Comparative Financial Statistics For Public Community And Junior: Fill & Download for Free

Original question: why do you dislike the Green New DealThe Green New Deal is very misunderstood. It’s become a political tool for both sides and thus a lot of confusion exists around it. So let’s clearly define exactly what it is.After that I am going to dive into why I don’t like it and what my issues with it are. This will be a long one and I hope it can easily show why the GND isn’t any good.The Green New Deal (GND) is not a piece of legislation nor is it a law or bill. It is a resolution. Think of it as a goal list for the Democrats and hopefully the government. It outlines where things should go and that is about it.Here it is from congress directly: https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdfThe GND lays out specific endpoints likeReform the transportation industry to be 100% greenhouse gas-freeRebuild the US to have “Green” buildingsCreate a more locally based food industryRely 100% on renewable energy in 10 yearsCreate a system where the public has an ownership stake in companies and the economyClose the wage gapEnd wage stagnationClose wage capIncrease life expectancyClean up nature, remove pollutionYou get the point. Now you may notice a few… issues let’s call them.First off this list is kinda dumb. It’s like a highschool wrote down all the problems in the world. It’s mostly obvious things that 90% of people can agree on. Like ya, let's end wage stagnation, live longer, and breathe clean air- who disagrees.The problem is that the GND offers no path to achieving any of these. These are all very present and discussed issues. If AOC has the solution than awesome, she needs to show it.In truth, she does not have a solution. She has the ambiguous “pie in the sky” goals of any young politician but no path to getting there. These are significant goals and just 1 of them would take years to accomplish.But again this is a resolution and its purpose is just to make these things a goal. So let’s just dive into the specifics.1: EconomicsOn page 11 at the top (lines 1–3) it statesproviding and leveraging, in a way that ensures that the public receives appropriate ownership stakesThis is a sneaky little call to socialism I suspect. The goal would be community ownership over this newly created economy. This then likely translates to state or federal ownership and thus a much larger government.A lot of the Green New Deals calls for increased regulation everywhere. The answer to everything seems to be more government oversight. I don’t think the highly inefficient US government is the answer to anything.More importantly, the GND calls for unionization (pages 10, 12, and 13) and collective bargaining on a national scale. This would lead to increased wages which is great! But companies can only spend so much on employees. If they raise wages that means they cannot afford to keep everyone on the payroll. Companies are not operating at a 60% profit margin- many have margins of 2% or 10%.So we will see increased unemployment rates which mean increased unemployment support on the state and fed- a state and fed financially bogged down in radically rebuilding the entire nation.We are already dealing with mechanization and going about unionizing everyone is a great way to push companies further towards automation.Also if we are radically remaking everything into a more socialist model who pays taxes? This would kill the rich and middle class. You are going to demand companies pay their people more, upgrade their locations to be “green”, and you are going to tax them more.Unions increase unemployment: Some Notes on the Economics of Unions: Part IIMechanization: Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines2: 100% renewableLet’s say we all agreed to embark on this GND. The primary goal is going “green” and that’s great. Let’s break this down a bitIndustry: 1/4th of Carbon emissions are produced via production and industry. A Toyota Prius is not good for the environment really at all. First is still partially uses gas the electric part relies on carbon-based electricity to charge its batteries. More importantly, though the complex production of these massive batteries produces tons of waste and carbon emissions. Over its lifespan, a Prius may actually be worse for the environment overall.Transportation: As stated most “hybrids” are not great for the environment and the same is true for Teslas and all-electric cars. The mass production of these cars has a serious impact. Not to mention it will take over a decade to phase out gas cars unless the government foots the bill for 300 million cars- which they cannot possibly do.Electricity: