Much has been written about the Underclass, since Charles Murray invented the term for the ethnically distinct group of under achievers and low earners in the USA who, he alleged, were disaffected from society, supported mostly by welfare benefits and semi-mired in crime. Conceptually and in reality this included the illegal aliens who flood the American labor market depressing wages and displacing those citizens on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. The right correctly blames excessive public spending on a workshy social basement group and illegal aliens who: (1) cynically exploit the welfare system, (2) create the huge budget it commands, and (3) who vote mostly for the Democrat candidates who support and work to expand that welfare system. These Democrats also look the other way when it comes to real immigration reform that would enable the U.S. to stabilize its population.
It is undeniable that such analyses have significant veracity. Benefits-cheating is a genuine problem and illegal aliens can legally secure manifold benefits based on their instant citizen anchor-babies. This put a significant strain on the federal welfare and Medicaid budget. Those who support the indolent and the illegals in their endeavors share the culpability.
But those are only one aspect of the budget problem. Arguably the super rich have failed in their responsibility to their fellow citizens. Instead of acquiescing to more equitable tax-structure, they prefer to donate funds for edifices on which their names can be prominently displayed. Alternatively they set up billion dollar tax – exempt foundations to pursue their personal philanthropic interests abroad instead of focusing on U.S. citizens in need of educational and other forms of assistance to enable them to climb out of poverty. If the federal government denies funding for family planning, private funds must be forthcoming to fill the void and take a step toward a stable population.
We have now entered an age when it is the divisive and damaging effects of a political party that panders to the poor and formerly powerless to assure their election and re-election. That is the sole purpose of organizations like ACORN and La Raza that seek to register the poor and the indigent to vote so that unaffordable welfare programs can be expanded to buy more votes.
This pampered poor are connected those who decide how taxes are to be spent. They are not hard to identify by their votes in the Congress. And it’s not just the poor. Unions are also anxious to feed at the public trough in every way they can. In the State of Wisconsin, unions especially the public employee unions, seek to recall the governor who had taken steps to balance the budget and deny the unions’ excessive demands that helped create the deficits allowed by his predecessor.
Key representatives of the amoral and isolated public employee unions are working the state from border to border trying to convince the electorate to give the governor the ax while they continue to deliver poor value for the money extracted from the taxpayers.
Showing posts with label unions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unions. Show all posts
Monday, April 9, 2012
Monday, March 7, 2011
Just Another Dee Perez-Scott Bleeding Heart Liberal
John Gurda, historian, wrote, “Republicans are on the offensive these days. Emboldened by their success at the polls and energized by the tea party activists in their midst, the GOP faithful have set out to remake America, and they've started in Wisconsin.
Virtually unknown outside Milwaukee County only a year ago, Governor Scott Walker has emerged as a rising star in the national party. Working in concert with conservative luminaries elsewhere in the country, Walker has demonstrated a flair for the bold statement and the sweeping proposal, and he pursues his grand plans with single-minded determination.”
We've been here before, of course. America has witnessed similar eruptions of political passion in decades past, on issues ranging from the great depression, the world wars, unionism, child labor, segregation, and creeping socialism.
John Gurda believes that Governor Walkers has contempt for compromise but the facts reveal otherwise. His proposals on employee contributions to health care and pensions already represent compromises. For example, although the national average on employee contributions to health care costs is 29%, Walker has asked for only 12%. Here in Colorado I understand the contribution is more like 31% with the government picking up the other 69%. The governor proposes a compromise pension contribution rate of 8-9% of salary. I don’t know what the national average is but in Colorado state employees pay 10.5% of salaries. Since the unions have already tacitly agreed to both proposals, one would have to conclude that even they see these changes as fully justified.
Gurda goes on to allude to Walker’s “demographic base” as though there is something suspect about that base. It won’t be long before Gurda is a member of that demographic. Maybe then he will see Walker’s efforts in a different light even thought Gurda has already erroneously concluded that “today's new right is the philosophical first cousin of prohibitionism.”
