Quoted from mcornetto Now that the very rich aren't being taxed - do you see them doing anything humanitarian?  No.  They are all busy pouring their money into PACs that are there to keep their taxes as low as possible.  Are they building parks?  Creating museums?  Adding to culture?  No, because there's no reason for them to do it any more.

By Maria Di Mento and Caroline Preston

The 50 biggest donors, including William S. Dietrich II (No. 2), contributed $10.4-billion last year, up from $3.3-billion in 2010.

I’m not sure where you got that statistic from Michael. But it’s not accurate.

Giving has increased, not decreased in America.

Complete list- HERE

http://philanthropy.com/section/Philanthropy-50/370/

Or were you talking about Australia?

Shawn…..><

In order to account for changes in buying power I looked for figures that compared philanthropy against the GNP.    Here's a progression of change.   Unfortunately couldn't find any figures on the web specifically for the 70s.  These figures are for American data.

5.1 percent of GNP in 1929

9 percent of GNP in 1959

2.2 percent of GNP in 2008

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Found 1964 - 11 percent of GNP

To be honest, math is not my strong suite.

Gauging a market during specific times is (for me) a real slippery slope.

Many…many factors can contribute to these numbers from then until now-

Valuation of the dollar, the number of millionaires / billionaires in America etc…

To say that the percentage against X at Y time is = to a decline or an increase is above my pay grade.

My point was based on your comment that there has been a decline in actual giving by American elite.

I honestly don’t understand the correlation between an individual’s contribution and the GNP.

But that’s my ignorance. I’m sure there are some here that know these things and I’ll be glad to learn if they can make it in small enough bites for me…

Shawn….><

GNP (gross national product) is the market value of all products and services produced in one year by labour and property supplied by the residents of a country.

When you compare charitable donations against that you are providing a ratio of how much the country gives to how much the country makes.   How generous they are compared to how much they have.  

Dollar values fluctuate and this ratio takes that fluctuation out of the equation.  It's a common way economists measure this activity.

EDIT: And here is an interesting article about the current state of giving from the same website you provided above.

http://philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Divide/133775/


  

Mitt Romney : "8 Million Americans still have no power."

Obama: "8 Million and one."


Phil

Maybe I'm feeling a little evil today, but I thought I'd foist this simple-minded, paranoid and nonsensical pollution on you too: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333135/voters-who-stayed-home-andrew-c-mccarthy?pg=2

http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/1.....=HP_LN&hpt=hp_t3

For Ray, and anyone interested.

Once again, the conventional wisdom and the "experts" were wrong. The US is on the verge of becoming an energy exporter.

Also note, none of this had anything to do with government planning. This is private industry responding to need. Or greed I suppose some might say.

Think about the ramifications for the Persian Gulf, and for the world economy.

Of course, I am not weighing the impact of carbon output on AGW(global warming). But it should be noted that carbon output is significantly down in the US, not because of government policy(unless you count the recession), but because of new technology developed by private industry.

So we can put our faith in the central planners and the regulators and redistributors, and surrender our freedoms to their wisdom and authority...

Or we can trust in the only thing that has ever worked to allow mankind to prosper and  to gain freedom: capitalism.

Nice find, Kev.

"The IEA said Monday it expects global energy demand to increase by more than a third by 2035, with China, India and the Middle East accounting for 60% of the growth"
Groannnn...
Scares the sh!t outta me.

Quoted from leitskev Once again, the conventional wisdom and the "experts" were wrong. The US is on the verge of becoming an energy exporter. Also note, none of this had anything to do with government planning. This is private industry responding to need. Or greed I suppose some might say.

Conventional wisdom has a certain "lag" that can be ascribed to it and the "experts" do change/modify their predictions as new data becomes available.
So, in that sense they are not wrong, but rather in or out of agreement with one another depending upon their area of expertise and adeptness at interpreting the data.

And I don't think being an energy exporter is a particularly wise thing to become, especially when it's due to increased production rather than decreased demand.
Non-renewable energy is a finite resource.
How bright is it to eat all the food on your own plate today only to go begging for food off the plates of other's tomorrow.
Brilliant.

