Excellent! We should implement your suggestion immediately!
Wrong. The word is ‘hosed’.
Hi, Sam Stone. It’s true that I was “snarky” about the holes in your argument. Much of your response seems devoted to pointing out that oil spills and broken windows are bad. I guess I should have mentioned that I already knew that; we could have saved some time. As for “You need to understand that GDP doesn’t measure everything” I was espousing this “novel” concept before it became popular even in Chicago. (And please let’s not turn this into a contest about whose dog can piss farther. I don’t have a degree in Econ, but I got straight A’s with the Chairman of the Econ Dept. begging me to change majors.)
Since you do seem focused on the efficacy of investments and therefore whether public or private borrowing is better, let me point out that Obama’s stimulus (to repair existing infrastructure whose need for repair is not in doubt, what’s with “Spending money on a domestic infrastructure could easily lead to over-building” ?) just might seem more efficacious than the private borrowing which led to the telecom and housing bubbles.
My questions, perhaps poorly phrased, were sincere. If Democrat deficits are bad, what about Reagan’s? Unless you denounce those deficits unambigiously, I’m afraid I’ll have to treat “fiscal conservative” as meaning “just another Beck-Limbaughist who’s read an economics textbook.”
The questions weren’t “arguments”. I’m just looking for simple answers to find out what “fiscal conservatives” really believe.
Jonathan Swift was a satirist who lived in the 1700’s. He wrote a work called: “A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick”, which is generally referred to as just “A Modest Proposal”. Essentially, the proposal was that Irish babies be fattened up for English tables. The first in a long and distinguished line of satirical essays written by him and others since.
Sure. I’m working on my own proposal to beat libbies with a club until they give me their money.
As a matter of fact, no it won’t.
In this day and age, if you support the public unions you forfeit any claim you might have to be a champion of the poor or the underdog. Because the public unions have managed to extract for themselves favors from government (using taxpayer dollars) which gives them significantly higher salaries and much better benefits than the average person whose taxes are paying them. They are becoming the new Bourgeoisie.
And no, they are not an overall force for good. Because unions do not create wealth, their use of forced collective bargaining and government power represents nothing more than a transfer of wealth from a poorer sector of society to them. Everything they gain comes at the expense of everyone else.
Well, at least you’re being honest.
Aw geez. I think you want to change the subject to the ‘public unions’, which isn’t really the same thing. Bourgeoisie, puh-leeze. I am one good proletariat.
Ok, I am familiar with that, the name just didn’t ring any bells.
I guess you gravitate toward the idea of destroying wealth, whether it is kids for breakfast or crushed clunkers. I can dig it. But I don’t why you wouldn’t favor reduced military spending. Even if the plan is to export expensive tanks and planes and whatnot, these things have no purpose but to destroy things. And I think it is a safe bet that anyone willing to pay millions or billions for them is also willing to use them. So, on a global scale, military spending causes money to move around with the end result being something gets blown up. What does that help? Better to produce worthwhile products. Like an independent American energy infrastructure.
It is a proposal to create value. It is at the expense of the elites, but they are mostly dead weight anyway. I hope you’ll elaborate. I could of course be wrong you know.
To come back to this. The trouble is that the unions are too small. Bigger stronger unions would mean better jobs for more people and less exploitation of the vulnerable. Look at Germany. They’re heavily unionized (and a little socialistic) yet have not only managed to hang on to their manufacturing base, they are the world’s leading export economy (or maybe 2nd to China now…). Their workers are not rendered powerless by their system, people get 6 weeks vacation and health care, yet we, with our system that promotes powerless workers and really fat fat cats, can’t compete and is losing its manufacturing sector altogether.
This new bourgeoisie thing is ridiculous. I’m talking about giving realistic pay and benefits to people who actually work for a living to make the wheels go 'round. You seem to want to take something away from them… because why?
Except for the fact that union workers are the ones who actually contribute value in the work world. Take them away and everything stops. You’d have a bunch of starving paper-pushers. In the dark. With no mail and garbage piled everywhere. Collective bargaining is a way to avoid exploitation and receive pay and benefits that are actually proportionate to the value they contribute. As we have seen, tilting the whole system toward fat cats who exploit workers until they can’t pay their mortgages doesn’t work. Those guys really need to get a real job.