Gurda announces that the tea party draws heavy support from Protestant evangelicals such as Walker himself, and their political playbook is a throwback to the “media-savvy opportunists, taking advantage of every opening to advance their cause.” Now this has a familiar ring to it. It sounds like a statement attributed to Rahm Emanuel when he was Obama’s chief of staff and also to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Saul Alinsky. In fact, you might say that this is right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook that has guided Obama before and since his election to the presidency. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
Gurda acts as if “demonizing” ones opponents or things that one opposes is something new. Maybe he was too young to appreciate fully how we demonized the Germans and the Japanese during World War II. “...The current crop of conservatives is making political hay from another temporary phenomenon: the global economic recession. The need for fiscal austerity has rarely been more obvious, but it's being used as a pretext for advancing the new right's legislative agenda.” Fortunately, no pretext is necessary because the need for fiscal austerity is coincident with the Tea Party’s agenda. But, one could argue that Pearl Harbor was our pretext for going to war even though there was a much larger agenda—to rid the world of some of its most repressive and cruel dictators.
Walker has demanded that public employees pay more for their pensions and health insurance - a necessary step to which they have agreed - and then proposed to modify their collective bargaining rights so that it will be more difficult to recoup those benefit changes if democrat/union control is returned to the legislature. That makes eminent good sense if you look beyond the immediate time frame. The history of public employee benefits provided by democrat legislatures in return for union political contributions and boots on the ground is clear in Wisconsin and other states.
Walker first declared a budget emergency and then cut taxes by $140 million to boost the ailing Wisconsin economy. This is equivalent to giving a blood transfusion to an ailing patient but you can count on the left to see this as a reward for rich businessmen rather than a life-saving necessity. In a spate of hyperbole, Gurda uses words like: “amputation”, “juggernaut”, and “dismantling”, all within two sentences. He sees the governor’s actions as “dismantling government one line item at a time, regardless of the consequences.” But there is certainly another point of view related to paring back a government that has become so bloated that it is doing too many things that people should be doing for themselves.
All political parties are driven by ideologies. They represent fixed, blinkered views of the world that focus on their own perspective and dismiss all other positions as either incomplete or simply wrong-headed. Sounds like both of the major parties, doesn’t it?
Limited government has always been an article of conservative faith as well it should be for all of us. Gurda argues that the movement currently afoot is not classic conservatism but something closer to creeping libertarianism. Norman Thomas, American socialist, 1948 once said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." That’s probably the same thing Barack Obama is saying quietly to his Administration today and that is his objective. Conservatives, therefore, are doing what they must to combat the creeping socialism of Thomas and Obama.
Tea party sympathizers want from the federal government only what the constitution intended. Gurda suggests that there is something wrong with giving personal liberty precedence over the state but isn’t that what distinguishes democracy from communism?
Gurda says,"If you listen closely to the rhetoric of the new right, the libertarian message is hard to miss, and there are corollaries of that message that many Wisconsinites might find troubling." However, to make his point, Gurda misstates and overstates the position of the Tea Party when he writes, “Everyone should have the opportunity to make just as much money as he or she can, beginning with the rich. The tea party faithful display a grim preoccupation with money: making it, growing it and preserving it intact from the clutches of a rapacious government.” Writer Kenneth Sollitt put it best, ‘‘…in the economic realm …, you cannot legislate the poor independence by legislating the wealthy out of it. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give to the people what it does not first take away from the people. … what one man receives without working for, another man must work for without receiving.” I suspect that makes perfectly good sense to those who believe in personal responsibility.
“The poor are largely responsible for their poverty. Some groups are truly deserving of help - the disabled and the frail elderly among them - but any able-bodied person of even modest intelligence should be able to get by without assistance from the rest of us." “We cannot fix generations of family dysfunction, centuries of entrenched prejudice or an economy that has shed entry-level jobs by the hundreds of thousands”... by indulging in cradle to the grave welfarism. We cannot build personal responsibility at the same time as we relieve people of that responsibility.
We cannot build self-esteem by robbing the poor of whatever self-esteem they have.
In Gurda you sense a liberal who resents that he has had to struggle to make a living, as though there was something inherently wrong with hard work. He alludes to Walker’s 52% of the vote. What was the typical margin of past presidents and governors? Oh, we wouldn’t want to disclose that context because it might weaken the argument. Walker’s actions are an attempt to redress decades of union –dominated, democrat legislatures that gave them all they asked for, saving nothing for a rainy day. Gurda is right when he mentions that there are two sides to the equation: revenue and expense. However, the conventional wisdom is that you don’t raise taxes during a recession. Has Gurda never heard the word “stimulus?” Tax increases are a reverse stimulus.