Additionally, alternative fuels & energy, specifically renewable + nuclear, are not cost competitive unless the price of oil is high.
With the U.S. as a net exporter due to increased production the price per barrel should drop making the development of alternative fuels & energy non-competitive.

Maybe it's a short-term loss, long-term gain national plan. I dunno.
Allow RoW to consume all the consumable fuel while the U.S. develops expensive high tech alternative energy to provide when they all run out.
Possible. Seems dangerous, but sound.

Private industry is largely enabled or constrained by government regulations, and in the case of energy policy, as a result of global competitive markets which themselves are frequently controlled by nationalized oil companies rather than capitalistic oil companies.
http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/world_oil_market.cfm

Capitalism exploits the opportunities foreign and domestic governments permit.


I wish the article had more to say about the U.S. energy independence.
I can find articles all over the place ABOUT the report, but not the report itself.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ri.....independent-by-2035/

http://www.eia.gov/
http://www.eia.gov/analysis/

Ah ha ha. IEA, not EIA. (to self: idiot)

Found it: http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2012/november/name,33015,en.html (to self: helps to look in the right place, dumb@ss)

Capitalism has failed. Growth is unsustainable in a world of increasing populations and finite resources.

We need to move towards an entirely new system.

What that is remains to be seen and the transition won't be pretty.

Whatever alternative to capitalism is proposed will be tyrannical. No one should have any illusions. And people will suffer. This is why the Left is dangerous. Sorry, Rick, all due respect, and I think you know my respect is sincere.

"Not a single vote for Romney or even an error? That's worth looking into," said Larry Sabato.

http://www.philly.com/philly/n....._got_zero_votes.html

In 59 Philly voting wards, not one single vote for Romney. Not one! That's better than Saddam Hussein did in his fake elections in Iraq. Maybe the tyranny is closer at hand than one would imagine. Call that paranoid if you like, but 59 voting wards in a major city, wards full of illiterates...and not even one accidental vote for Romney? That's not suspicious?

Ray, this is not the first such energy report. I read one about a year ago that said the same thing. Also, these technologies have been slowly accumulating for decades. No major break through was needed. It's not surprising that most of us might not know about them, but shouldn't "experts" on energy writing reports for the UN...reports that they hope will affect sweeping world policy...shouldn't those "experts" know about these things.

Maybe they're not experts at all. Maybe they know next to nothing about energy developments. Maybe, just maybe, they are nothing more than more Left wing agitators who dominate the UN and want to take our freedoms in the name of some "justice" they advocate for.

World running out of energy? Nope. Check it off the list.
World running out of food? Check it off. Hasn't happened. Only places where famine exists is due to local conflicts.
Carbon stimulated global warming? The extent and damage of global warming is still hotly under debate. Most predictions have been dramatically scaled back, even by advocates of the theory. There's been no global warming in the last 15 years. Global warming scientists are about as objective as those people doing energy reports for the UN. It's worth monitoring, and worth considering reasonable steps to reduce carbon emissions. There is no reason for hysteria, however, and there is no justification for using it to implement Left Wing schemes.

Yes, I know the Lefties here can't stand me. Hopefully you can leave that hatred to the politics thread, and we can remain friendly in film related topics. I will continue to learn from you guys in those threads, and be grateful for your superior knowledge there. Have a good week guys! I got work to do. We can't change the world from here anyway. It's all just noise to give us a work break.

Quoted from leitskev Hopefully you can leave that hatred to the politics thread, and we can remain friendly in film related topics. I will continue to learn from you guys in those threads, and be grateful for your superior knowledge there.

Easily done, if not a given.

The Left is dead as well, Kev.

We need to move towards a new scientific model and leave the old paradigms behind.

Capitalism hasn't existed for quite a long time anyway, just corporatism.

6 days! That's all it took before insinuations of Obama stealing the election (or wards as proxy) have surfaced in a mainstream forum!