This is a bigger problem. Solar panels and wind turbines seem great and they are fine but there are serious issues hereThey do not produce enough energy to power the US, no matter how many we buildWind and sunlight are inconsistent and we do not have the technology to store excess power produced during sunny or windy days to hold us over during cloudy or still days.Solar panel and wind turbine production is harmful to the environmentBuilding: Page 8, section E statesupgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification;The cost of this is INSANE. If we took every dollar from every rich person we wouldn’t even be close. Not to mention the INSANE cost in materials and the carbon emissions put out from nationwide construction.To do this is 10 years is silly. We’d have a better chance of building a death star. We certainly need to upgrade infrastructure but this takes decades and is an ongoing project. You need to free market to do this for you- no government can rebuild the whole nation in such a short timeframe.See the issues with all this? If you build enough electric cars or solar panels you hurt the environment. Even then it changes little because the electricity we rely on to power cars still has to come largely from carbon-based fuels.Current renewable energy methods cannot replace existing ones and the only realistic way to go green is nuclear power, and the GND forbids nuclear power.Not to mention the cost in metals, man-hours, and wealth is insane. Lastly consider nobody wants to live green. We talk about it and all but we want long baths, fun cars, nice houses, Xbox Ones, new movies, good restaurants, and new shoes.Prius: The Hidden Environmental Impacts of Hybrid CarsSolar panels cost: Environmental Impacts of Solar PowerSolar isn’t enough: Reliability of Renewable Energy: SOLAR.3: Pay gapThere is no pay gap between men and women. Men and women make the same money for the same work.The statistic that women make 75 cents compared to a man making 1 dollar is bogus. This is just average income overall- it does not measure 2 people in the same position.Women by and large chose to work in professions that do not pay as much. Men dominate STEM for instance which is very high paying while women dominate the humanities- something that pays terrible.There are virtually no cases of a company illegally paying women less than men. It’s illegal to do that already so I have no idea what AOC plans to do.The feminist theory is that we need more female CEOs to level the pay gap. But becoming CEO means you have no life for 2 decades as you work 80 hours a week to master your craft. I’ve seen feminists call the obstacles of becoming CEO “sexist gatekeeping” and this is dumb. Getting the best and highest paying job means there will be challenges and obstacles.In the same position working the same hours studies show men and women earn about the same- sometimes there is a 1 cent difference. In some fields where women are needed (like STEM) they outearn men. In other fields where men are needed (like social work) men outearn women.Harvard Study: "Gender Wage Gap" Explained Entirely by Work Choices of Men and Women | John PhelanGender Pay Gap Statistics for 2020 | PayScale.To make this a goal of the government is stupid- plain and simple.See my problem with all this?It sets unrealistic goals (that are already goals) while outlining no way to get there. It’s such a radical set of changes that the odds of us pulling it off are slim to none.This is a nation of 325 million people. You are talking about radically reforming employment, transportation, agriculture, energy, basic economics, laws, taxes, and everything else in the most complex nation on earth.It would be a disaster. It would be insanely expensive and even more difficult. We would end up with high unemployment, insane debt, collapsing companies, a rise in food cost, a rise in energy costs, a massively expanded government, and that is the best-case scenario.I am all for a better future but to do that you go issue by issue and line by line. We start with “clean transportation” and focus on that for a few years at least. This will take time and it will take technology we do not yet have. This is a process and we need to go about it carefully and with regard to how it affects people.The whole GND is a disaster. It ignores fundamental economics and reality for this hyper-political “dream”. It was written by climate scientists and pushed by a young junior congresswoman who was once a bartender and thinks that unemployment rates are based on available jobs.Bartenders that do not understand basic unemployment statistics are not great at reorganizing complex economies, just saying.

