Takers vs. Makers Update: Why Work When you can Occupy?

[_Droopy]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/michellema ... ion/print/

A’ Is for Agitation.

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis walks, talks and barks like a rootsy Occupy Wall Street activist. But this Big Labor loudmouth who’s leading the abandonment of nearly 400,000 schoolchildren in the Windy City is just another power-grabbing union fat cat.

Instead of academic excellence, she rails about “social justice.” Instead of accountability, she fumes about “profits” and curses merit pay. Lewis has marched with the Occu-clowns denouncing capitalism and promoting “socialism (as) the alternative.” She raves: “Occupy Wall Street and the whole concept of the 99 percent is an extraordinarily important movement.”

And she earned praise as a “fist-in-the-air, crowd-rousing, dynamic union leader” by former Communist Party revolutionary turned Obama-funded “school reformer” Michael Klonsky.

While she pays solidarity lip service to the 99 percent, Lewis is part of the deep-pocketed elite of public employee union chiefs who blame everyone else for their own financial and educational ruin. She’s good at pandering to her Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing colleagues and trash-talking the political machine. But she is the machine.

The Chicago Teachers Union rakes in nearly $30 million in forced dues from rank-and-file teachers every year. CTU is an affiliate of the behemoth AFL-CIO, which dropped an estimated $100 million in forced dues to support Democratic candidates and causes during the 2008 and 2010 election cycles.

Before Lewis took control of the CTU, the union was teetering on bankruptcy and owed millions of dollars in loans. The previous CTU president pulled down nearly $300,000 a year in base salary and compensation. Local union watchdogs reported that top CTU officers and staff with six-figure salaries and bonuses also received:

“… a monthly expense account for each administrator — officers, coordinators and field representatives — of $1,500; a car allowance of $7,000 per year (whether or not you have a car); 85 percent of car insurance and expenses paid; parking allowance; cellphone allowance; life insurance paid with union dues; and among other perks, a 53rd week of yearly pay for “working” over the Christmas holiday.”

Lewis assumed the CTU presidency in June 2010.

“Teachers union officials declined to provide information on Lewis’ salary,” The Chicago Tribune reports, but records show that she made more than $71,000 for half a year’s work in 2010 — along with compensation from the Illinois Federation of Teachers in 2011 totaling at least an additional $64,000 on top of her unknown base salary and benefits.

When she’s not urging other teachers to ditch the classroom or organizing traffic blockades to impede everyone else in Chicago from getting to and from their jobs, Lewis spends her time trashing public charter schools and business leaders trying to reform our Soviet-style monopoly in education. The results speak for themselves: While CTU members earn an average of $74,000 a year and are now spurning 16 percent pay hikes, 71 percent of the third-largest school district’s 8th-grade students can’t attain the most basic level of science proficiency, and nearly 80 percent are not grade-level proficient in reading.

Lewis, a vulgar standup comic wannabe who has joked publicly about smoking weed in college, sneered at parent-centered charter schools that defied the strike on Monday as not “real” schools. Competition is the enemy of union-enforced stagnation. She also played the race card like a Vegas poker pro. And in a stem-winder straight out of the Barack Obama/Elizabeth Warren/Occupy rhetorical handbook, Lewis blasted the “wealthy” at a strike rally this week: “You don’t make money by yourself,” she hissed.

Nope. In Social Justice World, you make that money by climbing up the public employee union ladder and extracting it forcibly through a compulsory dues racket that redistributes hard-earned dues from nearly 30,000 captive members to the union leadership’s class-warfare demagogues.

It bears repeating often: The goals of the teachers union radicals are not academic excellence, professional development and fairness. The goals are student indoctrination, social upheaval and perpetual grievance-mongering in pursuit of bigger government and spending without restraint: 2, 4, 6, 8! One agenda: Agitate!

[_Brackite]

The Occupy Movement in California is mainly responsible for the tax increases in Proposition 30 there. Proposition 30 is a tax increase on incomes over $250,000 and a quarter of a cent sales tax increase. California already has the 2nd highest income rate in the Nation, and it already has the highest minimum state sales tax in the Nation. And Since the Passage of Proposition 63 there, Millionaires in California already pay the highest income tax rate in the Nation. The Public Unions in California being "inspired" by the Occupy Movement there, decided to put most of the tax increases on the rich in California to help pay for their salaries and pensions. The Public Unions in California and Governor Jerry Brown in California initially set off gathering signatures for two distinct propositions, however, they reconciled and gathered up the signatures for what would be Proposition 30. However, raising taxes on the rich on the State level will Not do well for California. Some of the Millionaires in California will just decide to move out of California if they get another tax increase. A better idea would have to legalize and tax prostitution there. California's Proposition 30 Sucks!!!