Facts:

Obama +2.7% popular vote or over 3.25 million, if you like that better.
Obama +126 in the Electoral College.

Scurrilous rumours:

Obama +59 Philadelphian wards.

"How do you like them apples, ****?"

Regards a new societal structure: not gonna happen. A far brighter bunch of men debated these type of issues way before people checked out of the debate, 'cos "talking politics is dangerous". Nobody talks about the big ideas anymore - everyone is too afraid to offend.

Besides, for all his undoubted intelligence and analysis, Karl Marx never proposed an alternative to capitalism. People who actually read his work know this. And on the contrary, he was quite impressed and complimentary of the efficiency of capitalism in advancing the common good. What the far right and far left have done is draw the map in a way not reflective of the sensible masses. Capitalism is the best way to advance mankind, assuming the people harnessing it apply it responsibly. The absurd and simple-minded criticism that disagreeing with elements or application of capitalism is effectively disowning it is playground stuff of intellectual lightweights. Bit like those who suggest you hate a country because you make a criticism of it. The problem, then, isn't the system, it's the people.

The problem is the system.

It is the fact it puts a monetary value on every blade of grass on the planet and has perverted all value systems so that even human life is measured in monetary terms.

Capitalism has run out of things to exploit and it's internal contradictions are only going to become more apparent as technology (in particular automated workers) improves.

I agree that it is not going to change though...we're going back to a Feudal age where we have a tiny percentage of people who control all the resources and the rest are serfs.

It's inevitable.

Maybe it's the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?

The feudal days are gone and they're not coming back. Sure, poverty and income inequality is more pronounced now than since the Gilded Age - not my words, but those of The Economist. Hardly a left-wing rag. But my point is, IMO, the rapid shift to free market economics is what you describe as corporatism. Of course, those on the right believe in this particular calibration of capitalism and sell this version as capitalism. In reality, of course, it's just one form of capitalism. That's partly the problem - capitalism is Reganomics but it's also the social democracies of Scandinavia. Variations of the same system. It's a tough word to pin down and since the right championed their free market economics as capitalism, it's taken on that meaning in the wider vernacular. False, but widely and tacitly accepted in our discussion. Once we place the history of economics in context, we see the shades of grey.

So my argument would be that when you say that capitalism puts a monetary value on every blade of grass, I agree that's a sympton of the problem, but that's free market capitalism rather than the capitalism per se. Reagan and Thatcher brought about a systemic shift in our society and a real paradigm shift that funamentally altered what was previously a 'post-war consensus' centred around Beveridge in Britain (and modelled on Roosevelt's New Deal), or Eisenhower's soft Republicanism in the States. Now, I think the move to free market economics was for the bad, and someone like Kevin thinks it was for the good. No doubt there's merit in elements of both arguments. But what's undeniable is that there was a paradigm shift and it lasts until today. Clinton and Blair were third wayers who didn't really sit as either fundamentally left or right on policy, but obviously were men of the left - what I would term pragmatic progressives.

The only real way to make capitalism work is democracy and the only way to make democracy work is civility, understanding and compromise. That's the problem us first worlders face. Our problems are not intractable - it's our inability to tackle them together that is currently intractable. Yes, there are many greedy rich people who try to avoid their fair share and yes, there are many lazy idlers who will avoid work at any cost - both are problems we must tackle, but whilst the sensible middle is bickering and distracted, the far right characterise problems in terms of fringe groups, whereas the far left chracterise problems in terms of plutocrats. Stalemate on that issue and so many more. Root of the problem is the propensity for both sides to utilise the blame game. And becaue people carry their political stripes around like a football team, when a sensible politican comes around that looks to work across the aisle, they're torn down like you would tear down your rival football team's star player. Or, (and in England we call this banter, Kevin) in terms of Lenihan, you blame the entire history of dictators and evil men to be (dun, dun, dun) "the Left". Such simple-mindedness obviously lacks nuance and deserves ridicule, but it's that type of corrosive belief (espoused on both sides) that fuels the partianship we see, and leads people to believe "the sytem is broken". IMO, of course.