"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
m...
In article ,
"Percival P. Cassidy" wrote:

On 11/14/11 12:29 am, Robert Green wrote:

His other favorite saying was to "follow the money." I don't think
enough
journalists or even investigators live by that rule. I don't believe
there
are many journalists left that can do it in the modern age because
finances
are so complex. I'd still like to know who profited most from the
real
estate bubble because you can bet they're cooking up another bubble to
cash
in on.

That's why we have to ban political contributions altogether, whether by
corporations or by unions, and have publicly funded elections.

Perce

But multiple Supreme Courts with multiple outlooks have ALL put the
kibosh on such things, due to that pesky first amendment thingy. This is
a string of ruling dating from the immediate post-Nixon era forward. In
fact a lot of the really weird things, such as PACs, were put in place
by what the Supremes let stand and/or shot down.

The Supremes often shoot down laws not because what they're trying to
control is intrinsically unconstitutional - just that they're poorly
drafted. That's pretty easy to understand with our Congress. If I were a
cynic, I would say that Congress *deliberately" writes laws that they know
will fail to pass SC muster so they can appear to have done something and
only failed because of that "Warren/Roberts/U-name-some other CJ villain"
Court.

I think the error the Founding Fathers made was assuming that Congress would
never abdicate its power and would always fight for it the way the
individual reps did at the Constitutional Convention. Now, they don't want
to do anything for fear of ****ing off some lunatic fringe group and getting
voted out as a result of a nationwide nutcake campaign against them financed
by people who don't even live there. We're in serious leadership trouble,
which is obvious looking at the contributions both parties have made to our
current "broke" state of affairs. The political termites from BOTH sides
have found the holes, finally, in our foundation and we had better get them
out before repair isn't possible, as is often the case with termites.

Although you've pointed out the multiple courts have issued multiple
decisions that appear to support "money = free speech" they may also be
sending a message, as they often do, "You'd better fix this mess, and fast,
Congress." When it's clear a foreign power has funneled money to influence
an *important* election, the Congress might get serious about writing a law
that passes Constitutional muster barring, say, Israel, China, Chile or
Japan from pumping enormous amounts of money into elections across the US.
A lot of countries pay handsomely as it is to have us act as their personal
protection force. We can get more! (-:

As many here know, the Court vacillates. It reacts, although slowly, to
events and changes in society. Once slavery was A-OK with them. Handgun
control is just but another example. Hotly debated for years as to the
meaning of "right to bear arms" we've seen a swing in the recent, most
conservative court. Will a future, more liberal court once again decide on
other side? Oddly enough, the question of handguns and "corporate speech"
have a very similar pivot point: Do the rights to "bear arms" or to have
free speech apply to groups or individuals?

There's a good test for that possibility. It's the 5-4 split. More and
more cases are going that way and these "one vote win" cases could easily
revert with a new court balance. Or due to an unintended consequence so
extreme that people demand action. Or if the Chief Justice decides he likes
a particular issue raised in a particular case. And probably even if a SC
law clerk puts a brief in the wrong folder.

"Money = Free Speech" seems offensive to enough people that I think
eventually something will have to be done. Sadly, in the mode of government
we've adopted (crisis reaction) it will take a crisis like a "bought"
election by a foreign power to effect the required change. But don't worry:
those interested in buying an election know the "US For Sale" sign is out
there in bright neon. Their challenge is for someone to be able to follow
the money when that happens. It might take more than one or two
foreign-bought politicians before anyone notices.

--
Bobby G.

On 11/18/11 04:11 am, Robert Green wrote:

snip

I don't suggest anyone get a government check for doing nothing. In fact, I
am adamantly opposed to it for practical and moral reasons. Studies clearly
show the longer someone is on unemployment, the less likely they are to ever
return to the workforce. I'll agree there's great "moral hazard" in doing
that at least as bad as bailing out "too big to fail" banks.

But if the jobless are paid for scraping rust off bridges, cleaning up
highways and streets or some other project that has an instrinsic social
value, they can very easily prevent the destruction of wealth.

snip

The country benefits as a whole if instead of just handing out unemployment
checks we require people to attend retraining and skill building courses or
engage in community or public service, even if it's cleaning trash from
highways.