U.S. perspective.Asking “aside from the student debt, why is going to law school a bad idea?” is kind of like asking, “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”But, like all good legal answers, it depends.For some of my classmates and for me, going to law school was a good idea and a prerequisite to careers we wanted to pursue. Those of us who are likely to be successful at that went into it knowing that the job market is very tight for attorneys right now. So, those of us who made plans to be successful after law school got a J.D. either:fully intending to avoid oversaturated markets or content areas,with very specific plans to get into J.D. advantage jobs that don’t involve the practice of law, orwere already independently wealthy enough to avoid going into massive debt or without a good plan to repay it, andknew precisely what we were getting into.Because honestly, being an attorney can suuuuuck.Here are just some of the reasons that you might want to place that law school application in your hands into the circular file bin.If you are averse to working 60, 70, 80, or more hours a week on a routine basis, going to law school is a bad idea.Every job can be demanding sometimes when there’s a deadline, and ask you to put in a long week.Now, imagine doing that every week, all the time. This is not an occasional thing. This is the norm.Pretty much anywhere you’re going to work that isn’t your own solo/small practice is going to have a billable hour requirement. On average, expect that to be about 2,000 billable hours a year. If you take two weeks of vacation, that’s an average of 40 billable hours a week. It’s pretty safe to assume that you’ll need to work 60–70 hours a week to achieve 40 billable hours in that span.Do the math and realize that not taking that two weeks of vacation literally only knocks it back by about 2–3 hours a week. Then cry.You have a family and ever want to see your kids? Go to their ball games or dance recitals? Heh, heh. That’s cute. What has two thumbs, a filing deadline tomorrow, and needs to draft and upload their answer and counterclaim?You.You do.There are some areas of legal work where more regular hours are possible, such as being a judicial clerk. These jobs are not all that easy to come by and usually don’t pay amazing.Additionally, none of that work will be the kind of cool stuff you see on television, tearing down witnesses on cross-examination or debating precedent.You know what you will do?Write. All day. Every day. Hours on end.And read. All day. Every day. Hours on end.In a little cubicle with a flickering fluorescent tube light overhead, not in a wood-paneled office with a window surrounded by copies of leather-bound tomes.Seriously, document review is honestly something that I think Satan will force those in the seventh circle of hell to endure for eternity, with a big dashboard showing your statistics compared to everyone else while a junior partner comes by every so often to remind you that you’ll need to come in Saturday. And Sunday. And Sumonday, which was created as an eighth day of the week, on which day it will be always sunny and 70 outside and you will be periodically and randomly reminded of that throughout the day because you will never ever get to experience it again.If you think that law school is any sort of a golden ticket in life, going to law school is a bad idea.The job market is terrible. It’s been terrible for more than ten years. Depending on where you want to live and what you want to do, it’s not getting any better and likely won’t. There are too many law schools churning out attorneys, and their continually lowered admissions standards to keep the doors open and lights on is showing up in the ever-decreasing bar passage rates.That means that every year, there are more and more people out there with a J.D. who are competing for jobs, including those that are not considered the practice of law requiring a license. So, even if you don’t pass the bar, your J.D. is no longer as door-opening as it was even fifteen years ago.One-third of J.D. graduates are taking jobs that do not require that degree. There are far cheaper and less demanding avenues to get the education to qualify for those jobs. Even an MBA is half the cost, two-thirds the time sink, and doesn’t include the terrifying nightmare that is the bar exam.If you think that just being smart is going to cut it in law school, going to law school is a bad idea.Far too many people just don’t understand just how hard law school really is. I cannot stress this enough. It is not like any other form of graduate study apart from maybe medicine, in terms of the amount of work that you will have to do.The bottom third of almost every incoming 1L class is made up students who were big fish in small ponds, or people who are smart but lazy. They breezed through high school, skated through college on their ability to BS.And they utterly fail in law school. Many of them will drop out in the first couple of weeks or months; we lost about 5% of our incoming class to just pure attrition this way.I hate to break it to you, but being smart, even genius smart, will not earn you success in law school or the legal field.I graduated sixth in my class and it wasn’t because I was smarter than my classmates. It’s because I worked at it every. damned. day. I read every case before class. I wrote briefs for every case. I attended every study session the school offered. Hour after hour after hour after hour. I was at my desk doing the work when all but criminals and insomniacs are abed.Why? Because that’s how you succeed in law school and the legal career. You out-work