The price of inequality

FROM: The price of inequality, in colour | The Equality Trust

Evidence shows that:

1) In rich countries, a smaller gap between rich and poor means a happier, healthier, and more successful population. Just look at the US, the UK, Portugal, and New Zealand in the top right of this graph, doing much worse than Japan, Sweden or Norway in the bottom left. 

2) Meanwhile, more economic growth will NOT lead to a happier, healthier, or more successful population. In fact, there is no relation between income per head and social well-being in rich countries.

3) If the UK were more equal, we'd be better off as a population. For example, the evidence suggests that if we halved inequality here:

- Murder rates could halve
- Mental illness could reduce by two thirds
- Obesity could halve
- Imprisonment could reduce by 80%
- Teen births could reduce by 80%
- Levels of trust could increase by 85%

4) It's not just people in poorer communities who would do better. The evidence suggests people all the way up would benefit, although it's true that the poorest would gain the most.

5) These findings hold true, whether you look across developed nations, or across the 50 states of the USA.

from: The Rude Pundit

Dear Rude Pundit,
Thank you.
td

The Rude Pundit

11/07/2012

A Few Brief Notes to Republicans on the Day After Their Defeat by Barack Obama:
In four of the last five presidential elections, you lost the popular vote (we won't get into the fact that you really lost four of the last five elections completely). Is that telling you something? No, it's not. Because you're Republicans. And you don't care what reality is. You prefer to attempt to bend reality like a contortionist porn actor trying and failing to lick his own taint from behind.

You lost. It wasn't close. It wasn't a squeaker. It wasn't a nailbiter. All of your internal magical mathematicians were wrong. It was over the second the polls closed on the West Coast because it was over before the election even started. It was over because you nominated a fraud, a Tin Man who spent the entire campaign looking for a heart not because he really wanted one but because his advisors told him that he needed one. It was over because whatever else he tried to be, Mitt Romney was as close to a caricature of a rich dick as you could get without looking like he was merely plagiarizing The Simpsons or Dickens. It was over because, despite every effort to smear and lie about the President, Americans saw that Barack Obama was not your crude Bolshevik monster, but a cool, rational man who kept trying to get things done despite monumental opposition, despite monumental debt, despite a monumental storm. You won't see these things, though, because you're Republicans, and self-reflection is to you what a hot needle is to a cyst on your ass.

You are going to get advice from everywhere, all over, left, right, crazy. So the Rude Pundit's not going to attempt to say much here because you're not going to listen. It comes down to this: Stop being jerks, and, as Joe Biden said, get out of the way. Stop being jerks to women, to immigrants, to gays, to union members. Just...well, just fucking stop. If you don't understand how the GOP strategy of the last three and a half years affected you on a national basis, no matter what the gerrymandered House district yahoo votes told you, then you are damned to be party of nothing more than bodies in the road, slowing real progress, only to be crushed and run over one at a time, hoping that enough of your squashed and squeezed viscera gums up the engines of government enough to bring it to a halt. Or until the bodies are plowed out of the way, as they were in 2006 and 2008. If you think the lesson is that you weren't conservative enough, you know nothing about the United States.

Ultimately, you won't learn anything. Because you're Republicans. And there's something tragically touching and almost poetically ignorant about stubbornly clinging to the anchor of your principles even as the ship sinks and everyone around you is saying to let it go and take a life preserver.

Yeah, now we to look forward to the inevitable endless investigations of meaningless things before the push for impeachment. Because you're Republicans. And that's just easier to do than actually govern.

Why Legalizing Marijuana on Election Day Might Not Be a Good Idea - The Daily Beast

There are less than rosy sides to full legalization, and this article points out some of them.  They are a bit disconcerting, but still add up to less than the status quo on the issue.  The author closes with this:

As the Seattle Times recently put it in an editorial endorsing legalization in Washington State, the relevant question isn’t whether marijuana is good: “It is whether prohibition is good. It is whether the people who use marijuana shall be subject to arrest, and whether the people who supply them shall be sent to prison. The question is whether the war on marijuana is worth what it costs.” 

Quite obviously, the answer is no. In fact, of all the available options the status quo of criminalizing what millions of people enjoy—most of them nonwhite, poor, and in for a world of collateral damage as a result of their arrest—is probably the least attractive choice, worse only than full legalization. The better decision is incremental reforms at the state level and a hands-off approach from the feds. Let people grow pot, and sell it, but not for profit, and without advertising, and in a tightly regulated marketplace. Tinker every year, adding new provisions and privileges as much needed new research comes in. And always update the law with a sunset provision. That way the process can’t be hijacked by lobbyists and special interests—and only one thing goes up in smoke.

Why Legalizing Marijuana on Election Day Might Not Be a Good Idea - The Daily Beast