I sense the pendulum swinging back and believe that we will look back in 5-10 years and conclude that Wisconsin was the anti-California: a classic, liberal state where faulty ideas collided with fiscal reality and the electorate revolted, starting first with a rejection of public employee unions, a modern abomination and per se irreconcilable conflict of interest.
Today we are all Badgers.
From Scott Walker vs. Public Sector Unions by Stephen F. Hayes (The Weekly Standard)
February 17, 2011 —
”Walker is unapologetic. These are difficult times. Wisconsin is facing a budget crisis. And there have to be cuts. Walker believes the changes he’s proposing are relatively modest. “I’m asking them to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary to their pension – right about the national average for contributions. And I’m asking them to pay 12 percent of their health care premiums – up from 6 percent. The national average is around 25 percent.”
“So Wisconsin’s public employees will still have benefit plans more generous than most workers across the country. And these steps are being taken with the express purpose of avoiding major layoffs and dramatic paycuts. But the unions don’t like it.
“… What’s more, Wisconsin teachers pay as much as $1100 each year in compulsory union dues. If the legislation passes, they will no longer be required to pay those dues – returning that money to their own pockets.”
“Welcome to the reckoning. We have met the fiscal apocalypse, and it is smack dab in the middle of the heartland. As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation. Let us pray it does not go the way of the decrepit welfare states of the European Union. “
Her first paragraph says it all. Come to counter protest this Saturday from noon till three at the south Capitol building steps.
More info here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=142039272524888
The teachers seem to be squawking the most.
Others have posted information that the salary and benefit cost for an average Wisconsin teacher is around $100,000 per year.
Some questions we need to ask those teachers:
1. How many days do the kids go to school?
2. How many hours per school day is the teacher teaching?
3. What is the dollar per teaching hour cost?
My back of the envelope computation shows the cost is $110 per teaching hour.
The gov should lay this directly into obamacares lap...” we cannot afford the premium increases caused by obamacare..”
Oh, I see. I hadn't quite understood what was going on with the collective-bargaining issue.
Note to the union organizers: keep tossing the Bieber brains out in front as examples of your fine product...
The horror! We should fight this battle now in Wisconsin. Bring it on libs!
Public Service doesn't mean you're to be serviced by the public for life
President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10998, allowing Federal unions, is what opened the door for public sector unions at the state and local level, which is leading to bankruptcy from bloated public sector salaries, benefits, and retirement plans. Businesses that offered plans like many governments have would go bankrupt. Gov’t entities will, too, eventually, but it will be much more painful.
This is why unions should again be outlawed for public employees.
When collective bargaining was brought into American schools in the 1960s, it was a revenue stream and power base for Big Labor. Suddenly, union bosses became more interested in building political muscle than educating children.
At that point the battle between unions and school boards became more focused on salary, benefits, pensions and working conditions for adults, and less about students.
Kids are only pawns in the self-serving union game.
What is the purpose of teacher unions? To work for children? Establish new and better requirements? Push their members to better serve parents and children?
"Despite what some among us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees" ...National Education Association's just-retired General Counsel Bob Chanin. (The NEA is the County and State Association's parent body).
NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin Says Farewell:
As legendary New York teachers union leader Albert Shanker said, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children."
All government unions should be banned. The idea that government workers need protection from guess who?? THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, is ridiculous. remember, teachers are government employees. Ban government unions.
.
If we don’t someday outlaw public sector unions - as in, codified into the Constitution, this problem is going to keep coming back. This kind of crap is the precursor to violence.
Mark!
Hey teacher! leave them kids alone... All and all your just another brick in the wall!!
BTTT
Democrats are big on the whole "democracy" thing right up until they no longer have the upper hand. Then they whine like the craven little cowards that they are. "Illegal"? They don't care. As long as their temper tantrum produces results.
Hunt them down and bring them back in chains. If they resist, shoot them.
The protests in Wisconsin are right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook, utilizing the fallacious tactic of false choice. Liberals will take a complicated argument and reduce a myriad number of possibilities into just two. And if you don’t agree with them 100%, you are placed into the category that has a very unwholesome connotation.
In Wisconsin, like everywhere else, the citizens have elected officials who have determined that the population believes that public funding for education is necessary. The next question is—how much? The amount could be anything from a dollar per student to a million per student, and anything in between. If the current cost is $10,000 per student, and, by forcing teachers to pay a few dollars more a year for their (generous) health and pension benefits, that cost would be lowered to $9,900, that does not automatically throw the proponents of such a reduction out of the “I support kids” column and into the “I am ruining the education of the children” column. Yet that is essentially what the union thugs are asserting.
I have had many discussions with liberals over the years. They almost always attempt to place you in the “bad” category (of two categories) when there are actually an infinite number of categories available. If you voted for Obama, you are an enlightened multicultural elite. If you didn’t, you are a neanderthal racist pig. They don’t provide the category “I didn’t vote for him because he’s a socialist.”
And these selfish Rat infested UNIONS wonder why so many jobs are shifted overseas. These teachers are not losing their jobs but they deserve to be fired instead.
The governor should take the alternative and layoff/fire them. When their union leaders and the outside obama agitators who were bused in are still pulling down six figures and they are left holding a short-term unemployment check maybe they will realize that they were just cannon fodder for the larger socialist cause.
Screw them and FAD
As long as those who feed at the public trough can continue to squeal and get sympathy, the tax burden on private workers will just get higher and higher. It's a simple fact.
The parents of the students who are being enlisted to protest in Wisconsin need to get that message loud and clear.
If the teachers influence the kids to demonstrate, then the taxpaying parents of those kids might consider reducing their allowances (cars, entertainment, etc.) to demonstrate what the unions' excessive pension programs are doing to the family budget.