yes, it’s as if all they care about is protecting the economic interests of the wealthy.
The liberal Mecca whose Federal taxes go to propping up the budgets of the welfare red states that get more from the Fed than they contribute.
Funny how conservatives bitterly oppose taxing the rich but are happy to supplement their budgets with money taken from a rich state.
California would be thriving if it weren’t carrying the load of several red states on its back.
:dubious: Says who? I’m constantly reading warnings like this one in business publications that indicate that layoffs are often badly designed and badly implemented in terms of the company’s well-being:
Yes, I see how a well-designed layoff can minimize the damage to the workforce, but what makes you think that most layoffs are well-designed?
As usual, Sam, your tendency is to assume that everything in a private or less-regulated system will in practice work the way it’s supposed to, while everything in a public or more-regulated system will in practice fail.
Hiring and firing practices in private-sector jobs? They will work successfully to retain the best employees. Evaluation and promotion practices in public-sector jobs? They won’t work successfully to retain the best employees. Case closed. No valid evidence offered, just anecdotes based on a deep conviction that markets intrinsically work and government intrinsically doesn’t.
Never mind that we can all find innumerable counterexamples in our own experience, where private-sector layoffs in a company ditched good employees in favor of crappy ones and people rose to the top based on qualities other than merit. You’ve decided a priori that markets by their nature work successfully and government doesn’t.
This seems to me extraordinarily, and unintentionally, significant. What you’re basically saying here is that the work we expect teachers to achieve successfully is incompatible with having a full personal/family life of their own, and that the conditions we expect them to work under are such that only the young and inexperienced are naive enough to be idealistic and self-motivated about the job.
Based on your recounting of your experience, it sounds as though we do need to change something about public school teaching, but I’m not sure it’s the tenure system.
You might want to read your own cite a little closer. That list of political spending was from 1998-2011. Thirteen years, not last year. And unions aren’t represented on it because that list is of the kind of spending they aren’t allowed to engage in.
So It’s more complicated than that. The list I was looking at was the ‘Heavy Hitters’ list at openSecrets: Heavy Hitters.
On that list, the #3 all-time heavy hitter for political donations is the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees.
Is that clear enough for you?
Also in the top 20:
Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
National Education Assn
Laborers Union
Teamsters Union
Carpenters & Joiners Union
Service Employees International Union
American Federation of Teachers
Communications Workers of America
United Auto Workers
Machinists & Aerospace Workers Union
You also have to add in PAC spending. Top PAC spenders in 2010:
PAC Name Total Expenditures
ActBlue $60,367,858
Service Employees International Union $53,996,710
EMILY's List $33,038,014
Moveon.org $29,049,999
American Crossroads $25,817,254
American Fedn of St/Cnty/Munic Emp $19,510,238
American Federation of Teachers $19,060,206
National Assn of Realtors $16,031,376
Teamsters Union $15,150,627
National Rifle Assn $13,974,099
Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers $13,858,727
McCain-Palin Compliance Fund $13,498,867
Laborers Union $10,249,170
United Auto Workers $10,195,560
Free & Strong America PAC $8,675,546
Plumbers/Pipefitters Union $8,528,140
Communications Workers of America $8,398,565
Senate Conservatives Fund $8,339,708
Operating Engineers Union $8,230,475
Club for Growth $8,031,493
Then there are the 527’s - another organizational type that spends money on political campaigns. By far the biggest 527 in 2010 was the SEUI, contributing $17,621,408. In fact, unions were the top three 527s. but the SEIU dwarfs everyone else.
It’s a complex topic because various campaign regulations prevent some groups from contributing in one way, so they have to find another.
In addition, this is only federal political spending. The labor unions spend big at the local and state levels as well, whereas a lot of the other organization and companies that donate federally don’t necessarily have much state representation.
Add it up, and the picture looks a lot different than the one you’re presenting. In total, in 2010 the SEIU alone spent 85 million dollars on political campaigning. Andy Stern, the head of the SEIU is the most frequent visitor to the White House. From the linked article:
These guys are proud of the fact that they gave a ton of money to elect Obama, and were rewarded with top White House positions. That’s pretty disgusting. I can imagine what you’d be saying if ‘SEIU’ were replaced with “Haliburton”.
