The Dude wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:

SK790 wrote:If securing Iraq is so important to you, go join the goddamn army or shut up.

If increasing the power of American labor is so important to you, quit your job and become a union organizer or shut up.

the things you write down are so crazy mixed up, nobody can understand you, could you please write in plain english sentences

where did you develop the habit of assuming the role of board thought leader? it's not hard to understand anything he says. whether or not you agree with him, and i don't the vast majority of the time, he's not typing in tongues or anything.

ow, you scolded me, stop

The Savior wrote:

SK790 wrote:

sydnor wrote:

SK790 wrote:

The Savior wrote:We could have stayed

Why don't you go over then? I'm so sick of people who have no real stake in this making the decisions or calling for action. If securing Iraq is so important to you, go join the goddamn army or shut up.

what's the point of that? would it shock you if 51% of the army, or at least 51% of officers felt we should stay? i don't know if that's the percentage, wouldn't shock me if it was lower or higher. but the point remains, we don't let the army decide who to fight just because they want to fight.

savior believes we should have stayed. You (and I) don't. totally reasonable to have the debate.

jeff, i'm just sick of upper middle class white people urging us to go to war when very few of them or their family members are willing to serve. the military is an escape for a lot of poor kids who have no other options. i don't really know or care what % of the army thinks we should stay or how it's relevant to my point, but i guess my point was a bit vague...

you know the risk of loss would be far less had we stayed, even with a relatively nominal presence, than the current situation we're facing, right? further, i have multiple friends who have served and are serving. you're the same age I am or at least in the relative ballpark. it's been our generation serving the frontlines.

suggesting we stay isn't said lightly. it's the simple fact that volatility in the area would be far more manageable if we possessed a presence. broadcasting to our enemies when we're leaving (e.g. deadlines) is never, ever good.

i'm sick of this country playing arbiter between religious extremists and the corrupt governments they hate. which allies' borders are at risk at this point? us being there has only made them hate us more.

WE SHOULD SEND ALL THE HOME INSPECTORS TO FIGHT THE WAR

TWO BIRDS, ONE STONE

Turkey's is sort of at risk at the moment

SK790 wrote:jeff, i'm just sick of upper middle class white people urging us to go to war when very few of them or their family members are willing to serve. the military is an escape for a lot of poor kids who have no other options. i don't really know or care what % of the army thinks we should stay or how it's relevant to my point, but i guess my point was a bit vague...

I used to think this was true, too.

pacino wrote:Turkey's is sort of at risk at the moment

Thanksgiving isn't for another 2 months.

Werthless wrote:

SK790 wrote:jeff, i'm just sick of upper middle class white people urging us to go to war when very few of them or their family members are willing to serve. the military is an escape for a lot of poor kids who have no other options. i don't really know or care what % of the army thinks we should stay or how it's relevant to my point, but i guess my point was a bit vague...

I used to think this was true, too.

Why look at the neighborhood income levels as opposed to the income of the enlistees' families?

because it's from the Heritage Foundation?

I imagine it's still accurate given that people of similar income levels tend to live in the same vicinity, but I'd be interested to see if it makes a difference.

The people from the lowest quintile and are all in jail due to policies supported by the Heritage Foundation.

phatj wrote:

Werthless wrote:

SK790 wrote:jeff, i'm just sick of upper middle class white people urging us to go to war when very few of them or their family members are willing to serve. the military is an escape for a lot of poor kids who have no other options. i don't really know or care what % of the army thinks we should stay or how it's relevant to my point, but i guess my point was a bit vague...

I used to think this was true, too.

Why look at the neighborhood income levels as opposed to the income of the enlistees' families?

Because they don't require parental income when you enlist. They do supply an address, which enables this type of analysis. Of course, when 18-22 year olds enlist, we could look at their actual income to decide if they are poor, but that would be misleading. Most people enlisting don't have much income of their own, and that's generally not the argument being made when SK790 and others say that poor people are over-represented in the armed services.

If anyone has a source of this information that contradicts or confirms what I posted, I'm happy to look at it.

didn't read chart correctly

The top quintile of neighborhoods has average household income of $65k. It's by neighborhood. If you look at the census data map of the NYTimes, the top 20% of neighborhoods have income in that range.

edit: vanishing dude post!

That we broke the area obviously is a value judgment. That we changed it is not. Saddam had been in power for decades. We were variously neutral or friendly toward him until 1990. The Kuwait invasion and first Gulf War changed that, but then there was another decade where we mostly left him alone and vice versa.

The 2003 invasion was clearly a choice, and a bad one. Absent that, Saddam or his kids likely still would be in power. Terrible for Iraq, though arguably no worse than now unless you're a Sunni; probably better for the region (and worse for Iran), and better for us.

"The ruler is an awful guy + oil" is probably not a good reason to start a war, unless maybe against Canada.

hmmm. Not sure about that Heritage chart. Here's a CBO report on a different topic, but that reports US incomes by quintiles for the same period as covered by the Heritage report. on the page the link takes you to, aveage incomes by quintiles for 2007 are on the bottom 3rd of the page, & seem to have been adjusted to 2009 dollars.

Can it be that the Heritage data is skewed by focusing on incomes in neighborhoods from which enlistees come, rather than for all US neighborhoods? Reason I suggest this is werthless's table lists the Q5 income range as $65k-246k, while the CBO report lists the average Q5 income in the US as $273k. Even unadjusted, that average figure would be somewhere very near the upper bound of Heritage's top quintile range.