everyone else. That’s how you discover the obscure precedent that saves your case. You just work harder than everyone else around you.You thought you’d be able to have a social life in law school? Hahahahahahahahhhahhahah!! That’s cute.Guess what? While you’re off having a beer with friends, someone like me is outworking you and taking your spot in the class rankings. Which leads me to…If you don’t handle stress well, going to law school is a bad idea.The practice of law is not just hard because it’s demanding. It’s a really horrifically depressing line of work most of the time. Pretty much every client is coming to see you on the worst day of their life. The biggest culprits are family law and criminal law, but even estate planning is usually a mega-downer. Even contract drafting is a process of thinking about, “God, what is every conceivable way that these people could possibly screw this up and how can I preemptively deal with that?”Legal practice is a contentious, adversarial process where the slightest mistake can have incredible consequences. If I make a mistake, an innocent person could go to prison. Failure to meet a deadline could result in loss of my license. Missing a word in a sentence could be the difference between an enforceable and unenforceable contract. Writing a will with one bad ambiguity in it could cost someone tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation costs when it gets probated.And on the other side of things is another probably equally well-trained attorney looking to exploit every mistake I make.According to a study by Johns Hopkins, lawyers are the most prone to clinical depression of literally any profession and least happy in their careers.All of this is why lawyers have some of the highest substance abuse and suicide rates in any professional field.If you think law schools actually care about you personally, going to law school is a bad idea.My law school really wanted me to believe that they care about me personally. And the professors and most of the faculty really do. I had a good relationship with the president. The admissions people make a significant point about being a student-centered school and that is part of the mission statement.But at the end of the day, you’re only useful to to a law school as a statistic. They will not care about you unless they can get you gainfully employed to buttress their numbers, because where they sit on the US News and World Report rankings is crucial to their success as a school.Getting on law review, doing well at OCI, having good 1L grades, passing the bar… very little of it is really about what is good for you personally. Schools need their bar pass rates up and their marketability rates up because of the increasingly competitive and tight market.It doesn’t help that there are too many law schools out there, and now there aren’t enough students to go around because there aren’t enough jobs to go around, so enrollment is declining. So, they’re getting increasingly desperate for students, which leads to lowering standards, which leads to admitting students that don’t pass the bar and are less likely to get employed, and the cycle perpetuates.If you look like you’re a lost cause to them? If they don’t think they can get you to pass the bar and get employed? Hello, academic probation and dismissal. They’ll offer you the tutoring and support right up to the point where they don’t think it’ll make a difference.Also, that line is nowhere near where it was in undergrad. You might have gotten out of college with C’s and a 2.4 average. In law school, fall below a 3.0 and you’ll be having chats with the academic dean.If you think you should go to law school because you like arguing and being opinionated and your friends think you’re pretty good at it, going to law school is a bad idea.These people are called “gunners” and everyone hates them.They change every hypo in torts class and ask the professor about it.They want to argue about the potential application of Citizens United to some upcoming case in Constitutional Law. They drag their pet political bugaboo into class. They argue with the professors.Don’t. Be. That. Person.I speak from experience. I was a kind of accidental gunner in my first year. I wasn’t trying to be argumentative. I was just trying to figure it all out, so I asked those kinds of questions and tried to stick up when I thought a case was wrongly decided. I put a target on my back and alienated a significant chunk of my class. I am absolutely indebted to some upperclassmen who pulled me aside and mentored me out of it. When some folks who eventually came around and became my friends rib me about it, I always have to act like the peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: look around sheepishly and quietly say, “well, I got better…”There is only one opinion that matters in law school, and it’s going to be a written one by a judge, and it will be sitting in a case book, which you are supposed to read and understand how the court arrived at that conclusion. Whether you agree or disagree with it is utterly irrelevant in class.Legal argument is nothing like just being strongly opinionated. Legal analysis is a very specialized form of argument that requires the ability to be utterly objective one moment and then to turn around and apply that objectivity to zealous advocacy.Persuasiveness isn’t about being loud. It isn’t about appeals to ethics, or emotion, or even logic most of the time.It’s about application of the law to the facts.You have to understand how to set up legal tests and standards, and then use those legal tests and standards to identify the