Perhaps you could explain it to me. I’m always pro-being-less-idiotic, and I don’t understand your reasoning.
Hrm, anybody else notice that **Sam Stone **hasn’t been back to defend his lies?
I laughed.
I’m really not sure what the hell the point of this post was. At all.
None of the new trolls are, unfortunately.
I swear to god, you could not make this shit up.
The most obvious solution here is that nobody who isn’t a citizen–which includes corporations and unions–should be able to contribute to political campaigns. But that would harm superslug’s favorite teabaggers much more than it would hurt any liberal candidate. So instead, all he can do is whine the same wheeze about how we have to prevent people from using the money they’ve earned to support candidates who hold positions that they agree with, while allowing corporations to do the same.
Why am I not surprised that your retarded ass is hurring some durr up in here?
WTF is this? Are you purposefully spreading your dumb to multiple posts? Or did you forget to log in as your other identity before agreeing with yourself?
Back to the case at hand. You guys see the violent protesters in Madison?!? Not only are they pushing and shoving, but they’re planting palm trees as well! Hey, if it’s on Fox News, it’s gotta be true, right?
I’m having trouble understanding why workers using their own pay - even if it is pay earned from working for the state- shouldn’t be allowed to use that money - their own pay - to influence elections. The workers get W2s from their employer, the state, and pay Federal and State income taxes on it, so why shouldn’t they be able to use it as they want? Why should their employer - the state - be allowed to put strings on that money, when no other employer in the country can do so?
I’m going to guess that it’s because public unions are somehow unfairly mandatory for all public workers. Now, granted, there’s the kernel of an argument there if and only if union dues are A) non-nominal and B) mandatory for all workers.
This is why I think it should be just as simple to also disallow anyone whose income derives in any part from government contracts from making political contributions. I’m sure that won’t endanger anyone in the Fortune 500.
I used to work for the government; now I work for a private company. I’m still the same person.
My wife used to work for a private company; now she works for the public (as a teacher). She’s still the same person.
If the dues aren’t mandatory, then how does the union address the free rider problem?
You’re supposed to remember to change identities to your sock when replying to your own post. Try to keep up.
I saw a link to that but I didn’t have time to watch the video. Fair and balanced!
Right on!
Me, too.
Count me in as someone else who doesn’t get it.
Possibly explained by the fact that at least some of them are the same person.
Right?! Poe’s fucking Law.
Because **Shodan **is a champion durp hurper.
Good question. I could see a solution that involved making dues mandatory, but then also mandating that unions operate on a model where the mandatory dues ONLY covered union administrative expenses but workers could make optional voluntary contributions.
Of course, while we’re doing this, we need to also ban any people whose income derives partially from government contracting from donating to politics unless they can prove that none of their donations came out of the contracting income. Since otherwise that would be using the people’s money to negotiate against the people, don’t’cha know. I hear that’s a big problem (for idiots).
Missed it my 5 posts and 19 mins. 
Great minds, though…
Which was, in fact, how things worked when my mother was an AFSCME member. (Yes, AFSCME, meaning she was one of those evil taxpayer-bilking public employees.:rolleyes:)
Everyone was a nominal member and paid what was called “fair share” dues, because everyone under the collective bargaining agreement benefited from the contract negotiated by the union, and could access union representation in the grievance process or in the case of a disputed dismissal. If someone wished to be a full-fledged member, then they paid a higher level of dues and had a vote on union administration issues.
The first thing that needs to be done is to remove public employee’s ability to bribe politicians with money taken directly from the taxpayers.
It goes against the public interest.
I"m pretty sure you could not pass a Turing Test.
Also, how about if the very next thing that is done is to remove the ability of government contract receiving corporations’ ability to bribe politicians with money taken directly from the taxpayers. That is just as much “against the public interest”.
Oh hi, trolly!
1.) Public employees do not take money from taxpayers. Public employees are provided with a wage or salary and benefits in exchange for the services they provide, at a rate that is measurably below what they would receive in an equivalent private-sector job. The alternative is slavery. Are you in support of slavery?
2.) If unions’ ability to support political candidates is bribery, so is corporations’–especially any company that bids on government contracts. What’s your opinion on the ability of companies to contribute money to candidates?
