Comes in bulk, union members
The Democrats want to bail out private union pension funds to the tune of…. infinity.
Although right now taxpayers could possibly be on the hook for $165 billion, the liability could essentially be unlimited because these pensions have to be paid out until the workers die.
Sorry… not interested. You’ve already cost the nation too much in productivity, lost jobs, and bailouts. Suck eggs union members.
Maybe the tide is turning…
H/T: Richard Rider
Mild mannered, til you cross them
Greece has too many civil servants, doing too little unproductive work, earning way to much. But firing them is nigh on impossible. In other words, the rest of Greece is slave to these folks.
The US heads for that territory. California and New York are already there.
I know that Democrats, bought and sold by these unions, don’t really care about the country. So I don’t expect them to do anything about it.
So they should just be fired. Lock stock and barrel. Republicans should be skewered and replaced until we have a set representatives with the balls to cut the rug out from under public sector unions that think we work for them.
The police officer, fire fighter, teacher, and state bureaucrat living next to you may be nice at barbecues, but they are likely your and our countries worst nightmare, and a direct threat to your freedom.
As a protected class with direct access to your wallet, they turn into budget / wallet vampires at night. We need to send representatives that will put a stake in their beastly heart, if we want to survive as the land of the free, not the home of the enslaved.
Apparently, they like donuts too. I know – cheap shot! She earned it.
Democrats owe their soul to big unions. They will gladly sell ours to fund the debt.
Public sector unions should be illegal. And private sector unions should be treated like the big businesses they are.
If they knew then, what they know now…???
Ravenswood, West Virginia, lives on life support after the Kaiser aluminum plant that powered the towns economic rise slowly dies. Should the other major plant in town close, it could become a modern day ghost town.
Why would the plant close down? Well, it is old and refurbishing it costs. Demand is down in the recession. And the plant is unionized and has high labor costs relative to foreign and some domestic operations.
Kaiser’s Ravenswood plant created a middle class where there was none. When the United Steelworkers Union was voted in after the plant opened in 1957, the hourly wage jumped from $1.78 to $3.25.
This isn’t the first time Ravenwood workers have been out of work for a long time – twenty years ago they were locked out for nineteen months in a union labor dispute with the company.
That should have been a clue that the company, and the market, viewed their plant as “optional”. That should have been their clue to scale back their demands on the company. To work like the dickens to make it a better, more efficient plant. And to broaden their career options
Dave Guthrie, 51, says he’s glad he was laid off because now he has the time, money and motivation to go to college. He wants to be a traveling nurse, working short-term contracts around the country, far from what he calls the plant’s "us-vs.-them" labor-management dynamic.
Will 19 years of “good times” makes up for being jobless now? Will it make up for not leaving a strong town to their kids?
It seems a bad trade to me. I’d be mad at the “leaders” that egged it on.
SEIU is also exempt from anti-trust rules. How about changing that?
The House voted to remove antitrust exemptions that health insurance companies have.
I’m not sure, exactly, how the exemption helps companies that are largely state based. The industry claims removing it won’t matter a whole lot.
I’ve got two problems with this. The first is that I don’t like Congress aiming at a particular industry, especially when they largely have political aims not the merit of the actual proposal as their goal.
The second problem is that the anti-trust exemptions unions have causes far more havoc in the economy. Why not just get rid of anti-trust exemptions – period???
Well, we know that the Democrats don’t do anything for the country as a whole, they operate for their constituencies – unions, unproductive, bought off minorities, and terrorists. And we know that the Republicans are too stupid, or timid, or both, to fight for the country.
What a bunch of maroons we have “leading us”. We probably deserve the thumping the next decade is going to give us.
A school superintendent in Rhode Island fired every high school teacher:
Teacher salaries at the high school average $72-78k. Apparently 50% of the students at the school are failing all of their classes, and the graduation rate is also under 50%. In an effort to turn the school around, the superintendent requested some changes be made whereby the school day would be slightly extended, teachers would perform some extra tutoring, etc.
The union balked and refused the terms, so now she is firing the entire teaching staff of the high school and replacing them.
Exactly right. Even places that aren’t doing too bad should put down their public sector unions. Unions, especially public sector ones, pose a huge threat to states and the country. They need to be disbanded.
I’m not, but I’m sure somebody is. Likely suspects include the UAW and Public sector union members.
Perhaps they are the enemy we need to fight even more than Muslims?
I guess we are all scabs now
I’m not surprised that I get to pay a tax on my healthcare plan, but a union fellow with a better plan that he doesn’t pay for, doesn’t have to pay the tax.
And so it looks like they may have reached a deal sooner than otherwise expected: unions get a special two-year exclusion from the tax.
So not only does the healthcare bill kill our medical system it also kills any pretense that this government is of the people, for the people.
The Obama Administration really is the best money can buy.
Feet don’t fail me now!