relevant facts (because literally 90% of them won’t be,) and then demonstrate how those legally dispositive facts apply to the tests and standards to arrive at a legal outcome.An old trial attorney once told me, “If you don’t have good facts, pound the law. If you don’t have good law, pound the facts. If you don’t have either, pound the table.” While it’s good advice, everyone knows it and when you do pound the table, everyone’s going to know it’s because you’ve got nothing.If you think that you should go to law school so you can “change the world,” going to law school is a bad idea.I have to sheepishly raise my hand here. I went to law school at least in part because I wanted to have an impact on the world that I wasn’t having as a high school English teacher.Now, I didn’t think I’d be on the Supreme Court someday or anything, and I do make a difference in the lives of the people I work with. I am hopeful that I can use my extra training in alternative dispute resolution to make larger changes on the communities that I’m in and do some work in larger scale peacebuilding someday.But any area of the law where you’ll really make the most difference will pay like garbage. Like poverty-line-for-a-family-of-four level wages.Public defenders barely make enough to keep the lights on. Immigration attorneys trying to make a difference in the system right now are mostly volunteering. Working at legal aid is great, but get used to eating ramen because it’s all you can afford.Ironically, you’ll have better odds arguing a case before the Supreme Court and creating some sort of world-changing precedence by working as a small-firm attorney in the outstate rural boonies somewhere rather than by working your way up to senior partner at Dorsey and Whitney.You want a job at the ACLU? So does everyone else. You’ll be better off financially selling your soul to the Heritage Foundation or being a lobbyist, and you’ll have more influence with any of the movers and shakers in the world who actually create policy.If you’re not prepared to take eight to ten weeks off to study for the bar exam as a full time occupation and you have any anxiety issues about testing, going to law school is a bad idea.Seriously. Part of why the bar passage rates are so low is because there are more part-time students or even just lazy full-time students who think they can wing it because they heard that someone’s sister-in-law somewhere studied for two weeks and did just fine.Effectively studying for the bar exam takes, at best estimation and assuming pretty smart people, in the neighborhood of 400–500 hours. This is not a joke. This is assuming you spend the bare minimum on each subject tested on the bar and enough on practicing writing.Taking the bar is insanely stressful.On the multiple choice portions, you’re presented with questions that are, on average, half a page each. You have, on average, one minute and 46 seconds to read and analyze the problem, isolate the correct rule and remember what it is, and then try to guess which way the bar examiners are trying to fool you. It’s two to three days, eight hours per day, of absolutely mind-numbing tediousness.It’s also panic-inducing. You’ve put up anywhere from $500 to $2000 to take this test (depending on jurisdiction). If you fail, you have to do it again. It’s only offered twice a year, so your next shot is 5–7 months away (it’s only offered in July and February, not even every 6 months straight.) That level of stakes is what often what drives up people’s anxiety to the levels where they can’t focus and biff it on the test.I can’t tell you how many people have taken the first day and only came back for the second because they wanted to see just how badly they failed. It’s insanely demoralizing.If you don’t have a serious and specific plan about how to market yourself and in what area you plan to practice (both geographical and content area,) going to law school is a very bad idea.There are some areas where an attorney can do very well for herself these days. As oversaturated as many legal markets are for attorneys, there are other geographical areas that are desperate for attorneys, particularly rural areas in the Upper Midwest. A healthy attorney to population ratio is generally considered about 1:750. Around where I am, that ratio is often more like 1:1200, and where I want to work is frequently 1:2000 or 1:2500.You’ll need to be a generalist or at least more than single-subject specialization. Family law, low-level criminal defense (drugs and DUIs,) estate planning, and real estate will be your bread and butter.You’ll need to be willing to take appointments for public defense that will eat into your hours and pay what will amount in practice to minimum wage for tipped workers.You might need to be okay getting paid in chickens and firearms. This is not a joke.You will need to have very good conflict-checking software and a lot of your paperwork will be informed consent to conflict waivers.That said, it can be very rewarding. An attorney in some of these areas is usually a pillar of the community and a highly respected gig if you do your job well. You’ll never make the $250,000 a year large-firm-senior-partner money, but you’ll do all right. Plus the cost of living is usually much lower than the big city.In brief, if you know you want to be a lawyer, and you’re ready for a life of pain to be one, and you are going into law school with your eyes wide open, understanding that it’s very difficult work, not just in school but once you get out, and you really want to actually practice law, then it’s not a bad idea to go to law school.Otherwise, run away; don’t walk.

