They Redistributed the Wealth of the Private Sector Middle Class to the Public Sector; the End Game is to Pit the People Against Each Other with Orchestrated Protests, Then Order Out of Chaos with the Solution being a New World Order with 'Social Equality for All'

The Democrats elected in this country, the vast majority of them, have expressly engaged in sabotage against the American people by siding with other Americans whose job it is to squeeze every last dime out of them in what is not anything other than a transfer of wealth. Public sector unions create zilch. They produce zilch. They add zero to the gross national product. It's simply wealth transfer. It's simply the redistribution of wealth. And what now has happened is that those from whom the wealth is taken have figured out that the beneficiaries of the transfer now earn twice what they who are earning the money in the first place earn. Once that was learned, once that was figured out, what did you expect to happen? Did you really think that there was so much love and adulation, respect for government workers that no matter how large the shaft job was, that the people producing the money to pay these people would just continue to bow down and say, "Oh, please continue to serve us. We love encountering you at the DMV. We can't wait to see you when we have to go get our health care. We just love seeing you people when we show up at the airport. We love getting patted down while Ahmed sails through and the granny blue hair Bloody Mary gang has to be stripped down to bare nothing looking for a nonexisting weapon while we're paying all of this." - Rush Limbaugh, "Shared Sacrifice" is Stupid, February 22, 2011

Wisconsin Assembly Passes Bill Taking Away Union's Power

Collective bargaining laws are not a 'right' of the public sector

February 25, 2011

AP – Republicans in the Wisconsin Assembly took the first significant action on their plan to strip collective bargaining rights from most public workers, abruptly passing the measure early Friday morning before sleep-deprived Democrats realized what was happening.

The vote ended three straight days of punishing debate in the Assembly. But the political standoff over the bill — and the monumental protests at the state Capitol against it — appear far from over.

The Assembly's vote sent the bill on to the Senate, but minority Democrats in that house have fled to Illinois to prevent a vote. No one knows when they will return from hiding. Republicans who control the chamber sent state troopers out looking for them at their homes on Thursday, but they turned up nothing.

"I applaud the Democrats in the Assembly for earnestly debating this bill and urge their counterparts in the state Senate to return to work and do the same," Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, said in a statement issued moments after the vote.

The plan from Republican Gov. Scott Walker contains a number of provisions he says are designed to fill the state's $137 million deficit and lay the groundwork for fixing a projected $3.6 billion shortfall in the upcoming 2011-13 budget.

The flashpoint is language that would require public workers to contribute more to their pensions and health insurance and strip them of their right to collectively bargain benefits and work conditions.

Democrats and unions see the measure as an attack on workers' rights and an attempt to cripple union support for Democrats. Union leaders say they would make pension and health care concessions if they can keep their bargaining rights, but Walker has refused to compromise.

Tens of thousands of people have jammed the Capitol since last week to protest, pounding on drums and chanting so loudly that police providing security have resorted to ear plugs. Hundreds have taken to sleeping in the building overnight, dragging in air mattresses and blankets.

Click here to see photos of the Wisconsin protest

AP/Wisconsin State Journal, M.P. King

Walker issued a statement Friday praising the Assembly for passing the bill and renewing his call for Senate Democrats to return.

"The fourteen Senate Democrats need to come home and do their jobs, just like the Assembly Democrats did," Walker said.

With the Senate immobilized, Assembly Republicans decided to act and convened the chamber Tuesday morning.

Democrats launched a filibuster, throwing out dozens of amendments and delivering rambling speeches. Each time Republicans tried to speed up the proceedings, Democrats rose from their seats and wailed that the GOP was stifling them.

Debate had gone on for 60 hours and 15 Democrats were still waiting to speak when the vote started around 1 a.m. Friday. Speaker Pro Tem Bill Kramer, R-Waukesha, opened the roll and closed it within seconds.

Democrats looked around, bewildered. Only 13 of the 38 Democratic members managed to vote in time.

Republicans immediately marched out of the chamber in single file. The Democrats rushed at them, pumping their fists and shouting "Shame!" and "Cowards!"

