Glenn Reynolds links Nick Gillespie’s most excellent post on the coming “war” between public and private sector workers where that Reason magazine scribe opines, “I think this split between private and public-sector workers is one of the biggest issues in contemporary America.”
I agree.
As many Americans in have taken pay cuts to keep their private sector jobs, salaries for public employees keep growing, even as states face massive deficits. Since they’re working on our dime, shouldn’t they see a cut back in their salaries and benefits when we’re earning fewer dimes, thus sending even fewer pennies to them?
So, public-sector unions were illegal until President Kennedy’s Executive Order authorizing them.
They really were unthinkable before then. I mean, we need unions to counteract the greedy factory-owners, right? So, who are public-sector unions counteracting? Us, apparently.
My question is: can this be reversed with a simple EO as well? Any attorneys out there? My guess is no, but with HRC as a template, I don’t see why we can’t make this a movement goal.
Best wishes,
-MFS
Reagan set an important precedent when he broke the air controllers’ union. They were FAA employees, so I think that counts as public sector.
Which is why, no matter how much government spends, it always somehow needs more. Or as Gillespie puts it, “There are not enough private-sector workers to pay the taxes necessary to continue” today’s rapacious public sector.
President Reagan took on the Air Traffic Controllers not so much because of their salaries but because they went on strike which is in violation of their contract.
As for the bloated salaries of public employees’ lets admit they do important work for the most part. Its not the salaries that are the problem as it is the numbers with in government that need trimming. All to often we see these people chatting with one another, standing around, or hanging out at the local donut shop (bad DPW Employee)
The true blotted salaries are those of the legislature. But last time someone suggested a salaries freeze at the federal level congress agreed to it but exempted themselves from it only affecting the worker.
The danger posed by trying to rein in public sector pay is known fairly well in Britain. The legendary Winter of Discontent in 1979 arose directly from a freeze on public sector pay leading to nationwide strike action resulting in widespread power cuts, garbage being uncollected for weeks, and even the dead not being buried in areas. Ironically, it was a Labour government that eventually fell foul of the public sector and got massacred in the following election.
But my eye was drawn to this part:
Now I see where the writers of such stuff are going. You believe spending is out of control, you believe it will lead to an economic apocalypse, you believe smaller government is the answer, and you believe that people won’t move towards such a thing unless they are more scared of the alternative. But this sort of rhetoric is an exaggeration.
National debt is currently at 52.9% of GDP, and I saw the Heritage Foundation pose their 2035 estimate of national debt hitting 118% of GDP as something to be terrified of. But then I found that at this very moment, Japan has a national debt that is at 192.1% of their GDP (Don’t believe me? Believe the CIA). They must have gone through 52.9% and 118% in the past to get there, yet they still managed to maintain first-world standards of living.
So it’s possible to go a hell of lot higher than the United States is at now and still not have the country descend into anarchy. That’s not to say such huge national debts are a good thing (many other countries higher than the US are struggling with their debts), but rhetoric that ends up being at odds with reality destroy your credibility. If you promise disaster and it doesn’t come, it doesn’t matter if bad things are still happening, you promise a disaster and people will dismiss you if results are lacking.
They must have gone through 52.9% and 118% in the past to get there, yet they still managed to maintain first-world standards of living.
Not for long, it seems.
Basically put, the only thing that has kept Japan solvent to this point is that its people keep buying its own bonds, even though their interest rates are almost comically low. However, the people who are buying those bonds are the aging, who are starting to cash them in, and no one’s exactly standing in line to buy new ones at the rate of interest the government can afford to pay. The only way out is to start printing money, which is a recipe for hyperinflation.
My partner and his coworkers had their salaries slashed so the Teamsters could get their
salariesprotection money paid.NDT, exactly. Japan has at least been producing stuff that the world wants. Japan has been running trade surpluses all these years. Japan saves in a huge way, and has bought its own bonds from its own savings. They’ve been damaging their economy with their foolish policies, BUT, at least they started with a strong economy. Now they are about to go off a cliff demographically, at the same time Obama leads America off a cliff financially. It won’t be pretty. But Serenity’s comments are incredibly stupid.
This isn’t an Obama issue kids. It was George W Bush and the torturer Dick Cheney who decided that Corporate government is the way to go. Like the rest of this failed Republican Cults of Jesus Inc Texan child of privilege he had no clue to effective governance and the chickens are coming home to roost. Bush / Cheney / Rumsfeld put the standing fundamentalist Christian Blackwater aka Xe to work with no-bid contracts. Increasing amounts of the business of government is outsourced to private sector sources that are mythologically considered more “cost effective.” The US is headed straight for plutocracy. http://endrtimes.blogspot.com/2010/03/united-states-of-corporate-america-from.html The continuation of the Bush Administration lies is nearing completion.
