What matters is financial risk burdens...

Michael Harrington  Phil Ostrand • 20 days ago
Yes, but these are false arguments and the inevitable consequences of relying on false arguments. What matters is not income and wage comparisons but financial risk burdens. Private sector workers assume the risks of retirement and health care while as taxpayers they also assume those risks for public sector employees who receive risk free pensions and healthcare. This difference is far greater in monetary terms than income differentials. That injustice is what will end and no false arguments over comparative pay will stop it. Risk of loss is what matters.



Exactly.

And Senor Ostrand is wrong about teachers' pay. I can pretty much guarantee that there were no teachers in 1960 earning the equivalent of $90,000 in today's dollars, and no superintendents making a quarter million adjusted for the times, either.

Scott Walker understood that government unions in general and teachers' unions specifically want to make more than the average private worker and have ALL of the risk of changes to pensions and health care costs put on the private sector. That's thuggery. Imagine going in to negotiate a contract with someone who took the attitude that the contract would be set up so that only you would have any risk, and that THEY would have nothing but benefits and no chance of risk. You'd walk away from the table. That's what we need to start doing to these people.

Michael Harrington  no mo uro • 20 days ago
Yup, "heads we win, tails you lose" is the definition of economic immorality.

Douglas Proudfoot  Phil Ostrand • 20 days ago
If you don't like the Electoral College, feel free to amend the Constitution to make the popular vote binding in the election of a president. Read Article V. You need 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate to vote for your amendment. Or you need a Convention of the States to propose your amendment. Either way, then you need 3/4 of the state legislatures to ratify it.

Let me cut to the chase. You have no way on Gaia's green earth of passing such an amendment. Also there's no way a Trump appointed Supreme Court will find a penumbra that eliminates the Electoral College. We won by the rules. You can't change them legally. In an insurrection, we have all the guns plus the commander in chief, so you still lose. Get used to it. Quit whining.

JB  Phil Ostrand • 19 days ago
"You are warned"...or what?
You really think you and your kind have the stomach for a real fight?
That you would throw away the "antiquated" electoral college because your "side" lost is a testament to how ignorant you are. The electoral college is why we have the longest running representative republic in the history of mankind. It's what separates us from all of the other forms of government and makes the American miracle possible. Your public service unions have been drunk on taxpayer largess for over 30 years. It's time for all of you to produce value for your compensation like the rest of us.

Carry On

public sector greed

no mo uro • 20 days ago
VDH gets most of it, but he leaves out the #1 thing that fuels TDS - public sector greed.

Trump represents the beginning of the end. In two generations the percentage of working Americans who have their income stream funded directly by the government or by regulations which create artificial demand has quadrupled with no appreciable increase in the quantity or quality of the things that government is supposed to do. Tens of millions (and their spouses) depend on no-fire, no-metric, no-anxiety jobs that were created in this Keynesian frenzy of madness which was fueled by the lack of courage of politicians in dealing with the end of the WWII peace dividend.

The day of reckoning - what Keynes called the day when "in the end we are all dead anyways" - has arrived. But the greedy publicly funded - arrogant conceited teachers and professors, thugs in alphabet agency clown farms, etc. - in their paroxysm of thuggish panic are signing on to and supporting anything that will delay their inevitable transition back into the dreaded private sector at vastly lower salaries, if only even for a few months or years.

The loons at the top and in media and entertainment would be nothing without this army of orcs at their backs.