So the SEIU and AFSCME alone spent $172 million dollars in just the last election cycle. They were the two biggest political spenders in 2010. And we haven’t even added in the NEA or the American Federation of Teachers or any of the other public unions.
Then there’s the non-spending contributions - organizing workers to help with campaigns, sit ins, protests, etc. Get out the Vote campaigns using workers as free labor.
Oh, and one other thing - most of the other lobbyists and contributors give to both sides of the aisle, so their influence tends to be balanced a bit. The public unions give almost exclusively to Democrats. The Democrats in turn fight tooth and nail to get more perks to the public unions. It’s a corrupt process given that the money the unions raise for Democrats is money the Democrats raised for them. It’s a racket - The Dems give more money and benefits to the unions, and the unions put a percentage of it aside and kick it back to the Democrats to help them get re-elected.
If Republicans had a revolving-door scam like that going with conservative organizations, you guys would be having kittens.
Kimstu: When talking about economics and policy, we’re talking in generalities and on the margin. Of course not every firing situation is the right one. Of course there are badly managed companies. But in general, systems that attempt to retain and promote based on merit will over time maintain a work force of higher productivity than one that bases HR decisions on seniority alone. Do you disagree?
wait a sec…
Sam, that same Open Secrets cite seems to contradict what you’re claiming here. For instance, here’s their assessment of the relative weight of labor and business in contributions:
The list of lobbying by ranked sector seems to bear out that general conclusion.
In 2010, for example, the Labor sector overall accounted for only about $47 million in lobbying while various business/industry sectors ranked at several hundred million apiece.
Maybe this explains the apparent discrepancy, because that list seems to be about expenditures for political campaigns, not lobbying in the sense of paying lobbyists.
Again, you’re cherry-picking a particular type of spending there, namely their total expenditures. If you look instead at the PACs’ actual contributions to candidates, you get a different-looking list, headed by the National Association of Realtors, Honeywell International, and AT&T.
Yeah, but the total expenditures of all the 527s together in 2010 didn’t add up to the lobbying expenditures of more than a couple industry sectors.
In short, your original claim that “the public employee’s unions are the biggest lobbyists in Washington” is sounding pretty disingenuous, and I think Lamar was right to call you on it.
Yes, there are certain types of political spending in which labor in general and public employees’ unions in particular outspend other sectors and groups. But AFAICT, they are not the biggest political spenders overall, and they certainly are nowhere near the biggest lobbyists, if we define “lobbying” the way our Center for Responsive Politics source does.
Moving goalposts alert: we’re talking only about layoffs here, which is where the strict seniority-alone criteria apply, AFAIK.
You’re now attempting to conflate layoffs per se with vaguer concepts like “basing HR decisions” and “attempting to retain and promote”.
The purpose appears to be to insinuate that teachers unions use seniority as the sole criterion in all their HR decisions, including “attempts to retain and promote” in general. And I’ll need to see a cite before I believe that.
It seems that the sticking point here is what constitutes ‘lobbying’. I meant it in the general sense of influencing government and policy, where you’re apparently taking the literal description of it as defined in current statutes.
But the real question is whether or not the unions have political power, not what particular legal category their influence falls under.
And once again, Lamar’s cite doesn’t even show what he says it does, because the chart he said was for spending in the last election cycle was in fact spending since 1998. And he specifically mentioned the Chamber of Commerce as an example of how much more private interests are spending over the unions. But in fact in the last election cycle two unions spent more on the election than did the Chamber of Commerce.
Yes, they are. Let me repeat from my cite:
Seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?
I don’t know how they define it, so no, that’s not the standard. Let me define it if the term is getting in our way - “Using money and influence to change the direction of government in favor of your special interest.” The underlying question is one of political power though methods other than democratic vote count. That means money spent on formal lobbying activity, campaign donations, ad spending in support of a particular party or candidate, etc.