Thanks, but let me do one better. I am being honest in the context of the Overton window.
If union workers were truly the essential contributors of value, it would men they were irreplaceable. History has shown otherwise.
It would also mean they wouldn’t need forced collective bargaining to get the perks they enjoy.
And since they’re only 12% of the workforce, I have a hard time believing they’re the ones providing all the value. Especially since a good percentage of that 12% consists of government employees.
You seem to imply, without really saying it, that unions workers are wildly overpaid, and management suffers under their yoke. Are we to take a moment and weep for the downtrodden CEOs, who can barely scrape $1,000/hr from the greedy grip of the labor bosses?
What sort of frivolous “perks” did you have in mind? The eight hour day? Health benefits? Pensions? Is it your reading of history that these things were freely given from the gentle hand of capital, and that lying labor bosses rushed to take credit for their largesse?
You imply a great deal more than you say. How about you just say it, so we can get a clearer view?
Right, sorry. I was thinking in terms of my plans for much wider unionization. Workers are irreplaceable. The powerful are quick to point out that individual workers, however, are not irreplaceable. This is why nearly everyone who does something productive for a living needs to belong to a union. Individuals are very frequently (I’m not quite ready to say inevitably) exploited otherwise.
From that perspective my statement makes sense.
How about the CalPers pension? In case you’re not familiar with it, you can retire at 55, and get 2% of your salary per year of service, calculated against your single highest year of earnings. So if someone starts working in a public union in California at age 25, they can retire at 55 at 60% of their highest salary. Not only that, but they get full medical benefits for life, AND, their spouse continues to draw their pension even if they die.
But wait - it gets better. Your unused sick benefits can be converted to years of service if you don’t use them up.
So looking at the Calpers benefit tables, if you start working there at age 20, and you retire at 55 and have two years of sick time built up, you’ll be given credit for 37 years of service, and you will receive 74% of your highest salary.
The use of your single highest earning year, instead of taking a 3 or 5 year average, makes the system ridiculously easy to game - and you can find all kinds of people who make much more in their final year than they did in the previous year - it’s quite common for people to look for a higher paying job in their last year, and other people in the ‘system’ help them because they know why they’re doing it. So someone driving a bus for $70,000 per year may suddenly move up to ‘supervisor’ at $100,000 per year for their last year - then they retire with a $74,000 annual pension at age 55. - higher than their previous annual earnings.
If you’re willing to stick it out to age 60, you’ll do even better. Someone who starts at age 20 and retires at 60 will get 92% of their highest salary as a permanent pension - plus COLAs of 2-5% per year, and adjustments based on purchasing power changes in your region.
Allowing the surviving spouse to continue collecting means the average lifespan of the pension goes up from maybe 80 years to 85-90. So you have a situation where a person can work for 30 years, then collect a full pension for another 30-35 years.
I have a private sector pension - one of the better ones with a large corporation. My benefits are less than HALF of that. And if I die, my wife does not continue collecting my pension, other than the amount I contributed.
I’m not sure what you are insinuating. Why don’t YOU be more specific?
By the way, do you really think that the money the union workers negotiate comes out of the pocket of the business owner? You think this is a wealth transfer from the rich fatcats to the poor union employees?
If so, you need to learn a little bit about business. The fact is, when union wages go up, the company rolls the cost into the price of its products, just like it does when rent and raw materials go up in price. If the wages go high enough that the product is no longer competitive, the company goes out of business. That’s the way it works.
So when my minimum-wage earning mother took out a 40 year mortgage and put up every nickel she had to buy a little home, the price of that home was higher than it otherwise would have been, because it was constructed in part by union labor which makes three or four times as much money as she did. When a young family buys their first GM automobile, they’re also contributing several thousand dollars to the union’s pension fund - to provide pensions far better than they’ll probably ever get. And everyone who lives in California gets to pay tax to support the public pension - a pension almost certainly far better than they’ll ever get.
In addition, public unionized employees are now earning as much as 30% more than their equivalent private-sector counterparts. See, at least private sector unions are constrained somewhat by the laws of the marketplace - take too much from the golden goose, and it stops laying eggs. But in the public sector, there is no such constraint. California’s pension system is way underwater, with huge shortfalls. Employee salaries and benefits make up a large percentage of the California state budget, which is heavily in deficit. Who’s ultimately going to pay for that? Everyone but the retired public employees.
