Just a reminder. To those who aren’t busy marching for their rights to have the rest of us pay for [half] of their pensions,* and 88% of their premium health care plans, I mean.
Those folks are too faking sickness so that they can avoid going to work to teach the children — which they’re doing for the children, naturally — to pay attention to such materialistic trivialities. They’re idealists. Agitating for rights!
And by gum, we should be supporting them.
Oh, wait —
That article claims in the second paragraph that slow growth was “largely beyond the control” of government. Really. So, all those anti-business policies such as high taxes and idiotic regulations and outright illegal banning of the ability of certain industries to even do their business (drilling for oil, anyone?) had no effect on growth at all. An administration that seems bent on punishing anyone who makes money has had no effect on growth. Right.
I am amazed at the disconnect. I am amazed at the idiocy. These people are fucking idiots.
Now, Jeff: this isn’t about paying a little extra for their benes: it’s about losing some of their collective bargaining “rights.”
Just ask Bmore Liberal on this thread: he knows.
These people are fucking idiots.
No, they’re not; they’re bald-faced liars. They know damn good and well that Marxist assumptions about economies are bullsplat, and they know damn good and well that planned economies are as doomed to failure as perpetual-motion machines.
Because they’re not about income equality nor about making awful class distinctions go away nor about any of the garbage they shovel out: they’re about Being In Charge, and they criticize the free market not because it’s a bad thing but because they’re not in charge of it.
QED.
At least we had something to show for all that post-WWII debt. Besides the Forgotten Man wreckage left in the wake of the New Deal, that is.
In WWII we spent the money to save the world. Now we do it to buy elections. Weeeeeeeeeeeee!
Maybe this explains all the Nazi analogies. But those union thugs should be looking in the mirror.
For a lot of them it’s a power and control thing. For others, it’s an emotional need for a sense of control and order that can’t deal with uncertainty – it need not be neccessarily them controlling it, so long as the fatherly authority figgure whispers consolations and assurances in their ear.
A lot of them are just stupid, ignant, and emotionally immature. I think they are the REAL problem to deal with, in terms of numbers, when you do things like cutting budgets and such. They just want more free stuff, not less free stuff.
A goodly portion of them are simply indoctrinated with idiocy that they’ve never critically evaluated.
Some are simply getting payed to do that, and baby needs new shoes.
Any time you’re dealing with a mass of people, generalities are best, only generally true. If you’re trying to figgure a group (or a movement, or an ideology) out, I think the first step is understanding it’s not (not ever) monolithic. You start getting over 3 or 5 people in a room and that’s just impossible. There is, in these types of things, always a convergence of disparate motivations.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, after all. To look at these kooks and wonder, WTF is their malfunction? Well, many of them have many distinctly different malfunctions, and many may even have multiple malfunctions at once, any one of which would have sufficed to explain the matter.
Hopeful news from Indiana:
Indiana GOP lines up behind Lugar’s primary challenger
so long as the fatherly authority figgure whispers consolations and assurances in their ear.
I’d contend that if the authority figure is selling safety and security and cradle-to-grave, then we’ve got a “motherly” authority figure.
The “fatherly” authority figure wears jackboots and promises to rain hell on all the bad people so that the good people can get to work building a master race or a socialist utopia or whatever.
A lot of them are just stupid, ignernt, and emotionally immature. I think they are the REAL problem to deal with,
No kidding, but how do you do that? How do you make a bunch of over-privileged, over-educated, adolescent-minded people grow the hell up?
I’d submit that the Very Hard Lesson we’re about to learn will probably suffice, but not without much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, not to mention plenty of suffering by those who weren’t part of the problem to begin with.
WWII wisened up our grandparents, but then they hauled off and raised the boomers. Cripes, hooman society sucks.
to have the rest of us pay for 94% of their pensions
Careful with that – I heard Rush saying that today, and wanted to smack him for saying something that (I think) is so easily debunked.
I’m almost 100% certain that what Walker’s bill would do is have the teachers pony up 6% of their salary towards their pension, and the WI govt. will roughly match it, like happens in almost any private business. *
Not “your pension plan costs X/month, and we’d like you to pay 6% of that, we’ll cover the other 94%.”
I’m pretty sure that is what is meant by the health care number, though. The worker pays 12% of the cost, and the state picks up the other 88%.
—
(*) I’m assuming this to be the case, and I know what that makes me, but I’m pretty sure it’s in the ballpark of “right”.
John if the tax payers of Wisconsin are as of now picking up 100% of state employee pensions and under Walkers proposal they would now have to contribute 6%, who is picking up the other 94%? State pensions aren’t just like any private business.
“Republicans wants state workers to increase contributions to their pensions to 5.8 percent of salary” *
Walker is proposing that the employees contribute 6% of their salary towards their pension – presumably up from a current 0%. I haven’t found what amount, if any, the state would be paying towards said pension under Walker’s proposal. I’m assuming a straight-up matching 6%, as that was the typical deal in the private sector, back when I worked for a living, and inconceivable that a public sector employee would have a worse deal than the private sector, even under Walker’s “draconian” proposal.
Anyway, my point is there is no 6%/94% split — that’s bad math, conflating percentages of two different, unrelated numbers.
The worker is paid a salary ‘X’. On top of that, they receive benefits worth ‘Y’. We know from that MacIver Institute video that, on average, X=$56K and Y=$44K.