@ILoveCapitalism: If my comments are stupid then you’re in an even deeper pile of shit than you think because advocacy of the sort of large scale spending cuts you’d like to see is still a minority position. The majority of Americans still tend to get cold feet when shown exactly what would need to be cut and are of the opinion that the national debt is a problem that can and should be taken care of years or even decades down the road. I fully understand your arguments in favour of serious spending cuts, but millions of Americans remain ignorant of them and may not really want to be convinced.
Just when you think Serenity’s dumbassery takes the cake, along comes “ActiveCitizen54” who makes her look brilliant.
Let’s See:
Obama has already saved the economy from Collapse
Passed Health Care Reform
Negotiated a HUGE reduction in nukes
Set up a clear end game Iraq
Working on financial regulatory reform
All in spite of perhaps one of the most obstructionist minorities since the Dixie-Dems fighting against civil rights,
Now you want him to solve another “big issue” for the country?
Well, if he has shown one thing, he can solve the big issues so I am sure he is up to this “BIG ISSUE” too
#8: do you make this crap up or get it piped in with a hose or something?
#9: Serenity: are you saying that we would get cold feet if gummint workers had to fund their own retirements like the rest of us? That they would no longer be able to retire with a pension only to be rehired for the same job?
It really doesn’t make any difference whether or not people get cold feet. The reality is that we can’t afford it. We’re out of money; we’ve borrowed about everything in sight and we’ve borrowed against the earnings of people that don’t even exist.
Anecdote that illustrates the government’s attitude towards taxpayers: Imagine a county facility where an operations center used only occasionally has about 40 workstations – each equipped with an Aeron chair (the basic model is over $600; adjustable models above $800).
I have never been in a business office that had these chairs.
#10: Just when you think Serenity’s dumbassery takes the cake, along comes ActiveCitizen54 who makes her look brilliant. And just when you think ActiveCitizen54’s dumbassery takes the cake, along comes gillie who makes him look brilliant.
All the while spending ass loads of cash on cement life preservers for the Titanic passengers. Even if you list were true, not a DAMN one of those things has created jobs, saved the housing market, stopped the transfer of capital from the private to the public sector, makes America an attractive investment for foreign companies etc.
What’s more, with his “HUGE reduction in nukes” he took a HUGE one up the ass re: Iran.
“I think this split between private and public-sector workers is one of the biggest issues in contemporary America.“
And with Dan’s assent, that makes two people who think so.
Seriously….lets do a poll of the American people. How many millions would you need to poll before you found one person who put this on their top twenty list of issues?
A blatant attempt to divide Americans against eachother – get people hatin’ on their fellow citizens who might have a stable job (while of course gearing up for the next real fight – your attempts to subvert any real attempt to regulate the bankers who got us in this mess). A very typical strategy of the right.
Serenity, sorry if I was too harsh, but your basic argument structure about Japan’s debt level would be well in line with the following: “Bobby has been doing coke 5 years now, and see? He hasn’t been arrested. That means we can do coke too – even if we must admit it isn’t really good for us, snicker snicker. Because come on, everyone wants it. No one wants it taken away from them.”
First of all, vast swaths of the American people – you know, the productive and moral ones that the Democrats count on being able to exploit – are perfectly happy to live without being on welfare or other government pork. They may feel some attachment to certain breaks in the tax code, like the mortgage interest deduction – but only because they are raped by the tax structure as it is and by having to pay for the lazy, unproductive and self-indulgent ones. A great deal of the (justified) anger over Obamacare, aside from its financial destructiveness and impossibility of achievement, is over that issue.
As for the rest: Let’s see what happens when the addict hits bottom. That is: Let’s see what happens when the Japanese *can’t* lend us money any more (see NDT’s comment), and the Chinese and Arabs *won’t* lend us any more (because they know we’ve borrowed too much to pay back), and now $1.5 trillion in Obama deficits must be covered by tax increases – except that they won’t be, because little more tax revenue can be squeezed from Americans – and so finally the Federal Reserve prints even more money than it has in the last 18 months, creating inflation worse than the 1970s. In other words: Let’s see what happens when America completes its transition to Banana Republic. Which is the road that Nancy, Harry Greid and the Dear Teleprompter have us on. Your protestations about Japan (different situation) notwithstanding.
Don’t worry about gillie. Gillie has already demonstrated that he and his Barack Obama Party are hypocrites, given that gillie shrieked that opposing gay-sex marriage and voting for DOMA makes you “pro-gay”.
C’mon. It’s not as if he’s calling people he doesn’t like “racist terrorists”. You’re projecting again, dumbass.
If you actually gave a damn about “who got us in this mess”, you’d be calling for investigations of the very liberals you circle the wagons around. Oh and your beloved lord BJ too.
Is anyone really surprised that our resident Government Worker Tano isn’t keen on distributing his wealth away from him when the rest of us are trying to make ends meet?