3.) You’re talking here about the employees, not the unions. Do you think that public employees shouldn’t be allowed to privately contribute to political candidates with the money they’ve earned?
To mix a metaphor, why do you continue to beat your head against the broken record?
It’s easy, like shooting low-hanging fruit in a barrel.
Quote a ‘lie’ that I made in this thread, or retract that.
What is it about some of you that makes you go right for the ‘LIAR!’ charge? Do you know how obnoxious that makes you? And how stupid it makes you look when you’re proven wrong?
It would seem to me that your charge of my being a liar is based on one of two supposed rebuttals to my posts - one saying that Wisconsin public sector workers actually make 5% less overall than their private sector counterparts, and the other that Wisconsin only needs to raise $137 million, which could be done with a 1.5% surcharge on the ‘ultra-wealthy’, contradicting my claim that you can’t solve the problem on the backs of the rich. Is that about it? Or is there something else you think I’m lying about?
Oh for God’s sake. Now you’re bringing ‘slavery’ into it?
Look, this is an issue of public choice economics. The underlying issue is that the people who are supposed to contain the costs of government on behalf of the taxpayer are in a situation where they derive a good chunk of their financing from the people they are supposed to be managing.
The real underlying issue is one of incentives. In private industry, management and labor have to bargain. But their bargaining is constrained by the fact that their money has to be earned in the private market. Money that management agrees to pay comes right out of their own pockets. If labor demands too much, the entire company can go under because it becomes non-competitive and they all lose.
This balance of power leads to pareto-optimal outcomes assuming the government isn’t involved some way. Management pays just as much as they need to pay to retain a productive work force, and not a penny more. Labor bargains for as much in pay and benefits as they can get away with, subject to the realities of the market their company exists in.
In the public sector, these incentives are not there. “Management” are politicians spending money from a near-bottomless trough of taxpayer funds or borrowed money. There is no competition they have to worry about that forces them to keep costs in check. At least, not until the size of the deficit or the increase in taxes causes blowback from voters.
The real problem arises when the unions get so large that they wield considerable political clout on their own. The minute they get to the point where a politician has a better chance of being elected by kowtowing to their demands than he does by standing firm against their demands, then you have a system where the politician merely becomes a conduit for shoveling ever-more money from taxpayers to the public unions.
What makes matters much worse is that politicians also need money to run their campaigns, and so the rules have been set up so that public unions are allowed to withhold pay from employees and use that pay to kick back contributions to the politicians who vote for their appropriations. Now you’ve tilted the incentives even further in favor of the unions.
That’s the ultimate problem here - skewed incentives.
There’s a big difference. The unions are forcing their members to pay for these contributions, whether they want to or not. And the money for all this ultimately comes from taxpayers, so there’s an endless supply of it - until something breaks.
I have no problem with unions contributing to candidates, OR for companies doing so. The root problem is not campaign financing - the problem is that the system is set up so that politicians have too much power, and that’s what drives money and corruption. So long as government is regulating business and employing union members, businesses and union members have a right to fund candidates that they believe will act in their interest. The problem is that the government has too much power to act in their interest in the first place.
By the way, I suspect that YOU have a problem with corporations being allowed to contribute to candidates, and that you’d especially have a problem with it if 95% of all corporate campaign donations went to Republicans, and if Republicans gave corporations all a certain amount of money from taxpayers on the promise that the corporations would kick some of it back to Republicans.
However, there’s another problem with forced union dues - it’s immoral because it’s coerced. Public unions are closed shops, which mean employees have no choice but belong to the union, and the campaign contributions are withheld as part of mandatory union dues. One reform I would make right off the bat would be a check box that union members could make saying whether they wanted their campaign donations made to Republicans or Democrats, and the union would be audited to make sure that the percentage it gave to each matched the percentage of employes that chose the respective parties.
Or even better, make the campaign donation part of the dues completely optional. If the employee checks, “I do not wish to make campaign donations from my dues”, then he either pays less dues, or he can choose from a number of private charities that his contribution can go to. It’s unconscionable to force an employee to donate money to a political party he may be ethically or economically opposed to.
But that’s not the case. Their contributions are extracted from them without their choice.
Well, I didn’t call you a liar, so I can’t defend that. But what things have you said in this thread that you would stand behind as correct AND relevant?