[_Kevin Graham]

Or in Droopy's case, why work when you can rely on your family to support you?

[_Jason Bourne]

Or in Droopy's case, why work when you can rely on your family to support you?

Kev

That was a low blow wasn't? argue the issues and don't do personal attacks.

[_Bond James Bond]

Or in Droopy's case, why work when you can rely on your family to support you?

Or the government.

[_krose]

Some of the Millionaires in California will just decide to move out of California if they get another tax increase.

Really, how likely is it that someone would move to another state and leave a job that pays over a million dollars, just to avoid paying another 3% on the amount above a million?

Even if they could transfer to another state and keep the same salary, I don't see it. I can't speak for anyone else, but if I made that much money, I would gladly pay the higher tax to live in Newport Beach or La Jolla, rather than live in a low-tax place like Utah or Arizona (or Texas -- ugh!) and make even more.

[_Droopy]

Really, how likely is it that someone would move to another state and leave a job that pays over a million dollars, just to avoid paying another 3% on the amount above a million?

Quite likely, when one sits down and sees the punitive federal corporate tax rates, punitive personal marginal tax rates, punitive California personal income tax rates, high sales taxes, the inane smog and mechanical checks one must go through and pay for to operate a vehicle, oppressive environmental, CaL/OSHA, and numerous other layers of invasive an non-rational business regulation that has no real purpose other than to provide permanent sinecures for government bureaucrats and to expand the power and size of government for its own sake, fantastic property taxes and housing costs etc.

Yup, I'll take my business, my employees, and my taxes somewhere else where my entrepreneurial/job creation abilities are more appreciated and valued, and I'm living under something a bit less then a rogue, authoritarian socialist command and control nanny state bought and paid for to the core by public sector unions and fanatic environmental groups.

California is now a stagnant, decrepit, broke, thoroughly etatist, economically dying western European socialist welfare state with a massive and growing population of non-English speaking foreigners, many of whom have broken American law to come and stay here, with little incentive or desire to integrate and assimilate into the American mainstream, and who's welfare needs will eventually bury California economically.

The social consequences of this are monstrous in their implications.

[_palerobber]

Droopy, just out of curiousity, for how many total months since Jan 2000 have you not been gainfully employed?

[_EAllusion]

I'm sure there's some tax level that would prompt me to move, but I can't see marginal increases like those under discussion being the motivation. That goes into general cost of living. And while cost of living is a factor in where I decide to live, it isn't thee lone factor or even the most important one, at least within a decent range. When you look at a huge population of people, some of them naturally are going to be on the edge, so moving a marginal rate can cause a marginal amount of people to move. If you ever wonder why tiny changes tip a small amount of people off into moving, it's because a small amount of people were already on the cusp. A mass exodus, however, would be bizarre and does not happen with small changes.

Granted, I'm a "maker" and not a "taker" fantasizing about what it would like to be a maker, so I understand why people would give different answers.

[_Droopy]

I'm sure there's some tax level that would prompt me to move, but I can't see marginal increases like those under discussion being the motivation.

Marginal?

http://www.heritage.org/research/projec ... active-map

http://www.advisorone.com/2012/05/16/re ... hikes-will

http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2010/0 ... ears-rate/

http://www.pacificresearch.org/publications/taxifornia

http://www.pacificresearch.org/publicat ... cts-2011-3

The tax structure and rates in California have long been far, far beyond "marginal," and anything further will simply add more straws to the camel's back.

This story has an interesting twist:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/14/news/ec ... /index.htm

So, the takers (the California political class, California legislature, public sector unions, the welfare underclass, and millions of illegal aliens) want the makers (the people who save, invest, take economic risk, create wealth, jobs, and opportunity and who, among the rest of the California middle class and working poor (none of whom had anything to do with the budget shortfall) are now being asked to pay a higher sales tax in a state that is already one of the most oppressive in the nation across a plethora of layers of state taxation.

California, like the federal government, is fiscally out of control, and has a severe spending problem. Raising taxes will not solve it, and never has, either in California or at the federal level.

This budget shortfall is clear proof, not that "the rich" and the middle class need to be taxed to preserve the power and privilege of the California ruling class, but that the California ruling class, and the government they control, is bankrupt fiscally, intellectually, and morally.