But if scraping rust from bridges and cleaning up trash from highways is
necessary work, why not pay otherwise-unemployed people the proper wage
for doing the work, not making them work for peanuts?

Perce

On Nov 18, 4:11*am, "Robert Green" wrote:
"BobR" wrote in message

...
On Nov 13, 2:47 am, "Robert Green" wrote:





"HeyBub" wrote in message

om...

Robert Green wrote:

We can only hope. Unemployment at 4%, DOW-Jones above 12,000, 23
consecutive quarters of economic growth, low interest rates,
virtually no inflation, dead Mohammadens piled up like cordwood.

It was just an illusion, Bub. The magical numbers sprouted from all
of that from the Feds spending trillions on post 9/11 security, wars,
TSA, etc. It's amazing how a little government deficit spending can
falsely goose the economic numbers. Now we're experiencing the crash
of the speculative bubble and runaway defense spending that made
those high-flying numbers possible - but not real. We also destroyed
Iraq, the country that had the most to gain from keeping Iran nuke
free because they'd be one of the first victims of Iranian nuclear
aggression.

Boy, you sure don't understand economics. Government spending drives
DOWN
the GDP and destroys wealth.

Oy. So how did all the Bush government spending on the TSA, Homeland
Security, two different wars and the Medicare Drug plan create all those
wonderful numbers you continually crow about? You can't have it both ways,
as much as you seem to want it. Your own previous examples put the lie to
your current contentions.

According to your latest wild theory, those glowing (yet false) numbers
you
keep touting should have been impossible. If government spending destroys
wealth, the trillions of dollars we owe or have deficit spent should have
driven us to extinction by now. Only you could posit a theory that
immediately trashes your previous theories. You've gone and HeyBubbed
yourself! (-: In trying to figure out how you can came by the unusual and
"new for you" concepts you have about creating and destroying wealth, I
started out with a simple Google query:

http://www.google.com/search?q=gover...estroys+wealth

That lead to Ron Paul and Rush Limbaugh sites, so I knew I was getting
ready
for a visit to the Economic Twilight Zone. At least I know how this
bizarre
idea gained enough traction to be adopted by you.

http://logisticsmonster.com/2010/10/...ent-destroys-w...

"Maintaining a high level of employment is one of the main objectives of
The
Federal Reserve, which is just one reason it is ill conceived at its very
core. "

Cue Twilight Zone theme song. High UN-employment is a good thing, it
seems, according to Paul. No wonder why he's got the "destruction of
wealth" idea as ass-backwards as you do.

http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/tag/budget/

Mr. Johnston has quite a bit to say about the issue and debunks the
assertion that you and others (mostly Republicans) make concerning the
"destruction" of wealth. He makes a lot of the same points I have that
don't seem to get through to you, the most important being that you're
calling wealth transfers "wealth destruction" and that's just not correct.

Giving a guy a job to help rebuild a highway or bridge *transfers* the
wealth from money collected from taxes to that person. It's not lost. He
doesn't burn the money. He spends it. At the local grocer. At the gas
pump. On insurance. Car payments. Rent. Spending it "primes the pump" and
helps get stalled economies rolling again. It's remarkably similar to the
Republican "trickle down" theory except that unlike the "trickle down"
theory, this "wealth transfer" actually works and gets money into the
economy.

Explain to me again how this "transfer" destroys wealth? Maybe you can
find
someone on the web with a degree or credentials in economics to support
your
rather whimsical theory. I certainly couldn't. But maybe I didn't look
hard enough. All I found were politicians like Paul and pundits like
Limbaugh, all with a very obvious political axe to grind.

Johnston says: In general the market does a better job of allocating
capital for investment than government does. But when the market fails, as
with the unregulated insurance and bad loans that destroyed so much value
in
the last decade, then the only way to stop the vicious cycle of decline is
for government to temporarily make up the difference through more
spending.
Saying otherwise is the economic equivalent of arguing that water and
flour
make steak. . .