The Party’s ninety-million volunteers take the same oath⁠[1] today as they did a century ago: “I promise to bear the people’s hardships first and enjoy the benefits last.” Few benefit⁠[2] financially from membership and, between them, they contribute a billion dollars in annual dues and billions of volunteer hours leading China to dàtóng.Here’s the current composition of the Party’s membership:Half have at least a junior college degree,forty percent are women,one-third are ‘exemplary farmers, herdsmen and fishermen,’a quarter are white-collar workers,a sixth are retirees,one-tenth are ethnic minorities⁠[3] andseven million work for the government.Two-thirds of their leaders have graduate degrees and one-fourth have doctorates.They vote democratically–on a one man, one vote basis–for senior Party and government appointments. Surveys suggest that people are pleased with the direction they’ve set for the country.Admission to membership has always been highly restrictive and the process takes years. Candidates explain their motives for applying; list personal shortcomings along with detailed personal, financial and political information about themselves and their families; include recommendations from two Party members; and supply character references from two non-relatives who will be accountable for them for life. During the application process they attend weekly classes in Party history and ideology and participate in volunteer activities. Three quarters of university graduates apply but only a tenth succeed.So membership is pretty democratic already, and China’s governance process makes it the world’s leading democracy. Here’s why:Constitutionally, China’s constitution stipulates, “The State organs of the People’s Republic of China apply the principle of democratic centralism. The National People’s Congress and the local people’s congresses at various levels are constituted through democratic elections. They are responsible to the people and subject to their supervision. All administrative, judicial and procuratorial organs of the State are created by the people’s congresses to which they are responsible and by which they are supervised”. America’s founders carefully omitted the word ‘democracy’ from all Constitutional documents. For at least paying lip service to democracy, we must award a point to China.Electively, China’s bigger, more transparent elections were designed and supervised by The Carter Center which continues to expand the franchise at the behest of Premier Wen Jiabao, who told them in 2012, “The experience of many villages shows farmers can succeed in directly electing village committees. If people can manage a village well they can manage a township and a county. We must encourage people to experiment boldly and test democracy in practice”. Today, 3,200 democratically elected Congressional representatives must vote, almost unanimously, to approve all senior appointments and all legislation. In the U.S., wealthy, unelected people propose and fund candidates for election. An unelected Electoral College chooses the chief executive. China 2–USA 0.Popularly, the Chinese, who still bear scars of recent governance mistakes, will tell you that it was when Mao, Deng and the Qing Emperor ignored experts that they got the country into trouble. Today, Chinese democracy resembles Proctor and Gamble more than Pericles. There are more than a thousand polling firms in China and its government spends prolifically on surveys, as author Jeff J. Brown says, “My Beijing neighborhood committee and town hall are constantly putting up announcements, inviting groups of people–renters, homeowners, over seventies, women under forty, those with or without medical insurance, retirees–to answer surveys. The CPC is the world’s biggest pollster for a reason: China’s democratic ‘dictatorship of the people’ is highly engaged at the day-to-day, citizen-on-the-street level. I know, because I live in a middle class Chinese community and I question them all the time. I find their government much more responsive and democratic than the dog-and-pony shows back home, and I mean that seriously”. Even the imperious Mao would remind colleagues, “If we don’t investigate public opinion we have no right to voice our own opinion. Public opinion is our guideline for action,” which is why Five Year Plans are the results of intensive polling. Citizens’ sixty-two percent voter participation suggests that they think their votes count. Princeton’s Gilens and Page, on the other hand, examining the causes of Americans’ fifty-two percent voter participation, found ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’. China 3–USA 0.Procedurally, The Chinese engineers, economists, statisticians and sociologists who develop policies practice democracy among themselves and the top seven decision makers–appointed independently of each other and with a collective 200 years governing experience–require at least six votes to send legislation to Congress. If President Xi claimed