Tag unions

As Unemployment Rate Reaches 9.2% Obama Praises Stimulus Success

Allen Frederick 1 Comment

The unemployment rate increases and Obama says his stimulus package worked. He points to the money sent to states to prop up their public sector union jobs as creating or saving bunches of jobs. The only thing this proves to a thinking man is that too much money is being wasted on public sector union employees and it is stifling the private sector. If states can not afford to pay these huge benefit packages without turning to Washington for taxpayer support then the contracts need to be re-negotiated not bailed out.

THIS INSANITY has got to stop. Vote conservative in 2012. For this and other nonsensical things this President says and does he wins this week’s DoDo Bird award hands down.

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Our biggest priority of this administration is getting the economy back on track and putting people back to work. Now, without re-litigating the past, I am absolutely convinced and the vast majority of economists are convinced that the steps we took in the recovery act saved millions of people their jobs, or created a whole bunch of jobs. And, part of the evidence of that, as you see instances of the recovery act phasing out. When I came into office and budgets were hemorrhaging at the state level. Part of the recovery act was giving states help so they wouldn’t have to lay off teachers, police officers and firefighters. As we’ve seen that federal support for states diminish, we’ve seen the biggest job losses in the public sector — teachers, police officers, firefighters, losing their jobs. So, my strong preference would be for us to figure out ways that we can continue to provide help across the board. But I’m operating within some political constraints, because whatever I do, has to go through the House of Representatives. What that means then is, among the options that are available to us is for example the payroll tax cut.

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Wisconsin School Proves Walker’s Policies Actually Work

Allen Frederick 1 Comment

The sky will fall, Armageddon was sure to come, the end was near, this will be a disaster for our schools and our children, where the doomsday cries of those who opposed Scott Walker’s reforms in Wisconsin. All this was before the law was passed and enacted. Before ink was put to paper, before democrats returned from MIA status to block the bill’s passage. All these negative reports came fast and furious in an attempt to overturn the voter’s will in Wisconsin. Well now that the law is actually passed and enacted at least one school district in Wisconsin is raving about the positive impact the new legislation has had on their bottom line. At least for the Kaukauna School District the new law was the salvation needed. In other words the UNION THUGS along with the Democrats LIED to the voters.

Could it be the changes enacted in Wisconsin will actually work in other districts across the country? They can and they will, this is why the unions and the democrats who are bought and paid for by the unions fight so hard for education reform.

Amplify’d from washingtonexaminer.com

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now, they’ll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and also contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board President Todd Arnoldussen.
Of course, Wisconsin unions had offered to make benefit concessions during the budget fight. Wouldn’t Kaukauna’s money problems have been solved if Walker had just accepted those concessions and not demanded cutbacks in collective bargaining powers?

“The monetary part of it is not the entire issue,” says Arnoldussen, a political independent who won a spot on the board in a nonpartisan election. Indeed, some of the most important improvements in Kaukauna’s outlook are because of the new limits on collective bargaining.

In the past, Kaukauna’s agreement with the teachers union required the school district to purchase health insurance coverage from something called WEA Trust — a company created by the Wisconsin teachers union. “It was in the collective bargaining agreement that we could only negotiate with them,” says Arnoldussen. “Well, you know what happens when you can only negotiate with one vendor.” This year, WEA Trust told Kaukauna that it would face a significant increase in premiums.

Now, the collective bargaining agreement is gone, and the school district is free to shop around for coverage. And all of a sudden, WEA Trust has changed its position. “With these changes, the schools could go out for bids, and lo and behold, WEA Trust said, ‘We can match the lowest bid,'” says Republican state Rep. Jim Steineke, who represents the area and supports the Walker changes. At least for the moment, Kaukauna is staying with WEA Trust, but saving substantial amounts of money.

Then there are work rules. “In the collective bargaining agreement, high school teachers only had to teach five periods a day, out of seven,” says Arnoldussen. “Now, they’re going to teach six.” In addition, the collective bargaining agreement specified that teachers had to be in the school 37 1/2 hours a week. Now, it will be 40 hours.

The changes mean Kaukauna can reduce the size of its classes — from 31 students to 26 students in high school and from 26 students to 23 students in elementary school. In addition, there will be more teacher time for one-on-one sessions with troubled students. Those changes would not have been possible without the much-maligned changes in collective bargaining.

