The infamous "they're dumber than us" liberal mantra. YAWN YER a dumbdumb! Not very effective, MARIS, and not accurate at all. It's at the apex of your own intellectual debating abilities, though, so I'll cut you a break. Poor guy.
The average Wisconsin taxpayer makes $33,140. The average Teacher in Wisconsin makes $46390+ Benefits of $20-$30K The average Madison, Wisconsin teacher makes $67K+ $30-$40k In benefits, for 180 days work @ 7.5 hours per day, with 13 Paid Days off. The public already has spoken. Enough is enough.
The same applies to the public sector workers. You are their customers. You (through your elected reps) agreed to pay them _____ for their efforts. Now you want to renege on your promise. How would you feel if your customers decided to pay you less than you blled them for your services? Don't bother answering, we know the answer.
So you think they should settle for "average Wisconsin workers" as the standard for teaching requirements? Teaching is a highly specialized job requiring rare talents and skills, AND an advanced education. "Average" is a very low bar to hop, and the "average Wisconsin worker" is simply not up to the task of teaching. They're barely up for learning.
He already didn't, so don't hold your breath. Of course I'm okay with the union giving up 7% of their employees' pay to pay for their benefits if they want to. They don't want to, and I don't blame them at all. They made an agreement and held up their end. Their government is trying to renege on the deal, breach the contract. Of course, that's morally wrong. Have you decided to take a 7% cut yourself? Has PapaG? LOL!
Another red herring. I don't leech off of myself. I provide for myself, my family, and also for people like Sug. I'm not putting money into my own retirement right now, because I am making less income than last year. I don't have a guaranteed income. You public sector leeches really don't know how things work out here in the real world. The good thing is, the public is waking up to your scam, and yes, we can smell your fear. I will say that I fully support the military, police, and firemen, and I have no issue with what I pay for the service that they provide me and society in general.
I can see the point people make about the benefits being earned. However, I think this really raises the issue of whether govt. employees should be allowed to unionize at all. These benefits and salaries are not being negotiated (especially in good faith) between private parties, but between recipients of campaign donations and the donors. It's not a private corporation paying for it, but the taxpayer. I happen to be a big fan of unions under the right circumstances - this doesn't seem to be one of them.
I am as well. Private sector unions still provide a service, and those workers need to be protected against unlicensed or even illegal workers. Public unions are largely a scam, IMO, and primarily are used to launder private sector money to politicians and Democratic Party voters. First responders, I have no issue with paying for, as they provide a service that I appreciate and respect as being unique and rare.
What's their "end" of the agreement? How are they "breaching" the contract? I thought this was about "banning unions"? WTH are you attempting to show? That gov's with (R) after their name are bad, or that the first time someone wants to cut back on gov't spending you're up in arms? (Waiting in vain...)
Your assumption is that I have the money. To put the problem in the parlance of residential real estate, it's akin to a short sale. Sure, I made a promise to repay my mortgage, but circumstances have changed since I purchased the house. Sure, I could just hand back the keys (meaning fire the teachers I can't afford), but often times a better solution is a short sale (asking the teachers to pay a portion of the benefits they receive). Of course, the bank is going to get less than they originally thought they would, but they're going to get more than they would under a foreclosure. It's happening in Wisconsin right now, but it's going to happen all over the country soon. To get elected, politicians made public unions promises with other people's money. They wrote checks our asses couldn't cash. We're broke and we don't have the money. I wish we did.
There is an unholy alliance between politicians who make sweetheart deals with unions, deduct the union dues from the public employees' paychecks and send them to the unions, then have the unions send back much of that money in the form of political contributions to ensure future sweetheart deals. That kind of employee/union relationship doesn't exist in the private sector. I have long argued that public unions should be illegal; they're not arms-length relationships. Margaret Thatcher once opined about socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money. We've reached that point at virtually all levels of government.
"Sick notes" being handed out at Madison rallies by licensed MDs who work for UW-Madison. Isn't this both fraud and malpractice? Welcome to ObamaCare! Who gets billed for these "medical evaluations"? [video=youtube;hQRcNBWTOr8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQRcNBWTOr8&feature=player_embedded[/video]
Your son's education is your responsibility, absolutely. What that means is you need to teach him the skills he will need to be able to seek out and absorb knowledge, while discerning for himself what is fact and what is fiction and what is influenced opinion... You've been doing it already I'm sure, through basic interaction. But there's no reason for schooling to wait until he is of school age. My mother taught my siblings and I how to read and do basic math as toddlers. When I began kindergarten I was reading at a 3rd grade level. To say it helped me tremendously is an understatement. I compare this to the child's father who regularly takes the time to play catch and hit grounders to his son so he'll be able to perform on the ballfield. It doesn't mean limiting his educational opportunities by interfering with his teachers and their methods, thinking you know better how to do their job which they are trained for and you are not. I compare this to the father who comes to his son's ballgame and yells at the coach, the ref, the kids on the other team, and generally embarrasses everyone.
Except that's not at all how short sales work, on the rare occasions that they work at all. Banks nearly always will get more $ by going through the foreclosure process and selling the home themselves after kicking the family to the curb. This is why short sales almost always fail to close. The Stimulus Plan guarantees the government will repay up to 20% of the loss when a bank forecloses and sells the home at a loss. There is no such provision for a short sale.
A debt owed by ALL Wisconsin taxpayers, not just a few state workers. They (ALL Wisconsin taxpayers) voted to spend the money, or their reps did, and they reaped the benefit of the programs it was spent on.
Um, I meant that the state owes the money. That should have been obvious. Why are you so against the state public union workers paying a small fraction of their "own" bloated pensions? Is it your superior education that brings you to that conclusion? Anyhow, the WI GOP is convening the Senate again on Tuesday and will be voting on all non-spending bills, even those that they don't have a unified majority on in this case. For example, a 10-9 vote will end public union collective bargaining for everything except wages and some benefits, and the GOP members in more liberal districts will be able to vote against it. The Dems really pooped the bed on this one.
I'm not against them paying whatever they want to pay. I'm against them being forced to pay while the rest of the state government including the governor and reps pushing this and all of the private sector workers are not paying an equal amount for a debt they owe equally on. Oregon is in the same boat. PapaG, have you sent in your 7%? Or are you just an Armchair General?
To compare again to short sales, it seems the politicians are the ones who bought the house they no longer can afford, so they should either be reduced to part-time employees, or laid-off entirely. This would drastically curb their ability to write more bills (spend tax $) and the yearly tax revenue would eventually catch up and pay off the debt as programs and tax levies expire. The unions/teachers had nothing to do with the state being mismanaged so atrociously, so why single them out while ignoring the real culprits? That's like punishing the honest families losing their homes while rewarding the crooked lenders who defrauded them. If you don't like teachers simply vote no on all school levies for your district. That's the one your $ goes to.
I pay a hell of a lot more than 7%. Also, I pay 100% of my own retirement, as well as paying for slugs like Sug's retirement. This is commonplace for Oregonians who own their own business. Plus, the public employees have the private taxpayers and voters as their "boss". In Wisconsin, the "boss" is saying enough is enough, yet your Dems run and hide like little children. The ignorance by the libs in terms of basic economics exhibited in this thread is striking and obvious to me.