The Republicans walked past them without responding.

Democrats left the chamber stunned. The protesters greeted them with a thundering chant of "Thank you!" Some Democrats teared up. Others hugged.

"What a terrible, terrible day for Wisconsin," said Rep. Jon Richards, D-Milwaukee. "I am incensed. I am shocked."

GOP leaders in the Assembly refused to speak with reporters, but earlier Friday morning Majority Leader Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, warned Democrats that they had been given 59 hours to be heard and Republicans were ready to vote.

The governor has said that if the bill does not pass by Friday, the state will miss a deadline to refinance $165 million of debt and will be forced to start issuing layoff notices next week. However, the deadline may not as strict as he says.

The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau said earlier this week that the debt refinancing could be pushed back as late as Tuesday to achieve the savings Walker wants. Based on a similar refinancing in 2004, about two weeks are needed after the bill becomes law to complete the deal. That means if the bill is adopted by the middle of next week, the state can still meet a March 16 deadline, the Fiscal Bureau said.

Democratic Sen. Jon Erpenbach said he and his colleagues wouldn't return until Walker compromised.

Frustrated by the delay, Senate Republican Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, Jeff Fitzgerald's brother, ordered state troopers to find the missing Democrats, but they came up empty. Wisconsin law doesn't allow police to arrest the lawmakers, but Fitzgerald said he hoped the show of authority would have pressured them to return.

Erpenbach, who was in the Chicago area, said all 14 senators remained outside of Wisconsin.

"It's not so much the Democrats holding things up," Erpenbach said. "It's really a matter of Gov. Walker holding things up."

Who Here Likes Gov. Walker's Tactics?

February 13, 2011

TJ Badger, buckyville.yuku.com - My wife is a teacher, and chances are she is better at her job than you are at yours. God knows she is better than I am at mine and I make a great deal more than she does.

For years, I've been telling her that the union is doing a disservice to her in not properly educating teachers what their total compensation package really is. I've told her that she actually makes more than it seems relative to other professions because of her pension and her health benefits and the time off that she gets in the summer. I've told her that things are going to change at some point because health insurance premiums are spiraling out of control (I see it at my company) and they can't keep getting the same benefits due to cost and get salary increases.

Bottom line, her union leadership has done a poor job of letting teachers know all the facts so that they can see the other side of the argument when it comes to making the hard choices. My wife hasn't cared because she just wants to teach and make a difference in young people's lives. And she does.

So now Governor Walker comes along and is willing to make some hard choices. He knows that we can't keep going in the same direction. But how could he do it this poorly? How could he lump every debatable position (strength of unions, pay, pensions, insurance, furloughs and especially debate itself) all into one big statement and think he should just move forward? What a douchebag. Governor Walker, many of us would understand the hard cuts and decisions that must be made. But you alone are not the one to make them. And you can not pick and choose who to go after when making cuts.

For my own personal bottom line, I'm going to encourage my wife to look for alternatives. She deserves better respect than what she is getting from her leadership. And I guarantee you that it will hurt the kids she cares so much about.

Unions in the Midwest Mimic Protesters in the Middle East

February 18, 2011

TriValleyPatriots.com - Margaret Thatcher once famously said,

"The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Well, the public sector unions have hit just such a brick wall all over the country and they are not happy about it. In Wisconsin, angry mobs held up signs calling Governor Walker a dictator and comparing him to Hitler (how original!). Protesters -- many of whom were bussed into the state by Obama's OFA and organized by the DNC -- flooded into the statehouse, sitting in the halls to make passage difficult, and screaming from the balcony. One man was carried away in handcuffs after trying to rush the assembly floor.

The same type of thing is happening in Ohio and will be coming soon to the other states with bloated, unsustainable public sector union salaries and pensions maintained by a corrupt quid pro quo arrangement with the unions' wholly owned subsidiaries: the Democrat party.