He furthers his argument with examples of the quite idiotic statements of
our Republican politicians:
"We need to cut spending now in order to create jobs in America" - House
Speaker John Boehner on the floor of the House of Representatives in July
2010. "If government spending would stimulate the economy, we'd be in the
middle of a boom" - Senator Mitch McConnell in March 2011. "Government
doesn
't create jobs, you do" - Representative Nan Hayworth, M.D., speaking in
January to business leaders in her New York district.

None of the comments makes sense. The first violates the accounting
identity
that spending equals income. The second assumes that the stimulus was big
enough to make up for the fall in private sector jobs, when it was less
than
half what accounting identity algebra showed was needed. The third is just
plain nonsense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cay_Johnston

(Johnston received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting "for his
penetrating and enterprising reporting that exposed loopholes and
inequities
in the U.S. tax code, which was instrumental in bringing about reforms."
He
was a Pulitzer finalist in 2003 "for his stories that displayed exquisite
command of complicated U.S. tax laws and of how corporations and
individuals
twist them to their advantage." He was also a finalist in 2000 "for his
lucid coverage of problems resulting from the reorganization of the
Internal
Revenue Service.")

We saw that when Roosevelt implemented all manner of government jobs
programs back in the 30's and we see it now with stimulus and government
subsidy money.

Sweet Jesus Monroe! You don't have one ounce of shame, do you, comparing
the GDP of the worst period in American economic history with normal
growth
periods? That dog won't hunt. GDP, aside from being an imperfect measure
of the economic health of a nation, always tends to fall during periods of
extreme economic distress. Especially a collapse caused by an imprudent
financial industry, leveraged to the max.

To blame that on FDR's programs is more than dubious, it's dishonest. In
fact, it's the remaining social net programs like the FDIC and Social
Security that kept this last recession from collapsing the economy. Of the
many economists I've read who have commented on that period and the
current,
nearly all of them say the same thing.

They believe the problem, then AND now, was that the opposition party was
determined to keep the government stimulus packages well below the level
that would match the damage business had done. They do that primarily, it
seems, to keep the party in power from getting credit for ending the
recession/depression. They're also motivated to starve the stimulus to try
to recapture the leadership position no matter what harm it does to the
citizens.

Bombs destroy wealth. Hurricanes destroy wealth. Fires destroy wealth.
Governments *transfer* wealth.

You are right and wrong at the same time. *Right, government transfers
weath but in order to do so must confiscate the wealth from those who
earn it in order to give it to those who do nothing in return. *That
process destroys the incentive of those who create wealth and thus
eventually results in the destruction of wealth or at the very least
the removal of the wealth from the governments rule. *In any case. the
end result is the destruction of wealth.

I don't suggest anyone get a government check for doing nothing. *In fact, I
am adamantly opposed to it for practical and moral reasons. *Studies clearly
show the longer someone is on unemployment, the less likely they are to ever
return to the workforce. *I'll agree there's great "moral hazard" in doing
that at least as bad as bailing out "too big to fail" banks.

But that is exactly where most of the govt transfer payments that
transfer wealth go. The govt takes it from the most productive
people
in our society and give it to those that want to live off the system.
What do you think happened with all that money spent on welfare
from Johnson's war on poverty until today? And the poverty rate
is still the same. All it did was create generations of people
living
on welfare and all the problems that go with it. How much more
wealth would there be had that money stayed with the responsible
folks who earned it?




But if the jobless are paid for scraping rust off bridges, cleaning up
highways and streets or some other project that has an instrinsic social
value, they can very easily prevent the destruction of wealth.

The problem with that argument is that the money for those projects
is small compared with the social programs that hand out money.
And even that money isn't going where you think it is. The govt
money handed out for those projects isn't going mostly to the poor
and unemployed. It's going to overpaid union workers who are
screwing the taxpayers by sweetheart deals with the politicians
that prevent the use of non-union workers.



The system we have now pays people to do nothing, and I agree, that has
moral hazards and all sorts of other problems. *Still, I have a hard time
following how you get from destroying the "incentive to create wealth" to
the destruction of wealth.

