebook. She seems to have taken the posting down, but why do so many want what is bad for them? Citizens United has given voice to propaganda unseen since the 2nd World War. Only this time we don't have names or faces to assign to those voices. This new American Royalty scares me.

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NOrma, let's call it, Mitt's Bane. Sort of sounds like something out of Tolkien's writing.

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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

We just disagree on what the big words mean. They mean different things to different people. I'm not sure we could even use the phrase All men are created equal today. We simply know better. Even equal opportunity would be an enormous undertaking. But, it is the American baseline, the standard by which we lived for 204 years.

Now the republicans want to reinstitute the divine right of kings. God has chosen them to lead and prosper. Their happiness may not be abridged simply because another man's inalienable rights are in the balance. They must have more.

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The bottom line is that the U.S. is now a country in which our children will have poorer lives than we do.

Remember all that money that was around during the Clinton years? Aliens did not land and take it to Mars so it disappeared. Our government simply put in place legislation that moved that wealth from working families to the New Nobility.

When 400 billionaires have a net worth equivalent to fully half of American citizens combined, that 50% is toast. They do not have the money to give their children the tools to become successful or to give their congressman to influence governmental policy. They are serfs, pure and simple, with no hope of a better life short of winning the lottery.

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I can tell you all from experience that the University of Arkansas administration up on the hill fits the bill of the haves getting more. It is obscene the perks they have and the power they have. You would be surprised. Well, you probably wouldn't. Having said that, Krugman couldn't have said it better. The man is an amazingly insightful person.

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Outlier, if your premise is 'it is my turn now' then use your common sense and understand that I am not going to support transferring 'priviledge' from one group to the other. If you want 'equal opportunity' then you have my support. If you want me to consent to your taking from me to give to you then 'forget about it'!

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Someone should climb Mr. Krugman's ivory tower and advise him of the present occupier of The Whitehouse..."America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle." His opinion, as always, is sage like and insightful.

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I try so hard to understand southern thinking, but . . .

I get that southerners constantly hark back to yesterday, or yesteryear, and ancestors. All Gone-With-The-Wind-ish sentimental glossovers of the unflattering realities of the Civil Woah they're STILL processing 150 years later.

"My daddy once said . . . " whether Daddy's insights relate to current contexts or not. Which query, in this instance, Daddy's "camera" analogy fails, unless non-southerners are willing to stretch it -- toward what improbable and unrewarding point?

Southerners typically raise allusions to nature and farm animals, apparently to remind listeners of their rural links to the soil and simpler times and how, Mammy, as god is their witness, they'll never go hungry again or something.

Here butterflies replace cows and chickens. The old "herding butterflies" cliche, meant to resonate with creating equal opportunities for all, one guesses. At least in southern minds if no others.

Of course, southerners get God with a capital G in there. "Some people simply aren't meant to take advantage of the opportunities placed before them." Fate. Predestination. God's will for "some people." Sneaky southern divisiveness predictably, regularly, creeps in too: Us vs Them. (Often accompanied by barely disguised envious sarcasm: see below.)

Inevitably, southerners yield to parading flowery flights of supposedly charming rhetorical logorrhea, presumably in conscious or unconscious homage to more luminously talented Dixie dipsomaniacs like Faulkner and Williams.

Try making sense or tracing logic through THIS lush briar patch, Brer Rabbits!

"Then you always have the stupidest of the stupid in our impecunious under castes who refuse to go along with programs designed for them by the smartest among us. Dang that free will. It always seems to get in the way of the best of great government programs intended for society's scurf. Just gotta keep legislating and ruling that free will out of existence. Gotta put them on a leash or keep them penned up in their rookeries. No way they can be allowed to run free and screw up things for those who understand things they cannot!"

At last! Southern passive-aggressive sarcasm and meanness: deriding America's social safety nets (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, food stamps, attempts at universal health care) as "intended for society's scurf" (meaning dead skin flakes like dandruff).

That's heart. That's understanding. That's intelligence.

Some people simply aren't meant to make sense.

Makes one want to dress up in the draperies and go clubbing.

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I believe laws and regulations are slanted toward those who have the money to pursuade elected officals. That is wrong and that is the unlevel playing field.

Krugman above cites many examples of this in just the past year alone.

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Their biggest success was the inheritance tax and the all volunteer army. I love the line from the movie, "give your kids enough to do something but not enough to do nothing." All this wealth wouldn't be quite as dangerous if it didn't pass on down for generations. Then people like SHolmes wouldn't have to complain so much about someone taking his. He could keep it as long as he was using it but not after.

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normabates, does that change to my ending punctuation offer us a glimpse of your private performance of those words? Was spittle flying from your mouth with that, ". . . who understand things they simply cannot!" I like it.

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re: Norma: Thank you for that retort. It saved me from calling ND a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, one synapse ultramaroon. And, on topic, has anyone asked Wombat or Timmah if Adam had a navel?

Ozarkrazo, you prove that the right wing doesn't have a monopoly on idiots. ND's comment bears some truth. Krugman can become too predictable and a bit tiresome, whether one agrees with him or not.

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Well, I know one thing: The Stephens, Waltons, Tysons, Lindseys, Campbells all work hard and take advantage of every opportunity that comes their way. None of 'em can buy a better Coca Cola than any of you.

The way that Sam Walton, son of an investment banker, had to sell his old pick-up to open his first store..warms my heart and when Helen's father saw he had spunk he kicked in a few hundred thousand for weddin present. Life in Ark sure gits inspirational.

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