At least when I’m beating him like a drum on Health Care I have the decency to admit that I work for a health insurance company, but sure as hell don’t speak for them.
Oh, wait, Tano is a mouthpiece of this administration, so I guess he can’t even say that.
Hey ghillie, here’s another accomplishment Chairman Obama can notch on his gun:
Emphasis mine. My, you must be proud.
Pretty rhetoric. How, exactly? Every “stimulus” program he has champione, including those he piggy-backed onto those from Bush, have been utter failures. What’s the unemployment rate at again? So again, how exactly has Obama “saved the economy from collapse”?
A bill which most Americans oppose and for which his party will suffer the consequences of their arrogance at the polls this November. Oh and about your claim that Obama “saved the economy from collapse”, it will if these boondoggles keep getting enacted.
Eh, okay that’s nice. This is indeed a triumph, if we were still living in the 1980s or 90s that is. After nearly 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union it’s a bit anti-climactic now. If he really wants to impress folks, lets see him deal with Iran like Bush did with Libya.
What, by following a timetable for withdrawal largely established by the Bush Administration? Oh yay. What a ‘leader’! Didn’t Obama promise to have all soldiers out of Iraq in 16 months? Hmmm…seems like we’re awfully close to that point in his term.
Which so far has done nothing to help unemployment or improve the economy.
Oh please, your rhetoric may sound purdy to your ears but makes you look like an ass. The Democrats have had enough votes in BOTH Houses of Congress to ram through whatever they please. Yet instead, true to form for this party, they whine about a minority that has virtually no power. The problem the Dems have is with themselves, not the GOP.
Part of me hopes the GOP doesn’t win actual control of Congress this fall. Do I hope they’ll make big gains? Yeah. But first of all, the GOP did a bad job (on domestic policy) in the Bush years and still needs to learn.
Second, more and more crap is going to hit the fan in the next 2 1/2 years… and even if bits of that crap were implemented by Bush and the Hastert/DeLay Republicans, it was all created according to the *Democrat philosophy* of endless government growth, exploitation of the productive, etc. Democrats deserve to be in power as that crap hits!
My silver-lining scenario (I refuse to say “ideal scenario”) is for the Democrats to be so completely drowned by the next 2 1/2 years of crap that their philosophy has created, as it hits the fan, that America ultimately swears off the Democrat philosophy for the next century.
And as far as that “huge reduction in nukes” goes, looks like the idiot child gave away missile defense to do it.
Speaking to reporters in Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia reserved the right to pull out of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, if the level of U.S. missile defense forces increases.
“The package of documents presumes that the treaty is concluded in circumstances where the parties have appropriate levels of strategic defensive systems,” Mr. Lavrov said. “Changing these levels gives each party the right to decide the question of its future participation in the process of reducing strategic offensive arms.”
Add to that the fact that the Russians couldn’t have maintained their arsenal levels anyway because of the cost, and what we see is that this “treaty” is just the Russians telling the US to emasculate itself and Obama cheerily complying.
(P.S. My *ideal* scenario would be for the Democrats to swear off their philosophy themselves, right now – repealing Obamacare, voluntarily cutting $1.5 trillion from domestic spending and entitlements RIGHT NOW, etc. But that ain’t happening.)
And that “huge” reduction in nukes…it’s only a reduction of a few-hundred deployed launchers and a 10% reduction in MIRV warheads. The Russians probably would have had to cut-back that much just to their own fiscal limitations and the total failure of their latest ICBM missile design for their Boomers. They’ve been working on a replacement for the overly-expensive Typhoon-class for twenty years….and they still don’t have a reliable missile for it’s missile silos. The Typhoon’s nor the antiquated Delta-class’s missiles don’t fit the new boat’s launch-tubes….oops.
Tano @15 wrote: A blatant attempt to divide Americans against each other – get people hatin’ on their fellow citizens who might have a stable job…
Tano – are you kidding? If cannot believe that anyone with an active brain cell believes this. Envy and division has been stock and trade of the Left for years.
Criminy.
SoCal,
Tano’s a typical Federal Employee, they lost their brain cells a long time ago.
“typical Federal Employee, they lost their brain cells a long time ago”
Is it really necessary to be that insulting? While you may fairly question the growth of the government* sector (and I would not disagree with you, even as the child and grandchild of proud civil servants), most Federal employees do good work. You may not like their hours or their pay, but there is no need to broad-brush insult them this way.
*I use “government” on purpose, instead of “Federal”, since Gillespie’s post specifically points to state jobs, which are a huge problem just about everywhere (especially here in NJ!)
Neptune,
We have a saying at work. “I can make a small government conservative in two weeks. Just have him take Fed Calls.”
It is my experience that the “Federal employees [who] do good work” are the exception, not the rule.