Obviously, not all of the benefits package is pension-related. Some proportion of it is healthcare. Some proportion is spent on other benefits, presumably. What’s the breakdown? Dunno, don’t care.
Let’s say that the pension plan is 50% of Y, or $22K. That’s probably high, but who knows.
Walker’s plan would have the worker kick in 6% of wholly-unrelated number ‘X’ ($3,360) towards their pension, which in this example would mean the worker is paying 13% of their pension costs and the state is picking up the other 87%.
But, as plainly stated above, the example is using numbers I pulled out of my ass. The point is that it is incorrect to say that there is a 6/94 split on the “pension costs”. I haven’t seen that data, and I believe it likely to be much more in the 50/50 range.
The only place there is a 6/94 split under the proposal is “amount of salary worker pays into their pension” (6%) versus “amount of salary worker gets to keep after paying into their pension” (94%).
Okay. Somebody find a definitive answer and post it. I don’t believe it’s 50/50. So let’s see if we can’t get the actual number. Seems to me that if you’re being asked to pay 6% of your pension, 94% remains to be paid. By whom? And how?
Don’t know the exact numbers but I believe the 5.8% is of their yearly salary, not the total contribution. I believe the 5.8% works out to about half the total payment into the pension with the state picking up the other half.
Let me look around.
Okay, here (http://www.weau.com/home/headlines/115927374.html):
the weac site doesn’t give info about benefits just propganda
http://www.weac.org/Home/Teachers.aspx
Again, it’s not “6% of your pension” it’s 6% of your salary towards your pension. The complimentary 94% is “salary you get to keep” — it says nothing whatsoever about what “the pension” is, or what proportion of pension is picked up by the state.
While not proof of anything specific, I found this:
link
here’s this:
Welcome to the
Department of Employee Trust Funds
Internet site
http://etf.wi.gov/
i think not being able to find a straight forward response to this lends credence to the union being able to leverage the numbers to make money:
from chicagoboyz:
“Let me explain with an example: A Union begins by negotiating with the Employer/State. They’ll claim their buying leverage will afford Employer significant savings. They’ll end up with a 3-tiered cost structure which allows the Union a profit even with the highest benefit option available as Union already has a very good idea about what Providers will be charging. But it gets even more lucrative for Unions at this point. Let’s say high-end Blue Cross PPO coverage costs $400 for the Family tier. What a Union will do is require $425 from Employer, plus a loaded in admin fee, as a charge for all Families in the employer group. So far, so fair? But, the Union will also offer a few other plans for Employees to choose from. The Union will also have developed relationships with a few cheaper HMO plans, and lesser PPO benefit structure plans that charge, as an example, $325 and $375, respectively.
At an Open House, employees will choose what fits their needs and the Union is in line for the “breakage”. The left over breakage is then, to my experience, placed in a fund where only the Union has the checkbook. Cars, Vacations and Condo’s, oh my. The Union also makes a “commission” off of things like Pre Legal, Dental and Term Life. As another profit source, the Union also leans on the Administrator for favors I’d rather not list, but usually involving idiocy like buying thousands of dollars of “raffle tickets” and leasing cars for the Union’s Business Agents,”
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/20544.html
i think you have to know how the game is played to know who benefits.
so we are back engineering what the union and gov’t are doing.
The difference is that the pensions are run by the state and (the teacher’s) health policies are from WEAC, nr.
So, the union is making secondary money on the health plans but not the pensions under the current system.
lots of corruption:
“MacIver News Service | January 25, 2011
[Waukesha, Wisc…] Wisconsin school districts are saving millions of dollars by switching health insurance providers away from WEA Trust, but the teachers union is not making it easy.”
http://maciverinstitute.com/2011/01/school-districts-seek-new-insurance-options/
don’t worry just suck koch
“So, the union is making secondary money on the health plans but not the pensions under the current system.”
um i’ve spent 10 minutes on this topic. i don’t know. but if you can’t can’t find a simple answer quickly then transparency is not a goal.
Yep, I mentioned this somewhere before but those school districts will need the flexibility created by dropping collective bargaining on benefits so they can switch teachers off their super gold plated plan and onto a far cheaper one.
And they’ll need to do it because the next budget will assume that each of them have taken this step and will reduce state aid accordingly.
Oh, they’ve definitely been avoiding transparency. Just for different reasons for pensions and healthcare policies.
“Yep, I mentioned this somewhere before but those school districts will need the flexibility created by dropping collective bargaining on benefits so they can switch teachers off their super gold plated plan and onto a far cheaper one.”
this is the 1st time i’ve looked into how the interface of union/gov’t works. you may be right.
but, i think that the unions have this down to a fine science in every school district in the country. they have had the time to do so. this be big money dude. that’s why the all out turn out in madison.
Oh, Wisconsin is definitely the place to study that.
We’re shockingly messed up.
“We’re shockingly messed up.”
my prop taxes double in 10 yrs. it is everywhere these folks function without restraint.
ann althouse death threat”:
I receive a threat: “whoever video taped this has no life and needs to be shot in the head.”
That’s it, thanks. Post now reflects those numbers.
well i’d like to see the union’s biz model. theses clowns don’t collect over 400k for nothing.
No problem. Lots of news articles are using the pension and healthcare benefits percentages in the same sentence and the parallel construction is making it sound like both of them relate to their respective total benefits.
That’s what I like about spreadsheets. No oddly phrased word problems.
i think the mob is public education. or mubarack/hitler/stalin is scott walker. the choice is obvious.