Walker had no intent to demonize teachers. He merely pointed out that collective bargaining has enabled public employees to enjoy advantages not available in most other occupations and that in the present recession it is necessary to pare back those advantages and establish a way to make sure they do not get out of hand in the future. Gurda acts as if the legislature is incapable of providing fair compensation to public employees without the pressure of collective bargaining and unions breathing down their necks. If government is the expression of our collective will then so be it. Let’s not give that up and allow unions to usurp the power of government.
Virtually unknown outside Milwaukee County only a year ago, Governor Scott Walker has emerged as a rising star in the national party. Working in concert with conservative luminaries elsewhere in the country, Walker has demonstrated a flair for the bold statement and the sweeping proposal, and he pursues his grand plans with single-minded determination.”
We've been here before, of course. America has witnessed similar eruptions of political passion in decades past, on issues ranging from the great depression, the world wars, unionism, child labor, segregation, and creeping socialism.
John Gurda believes that Governor Walkers has contempt for compromise but the facts reveal otherwise. His proposals on employee contributions to health care and pensions already represent compromises. For example, although the national average on employee contributions to health care costs is 29%, Walker has asked for only 12%. Here in Colorado I understand the contribution is more like 31% with the government picking up the other 69%. The governor proposes a compromise pension contribution rate of 8-9% of salary. I don’t know what the national average is but in Colorado state employees pay 10.5% of salaries. Since the unions have already tacitly agreed to both proposals, one would have to conclude that even they see these changes as fully justified.
Gurda goes on to allude to Walker’s “demographic base” as though there is something suspect about that base. It won’t be long before Gurda is a member of that demographic. Maybe then he will see Walker’s efforts in a different light even thought Gurda has already erroneously concluded that “today's new right is the philosophical first cousin of prohibitionism.”
Gurda announces that the tea party draws heavy support from Protestant evangelicals such as Walker himself, and their political playbook is a throwback to the “media-savvy opportunists, taking advantage of every opening to advance their cause.” Now this has a familiar ring to it. It sounds like a statement attributed to Rahm Emanuel when he was Obama’s chief of staff and also to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Saul Alinsky. In fact, you might say that this is right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook that has guided Obama before and since his election to the presidency. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
Gurda acts as if “demonizing” ones opponents or things that one opposes is something new. Maybe he was too young to appreciate fully how we demonized the Germans and the Japanese during World War II. “...The current crop of conservatives is making political hay from another temporary phenomenon: the global economic recession. The need for fiscal austerity has rarely been more obvious, but it's being used as a pretext for advancing the new right's legislative agenda.” Fortunately, no pretext is necessary because the need for fiscal austerity is coincident with the Tea Party’s agenda. But, one could argue that Pearl Harbor was our pretext for going to war even though there was a much larger agenda—to rid the world of some of its most repressive and cruel dictators.
Walker has demanded that public employees pay more for their pensions and health insurance - a necessary step to which they have agreed - and then proposed to modify their collective bargaining rights so that it will be more difficult to recoup those benefit changes if democrat/union control is returned to the legislature. That makes eminent good sense if you look beyond the immediate time frame. The history of public employee benefits provided by democrat legislatures in return for union political contributions and boots on the ground is clear in Wisconsin and other states.
Walker first declared a budget emergency and then cut taxes by $140 million to boost the ailing Wisconsin economy. This is equivalent to giving a blood transfusion to an ailing patient but you can count on the left to see this as a reward for rich businessmen rather than a life-saving necessity. In a spate of hyperbole, Gurda uses words like: “amputation”, “juggernaut”, and “dismantling”, all within two sentences. He sees the governor’s actions as “dismantling government one line item at a time, regardless of the consequences.” But there is certainly another point of view related to paring back a government that has become so bloated that it is doing too many things that people should be doing for themselves.
All political parties are driven by ideologies. They represent fixed, blinkered views of the world that focus on their own perspective and dismiss all other positions as either incomplete or simply wrong-headed. Sounds like both of the major parties, doesn’t it?
Limited government has always been an article of conservative faith as well it should be for all of us. Gurda argues that the movement currently afoot is not classic conservatism but something closer to creeping libertarianism. Norman Thomas, American socialist, 1948 once said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." That’s probably the same thing Barack Obama is saying quietly to his Administration today and that is his objective. Conservatives, therefore, are doing what they must to combat the creeping socialism of Thomas and Obama.
Tea party sympathizers want from the federal government only what the constitution intended. Gurda suggests that there is something wrong with giving personal liberty precedence over the state but isn’t that what distinguishes democracy from communism?