What is the solution being demanded by these raucous mobs? Higher taxes, of course. Despite the fact that public sector workers have far more lavish salaries and pensions with far more job security than their private sector counterparts -- who are forced to pay their salaries via compulsory taxation -- these thugs scream and wail that even more must be taken from the productive individuals on whom they depend, because they expect to be paid more and more without commensurate merit or effort, regardless of whether economic realities even make such extravagant compensation possible, and callously indifferent to what such a burden does to their unwilling victims.

The public sector unions have had an easy time leaching off of the productive members of society over the past couple decades, and they do not want to let go of their power. Now, as they protest the attempts of the Wisconsin legislature and governor to impose limitations on how much these parasites can steal from the Wisconsin taxpayers, the public sector union members dare to call that action dictatorial -- a claim too ridiculous and patently false to take seriously.

No less absurd is the cry that their civil rights are being violated. Would that include the right to force people in the private sector, some of whom are already taxed so heavily that they are unable even to contribute to their own pensions, to give up even more in order to spare a bunch of beady-eyed deadbeats the burden of actually paying toward their own pensions? Is Governor Walker violating the "rights" of public sector union employees to loot and destroy what is not theirs? These quasi-riots are about the unions' lust to control us and our earnings much more than they are about the impact on employees' compensation.

Pawlenty Hits Public Unions

December 13, 2010

Politico - Tim Pawlenty's campaign for president hasn't made him a celebrity, but he's been remarkably good at seizing on his party's issue of the moment, an on hot topics like education reform and, today, public sector unions.

In the Wall Street Journal, he challenges the very idea that public workers should be able to organize:

The moral case for unions—protecting working families from exploitation—does not apply to public employment. Government employees today are among the most protected, well-paid employees in the country. Ironically, public-sector unions have become the exploiters, and working families once again need someone to stand up for them.

If we're going to stop the government unions' silent coup, conservative reformers around the country must fight this challenge head on. The choice between big government and everyday Americans isn't a hard one.

Public Employee Unions vs. the Rest of Us

February 22, 2011

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post - Many liberals still profess confusion about the distinction between collective bargaining in the public sector and that in the private sector. Really, it's not that hard, unless the intention is to ignore the obvious differences between public employee unions (which negotiate against friendly politicians to whom the unions give huge campaign donations) and private unions (which negotiate at arm's length against employers that don't enjoy a monopoly in the market). David Brooks provides a helpful guide to the perplexed:

In Wisconsin and elsewhere, state-union relations are structurally out of whack.

That's because public sector unions and private sector unions are very different creatures. Private sector unions push against the interests of shareholders and management; public sector unions push against the interests of taxpayers. Private sector union members know that their employers could go out of business, so they have an incentive to mitigate their demands; public sector union members work for state monopolies and have no such interest.

Private sectors unions confront managers who have an incentive to push back against their demands. Public sector unions face managers who have an incentive to give into them for the sake of their own survival. Most important, public sector unions help choose those they negotiate with. Through gigantic campaign contributions and overall clout, they have enormous influence over who gets elected to bargain with them, especially in state and local races.

There isn't much doubt, as Richard Cohen explains, that this imbalance has resulted in some grotesque outcomes. He writes:

In New York City, the No. 2 guy in the fire department retired on a pension worth $242,000 a year. In New York State, a single official holding two jobs and one pension took in $641,000. A lieutenant with the Port Authority police retired with an annual pension of $196,767, and 738 of the city's teachers, principals and such have pensions worth more than $100,000 a year. Their former employer, it goes almost without saying, is steamed. Their former employer is me.

These examples of pension obesity were culled from the local newspapers, which never fail to shock with revelations of how good life is for those who once worked for the city, the state or any one of several public agencies. In some cases, retirement came a mere 20 or so years after first reporting to HR and, if you were lucky enough to fake a disability - oh, my aching back! - the sky is virtually the limit. Fully one-third of all New York City cops who retired during a recent 17-month period did so on disability. They have dangerous jobs, we all know - but not nearly as dangerous as Long Island Rail Road workers. Almost all of them retired on disability. All aboard!

