Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
m...
In article ,
"Robert Green" wrote:


money in the open that they used to demand under the table. It's why
CEOs
can get away with $20M compensation packages (thank you, Kurt - I no
longer
write "salary")
You have learned your lessons well, Grasshopper (g).

Enough two by fours on the head does the trick.

and why unions ended up being run by guys with diamond
pinkie rings. I did see an interesting item one. It claimed that
Teamster
investments never lost a dime until Jimmy Hoffa was booted out. The
Federal
Trustees that stepped in basically eviscerated the pension funds with
bad
investments.

I got problems with that, from the Vegas experience alone.

Vegas experiences are difficult to parse since the whole state government
had a somewhat cozy relationship with mobsters, at least for a while. Sadly
a lot of the material used in the "Godfather" was thinly disguised truth

I think a
lot of that was creative bookkeeping on the part of Hoffa and Pinkie
ring types. (Not that the the Feds did not make it worse).

No doubt they were skimming, but they were at least making it *look*
profitable. (-: I've never run the Hoffa rumor to ground and must have
heard it a least 25 years or so ago. But I certainly can see how an
arbitrager might be reluctant to give the Teamster Pension Fund the same
kind of "haircut" he would a teacher's fund. .

I think there's an important lesson here. Movements like the labor
movement
that did a lot of good for a lot of people eventually get crusty like
old
galvanized pipes running hard water with slow leaks. Sometimes they are
best rebuilt from the ground up. There's no doubt that too many people
were
promised too many benefits without any planning for how they would be
paid
for. The focus of that fight will doubtless be the municipal and county
worker unions that secured those concessions without securing financing.

I really don't put a lot of the blame for that on the unions.

If the union members didn't get the benefits they bargained for, the union
has to share some of the blame. Someone should have been smart enough to
make sure funds were sequestered from operational funds and demanded it as
part of the contract. Both the union reps and the company bosses were
probably very happy to promise benefits both knew the rank and file would
never get to collect. Sort of like Congress. (-:

GM's collapse, for example, was largely bad management.

I'd say too many chiefs and not enough workers.

But it was also largely bad management of the interaction with the unions.

It's not a subject I've followed closely but it's clear that "pension
principal adjustments" seem a lot more common than "mortgage principle
adjustments." When it comes to who gets to hold the short end of the stick,
it's pretty clear who the usual victims are - the taxpayers. Even Tom
Coburn (R) of Oklahoma wants to stick it to the rich for a change.

http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/201...ch-and-famous/

As we've noted before, ending deductions is in some sense the same as
imposing luxury taxes in that the unintended effect of both can easily be
fewer jobs.

--
Bobby G.