This is just wrong. A deadweight loss is a loss to the size of the economy because someone lacks the funds to purchase something at market price he would have with more money. Cutting middle-income workers’ salaries removes purchasing power from those with incentive or desire to purchase goods and services–possibly more in fact than the taxes required to protect those salaries. If you’re really concerned about deadweight loss, you should be for progressive wealth tax & redistribution; it’s the rich who are likely to fail to spend in favor of saving. In any case, we don’t especially need a yachtmakers’ economy.
Uhm, weren’t tax rates on the rich much higher in the 1950s? How bad did the rich have it back then?
All that’s been argued in this thread by conservatives is that we shouldn’t tax the rich, but we should cut spending.
We can’t ask the rich to sacrifice anything more but we’re asking everyone else to. Someone please show where the rich are being asked to sacrifice anything in this economy?
http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/blio.php
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?year=2010&lname=N00&id=
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indus.php?lname=P&year=2010
I’m not seeing any argument between us, Le Jacq.
You didn’t read your own cites very carefully, did you? For that matter, you didn’t read my posts very carefully either.
Oh hell, let me help you out. From your first cite:
So really, that chart is, “Labor vs everyone in America who works for a business, including union members who give individual contributions.”
Unions are only 12.5% of the population. Heavily over-represented, aren’t they?
There are other problems with your cites as well, but hopefully that will get you started.
Wasn’t trying to differ. I was grousing. At the time I was boiling mad at having seen that Bank of America paid zero in taxes but yet made $4 billion off this crisis. Yet there are right wingers out there saying they’re overtaxed. Yet we’re cutting spending for everyone else. WTF.
No, I have no beef with your points. I’m just pissed off at the rape and pillage being inflicted by the rich. Some of my clients - there are a lot of millionaires in this area - have this attitude, and I’ve actually dropped one or two of the most egregious bastards just so I didn’t have to hear them whining about paying taxes that they are almost fully sheltered from while hating on people who lost their jobs and are sick and in need of health care. ARGH.
Yes, I’m sure that individual donations from union members really ramp up the level given by unions to well over the five percent of total contributions that the actual unions are responsible for. Maybe they even get it into double figures. Whether unions are overrepresented or not, let’s look at things via the prism of yout own mteric, which is “Using money and influence to change the direction of government in favor of your special interest.”
And to anybody not ridiculously ideologically blinded, that means business contributes vastly more money than anybody else to get lawmakers to see their side of things. And the results of that money are as clear as day for anybody to see! Business gets exactly what it wants while unions are marginalised, can’t get any legislation they favour (like card check) passed and are an irrelevant sideshow in the lawmaking/labour policy process compared to every other major economy.
It is hard to grasp sometimes, but the fact is that conservatives as a rule do not subscribe to the ethic of fairness. Liberals might be OK with a balance between the influence of labor unions/the middle class and that of the conservative welathy elite, but conservatives see ANY ability by the labor unions/the middle class to influence the political process as inherently WRONG. All power should belong to the wealthy conservative elite, to which they belong or wish they belong, and any other influence must be destroyed. Hence the attack on labor unions.
In much the same way, when the Bush Administration was in power, with Fox News its lapdogs and most of the mainstream media following along, they went after NPR big time. NPR was a tiny voice in the wilderness, but it was not following in the pantheon of media lapdogs, so it had to be destroyed. Fortunately, they could not manage that. But they sure tried.
Do not ever expect conservatives to notice that they have the overwhelming advantage. To them, that is part of what being a conservative is all about, which is why the 60s and 70s are still as a red-hot poker in their brains.
And yet fairness is the cornerstone of a civilized society. At some point those who cringe at the idea of fairness need to confront this. If fairness is such a bad word what is the point of a society? If we’re going to go by survival of the strongest/fittest, then why not just go back to the jungle and live like animals?
Why don’t liberals nail the Republicans to the wall on this?
It’s a corollary to the whole survival of the fittest/strongest meme: the golden rule, those who have the gold make the rules.