Wisconsin in the news

[_EAllusion]

Uh, it already is the state employed medical professionals. The firefighters might be next, but I think the police and state troopers are safe as long as the rank and file consistently vote Republican and those professions continue to be loved by Republicans.

[_MCB]

Interesting. I am opposed to it as a whole, but weakening the tenure system is **a good thing** to copy the parlance around here. It is just too broad.

Police, state trooper, and firefighter unions are exempted.

Interesting.

[_Dr. Shades]

I am middling on the issue, there are good and bad provisions in it (just like there were in NCLB) I did sub on Thursday last week.

"NCLB" = "Non-Contributing Liberal Bastards?"

[_MCB]

Actually, I made a mistake in my professional career by not joining the union. I think some of the LDS culture rubbed off on me. Growing up, I thought that unions were some kind of Commie plot.

Yeah, NCLB was touted as a conservative measure-- initially, it was required to abide by it, with no funding.

Although I claim to be moderately liberal, I freely cross the fence.

[_ajax18]

When I taught high school in Florida a coworker of mine was diagnosed with cancer. Within a month the school system had terminated her. I've often heard of uniformed service members having to hide a cancer diagnosis from the army and pay out of pocket privately for treatment. Otherwise they would lose their job as well. If the government is willing to do that to someone to save money I can only imagine how the private sector will treat them.

With what the public is willing to pay teachers, the demands they make seem pretty absurd to me. But there is a significant vocal minority that simply is not even close to being reasonable or fair, and they're loud enough to basically control the school board with their complaints. It's an example of why socialism and public education simply does not work.

[_krose]

Police, state trooper, and firefighter unions are exempted.

Interesting.

Unless I heard it wrong, they all supported Walker in the election.

[_krose]

All Wisconsin has done is leveled the playing field, so public employees are equal to the private sector...

Are you claiming that unions are not allowed to negotiate benefits when dealing with private employers?

[_cambreckenridge]

Personally, I do believe that the effects of the most recent recession on govt and private sector budgets is being milked beyond what is necessary to get by until the economy recovers. Belt-tightening is one thing, but some of the things targeted for cuts take decades to get back.

States are in a really bad way right now, as are small businesses & the average citizen. However, I think the situation is being used by some as a means of increasing the pace in ridding the US of unions, pensions, health benefits for workers, etc, a trend going back quite a few years, albeit more slowly.

That is the part I think is harmful for our people and our economy overall, especially long-term. Some people cheer when the stock market is up and companies appear to be thriving, some setting record profits quarter after quarter, and still think it's logical for the workers within those companies to continue having their wages & benefits slashed. The record profits haven't been achieved by the savings from cutting benefits, as the profits were posted beforehand & total much more than those cuts would provide.

Not only do I believe those who claim a strong middle class is vital to a healthy economy, but I also believe historical accounts of life in the US during the early decades of the 20th century, before unions (and before some of those originally beneficial unions became corrupt), before Social Security, before Medicare, before worker safety laws, before laws restricting the pollution of land, air, & water - before life as we've been raised with existed.

Just as the younger people watching "Mad Man," often express genuine disbelief that situations portrayed actually existed in the US in those years, I don't think most people would believe the realities of US life before those 'socialist' moves by FDR if they actually knew about them. For many Americans it was Dickensian.

To take it even further, as bad as the Wall Street disaster was, I believe that when any industry, through excessive hikes in costs, starts tanking our economy, there needs to be a way to stop that abuse - for abuse is what it is. I'm speaking of 1) oil industry, 2) pharmaceuticals industry, 3) health insurance industry, to mention only the most obvious.

