OPINION
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2004
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
EDITORIAL BOARD
www.kansan.com
Bipartisan politics means hope for a better America
Bush lied about Iraq and Kerry didn't win those medals.
Whatever you may believe, or whomever you think the better presidential candidate may be, none of that should matter after the election. Bush and Kerry, who have expressed opposite positions on the major issues, have participated in one of the most vicious presidential campaigns in U.S. history.
However, the two presidential candidates have also expressed one common goal: hope for a better America. We need to clean our heads of every negative, partisan thought from this election, and think about the hope for a better country.
Although the Bush and Kerry campaigns have viciously questioned the integrity and honesty of each other for the past year, they both have expressed hope for a happier, more peaceful America.
America needs to return to a time when political parties worked together and not to tear each other down. People did not argue with each other about party-platforms and political identification. Rather, they united to tackle the issues that would create a better nation.
After such a divisive election, we need to step aside from the partisanship and focus on the real issues that will, once again, bring hope to our country.
Do not allow your personal political bias to blind yourself from the more important vision of America's future. Regardless of your feelings about the war in Iraq, you should support the troops who are fighting for our country and for their lives.
We must continue to use our vote to support or oppose the issues, not the political party. Hope for America's future relies on openminded, bipartisan opinions.
Free forAll
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phrase "sort of" 112 times in the 50-
minute class today and I just think
that's really pathetic and yes, I did
count.
Anybody else see a problem with the fact that I am now walking to McCollum from the Lied Center after being put there by a bus that said "McCollum" on it?
phrase "sort of" 112 times in the 50-
minute class today and I just think
that's really pathetic and yes, I did
count.
I would just like to thank all the McColum Hall St. Louis Cardinals fans for being such good sports and letting me have a full night of sleep even though their team lost. They rock my world.
It's really not that hard. Eat something, you go take it to the sink, rinse it out, put it in the dishwasher. Honestly, is it that tough of a thing to do?
How can we even begin to talk about campus safety when the University forgets to turn on all the night lights and the emergency phones? I'm walking home in the pitch dark from the library. Way to go, KU.
payers earning 20 percent of the wealth in this country, and so forth. But it ain't so. In fact, the curve sags now in an alarming and ominous distribution-of-wealth crescent, as if in America we have a Marxian owning class and hoards of soot-coated underlings, toiling to make the machine work.
While we're on the anti-Wendy's commercial kick, I want to know what is up with using Alfred Hitchcock music in a Wendy's commercial? Come on, have some respect.
So, my English teacher said the
You know, I don't think I want a New Testament from a guy on campus. But the girl on Wescoe Beach? That I might consider.
payers earning 20 percent of the wealth in this country, and so forth. But it ain't so. In fact, the curve sags now in an alarming and ominous distribution-of-wealth crescent, as if in America we have a Marxian owning class and hoards of soot-coated underlings, toiling to make the machine work.
SACK'S VIEW
If anything, I think I'd be a penguin. But I'd be the one who figures out how to fly.
Man, I wish Conan O'Brien was my roommate.
payers earning 20 percent of the wealth in this country, and so forth. But it ain't so. In fact, the curve sags now in an alarming and ominous distribution-of-wealth crescent, as if in America we have a Marxian owning class and hoards of soot-coated underlings, toiling to make the machine work.
The Free for All needs a schedule so I know when to look for my quotes.
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I don't think girls should wear shirts with clever sayings on them because when I read them, it looks like I'm staring at their chest.
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Hi. I want to thank the guy who turned in my purse in front of the Union to the Hawk Shop. You rock my world, thank you for finding it and turning it in. I'd love to meet you sometime.
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I love when people make violent hand gestures when they're on their cell phones like the other person on the other line is gonna be able to see them or something.
payers earning 20 percent of the wealth in this country, and so forth. But it ain't so. In fact, the curve sags now in an alarming and ominous distribution-of-wealth crescent, as if in America we have a Marxian owning class and hoards of soot-coated underlings, toiling to make the machine work.
Let the bus driver have his stereo.
payers earning 20 percent of the wealth in this country, and so forth. But it ain't so. In fact, the curve sags now in an alarming and ominous distribution-of-wealth crescent, as if in America we have a Marxian owning class and hoards of soot-coated underlings, toiling to make the machine work.
Do you think that in California, they sell California Style Sunny Delight as just plain Sunny Delight?
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111 Staffer-Flint
Steve Sack/STAR TRIBUNE
Polarization damages population
POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE
So it's over. All the ads, chalking, issue-spinning, party-line salivating, partisan bickering, talk of who has the better hair, values and plans to keep our country running. It can all be put away until next election.
We can all hope that today we have a clear winner. There is a chance that we won't. But beneath the surface of this political season rests a larger, lingering issue that we all wear, but don't want to talk about. Kind of like underwear. The issue, polarization in this country. Of wealth. Of ideals. Of what tastes "American."