Very easy. Take money in the form of taxes from the hard working
couple that
makes $200K a year running a small business and give it to the welfare
mother
on drugs who has 3 kids with different fathers at 19. The wealth
that could
have been creating jobs is now going down a rat hole, supporting and
encouraging an irresponsible lifestyle that produces nothing.




*They are still two quite different things and
that's why I have been needling HeyBub. *His examples, labeled as
"destruction of wealth" have mostly been "transfers of wealth." *That's the
main job of governments - take taxes from lots of people to spend in ways
the governments think will add value. *I'll agree they get that dead wrong,
as in ...



Show us where in the constitution it says that the main job of govt
is to transfer wealth. Or even a job of govt period.

"Percival P. Cassidy" wrote in message
...
On 11/14/11 12:29 am, Robert Green wrote:

His other favorite saying was to "follow the money." I don't think
enough
journalists or even investigators live by that rule. I don't believe
there
are many journalists left that can do it in the modern age because
finances
are so complex. I'd still like to know who profited most from the real
estate bubble because you can bet they're cooking up another bubble to
cash
in on.

That's why we have to ban political contributions altogether, whether by
corporations or by unions, and have publicly funded elections.

Perce

I've been reading a lot of proposals about how that could be done, but none
of them sound very helpful. It took a long, long time for our government to
become so dysfunctional that we have people giving lots of money to fund
races far away from where they live. The Founding Fathers were good, but
not good enough to keep the "Embezzling Great-grand Nephew's" fingers out of
the taxpayer's till for more than a hundred years or so.

http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-.../dp/0446576433

In an era when special interests funnel huge amounts of money into our
government-driven by shifts in campaign-finance rules and brought to new
levels by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission-trust in our government has reached an all-time low. More than
ever before, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress, and that
business interests wield control over our legislature.

As for me, when I'll believe in "money = free speech" when I see dollars
coming out of someone's mouth while they're speaking. If fairness means
banning union, corporate and all other forms of "group" money from
elections, I can live with it.

--
Bobby G.

"Percival P. Cassidy" wrote in message
...
On 11/18/11 04:11 am, Robert Green wrote:

snip

I don't suggest anyone get a government check for doing nothing. In
fact, I
am adamantly opposed to it for practical and moral reasons. Studies
clearly
show the longer someone is on unemployment, the less likely they are to
ever
return to the workforce. I'll agree there's great "moral hazard" in
doing
that at least as bad as bailing out "too big to fail" banks.

But if the jobless are paid for scraping rust off bridges, cleaning up
highways and streets or some other project that has an instrinsic social
value, they can very easily prevent the destruction of wealth.

snip

The country benefits as a whole if instead of just handing out
unemployment
checks we require people to attend retraining and skill building courses
or
engage in community or public service, even if it's cleaning trash from
highways.

But if scraping rust from bridges and cleaning up trash from highways is
necessary work, why not pay otherwise-unemployed people the proper wage
for doing the work, not making them work for peanuts?

Where did I say I'd make them work for peanuts? As any fan of "Everyone
Hates Chris" knows, I would pay them in popsicle sticks. (-: sarcasm
alert

--
Bobby G.

On Nov 18, 6:56*am, "
wrote:
On Nov 18, 4:11*am, "Robert Green" wrote:





"BobR" wrote in message

....
On Nov 13, 2:47 am, "Robert Green" wrote:

"HeyBub" wrote in message

om...

Robert Green wrote:

We can only hope. Unemployment at 4%, DOW-Jones above 12,000, 23
consecutive quarters of economic growth, low interest rates,
virtually no inflation, dead Mohammadens piled up like cordwood.

It was just an illusion, Bub. The magical numbers sprouted from all
of that from the Feds spending trillions on post 9/11 security, wars,
TSA, etc. It's amazing how a little government deficit spending can
falsely goose the economic numbers. Now we're experiencing the crash
of the speculative bubble and runaway defense spending that made
those high-flying numbers possible - but not real. We also destroyed
Iraq, the country that had the most to gain from keeping Iran nuke
free because they'd be one of the first victims of Iranian nuclear
aggression.

Boy, you sure don't understand economics. Government spending drives
DOWN
the GDP and destroys wealth.

