Posted on 04/25/2018 8:23:41 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Cuba is so lucky. With the installation of their new president, Miguel Díaz Canel, Cubans will be able to continue with their terrific lifestyle. What lifestyle? Income equality.
We are repeatedly told that income inequality is bad. Apparently, you should be ashamed of yourself if you earn more money than what lazier people get. We are supposed to assume that the definition of paradise is a place where everyone has the same income. So what is it like in a country with income equality?
Cuba has income equality. Verifying this requires a careful look at the data. Most sources – for example, Brookings – cite a per capita income of about $240 per year. Wikipedia cites about $22,000 per year, so be careful with your information sources. The government employs 78% of the workers, so there is little opportunity to get an income very different from the average. How can people survive on a salary of practically nothing? Thanks to the government, Cubans get free food and medicine. They get subsidies for virtually everything they might buy. As a result, someone getting no salary is only slightly worse off than someone with a relatively high income. In all practicality, Cuba has as close to income equality as a society can provide.
Cuba also has abject poverty and child prostitution. Before the 1959 revolution, Cuba exported $780 million (1959 dollars) of goods, mostly food. Now it imports 70% to 80% of the food that it consumes. The result is that Cubans risk their lives in shark-infested waters to escape.
Before the Castros took over Cuba, it was quite prosperous. PBS describes Cuba's 1950s living standards this way:
Cuba ranked fifth in the hemisphere in per capita income, third in life expectancy, second in per capita ownership of automobiles and telephones, and first in the number of television sets per inhabitant.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
(The Finns are smart enough to call a failure a failure, as well as act on it.)
I was recently at Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, where the management had actually managed to politicize a Spring Flower Show with a display on Cuba and how we should emulate them because everything is so much more green and sustainable there since there are no American Pig Capitalists mucking the place up.
Fun Display Factoid: Cuba is a world leader in organic farming methods. This is because the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving them without a source of fertilizer. How lucky for them!!
Inside Fidel Castro’s luxurious life on his secret island getaway
https://nypost.com/2015/05/10/inside-fidel-castros-luxurious-life-on-his-secret-island-getaway/
Flew from Miami to Costa Rica. Flew over Cuba at night. Not quite as dark as North Korea, but there weren’t a lot of lights on. So they’ve got that low carbon emissions thing going for them.
Let's go to Margaret Thatcher for the response to Liberal income equality arguments:
"What the honorable member is saying is that he would rather the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich. That way you will never create the wealth for better social services as we have."
In 1994 I was in Guantanamo Bay Cuba helping with the diaspora. 35,000 Cubans risked shark and barracuda infested waters to travel across the bay on rafts, inner tubes, anything they could paddle and float with.
Castro had meat rendering plants dump their residues into the bay to attract sharks and barracudas to help minimize the numbers of people escaping.
Why a Cuban would ever vote Democratic is beyond me. It is like feminists supporting Islam.
The other thing about Cuba is that people age real quickly. 40 year-olds look like they are in their 60s, they are so emaciated.
The socialist states are failing. Now with Obama gone and no longer supporting them they are falling like flies
Yet both happen, amazing as you say.
You want to see guaranteed income and socialism?
Take a drive through an Indian reservation.
You want government single-payer health care?
Go to a VA hospital or prison
Plenty of examples here at home.
RE: Didn’t Finland just terminate a similar “experimental” program?
I didn’t know they had one. Could you point us to a reference (a link perhaps) for this?
Or pro-Israel Jews voting Democrat.
Finland ran a two-year experiment on guaranteed income and chose a random sample of unemployed people with which to conduct.
Europe’s first national government-backed experiment in giving citizens free cash will end next year after Finland decided not to extend its widely publicised basic income trial and to explore alternative welfare schemes instead.
Since January 2017, a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58 have been paid a monthly €560 (£475) , with no requirement to seek or accept employment. Any recipients who took a job continued to receive the same amount.
Amen. Thus sayeth Ronaldus Maximo the Great.
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