Is it any wonder that even private-sector union members have had it with their public union comrades?

Last night I spoke with Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute who heads the Center for Employment Policy. She explained that the extent of the unfunded liabilities is huge, but actually uncertain. She told me,

"Unfunded pension liabilities are estimated at $2 trillion or $3 trillion. But no one really knows because pensions depend on salaries at retirement and numbers of public sector workers. Both can change."

Moreover, she observed that the problem isn't simply the extent of the liabilities, but what it means for residents whose taxes are going up and whose services are being pared back to pay for extraordinary benefits and salaries for public employee unions.

On this point, Tim Cavanaugh has a superb analysis in Reason Magazine of the degree to which California's indebtedness to public-employee unions has crowded out the progressive agenda of a liberal governor and an overwhelmingly liberal legislature. He explains:

[Orange County Supervisor John] Moorlach alludes to a striking feature of the current pension reform movement: It is a revolt led by the supporters of big government. At every level, Californians want assertive government. Republican farmers demand cheap water and more than $2 billion a year in subsidies. Unionized TV and movie productions command incentives such as $500 million in tax credits. In popular referenda during the last five years, California voters have voted themselves nearly $100 billion in bonded debt. The acceptable question is no longer whether to spend but what to spend it on.

This is why the most aggressive lobbying for pension reform is coming not from fiscal conservatives but from progressives, who see the logarithmic cascade of pension liability as a threat to public parks, environmental programs, and rail transit.

There is no doubt that public employees have successfully gamed the system. As Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute has found, public-employee unions have done much better than their private sector counterparts. Biggs writes:

Is the overpaid federal worker really just a myth? Not according to academic research. Economists have studied federal pay since the 1970s, and their methods and conclusions differ markedly from those of the government. Economists use statistical techniques that account for differences in workers' age, education, experience, gender, race, marital status and other characteristics.

Those studies generally have found a federal pay premium in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to the 1999 Handbook of Labor Economics. A private sector worker earning $50,000 per year, for example, might receive $55,000 to $60,000 per year as a federal employee. The largest premiums are for lower-skilled employees, with smaller benefits as education increases. Interestingly, foreign studies also have found pay premiums for their government employees, suggesting government's weaker budget constraints allow public sector pay to rise above market levels. . . .

In addition, feds quit their jobs at much lower rates than private sector workers, implying that civil service positions offer better compensation, job security and benefits. These retention rates persist even with the federal retirement program's shift away from a defined benefit pension structure, which was believed to account for low quit rates.

In sum, one must try really hard to ignore the distinctions between public and private unions. It is those disparities that produce disproportionately rich salaries and benefits for public-sector employees and that burden state budgets. You would think that more politicians and pundits on the left, who have so many creative ideas for spending the taxpayers' money, would recognize that it's their agenda as well as the country's political health that is imperiled by the public employee union racket.

“Leveling Up” the Middle Class

February 13, 2011

Notes from Babel - E.D. Kain asks whether we’re thinking about public sector pensions all wrong. True, they generally receive higher salaries, more job security, better working conditions, greater benefits, more paid sick leave, vacation, and holidays, and better and earlier retirements than the rest of us. But taking aim at public sector employees is exactly the wrong approach, E.D. suggests—by pitting working class against working class, they both ignore the real enemy, the rich, who casually continue to stockpile their wealth. Thus, E.D. argues that the ideas of “austerity for all” and “upside-down egalitarianism” distract us from what we should really be working on: infusing more wealth into the middle class:

Maybe we should be trying to bring the private sector more in line with the public sector. Maybe the logical conclusion is that private sector workers are getting screwed – and that comparisons with public sector unions simply makes this glaringly obvious. Nobody but public sector employees receive pensions anymore. And maybe this is an argument to move back to the pension model rather than an argument to get rid of public pensions. Maybe leveling the playing field is the right idea, but we should level it up rather than level it down.