Here’s the Calpers benefits guide if you want to do your own calculations.
What! A group of scalawags have leveraged their political power to afford access to the public coffers! The horror, the horror! Just you wait until the Republicans find out, they take a very dim view of stealing their playbook!
Those CEOs who couldn’t carry home their paychecks if it was in Benjamins, what union do they belong to? Their pay doesn’t get passed along to the consumer? That’s a neat trick, how do they manage that?
Of course it does. You’re offering a strawman argument.
The fact is that you support a system in which people use political power to force other people to give them money to finance salaries and benefits that are much higher than average. Because these costs are passed along as prices, and are therefore regressive, you support a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, in the name of union labor.
I personally support the poor. That’s why I like Wal-Mart, and oppose things like the Davis-Bacon act, which shuts poorer, non-union laborers out of the government contracting business. How many lobbying dollars to you think the unions had to kick back to politicians to buy that particular favor?
You know that government stimulus package for weatherizing homes? It was supposed to help the economy by funneling jobs down to poor communities, giving semi-skilled people jobs putting weatherstripping on windows and whatnot. Guess what? The Unions got to that one, and managed to add a ‘prevailing wage’ rider to the work so that union labor rates would have to be paid for the job. So much for the semi-skilled guys.
And what’s worse, that little clause has snarled the program in red tape while the government tries to figure out what the various prevailing wages are around the country. As a result, only a tiny percentage of the homes that were supposed to be weatherized by now have actually been done, and the program has turned into a complete waste.
But hey, the unions are happy. They kept all those non-union guys from getting jobs. Mission accomplished.
I have no idea. Rather expect you to provide such information, since you are the one making the allegation. When might we expect such?
This totally wrong advice to give to people. Unions and “collective bargaining” make you weaker not stronger. That is what history has shown.
The only thing a person can count on to be marketable in the working world is the knowledge in his brain and the skills in his arms & legs. (Hopefully more of the former than the latter as he gets older.) The only thing a worker can really count on is his willingness to constantly improve his raw skills. If you rely on a union, you’re setting yourself up for an economic downfall.
If unions were great, they would have prepared their members (e.g. education/training) to earn a living in other ways unrelated to the company they were tied to. For example, an GM auto worker wins wage & benefit concessions via the union. Great. Things are seemingly wonderful for 20 years. Now the auto industry tanks. The union reluctantly gives back more and more benefits and cut wages. Also, more and more union workers are laid off. Now what? You’re 50 years old and have zero value to the outside world because the only thing you know is how to operate some robot in a plant that’s been shut down. Your entire family’s economy was tied to what the union could “win” for you. Now you realize the union just castrated you into complacency.
In this modern world, you expect to work from age 18 to 67 and possibly even longer. There is no union in the world that will give you a stable job for 50 years. There is no union I know of that continously replenishes your brain with new skills so that the layoff from the job is not an economic disaster. If people join one, they deserve the downside they get.
The fundamental problem is that the only “leverage” unions have is to instruct their members to stop working. If one stops to think about it, that’s very strange leverage. Instead of leverage of worker’s improving knowledge (their workers’ brains are better than anyone else’s brains), the only tool they can use to threaten is the synchronization of a temporary work stoppage. History has shown that this type of leverage is very weak. This type of feeble leverage does not carry you through a lifetime of employment.
The only sane way to use unions is to treat their negotiated benefits as temporary “bonuses.” Unfortunately, workers don’t do that. They treat their union salary & benefits as lifetime “baselines.” With that mentality, you will get blindsided by the economic winds of change: changing consumer preferences, globalization, layoffs, etc.
Organize and join a union in the 21st century?! Total financial suicide.
I already gave you all sorts of links and documents showing that big labor dominates the largest political contributors, and pointed to a specific case of union lobbying modifying a stimulus package to their benefit - to the point where it became useless as stimulus. So I suspect your question above is simply an attempt to deflect the issue by focusing on my rhetorical statement. In fact, the Davis-Bacon act has been around since the depression.
Here’s a little story with the kinds of concrete numbers you’re looking for. After Katrina, Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon act to attempt to speed up government reconstruction assistance. The labor unions and Democrats went ballistic. The AFL-CIO lobbied like crazy to halt the suspension.