Oy. So how did all the Bush government spending on the TSA, Homeland
Security, two different wars and the Medicare Drug plan create all those
wonderful numbers you continually crow about? You can't have it both ways,
as much as you seem to want it. Your own previous examples put the lie to
your current contentions.

According to your latest wild theory, those glowing (yet false) numbers
you
keep touting should have been impossible. If government spending destroys
wealth, the trillions of dollars we owe or have deficit spent should have
driven us to extinction by now. Only you could posit a theory that
immediately trashes your previous theories. You've gone and HeyBubbed
yourself! (-: In trying to figure out how you can came by the unusual and
"new for you" concepts you have about creating and destroying wealth, I
started out with a simple Google query:

http://www.google.com/search?q=gover...estroys+wealth

That lead to Ron Paul and Rush Limbaugh sites, so I knew I was getting
ready
for a visit to the Economic Twilight Zone. At least I know how this
bizarre
idea gained enough traction to be adopted by you.

http://logisticsmonster.com/2010/10/...ent-destroys-w....

"Maintaining a high level of employment is one of the main objectives of
The
Federal Reserve, which is just one reason it is ill conceived at its very
core. "

Cue Twilight Zone theme song. High UN-employment is a good thing, it
seems, according to Paul. No wonder why he's got the "destruction of
wealth" idea as ass-backwards as you do.

http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/tag/budget/

Mr. Johnston has quite a bit to say about the issue and debunks the
assertion that you and others (mostly Republicans) make concerning the
"destruction" of wealth. He makes a lot of the same points I have that
don't seem to get through to you, the most important being that you're
calling wealth transfers "wealth destruction" and that's just not correct.

Giving a guy a job to help rebuild a highway or bridge *transfers* the
wealth from money collected from taxes to that person. It's not lost. He
doesn't burn the money. He spends it. At the local grocer. At the gas
pump. On insurance. Car payments. Rent. Spending it "primes the pump" and
helps get stalled economies rolling again. It's remarkably similar to the
Republican "trickle down" theory except that unlike the "trickle down"
theory, this "wealth transfer" actually works and gets money into the
economy.

Explain to me again how this "transfer" destroys wealth? Maybe you can
find
someone on the web with a degree or credentials in economics to support
your
rather whimsical theory. I certainly couldn't. But maybe I didn't look
hard enough. All I found were politicians like Paul and pundits like
Limbaugh, all with a very obvious political axe to grind.

Johnston says: In general the market does a better job of allocating
capital for investment than government does. But when the market fails, as
with the unregulated insurance and bad loans that destroyed so much value
in
the last decade, then the only way to stop the vicious cycle of decline is
for government to temporarily make up the difference through more
spending.
Saying otherwise is the economic equivalent of arguing that water and
flour
make steak. . .

He furthers his argument with examples of the quite idiotic statements of
our Republican politicians:
"We need to cut spending now in order to create jobs in America" - House
Speaker John Boehner on the floor of the House of Representatives in July
2010. "If government spending would stimulate the economy, we'd be in the
middle of a boom" - Senator Mitch McConnell in March 2011. "Government
doesn
't create jobs, you do" - Representative Nan Hayworth, M.D., speaking in
January to business leaders in her New York district.

None of the comments makes sense. The first violates the accounting
identity
that spending equals income. The second assumes that the stimulus was big
enough to make up for the fall in private sector jobs, when it was less
than
half what accounting identity algebra showed was needed. The third is just
plain nonsense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cay_Johnston

(Johnston received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting "for his
penetrating and enterprising reporting that exposed loopholes and
inequities
in the U.S. tax code, which was instrumental in bringing about reforms."
He
was a Pulitzer finalist in 2003 "for his stories that displayed exquisite
command of complicated U.S. tax laws and of how corporations and
individuals
twist them to their advantage." He was also a finalist in 2000 "for his
lucid coverage of problems resulting from the reorganization of the
Internal
Revenue Service.")

We saw that when Roosevelt implemented all manner of government jobs
programs back in the 30's and we see it now with stimulus and government
subsidy money.

