Posted on 02/22/2011 10:17:43 PM PST by neverdem
One reason liberals get so excited about the protests and teacher strikes in Wisconsin is that they see this as a battle to preserve the power of the working man -- a noble cause and one many liberals take very seriously.
If you squint just right, you can see it their way: Republicans are fighting to take away collective bargaining rights from unions, who are responding with protest and solidarity. Of course, this blurs the crucial distinction between private-sector unions and government-sector unions. When it comes to stubbornly blurring economic reality so as to demonize your political rivals, you can often count on Paul Krugman.
In his column today, Krugman describes the unions as a "counterweight to the political power of big money."
But the unions are big money. Five of the top ten contributors to congressional and presidential campaigns since 1989 are labor unions according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In the last election, 10 of the top 20 PACs were union PACs.
More importantly, it's not as if Big Labor is balancing out the rest of "big money." Does Krugman know that all of the top ten industries contributing to the 2010 elections gave more money to Democrats than to Republicans? That's right: Lawyers, Health Professionals, Securities & Investment, Real Estate, Insurance, Lobbyists, Pharma, Government Unions, Entertainment, and Electric Utilities all favored Democrats in 2010.
If unions represent “the worker” against management and the owners of the company, then I guess government employee unions must “protect” government workers from the government, and more importantly, the tax-payer.
That works out really well...
Mark
Here is the problem. As this article noted, unions are among the top contributors to political campaigns. In the case of government unions, they are donating to someone who might well in the future be across the table from them - so, given the power that government unions now exercise in the political process, it means the union has representation on both sides of the table, which has led to the massive increases in pension and benefits costs to taxpayers. That is the greatest problem here - the unions in that situation have just as much ability to be abusive as employers were 100 years ago when they controlled government and law enforcement. As long as government employee unions are so deeply ingrained into the political process, it is not an unreasonable demand to remove their collective bargaining capacity.
“Yup, youre a long time freeper who claims military service,
Huh? Im not seeing what you apparently are seeing.”
I looked at the poster’s profile...
To further reinforce your point, one of the most egregious aspects of the public employee union/Dem politician relationships is the way unions have negotiated the benefits part of their package.
Invariably, they have called for huge increases in benefits (which now approach 50% of public employee compensation), but have agreed to irresponsibly low funding of these benefits.
Thus, they were able to manipulate the relationship -- vastly increasing public employee compensation while allowing the politicians to reflect only negligible current costs to their budget. The enormous future liabilities were buried under the rug -- in a manner that any private sector employer would be charged with pension fraud.
“Um, the Walker had a balanced budget but cut taxes for the rich is a donk talking point and an outright fabrication, not a view.”
Yes, but it is also someone who is not yet familiar with economics or politics would not recognize as such. Instead of welcoming this person and dazzling them with the truth...you shut them down. That is not good for anyone, and what the heck is copying the Admin Moderator? That seemed just plain weird.
I checked the poster’s profile and saw that he’d been here a while, so the “newbie mess up” excuse didn’t apply.
And I copied the Admin Mod because he can call the lightning.
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