Before Wall Street, before Obamacare, those industries were happily jacking up prices, sometimes using excuses such as Hurricane Katrina or onerous gov't regulations, sometimes w/no justification at all except that they had a right to do so. Then, I started seeing those 'record profits' headlines in the financial sections of the news. That kind of profit-taking put the lie to the lame excuses. The oil prices started this recession through the huge increases in transportation costs that impact every item we use. Small businesses got wiped out, larger businesses postponed raising their prices hoping gas prices would go down, but had to jack them up when gas prices didn't go down. Oil execs claimed the right to have the same percentage/profit margin as other industries (maybe, but not through hiking prices all at once!), and continued to enjoy record profits. The congressional committee investigating prices was limited to analyzing only one specific week during one of the time periods questioned.

Health insurance & drug prices jump at the will of the manufacturers and are out in space somewhere in relation to the needs of what could still be a very profitable industry. They impact employers & employees. I resent Obama for campaigning on the issue, citing the need to rein in the grossly excessive, life-damaging, unnecessary profits those industries reap at the cost of all of our health & lives, then totally caving in, keeping way silent on the issue, and allowing the public option to be dropped from Obamacare, handing more huge profits to those very industries who, by the way, made sure to hike their prices even higher right up until a month before Obamacare was due to be voted on.

These industries, when asking for reduced regulations, used to claim that none of them would do anything that would hurt their own field long-term. Well, Wall Street, Enron - how many examples do we need - showed that many people in vital positions are quite willing to lay waste to the long-term if they think they have a shot at grabbing a bundle of loot & get away.

I remember an Enron rep or employee saying, "What we did may have been unethical, but it wasn't illegal." !! That's exactly like a parent/child exchange: "I told you to stop hurting your brother! - "No you didn't. You said to stop hitting him. I didn't hit him - I kicked him! You didn't say I couldn't kick him!" Since business has a free ticket for anything unethical as long as it isn't illegal, I'd say they cry for more, not less, regulation.

It is NOT that union employees get 'too much.' Other workers in this country are simply not getting enough.

If we continue to allow this free-fall of benefits, union protection, wages, etc, it will take decades to bring back any form of fair worker compensation, back to the "good product for a reasonable price, a reasonable profit, and reasonable pay for the employees.

It is simply not possible for most people to support themselves, much less raise a family, save for retirement, purchase health insurance, etc - things hard working people should be able to expect in this nation - on the wages they have to accept. Not because they are frivolous, but because of the forces at work, based on the worship of money & power (read King Benjamin's speech) that prohibit those things, that tell people they are selfish for expecting them but cry 'abuse' if the Soc Sec tax is adjusted to higher incomes over the past decades since it was last adjusted, defend continued huge salaries & perks for unethical execs who shouldn't even have those jobs anymore, in my opinion, and blah blah blah.

Up is down, black is white, the wealthy are the deserving, the average citizen is the pig - and in spite of the warnings & specific examples within the Book of Mormon, esp. King Benjamin's speech & other sections written specifically to the LDS TODAY, Mormons continue to back the interests of the secret combinations who lay destitute the sick, the orphans, the widows - all that stuff.

Our attention is focused on making sure that "if I'M bad off, then EVERYBODY has to be just as bad off" instead of focusing on the very real reasons that none of us really has to be that bad off & what we can do to bring back a strong economy for all of us.

Yeah, I do go on and on - feel free to ignore any post with my name on it.

Cam

[_Droopy]

That being said, I think workers should have every right to come together and collectively dictate the terms of their employment, just as I think employers have every right to dictate what they'll pay for labor. To the extent Walker's bill is politically motivated union busting, and that's all it really is, I'm appalled.

This misses the one, key, salient point in all of this that must, as a first principle, be confronted under such circumstances as the present unpleasantness in Wisconsin, which is that public sector unions are fundamentally incompatible with a free, rule of law based society grounded in the concept of limited government and never should have been allowed to exist in the first place.

The very idea of the unionization of public sector workers, of any kind, is a matter of a fundamental conflict of interest between public sector employees and their fellow citizens. Public sector unionism creates an irresistible and vicious entitlement mentality (as it dos in private sector unionism) but also, within the public sector context, generates a powerful divergence of incentives and interests between the private and public spheres, such that what is good for government workers becomes inherently detrimental to interests within the private sector and civil society generally (rather than coinciding with it, to a greater or lesser degree), and vice versa.