Gurda says,"If you listen closely to the rhetoric of the new right, the libertarian message is hard to miss, and there are corollaries of that message that many Wisconsinites might find troubling." However, to make his point, Gurda misstates and overstates the position of the Tea Party when he writes, “Everyone should have the opportunity to make just as much money as he or she can, beginning with the rich. The tea party faithful display a grim preoccupation with money: making it, growing it and preserving it intact from the clutches of a rapacious government.” Writer Kenneth Sollitt put it best, ‘‘…in the economic realm …, you cannot legislate the poor independence by legislating the wealthy out of it. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give to the people what it does not first take away from the people. … what one man receives without working for, another man must work for without receiving.” I suspect that makes perfectly good sense to those who believe in personal responsibility.
“The poor are largely responsible for their poverty. Some groups are truly deserving of help - the disabled and the frail elderly among them - but any able-bodied person of even modest intelligence should be able to get by without assistance from the rest of us." “We cannot fix generations of family dysfunction, centuries of entrenched prejudice or an economy that has shed entry-level jobs by the hundreds of thousands”... by indulging in cradle to the grave welfarism. We cannot build personal responsibility at the same time as we relieve people of that responsibility.
We cannot build self-esteem by robbing the poor of whatever self-esteem they have.
In Gurda you sense a liberal who resents that he has had to struggle to make a living, as though there was something inherently wrong with hard work. He alludes to Walker’s 52% of the vote. What was the typical margin of past presidents and governors? Oh, we wouldn’t want to disclose that context because it might weaken the argument. Walker’s actions are an attempt to redress decades of union –dominated, democrat legislatures that gave them all they asked for, saving nothing for a rainy day. Gurda is right when he mentions that there are two sides to the equation: revenue and expense. However, the conventional wisdom is that you don’t raise taxes during a recession. Has Gurda never heard the word “stimulus?” Tax increases are a reverse stimulus.
Walker had no intent to demonize teachers. He merely pointed out that collective bargaining has enabled public employees to enjoy advantages not available in most other occupations and that in the present recession it is necessary to pare back those advantages and establish a way to make sure they do not get out of hand in the future. Gurda acts as if the legislature is incapable of providing fair compensation to public employees without the pressure of collective bargaining and unions breathing down their necks. If government is the expression of our collective will then so be it. Let’s not give that up and allow unions to usurp the power of government.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Dee Perez-Scott Applauds Madison Madness
The Democratic/government-union days of rage in Madison, Wis., are a disgrace. Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan calls it Cairo coming to Madison. But the protesters in Egypt were pro-democracy. The government-union protesters in Madison are anti-democracy -- they are trying to prevent a vote in the legislature. In fact, Democratic legislators themselves are fleeing the state so as not to vote on Gov. Scott Walker's budget cuts.
That's not democracy.
The teachers' union is going on strike in Milwaukee and elsewhere. They ought to be fired. Think Ronald Reagan PATCO in 1981. Think Calvin Coolidge police strike in 1919.
The teachers' union on strike? Wisconsin parents should go on strike against the teachers' union. A friend e-mailed me to say that the graduation rate in Milwaukee public schools is 46 percent. The graduation rate for African-Americans in Milwaukee public schools is 34 percent. Shouldn't somebody be protesting that?
Gov. Walker is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and he wants state workers to pay one-half of their pension costs and 12.6 percent of their health benefits. Currently, most state employees pay nothing for their pensions and virtually nothing for their health insurance. That's an outrage.
Nationwide, state and local government unions have a 45 percent total-compensation advantage over their private-sector counterpart. With high-pay compensation and virtually no benefits co-pay, the politically arrogant unions are bankrupting America -- which by some estimates is suffering from $3 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Exempting police, fire and state troopers, Walker would end collective bargaining over pensions and benefits for the rest. Collective bargaining for wages would still be permitted, but there would be no wage hikes above the consumer price index. Unions could still represent workers, but they could not force employees to pay dues. In exchange for this, Walker promises no furloughs or layoffs.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is also pushing a bill to limit the collective-bargaining rights of teachers for wages and wage-related benefits. Similar proposals are being discussed in Idaho and Tennessee. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich wants to restrict union rights across the board for all state and local government workers. More generally, both Democratic and Republican governors across the country are taking on the extravagant pay of government unions.
Why? Because taxpayers won't stand for it anymore.
In an interesting twist on this story, even private unions are revolting against government unions. Private unions pay taxes, too. And they don't have near the total compensation of the public unions. It's no wonder they're fed up.