I’ve written before that, despite my conservative biases, I’m mesmerized by the progressive/utopian ideas of Edward Bellamy and early Robert Heinlein, in which man is provided a comfortable living as a matter of right and left to his own devices to cultivate his productive capacity as he sees fit. Speaking for myself, I don’t imagine I would suddenly become entirely unproductive if the government starting writing me a check each month. Yet, I seriously question whether this applies to every American, or even a substantial majority of them. Could we continue to support ourselves in the way we’ve grown accustomed if we all suddenly got comfortable?

Arguments like Bellamy’s Heinlein’s and E.D.’s suggest that our future holds a world in which the middle class is guaranteed comfort, stability, and reasonably interesting and not-terribly-stressful employment. Nay-saying curmudgeons like me think that humans tend to fall prey to their own vices; thus, to have any kind of comfort, stability, and interesting work, people require certain unpleasant kinds of motivation—competition, stress, fear of unemployment, worry about the future, etc. In short, while there are certain people who have a burning desire to be productive, most of us have only a latent desire to be productive. As Thomas Edison said,

"Most people miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work."

It takes unpleasant external forces to get the human productive spirit whipped up into useful action.

Yet, I think I can safely assume that this view will never enjoy unanimous support, so we are left with E.D.’s suggestion: Why not focus our middle class energy on “leveling up” the playing field to our collective benefit? But think about what this suggests. Public sector compensation is not determined by market factors. Indeed, the very definition of the public sector is that it is something outside the private sphere. While private sector numbers are sometimes used as a touchstone, the determining factor in public sector compensation is ultimately moral/political.

This is why the left loves to grow government, as this enables politicians and bureaucrats to engineer their own version of what the middle class ought to be. Specifically, most of today’s public sector workers came to their jobs knowing they would be paid less, but that certain benefits were more generous. But politicians, usually left-leaning, eventually decided public employees shouldn’t have to choose between future comfort and present comfort, and that they ought to have the best of both. But, by now, many state and local government workers make more than their private sector counterparts, and the gap continues to widen each year. From 2000 to 2007, public employees saw a 16% increase in compensation after adjusting for inflation, compared with just 11% for private workers, according to the USA Today.

So, to suggest that we ought to reconcile our two middle classes—the public sector and the private sector—by using the public sector compensation structure as the model, is to say that all compensation in the U.S. should be determined by moral/political factors rather than market factors.

Before considering what this means, let me say that I don’t fault E.D. for being allured to that position. For all the talk about how we ought to let the “free market” determine winners and losers rather than politicians and bureaucrats, the free market is inscrutable and substantially unfree.

As I wrote about recently, beginning at the turn of the 20th century, our economy has become increasingly diffuse, providing few obvious connections between labor and consumption, indicating the two are only loosely or insignificantly related. Modern labor is attenuated from its ultimate product, making the idea of the traditional work ethic prevalent in pre-20th century agrarian America less and less relevant. The American laborer no longer provides his own essentials of survival, but instead deposits his effort into a vast and complex economic machine. His yield, his “wage,” serves as the only symbol of his output, a rebuttable presumption of the true “value” of his labor. How does a cubicle worker in the marketing department of the Coca-Cola corporation have any idea how much his efforts contributed to the 1.3 billion servings of cola his employer sold that day? Next to none. And yet he counts on his paycheck form those efforts to pay his mortgage and buy cars and iPhones and college educations for his children.

As his commercial appetites continued to increase—goaded by our consumer economy—the American middle class begins to closely scrutinize the legitimacy of that presumption. It was this deadly cycle that ultimately led to a new, illegitimate basis for finding “individual rights” in American politics: If the market would not set a wage sufficient to meet the standard of living the American labor thought he should have, he would set it himself. And the tool he would use to accomplish this was collectivism—e.g., labor unions. Like the ills of slavery, since government had aided the accession of uncorked individualism (e.g., through a national bank and internal rail and telegraph projects), it was natural and perhaps even appropriate to look to government to redress its abuses.