Private sector unionism, whatever its original intentions and value, went spinning out of control in the early 1930s and has yet, for the most part, to regain its economic or moral bearings. Even though such unionism has shrunken, due to its own intrinsic attributes, to some 12% of the working population, where it still retains power, its destructive effects are still in strong evidence (in the auto industry, for a recent glaring example).

Unionization in the public sphere is another animal entirely, however. It sets off entire classes of citizens, dependent utterly for their sustenance and livelihood upon the state, against the interests and values of their fellow citizens, and the appetite for ever more taxpayer gravy as the gravy train picks up speed and cargo over time becomes insatiable.

All that does is help weaken the resolve against the bill, which is absolutely needed to maintain a mass strike. Which is likely what is going to have to happen.

This is what I mean. The very idea of taxpayer funded employees striking at taxpayer expense, supported in their strike by taxpayer funded dues paid to the taxpayer funded unions who now use said taxpayer funded union dues to aid and abet public sector employees walking off their taxpayer funded jobs (which we now understand average combined wages and benefits upwards of double, on average, what compatible jobs in the private sector pay) should strike anyone who understands and supports the principles of the Founding as corrupt by definition.

All the public employees in Wisconsin who will not return to their lavishly remunerated taxpayer funded jobs, or in particular, who strike, should be summarily and unceremoniously fired, just as any private sector employee who walked of his job would be.

[_Eric]

Some good ideas on how to solve this crisis: The US states’ budget crisis: Where should the money come from?

The two-year projected deficit of the state of Wisconsin is $3.6 billion, little more than a rounding error when considering the vast wealth of the American financial aristocracy. The Koch brothers, the ultra-right patrons of Governor Walker, could write a check to cover that deficit and still remain billionaires.

Let us consider, starting with the low-hanging fruit, where the money could be found to wipe out the deficits of all 50 states combined, which this year come to a projected $130 billion.

* The extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, enacted by a Democratic-controlled Congress in December with the approval of the Obama administration, pumps $700 billion over the next ten years into the pockets of the rich. Reclaiming two years of that tax windfall would eliminate all the state budget deficits combined.
* Total compensation at Wall Street banks and securities firms last year hit a record $135 billion, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, on all-time-high revenue of $417 billion. The recipients of the Wall Street bailout could bail out the states out of their own pockets.
* The 400 richest individuals in the United States dispose of a staggering $1.37 trillion in assets, an average of nearly $3.5 billion apiece. A levy of 10 percent on the resources of these billionaires would also erase the deficits of all 50 states.
* Combined profits for all American corporations rocketed upwards in 2010, hitting an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter. A tax of eight percent on those profits—the same percentage as the cut Walker seeks to impose on schoolteachers and park rangers—would eliminate all state deficits.
* US corporations are currently sitting on $2 trillion in cash, refusing to hire workers despite collecting tax cuts that are supposed to be incentives to do so. A levy of 10 percent on that idle cash would provide enough money to eliminate not only the deficits of the states, but the deficits of all cities and local governments too, as well as preserving the jobs of hundreds of thousands of public employees.
* Hedge funds assets rose to $1.92 trillion in 2010, the highest ever, up from $1.18 trillion at the beginning of the year. Given a standard earnings formula of 2 percent of total assets plus 20 percent of the increase, hedge fund bosses stood to collect roughly $186 billion in personal income. An 80 percent tax on that income—less than the percentage rate on multimillionaires levied under the Eisenhower administration—would produce more than enough revenue to put all 50 states in the black. (It should be pointed out that the top hedge fund manager, John Paulson, had a personal net profit of more than $5 billion in 2010, while more than a dozen hedge fund bosses had personal incomes above $2 billion and many more took in over $1 billion).