Teachers’ salaries will stay “relatively the same,” Arnoldussen says, except for higher pension and health care payments. (The top salary is around $80,000 per year, with about $35,000 in additional benefits, for 184 days of work per year — summers off.) Finally, the money saved will be used to hire a few more teachers and institute merit pay.
In the Kaukauna schools, the world is not only not falling apart — it’s getting better.

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See How They Run

Allen Frederick Leave a comment

If you can’t get your way take your ball and bat and go home. Apparently democrat lawmakers have never outgrown their childhood tendency to throw a temper tantrum. First it was Wisconsin now Indiana, I wonder if we can get the dems on capital hill to take an extended leave of absense?

Now that is one government I would love to see shut down for months. What say you?

But since Dems are such great actors I award them this week’s DoDo Bird Award. They earned it. Maybe one day the Dems will become a distinct breed like the DoDo bird. One can hope.

Eagle out!

Amplify’d from www.onenewsnow.com
Running Democrat
Statehouse walkouts are not without precedent.  In fact, they are a reasonably common occurrence.  But they are largely symbolic gestures — an attempt to demonstrate the minority’s outraged disapproval of the majority’s agenda.  Seldom do they go on for days, and until now, never have they been legitimate attempts to undermine the entire democratic process by grinding the operation of government to a halt.
For those who may be unaware, Indiana Statehouse Democrats staged a walkout a month ago to deny the large Republican majority the ability to enact legislation opposed by public and private union bosses — specifically right-to-work and public education reform laws.  The Democrat caucus fled across state lines to Illinois (where else?), and have been holed up in a hotel demanding concession after concession to earn their return.  But even after capitulating to their juvenile fit and pulling the right-to-work law off the table, Republican leaders have been unsuccessful in luring the Democrats back to work.
There’s a phrase for what is occurring in Indiana; it’s called the “tyranny of the minority.”  In Federalist #10, James Madison warned against the tyranny of the majority by proposing that a republican form of representative democracy would best protect the rights of the minority.  What he apparently didn’t count on was that in an effort to appease their union masters, the minority would one day use those protections to obliterate the democratic process.  And that is precisely what is unfolding.

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Wisconsin Union Battle Only Beginning

Allen Frederick 1 Comment

This well written article details the bigger problem of TAXPAYER funded public education. Since school districts have the right to tax citizens there is no end to their ability to shake down the public for more and more money to fund their insatiable appetites. The battle has just begun, we need to keep up the opposition. We need to stand up for the abolition of property taxes for school funding.

Amplify’d from americanvision.org

The unions in Wisconsin are busted. There is no return, and they know it. Liberals across the nation know it. They have played the legislative game long enough to understand that a legislative momentum is a hard thing to reverse. The momentum created by the Tea Party doesn’t seem to subside yet; if anything, it seems to be picking up speed, on both local, state, and federal level.

The standoff was between the state legislature and the unions. The state has a budget to balance. It’s the state budget, not the taxpayers’ personal budgets. Unions will lose their monopoly power, their privileges, and their ability to force taxpayers to pay more towards the state’s employees lavish retirement and benefits. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into more money kept in the taxpayers’ pockets. It doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be tax increases in the future. In fact, my argument in this article is that there’s nothing to prevent the tax burden from increasing, whether unions are busted or not, unless the legislators are ready to effect changes more fundamental and sweeping than simply abolishing collective bargaining.

Let’s not forget, this is not about unions in general. This is about public school teachers and their unions. The majority of those protesting there were public school teachers. Look at the data: Of 181,577 state and local government full-time employees in the state of Wisconsin, 108,365 are in education. (Police and fire are only 18,000; health and hospitals about 5,000.) Of those about 60,000 are teachers – almost as many as all the other branches of government combined. One of every three government employees is a teacher. Three of every five works for the school districts.

These teachers work for school districts. And here is the problem for the taxpayers, whether unions are busted or not: School districts have the authority to tax. No matter how many battles the state wins against the unions, even if the state legislates the unions out of existence, the taxpayer is still screwed.

Let’s look at the numbers: The tax levies imposed by the school districts in Wisconsin for 2010-11 add up to almost $4.7 billion, or $9.76 per $1,000 value. Divided per capita, the average family of four pays close to $3,500 per year – not on increase, nor on profit, but on assessed value only, which is the very definition of rent, or of racket, applied to the private sector. Add to this the various local, state, and federal grants – paid for by your taxes again – and the total cost for public education in Wisconsin is $8.6 billion, all paid by the taxpayer. So the tax burden on the average family of four now gets to $6,500 a year – only to pay the government school districts. No other government institution has this exclusive right to tax the individual citizen to cover its own expenses.