Hard to have an average that is essentially at the very top of the reported range.

drsmooth wrote:hmmm. Not sure about that Heritage chart. Here's a CBO report on a different topic, but that reports US incomes by quintiles for the same period as covered by the Heritage report. on the page the link takes you to, aveage incomes by quintiles for 2007 are on the bottom 3rd of the page, & seem to have been adjusted to 2009 dollars.

Can it be that the Heritage data is skewed by focusing on incomes in neighborhoods from which enlistees come, rather than for all US neighborhoods? Reason I suggest this is werthless's table lists the Q5 income range as $65k-246k, while the CBO report lists the average Q5 income in the US as $273k. Even unadjusted, that average figure would be somewhere very near the upper bound of Heritage's top quintile range.

Hard to have an average that is essentially at the very top of the reported range.

Your link is not showing quintiles of neighborhoods; it's showing quintiles of income. So if you have retirees living in nice neighborhoods, that drags down the average and median income in that neighborhood. That's why the distribution of neighborhoods is more compressed than the distribution of income overall.

Take a look at the median incomes in each neighborhood here:

http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer

The neighborhood disribution is more compact than the overall income distribution. Good luck finding neighborhoods with median incomes above $300k.

The whole income quintiles by neighborhood approach feels like it obscures the differences in circumstances of bottom & top quintile individuals anyway, military enlistees or otherwise

When you have the kind of scale-free distributions that US incomes describe, tidy quintile groupings start not to have much meaning





I mean, you find yourself in the position of asserting that the material experience of someone whose economic milieu is, say, around the 50th percentile is not substantively different from that of a person at the 95th percentile. Or conversely, that the 50% person's circumstances aren't much more like the 10% person's than the 95% person's.

Fewer military enrollees come from the 20% of lowest income neighborhoods than come from the top 20% of neighborhoods. That's the only argument.

There is no publicly available income info on each enrollee's family, which is why the neighborhood had to be used instead of the actual family income or wealth. It's a data availability problem, and one that is common. This is the same type of data shortcoming that causes confusion when news outlets refer to high income people as a proxy for wealthy people; wealth data is not known, while income often is. People just these data points interchangeably because no one has wealth data.

I was surprised when I learned this info ... people that live in poor neighborhoods are underrepresented in the military.

drsmooth wrote:I mean, you find yourself in the position of asserting that the material experience of someone whose economic milieu is, say, around the 50th percentile is not substantively different from that of a person at the 95th percentile. Or conversely, that the 50% person's circumstances aren't much more like the 10% person's than the 95% person's.

I make no such assertion.

Werthless wrote:

drsmooth wrote:hmmm. Not sure about that Heritage chart. Here's a CBO report on a different topic, but that reports US incomes by quintiles for the same period as covered by the Heritage report. on the page the link takes you to, aveage incomes by quintiles for 2007 are on the bottom 3rd of the page, & seem to have been adjusted to 2009 dollars.

Can it be that the Heritage data is skewed by focusing on incomes in neighborhoods from which enlistees come, rather than for all US neighborhoods? Reason I suggest this is werthless's table lists the Q5 income range as $65k-246k, while the CBO report lists the average Q5 income in the US as $273k. Even unadjusted, that average figure would be somewhere very near the upper bound of Heritage's top quintile range.

Hard to have an average that is essentially at the very top of the reported range.

Your link is not showing quintiles of neighborhoods; it's showing quintiles of income. So if you have retirees living in nice neighborhoods, that drags down the average and median income in that neighborhood. That's why the distribution of neighborhoods is more compressed than the distribution of income overall.

Take a look at the median incomes in each neighborhood here:

http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer

The neighborhood disribution is more compact than the overall income distribution. Good luck finding neighborhoods with median incomes above $300k.

Thanks for that link. I repeatedly forget how handy that NYT collection of maps can be.

Feels like those maps undercut Heritage's assertion that recruits are well-distributed across economic strata, because as you point out, the 'neighborhood' (census tract?) income ranges are almost invariably quite broad, consisting of numerous households - typically well more than half - not falling in the upper quintile of incomes.

That is, Heritage would have us believe recruits are sprinkled fairly uniformly well up into the upper quintiles of income, when it seems more likely they bunch down near the lower bound of the neighborhood ranges they've selected - kind of like the way physician charges bunch up around a "what 9 out of 10 doctors charge" figure.

Werthless wrote:

drsmooth wrote:I mean, you find yourself in the position of asserting that the material experience of someone whose economic milieu is, say, around the 50th percentile is not substantively different from that of a person at the 95th percentile. Or conversely, that the 50% person's circumstances aren't much more like the 10% person's than the 95% person's.

I make no such assertion.

yes, of course; by you, I meant abstract "you", not you you (so defensive...)

Werthless wrote:I was surprised when I learned this info ... people that live in poor neighborhoods are underrepresented in the military.

so immediately after you've dismissed the authority of the data, you make an unabridged assertion like this?

I mean, the data suggests there's not much to confirm that those "poor" neighborhoods are homogenously "poor". What you've* got is a "truth" that doesn't have much true in it.

aka Heritage reality. Heritage has "lied" to you, and you've gobbled it up, all eager to be "surprised" like you are

* & this time, you means you