Leading the charge to reinstate the Davis-Bacon act was representative George Miller. He was in charge of the labor subcommittee in the House, and got a lot of the credit for Bush having to ultimately rescind the suspension.
So… Who do you think George Miller gets his money from? OpenSecrets.org has the list.
Here are all the groups that gave the maximum allowable contributions to his campaign:
This guy is completely owned by the labor unions. And when the D-B act was reinstated, it did slow down reconstruction. So… If you supported this, you supported keeping desperately poor disaster victims from getting the rebuilding assistance they needed, so that union workers could maintain their higher-than-average pay and benefits, and shut out lower-cost competition.
I’m sorry, but this isn’t ‘progressive’ at all. The labor unions (especially the public labor unions) are just a big-money special interest using government to carve themselves a bigger slice of the pie - generally at the expense of people less well off than they are.
Now, I’m guessing you think the answer to this is to expand the reach of the unions so that more people can get these benefits. If so, you need to understand that the unions aren’t creating wealth - they’re distributing wealth from others to them. For the big labor unions to get what they get, they HAVE to have lots of other people outside the system to pay for it. They’re parasites.
When union power grows beyond a certain small percentage of the population, it becomes unsustainable. Then you get labor riots like had in Britain in the '70’s, or you get an economic collapse like Greece or like what’s about to happen to California. You can’t vote yourself a free lunch.
Unions do many good things. They can help uphold safety standards, maintain codes of conduct for employees, etc. This is especially true of the more technical unions. I’m not criticizing unions per-se - I’m criticizing big labor - the organized power structures in the seats of government which buy politicians and work to modify laws to their benefit at the expense of the public.
Unions are a valuable tool for workers, allowing them to exercise their right to bargain collectively with their employers. But when they manage to protect themselves behind the shield of government at a national level, bad things happen.
I need to come back later to answer the content of your post. Thanks for it. For now I wonder how to calculate the ‘dollar velocity’ effects (is that the right terminology?) of Republican groups coughing up another $380 million to lobby against legislation empowering unions/unionization. The evangeli-proles and their counterparts are bilked most by corporate America. A portion of this income is handed to lobbyists to influence policy away from pro-union legislation. Those lobbyists blow wads of cash on hookers and drugs, cars and boats &etc. The hookers get a lot more manicures and pedicures, which increases immigration from Southeast Asia (I know this sounds crazy, but IMHO it is true). These immigrants really ought to be taught to join unions so they can lead prosperous, dignified lives. But the evangeli-proles disagree with their origins and will pay to take them down. I think in cases like this the money changes hands more often than in, say, bonds.
There is quite a lot to say to all this, so let’s start with this series of points.
Unions are just a big money special interest huh? To champion people who do productive work for a living is just the dastardliest conspiracy ever conceived, no?
Congress doesn’t create wealth. Shall we abolish it too?
You really should understand how this works by now. Financial Transactions 101: Money is exchanged for goods and services. I’m sure you’ve heard of that. The ‘others’ from whom unions are ‘distributing wealth’ are the people consuming the union workers’ products and services. It is a shock to some when they find out what those products and services are worth. Your perspective seems to be ‘parasite= not a slave’.
Well, I’ll listen if you’d like to explain how unions are to blame for all these troubles, but I don’t buy it. Unions in this country used to represent a larger percentage of the population, and overall people enjoyed a higher standard of living. California’s main problem is that they’ve been spending more than they earn for way too long, and now they’re trapped by their own laws. Conditions in California have changed a great deal in 50 years or so, and those changes were not handled well. I find absurd your suggestion that some people who actually do something productive for a living having the gall to demand a living wage is the common root of all these issues.
Not that I ever said you couldn’t find examples of bad union behavior/effects. And I agree with the notion of a powerful union respecting the responsibility that comes with their power. But you strike me as basically demonizing unions.
Maybe you can explain your hard-on for “people who do productive work for a living”? By “productive” I assume you mean “work with their hands”. Why do you think their work is more valuable than people who work with their mind? Or people whose work consists of leading and organizing others?
See, “productive” work isn’t really all that valuable. Most things people can produce can be produced more cheaply and accurately by someone else or by a machine.
This would be an interesting mechanic, especially in light of the recent SCOTUS ruling.