CarbineCaleb
New member
No violence problem, no wealth gap in US?
Sensop - I think you are confounding things when you compare Japan and the US - many potential causitive factors differ between the two countries, and so to single out one factor as causitive for a an observed phenomenon (homicide rate), when looks at only two countries, can easily lead to a false conclusion... you can learn this from the teachings of any elementary statistics course.
As to there being no widening gap betwen rich and poor in the US, consider the following, from the Christian Science Monitor:
"According to World Bank data... In the US, the poorest 10 percent receives 1.8 percent of total income, while the richest 10 percent gets almost a third.
In no other rich democracy does the poorest 10 percent receive less than 2 percent of the total. (The average for rich countries is 2.9 percent.)
Don't leap to the conclusion that this extreme inequity in US income distribution reflects the policies of the Bush administration. The data are for a Clinton boom year - 1997.
In fact, Census Bureau data show a steady erosion of income inequity since the 1970s."
...which you can find at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0113/p09s01-coop.html
And as to those that claim that the U.S. doesn't have a high homicide rate, consider the illuminating graphs on international "Age-Adjusted Firearm Mortality Rates per 100,000 Population, by Intent" at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, which opens with:
"International Contrast Compared to other industrialized countries, violence and firearm death rates in the United States are disproportionately high. Of the approximately 50 upper- and middle-income countries with available data, an estimated 115,000 firearm deaths occur annually and the U.S. contributes about 30,000.8 Among industrialized nations, the U.S. firearm-related death rate is more than twice that of the next highest country (See Figure 3). The firearm death rate in the U.S. (14.24 per 100,000) is eight times the average rate of its economic counterparts (1.76).9 "
which can be found together with frequency graphs for firearms homicide in some 20 developed nations
http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/ficap/resourceBook/sectionOneIntl.htm
...this comes out of the medical school at Penn, and the data was drawn from the International Journal of Epidemiology
I think that some people here should check their facts and ideas using neutral and knowledgeable academic and government sources, not idealogical organizations.
Sensop - I think you are confounding things when you compare Japan and the US - many potential causitive factors differ between the two countries, and so to single out one factor as causitive for a an observed phenomenon (homicide rate), when looks at only two countries, can easily lead to a false conclusion... you can learn this from the teachings of any elementary statistics course.
As to there being no widening gap betwen rich and poor in the US, consider the following, from the Christian Science Monitor:
"According to World Bank data... In the US, the poorest 10 percent receives 1.8 percent of total income, while the richest 10 percent gets almost a third.
In no other rich democracy does the poorest 10 percent receive less than 2 percent of the total. (The average for rich countries is 2.9 percent.)
Don't leap to the conclusion that this extreme inequity in US income distribution reflects the policies of the Bush administration. The data are for a Clinton boom year - 1997.
In fact, Census Bureau data show a steady erosion of income inequity since the 1970s."
...which you can find at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0113/p09s01-coop.html
And as to those that claim that the U.S. doesn't have a high homicide rate, consider the illuminating graphs on international "Age-Adjusted Firearm Mortality Rates per 100,000 Population, by Intent" at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, which opens with:
"International Contrast Compared to other industrialized countries, violence and firearm death rates in the United States are disproportionately high. Of the approximately 50 upper- and middle-income countries with available data, an estimated 115,000 firearm deaths occur annually and the U.S. contributes about 30,000.8 Among industrialized nations, the U.S. firearm-related death rate is more than twice that of the next highest country (See Figure 3). The firearm death rate in the U.S. (14.24 per 100,000) is eight times the average rate of its economic counterparts (1.76).9 "
which can be found together with frequency graphs for firearms homicide in some 20 developed nations
http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/ficap/resourceBook/sectionOneIntl.htm
...this comes out of the medical school at Penn, and the data was drawn from the International Journal of Epidemiology
I think that some people here should check their facts and ideas using neutral and knowledgeable academic and government sources, not idealogical organizations.