that global warming is a hoax he would be regarded as autocratic, not democratic. If he wants a new climate policy and persuades five colleagues to support it, he can push it into the trials pipeline but, without solid trial data, he can’t propose legislation and the popularly elected, unpaid congress has proven willing to delay leaders’ pet projects for decades. Data-driven democracy has steadily narrowed the gap between public expectations and government capacity, which is why Chinese support for government policies stands at 96 percent, higher than even Switzerland’s or Singapore’s and far higher than our twenty percent. China 4–USA 0.Operationally, American presidents resemble the medieval monarchs upon whom their office was modeled, as Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, observed, “We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits which, after all, he can interpret for himself”. Our presidents hire and fire all senior officials, secretly ban fifty thousand citizens from flying, order people kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated and take the country to war. No Chinese leader, not even Mao at his peak, could do any of those things. The president cannot even choose his prime minister (always his strongest rival for the presidency), can only make decisions with 6–1 or 7–0 support from colleagues and can’t hire or fire officials, elect, assign or suspend members of Congress. As Stanford VC Robin Daverman explains, China’s initiatives rely on math: “Major policies undergo ‘clinical trials,’ beginning in small towns that generate and analyze test data. If the stats look good, they’ll add test sites and do long-term follow-ups. They test and tweak for 10-30 years then ask the 3,000-member People’s Congress to review the data and authorize national trials in three major provinces. If a national trial is successful the State Council [China’s Brains Trust] polishes the plan and takes it back to the 3,000 Congresspeople for a final vote. It’s very transparent and, if you have good data and I don’t, your bill gets passed and mine doesn’t. People’s Congress votes are nearly unanimous because the legislation is backed by reams of data. This allows China to accomplish a great deal in a short time: your winning solution will be quickly propagated throughout the country, you’ll be a front page hero and you’ll be invited to high-level meetings in Beijing and promoted. As you can imagine, the competition to find solutions is intense”. Operationally, data-driven legislation wins hands down. China 5–USA 0.Substantively, researchers, experts, media, academics, stakeholders and obstreperous citizens set the agenda. Since 2000, China has allowed foreigners to conduct surveys and publish apolitical results without submitting their questionnaires and Harvard’s Tony Saich, who’s been polling there for over a decade reports, in Governing China,that ninety-six per cent of Chinese are satisfied with their national government and, according to Edelman’s 2016 Report, almost ninety percent of Chinese trust it. World Values Surveys found that eighty-three percent say China is run for their benefit rather than for the benefit of special groups–compared to thirty-eight percent of Americans. China 6–USA 0.Financially, ninety-five percent of poor Chinese own their homes and landand the Chinese own, in common, the commanding heights of their economy– banks, insurers and utilities. And inequality is being effectively addressed. In its 2017 study, Global Inequality Dynamics, America’s National Bureau of Economic Research reports that, though the bottom half of Chinese saw their share of national income fall from twenty-seven percent to fifteen percent after 1980, Americans’ share collapsed from twenty percent to twelve percent. Simultaneously, China’s top one percent captured thirteen percent of all personal income, but America’s elite grabbed twenty percent. Since those figures were compiled, China has eliminated urban povertyand, the World Bank adds, “We can reasonably expect the virtual elimination of extreme poverty in [rural] China by 2022”. Every Chinese–not just the poor–has doubled her income every ten years for the past 40 years, an extraordinary improvement in income mobility and the inverse of our experience. In the U.S., says Stanford’s Raj Chetty, “rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Absolute income mobility has fallen across the entire income distribution, with the largest declines for families in the middle class”. China 7–USA 0.It’s clear that China has improved on our quaint, eighteenth century model.___________________________________________________________________________1 The oath is based on advice to officials by the great Song Dynasty Chancellor, Fan Zhongyan (AD 989–1052).2 Economic Returns to Communist Party Membership: Evidence from Urban Chinese Twins. Hongbin Li Pak Wai Liu Junsen Zhang Ning Ma. The Economic Journal. Vol. 117.3 Ethnic minorities make up 8.5% of China’s population.