As E.D. suggests, the finance sector might also deserve some blame for the middle class dilemma:

I always thought a thriving middle class was good for business, that the corporate world would want to pay people well and keep them happy so that they kept buying things. But it turns out that you don’t need a middle class to buy things, to keep the engines of commerce humming and whirring and piling up vast stores of cash. These days anyone can buy things, all it takes is a little credit card debt, maybe a second mortgage. For the truly committed consumer there’s always payday loans.

This strikes me as correct. The middle class allowed itself to be lulled away from the bargaining table by loose credit and home equity lines of credit, and have probably been getting lousier terms from employers over the last few decades as a result.

But while I’m tentatively sympathetic to the labor movement for some of the above reasons, I believe it’s basically only justifiable on pragmatic grounds. There is no reason why rampant individualism, whether of the late 19th and early 20th centuries or of today, is “wrong” from a legal point of view. As leaders like Teddy Roosevelt have admonished, however, the masses will not tolerate gross income inequality for long. If the wealthy do not moderate their own indulgences, the government, as a matter of political necessity, will have to do it. However, getting the government involved in choosing winners and losers—or deciding the measure of those winnings—is an unpleasant and dangerous business. It should be avoided at all costs, and probably should be abandoned once political exigencies have subsided.

As E.D. suggests, having a strong middle class is good for everybody, but corporations won’t trickle it down unless the government or collective bargaining makes everyone else trickle it down, too. Perhaps. The big problem E.D. and others will have to contend with is, once you start redistributing power, how do we decide who gets more or less power, and how much more or less? Conservatives and libertarians love leaving these decisions to nature and markets because, for all their faults, they’re procedurally fair—even though they may not be substantively fair. If we give up or alter procedural fairness to achieve greater substantive fairness, as E.D. proposes, he will have to contend with how we can still guarantee procedural fairness. This is the hill the left and the labor movement usually die on.

Economic Inequality in a Nation of Stereotypes

January 8, 2011

DC Urban Moms and Dads - Recent discussions of the proposed federal employee pay freeze highlight an unfortunate development: Americans have begun taking far too much pleasure in other's misfortunes.

When President Obama proposed last week that the pay of federal employees be frozen for two years, the DC Urban Moms and Dads discussion forums were inundated with posts on the topic. A common theme among posters who supported the proposal was that government employees were lazy recipients of overly-generous benefits packages who were impossible to fire. "Welcome to the real world" was the frequent refrain.

I was immediately reminded of the debates surrounding former DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and DCPS teachers. Rhee was praised for her willingness to challenge the Washington Teachers Union. Teachers were criticized as lazy whiners who were more interested in protecting their cushy jobs than teaching children. Rhee received nearly universal praise for firing them in great numbers.

There were also parallels with common attitudes towards the United Auto Workers during the government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. "Auto workers are overpaid, lazy, and deserve to lose their jobs", we were told. Depressingly little concern was shown for the fate of these blue collar workers.

The common theme here is that many of us have come to see others not as friends, neighbors, or fellow citizens, but as stereotypes. As is frequently the case, it is easy enough to find examples that exemplify the stereotypes. But, as is also true of stereotypes, they are mostly wrong in the broader sense. Another thing these groups have in common -- according to the stereotypes -- is that they are lazy and inordinately well compensated. The stereotypes encourage us to welcome them being taken down a notch or two.

The irony is that nobody becomes a federal employee, teacher, or auto worker to get rich. Moreover, these professions used to be sort of like motherhood and apple pie -- they made America great. Now they have become scapegoats. They are people we love to hate.

I think this is a dangerous trend. It is popular now to look to the earliest days of American history for guidance for today's politics. In that vein, John Dickinson, George Washington, and Patrick Henry all famously used the phrase "United we stand, divided we fall." When federal employees express glee in the firing of teachers, teachers offer approval for auto industry layoffs, and auto workers chuckle at federal employees getting their pay frozen, it benefits none of the groups. And when everyone else applauds the financial hits suffered by those workers, it weakens us all. We become like the proverbial crabs that individually could escape from a bucket, but pull each other down so that none can escape. We've become the engine of our own failure.

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