Sweet Jesus Monroe! You don't have one ounce of shame, do you, comparing
the GDP of the worst period in American economic history with normal
growth
periods? That dog won't hunt. GDP, aside from being an imperfect measure
of the economic health of a nation, always tends to fall during periods of
extreme economic distress. Especially a collapse caused by an imprudent
financial industry, leveraged to the max.

To blame that on FDR's programs is more than dubious, it's dishonest. In
fact, it's the remaining social net programs like the FDIC and Social
Security that kept this last recession from collapsing the economy. Of the
many economists I've read who have commented on that period and the
current,
nearly all of them say the same thing.

They believe the problem, then AND now, was that the opposition party was
determined to keep the government stimulus packages well below the level
that would match the damage business had done. They do that primarily, it
seems, to keep the party in power from getting credit for ending the
recession/depression. They're also motivated to starve the stimulus to try
to recapture the leadership position no matter what harm it does to the
citizens.

Bombs destroy wealth. Hurricanes destroy wealth. Fires destroy wealth..
Governments *transfer* wealth.

You are right and wrong at the same time. *Right, government transfers
weath but in order to do so must confiscate the wealth from those who
earn it in order to give it to those who do nothing in return. *That
process destroys the incentive of those who create wealth and thus
eventually results in the destruction of wealth or at the very least
the removal of the wealth from the governments rule. *In any case. the
end result is the destruction of wealth.

I don't suggest anyone get a government check for doing nothing. *In fact, I
am adamantly opposed to it for practical and moral reasons. *Studies clearly
show the longer someone is on unemployment, the less likely they are to ever
return to the workforce. *I'll agree there's great "moral hazard" in doing
that at least as bad as bailing out "too big to fail" banks.

But that is exactly where most of the govt transfer payments that
transfer wealth go. * The govt takes it from the most productive
people
in our society and give it to those that want to live off the system.
What do you think happened with all that money spent on welfare
from Johnson's war on poverty until today? *And the poverty rate
is still the same. * All it did was create generations of people
living
on welfare and all the problems that go with it. *How much more
wealth would there be had that money stayed with the responsible
folks who earned it?



But if the jobless are paid for scraping rust off bridges, cleaning up
highways and streets or some other project that has an instrinsic social
value, they can very easily prevent the destruction of wealth.

The problem with that argument is that the money for those projects
is small compared with the social programs that ...

read more »- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Here's examples of where some of that govt stimulus went:

http://coburn.senate.gov/public/inde...0-6a8e62427efb


Examples of wasteful projects include:

- $762,372 to create “Dance Draw” interactive dance software

- $1.9 million for international ant research

- $1.8 million for a road project that is threatening a pastor’s home

- $308 million for a joint clean energy venture with…BP

- $89,298 to replace a new sidewalk that leads to a ditch in Boynton,
OK

- $200,000 to help Siberian communities lobby Russian policy makers

- $760,000 to Georgia Tech to study improvised music

- $700,000 to study why monkeys respond negatively to inequity

- $193,956 to study voter perceptions of the economic stimulus

- $363,760 to help NIH promote the positive impacts of stimulus
projects

- $456,663 to study the circulation of Neptune’s atmosphere


Those are excellent examples of how govt transfer of wealth
results in wealth being destroyed. Unless you believe that
paying Siberians to lobby Russians or studying voter perceptions
of the stimulus creates wealth. It doesn't. It's just more money
****ed
away down a rat hole.

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.

On Nov 10, 9:50*am, Home Guy wrote:
Will Perry become the next idiot republican prez, following in Bush's
klownish footsteps?

No, our next president will be named after a kitchen utensil.

"Home Guy" wrote in message ...
HeyBub wrote:

Republicans in 2002 thru 2007 "If you criticize a President during
war time you are a traitor."

Republicans in 2008 thru 2011 "It is OK to criticize a President
during war time."

Excellent inventions!

That atmosphere or sentiment certainly existed in the public media
during those years.


Considering the clear bias of the 'public media" for the Dems, that is no
surprise they would make such a claim
(It's also no surprise you would swallow such ****)


It was really bad during the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election.
It was so bad you got the sense that they didn't want to hold an
election during "war time". You don't change horses half-way through a
race (or some such nonsense).


Yawn