So, having lost badly in the last election, the government-union Democrats in Wisconsin have taken to the streets. This is a European-style revolt, like those seen in Greece, France and elsewhere. So it becomes greater than just a fiscal issue. It is becoming a law-and-order issue.
President Obama, who keeps telling us he's a budget cutter, has taken the side of the public unions. House Speaker John Boehner correctly rapped Obama's knuckles for this. If the state of Wisconsin voters elected a Chris Christie-type governor with a Republican legislature, then it is a local states' rights issue.
But does President Obama even know that the scope of collective bargaining for federal employees is sharply limited? According to the Manhattan Institute, federal workers are forbidden to collectively bargain for wages or benefits. Instead, pay increases are determined annually through legislation.
Meanwhile, Walker said it would be "wise" for President Obama to keep his attentions on Washington, not Wisconsin. "We're focused on balancing our budget," he said in a television interview. "It would be wise for the president and others in Washington to be focused on balancing their budget, which they're a long ways from doing."
Amen.
Obama should stay out. And Walker should stand tall and stick to his principles. A nationwide taxpayer revolt against public unions can save the country. Otherwise, the spiraling out-of-control costs of state public-union entitlements will destroy the local fisc, just as surely as the unreformed federal entitlements of Social Security and health care are wrecking our national finances.
--Larry Kudlow
Madison Madness
That's not democracy.
The teachers' union is going on strike in Milwaukee and elsewhere. They ought to be fired. Think Ronald Reagan PATCO in 1981. Think Calvin Coolidge police strike in 1919.
The teachers' union on strike? Wisconsin parents should go on strike against the teachers' union. A friend e-mailed me to say that the graduation rate in Milwaukee public schools is 46 percent. The graduation rate for African-Americans in Milwaukee public schools is 34 percent. Shouldn't somebody be protesting that?
Gov. Walker is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and he wants state workers to pay one-half of their pension costs and 12.6 percent of their health benefits. Currently, most state employees pay nothing for their pensions and virtually nothing for their health insurance. That's an outrage.
Nationwide, state and local government unions have a 45 percent total-compensation advantage over their private-sector counterpart. With high-pay compensation and virtually no benefits co-pay, the politically arrogant unions are bankrupting America -- which by some estimates is suffering from $3 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Exempting police, fire and state troopers, Walker would end collective bargaining over pensions and benefits for the rest. Collective bargaining for wages would still be permitted, but there would be no wage hikes above the consumer price index. Unions could still represent workers, but they could not force employees to pay dues. In exchange for this, Walker promises no furloughs or layoffs.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is also pushing a bill to limit the collective-bargaining rights of teachers for wages and wage-related benefits. Similar proposals are being discussed in Idaho and Tennessee. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich wants to restrict union rights across the board for all state and local government workers. More generally, both Democratic and Republican governors across the country are taking on the extravagant pay of government unions.
Why? Because taxpayers won't stand for it anymore.
In an interesting twist on this story, even private unions are revolting against government unions. Private unions pay taxes, too. And they don't have near the total compensation of the public unions. It's no wonder they're fed up.
So, having lost badly in the last election, the government-union Democrats in Wisconsin have taken to the streets. This is a European-style revolt, like those seen in Greece, France and elsewhere. So it becomes greater than just a fiscal issue. It is becoming a law-and-order issue.
President Obama, who keeps telling us he's a budget cutter, has taken the side of the public unions. House Speaker John Boehner correctly rapped Obama's knuckles for this. If the state of Wisconsin voters elected a Chris Christie-type governor with a Republican legislature, then it is a local states' rights issue.
But does President Obama even know that the scope of collective bargaining for federal employees is sharply limited? According to the Manhattan Institute, federal workers are forbidden to collectively bargain for wages or benefits. Instead, pay increases are determined annually through legislation.
Meanwhile, Walker said it would be "wise" for President Obama to keep his attentions on Washington, not Wisconsin. "We're focused on balancing our budget," he said in a television interview. "It would be wise for the president and others in Washington to be focused on balancing their budget, which they're a long ways from doing."
Amen.
Obama should stay out. And Walker should stand tall and stick to his principles. A nationwide taxpayer revolt against public unions can save the country. Otherwise, the spiraling out-of-control costs of state public-union entitlements will destroy the local fisc, just as surely as the unreformed federal entitlements of Social Security and health care are wrecking our national finances.
--Larry Kudlow
Madison Madness
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