49 for Bush, 49 for not-Bush, and 1 for Nader. Families flying private jets to play Augusta National golf course on the weekends, and single mothers struggling to meet the many needs of living in a first-world society. How did it get this way, and what can be done to help bridge rancorous factions of "liberal wieners" and "right-wing nut jobs?"
SEAN PAUZAUSKIE opinion@kansan.com
Money trickling up into the top 20 percent of income tax payers during the past 50 years stands as a statistical fact. In basic economics everyone learns about the Lorenz curve, which displays the distribution of income as a function of population — i.e. who owns how much. In a perfect world, the Lorenz curve zips up in a linear fashion, with the bottom 20 percent of income taxpayers earning 20 percent of the wealth in this country, and so forth. But it ain't so. In fact, the curve sags now in an alarming and ominous distribution-of-wealth crescent, as if in America we have a Marxian owning class and hoards of soot-coated underlings, toiling to make the machine work.
Some of you might wonder if the Lorenz curve means anything to your life. To be honest, I can't say that I think many KU students have dipped below the poverty line during the past four years. But I can say that I strongly disagree with some of the choices that the Bush administration has made during the past four years, perpetuating the polarization of wealth, and ultimately values. And I think you should, too.
To protect wealth-polarizing tax cuts, George W. Bush kicked 2 million children out of their after-school program and took 88,000 police off the streets.
Taken as a whole, during the past four years our president has simultaneously favored policies that polarize wealth in our country and in the world.
I can't say what the outcome of these choices will ultimately produce, only that now we stand at a pivotal and potentially disastrous point in our fiscal and cultural history. Assault rifles trickle back onto the streets. Renewable sources of energy still sluggishly slum. Some pundits believe that children will be raised in increasingly polarized environments. David Brooks of The New York Times terms them "political ghettos."
With all this thrown in our faces as the up-and-coming generation who will someday possess the power to change these things, a critical time for decision making in terms of how we will handle dealing with the opposing 50 percent of our fellow Americans also rests in the foreground.
It is time that both sides start to give up pawns in hopes that the American game can continue at home and in the world at large. If not, the rubberbands of wealth and ideals will surely continue to stretch.
Pauzauskie is a Topeka senior in English and cell biology.
Living wage comes at cost of jobs
Wouldn't it be nice if all jobs paid a living wage? It wouldn't.
FRESH ARRAH
A universal living wage would make whole classes of employees unemployable.
Few employers are running philanthropies, and employers will lay off their least productive employees if forced to pay them more than they are worth. A mandated wage increase will boost some workers' wages at the expense of other workers' jobs.
The living wage is merely a hiked-up minimum wage — "A minimum wage on steroids," as author Star Parker puts it.
ARRAH NIELSEN
opinion@kansan.com
If a minimum wage increase will reduce poverty, why settle for only a one- or two-dollar increase? Why not raise the minimum to $500 an hour so we'd all be making more than Lew Perkins? Because that isn't how economics works. The only place where economics works this way is in the imagination of a liberal.
A professor of mine was fond of pointing out the superiority of employee wages in Europe. He seemed not to know that European nations also have much higher rates of unemployment. France and Spain both have unemployment rates in the double digits. More than 80 studies demonstrate a link between minimum wage increases and higher unemployment rates.
But my professor didn't mention any of the drawbacks of increasing the minimum wage. That didn't surprise me. Liberals don't like to talk about the high costs of implementing their half-baked ideas.
There isn't a committee anywhere that sits around and decides what people "deserve" or what they're "really worth." In a free market, the market determines wages, not third-party committees. What people are paid comes down to what workers are willing to work for and what their employers are willing to pay them.
You can pay low-wage workers $10 an hour, $100 an hour or a monkey and a handshake, for that matter, but it won't improve the skill or productivity of the low-wage worker. All you are doing is artificially raising the pay scale. The market automatically adjusts to the supply of money, and as wage floors rise, so does the cost of everything else.
"How many working families will be helped?" asks The Nation's Stephen Luce of establishing a living wage. Hardly any. U.S. Census data in 2003
revealed that the average family income of the typical low-wage worker is $40,000 a year. Seventy-two percent have a family income at least 50 percent above the poverty line. Twenty percent belong to families making more than $80,000 a year.
Most low-wage workers are students, adults living at home with their parents, or they are being supported by a spouse. Hardly any are supporting a family. But statistics like those above do little to persuade those who prefer to view the law of supply and demand as a moral melodrama.
A massive empirical study spanning from 1966 to 1988 conducted by Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway found that minimum wage increases did not lower poverty rates. It actually increased poverty in some instances. Furthermore, statistical analysis found a link between minimum wage increases and higher unemployment rates. The party of the people is advocating a policy that will eliminate the peoples' jobs.
Distorting market wages through living wage ordinances gums up the economy and hampers job creation. It is better for low-wage workers to be employed than it is for living wage advocates to pass counterproductive measures that make them feel noble.
Nielsen is an Andover senior in anthropology and history.
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