Even worse: The taxpayer has no power whatsoever to decide how much those taxes will be. Neither has he the power to demand accountability from the school districts. No one has a veto on the spending frenzy of the school districts. And there is no opting out: If you live in a house, whether you own it or rent it, you pay. Even if your children go to a private school or are homeschooled. Even if you never used any of the facilities of the public schools.

In short, like Michael Moore said, there is a lot of cash out there, up for grabs: $8.6 billion every year, to be plundered by 108,000 teachers and school administrators in Wisconsin only. The state can win the fight against the unions; but that doesn’t mean that the $8.6 billion burden is off the back of the taxpayer. Property taxes and federal taxes make sure this doesn’t change. And teachers’ unions are predators: As long as there is an easy prey, the taxpayer, they will fight to have their piece of his flesh. The collective bargaining is only the visible part of the teachers’ unions, the tip of the iceberg. The real power of the public schools is the power to tax; and the teachers’ and the administrators’ power to do as they please with the money.

“The power to tax is a power to destroy.” When Daniel Webster said these words in 1819 he meant a legal power to destroy. No entity can tax unless it first has the power to impose sanctions for not paying taxes. But there is more to it: The legal power to tax and destroy, combined with the fallen human nature (and the predatory collectivist instincts of the committed socialists in the teachers’ unions), produces a psychological inclination to destruction. Every institution that lives on money extracted by brute force eventually turns into an institution of destruction. What it will destroy depends on its field of activity. The Fed is destroying the money system of America; FDA is destroying the food supply, ATF is on a quest to destroy all alcohol, tobacco, and firearms (private, of course), and TSA is on a quest to destroy all transportation security whatsoever.

And teachers have their own field: education. In case you wondered what is destroying learning and intelligence in America, it is the taxes that support the government schools. Try it with your teenage son: Never make him earn his money, always give him abundantly without asking for accountability, and let him have the car keys and the booze anytime he wants. How high is the probability that this will make him into a conscientious, productive, responsible adult? Same applies to government schools: they drink up the taxpayers’ money, and never have to give an account.

When a person has a secure stream of benefits and privileges backed up by the power of the state, they develop a “prison guard” mentality. “Prison guard,” that is, preserving the status quo. This was the problem the Soviet leaders had with the nomenklatura – the elite class of “managers” that controlled the levers of the economy, the education, the scientific projects, etc. of the Soviet empire. The nomenklatura had all the privileges, presumably to have the comfort to develop, innovate, lead the society to higher and higher achievements. But this security produced the opposite result: The nomenklatura was the least responsive, the least innovative, and the most reactionary class in the Soviet society. The guaranteed access to money and power didn’t produce initiative and productivity as was expected; it produced the opposite effect.

Abolish property taxes. And then, get the government out of the education business entirely.

Make the schools compete. And make them compete not on the basis of the lame “voucher” system. Make them compete on a market basis – attract parents based on low prices, quality, innovation, relevance to the modern world, just like the thousands of private schools in this country do and survive and even thrive. Let Mom and Dad keep those average $6,500 a year to themselves, and let them decide what school they want to enroll their children in. Free the market so that newcomers enter and offer new possibilities, new systems, and new methods of teaching. Restore the sovereignty of the parents, and enact a separation of state and school – protecting the schools against the destruction of the taxing power of the state.

If legislators do that, we will see a new battle forming: teachers’ unions against school administrators. It won’t be the taxpayers that will pick up the tab for the teachers’ privileges anymore; it will be those that are economically and financially responsible for the schools. The teachers will have to yield, eventually, unless they want to see their schools bankrupt and closed. Or, unless they want to be fired, with others taking their place, more willing to work, and less willing to argue about benefits. And everyone will be better off.

Until legislators abolish property taxes, and abolish all government grants to school districts, the taxpayer is still the losing party. Wisconsin is not a victory, yet.

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Dem Govs Unclear on Whether Voters Should Have Say in Public Employee Pay Hikes

Allen Frederick Leave a comment

Democratic governors were critical of how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is handling the showdown with the public employees union in his state, but were ambiguous about whether they could support Walker’s proposal to allow voters to approve or disapprove by referendum any pay raise for public employees – including teachers – that exceeds the rate of inflation.

Why should the taxpayers have a say in what public sector union members make, it is not like they are paying their salaries or anything, Oh wait they actually are paying their salaries, perhaps then they should have a say in how much they think they should get paid.

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