Instapundit writes:
UH OH: Underfunded Public Pensions as “Stranded” Costs? Two Trillion Dollars? “One question about these obligations is whether taxpayers will stick around to pay them, or instead will vote with their feet. . . . Many of these pension obligations have been incurred by municipalities and others by states, and in some cases the obligations are intertwined. But what happens if voters-taxpayers move out? The assumption has long been that taxpayers are stuck, on account of jobs and other circumstance. But query whether that is necessarily true as the baby boom generation retires.”
This is exactly why politicians bought by unions and public sector employees are attempting to nationalize obligations like healthcare as well as industries unions have killed (automobile initially).
Once nationalized, we won’t be able to run from stupid overly generous under funded post employment obligations.
Do not confuse Democrats with idealists. Sure there are socialists amidst them, but at the core they are bought and sold corrupt politicians eager to please their union and public sector masters.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together have cost the US Taxpayer over $400 billion dollars. And there is no end in sight.
Unlimited bailouts will now allow the Treasury to keep them in conservatorship, which means they can help to conserve the Democratic majority in Congress by increasing their role in housing finance. With the Federal Reserve planning to step back as early as March from buying $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, Team Obama is counting on Fan and Fred to help reflate the housing bubble.
Yet, with all this cost, and with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being extensions of government, their CEOs each will get $5 million dollars salary.
So a pay czar only pay czars folks the unions are pissed at? Is that it? Pay no attention to the places where Democrats park their cronies?
Crony capitalism.. brought to you by the Democratic party. Personally, I’d be ashamed to be associated with that party.
Some folks have asked “Gosh Ken, you can’t really want to get rid of Unions”…. My answer is yes, I do.
But more specifically, I either want to get rid of all of them, or have a LOT more of them. Unions, like any other BUSINESS, should compete. An employee should be able to choose which union to join based on competitive offerings. And if any one union gets too big, or too dominate in a region, business sector, or even a company, it should be broken up or banned.
In other words, unions should be treated like businesses, which is what they are.
The idea that it is bad for only one company to sell cars, but okay for only one company to sell the labor that builds cars makes no sense.
And… if I find unions dividing but coordinating attacks on business or politics, well, I’ll smack them just as hard as I would other businesses attempting end-runs around competition.
This an obvious and needed change that won’t happen because our politicians, like Barack Obama, are already bought by unions like the UAW and SEIU.
Fighting terrorism through union activism – join today!
I’ve sorted out how to solve this terror problem… tell the Obama administration that Islamic Jihadists management won’t let local jihadists unionize. Then sit back and watch the fur fly as world-wide terror has a newly fierce enemy.
But alas, then I wake up, and find our illustrious leaders want to further decapitate our security efforts by unionizing TSA employees. In light of our recent experiences with union failures, why spread the rot?
Thus, while the terrorists remain nimble, flexible and low overhead, those trying to catch them become even more sclerotic than now.
The Obama administration consistently picks the ONE wrong thing out of millions of right things.
You can’t be that good at being wrong by accident, there has to be some evil puppet master (George Soros, the Devil, any suggestions??) pulling the strings.
We should be getting rid of unions, not making more.
NBA player, steel executive, union busting mayor
Dave Bing, NBA player turned steel entrepreneur faces the unenviable task of saving a city that doesn’t seem to want to be saved:
In November, 57% of the Detroit voters bought into his tough-love reform agenda. Mr. Bing replaced the disgraced Kwame Kilpatrick, who went to jail earlier this year for spending city funds on his girlfriends—just the publicity boost the city already flat on its back didn’t need.
The mayor’s office is in the heart of downtown Detroit, which has shrunk to about an eight-block radius of high rise office towers, upscale restaurants and stores
His biggest problem? No surprise, the same thing that killed the biggest employers in town, a unionized workforce.
"Today in the city of Detroit," he tells me, "our union employee benefits cost 68% of what their base wage is. I don’t think that happens in any other place in the country." To give a sense of how excessive those pay packages are, he adds: "When you look at one of the most dominant labor unions in the world, the UAW, they’re nowhere close to what we give our city workers."
He should just fire everybody and hire back scabs. But for now he holds bankruptcy over their heads:
"This would void all the city contracts," he insists. "That means workers have to make a decision: Do you want to start with zero, or do you want to start from where you are and give up just a little bit? Under bankruptcy you start with zero." Mr. Bing is a hardliner.
This is what happens when a real service oriented person takes office.
All of the US needs a Dave Bing – quickly.
They want us to pay for their health care obligations.
In case you are wondering what all this fuss about healthcare is… the Democrats don’t care a whit about the US running out of money. They are way more concerned that the union management that pays for their elections may have trouble paying the health care bills they owe their membership.
If a Democrat is talking… he/she is lying.
If a Republican is talking… he/she is probably lying but there is a small chance not.
Some crappy choices we get. No wonder Tea Party folks are more popular.