How are postal employees paid? How are Senators and Representatives paid (who make twice the money these poor teachers make AND the taxpayers truly pay for their benefits and pensions)? If you want to go after overpaid/under qualified/fat cat government employees then go after the fucking idiots that are "representing" us. They REALLY don't work a 12 month year. In fact BONER set up for them to work one week and have vacation for two week intervals for the next three or four months. I don't see any of you raising hell about that.
then i'd say you haven't been paying the slightest bit of attention. there have been people screaming from both the left and the right about the incompetence and corruption that runs throughout government for as long as i can remember, but the subject always seems to get changed. a new batch of entitlements is handed out to mollify the teeming masses, a new danger is identified to set the cause-heads yammering for more legislation, a new set of thieves is elected to promise change and the complaints become secondary to some new cause of the moment. there isn't a single government employee that isn't over-paid and under-worked, that doesn't continually fail to meet the minimum requirements of the job and still manage to duck the responsibility for their failures, but the game just continues because the people who pay the bills are so easily misdirected.
the situation in wisconsin is a perfect example of this misdirection. thinking that it would defuse some of the argument, police and firefighters were exempted from the proposed changes. did that tactic work? of course not, the pro-union forces merely pushed the next most important tier to the forefront. if teachers had been exempted they would have gone down another rung, then another and another and eventually we'd be having the same arguments about the importance of the janitors or gardeners on the government payroll. it never ends, each capitulation is met with further defiance by the groups that didn't get exactly what they wanted. when those tactics fail, there is always someone who will chime in with a comment about those at the apex of the pyramid scheme of government and we start climbing down the ladder all over again. we go up and down the government pay scale and no one is ever willing to pay the price of their incompetence.
no one but the taxpayers of course, but they don't matter. the taxpayer from the private sector is supporting this whole mess, but their voice is muted by the bleeding hearts, the statists and the constant lies of their representatives. thanks to decades of mind numbing liberal rhetoric that has demanded ever more government to provide ever more aid to the common man, the massive engine of governmental bureaucracy has begun to bleed its revenue sources dry and to falter. it took a major economic downturn to show us the sorry results of our constant demands for more government and we now find that there is no remedy. each segment of the public sector has armored itself in layers of protective regulations and a mythology of its importance to the grand scheme of things. in our hubris, we have dismantled many of the private sector equivalents that could have saved us from these bureaucratic behemoths and we find ourselves at the mercy of that which we built to serve us. even an attempt to unravel the mess we've made is met with incredulity. no one believes we can do without the monster we have created.
first we created government to demand that the rights of the workers weren't trod upon and it failed miserably at that. we then created unions to support the cause of workers. that worked for a while, but they soon became as abusive as the robber barons they were set to combat. next we created unions for the employees of the very government that was supposed to be protecting workers rights all along and, sure enough, they too became as abusive as their private sector counterparts. in fact, they became even worse because, being a part of government, they were allowed to create the sort of monopolies that are forbidden in the private sector. we now have government janitors that have solidly ensconced themselves in the middle class. we have teachers that fail miserably at their task, but manage to retire with taxpayer provided, cola protected pensions that pay out as if they had never stopped working. we have legions of secretaries, under-secretaries, assistants to this, assistants to that and myriad other bureaucrats that are all providing themselves with tidy little nest eggs for having managed to avoid any work of real value for their entire lives. at the top of the heap we have elected officials who provide for their extravagances through their own propensity for deception and the ignorance of their constituents.
all of this waste is going on in front of your very eyes and you have the audacity to bitch about the lessening of the influence of unions that should never have had a reason to exist in the first place? i realize that the very term "union" is sacrosanct to the left, but this just shows the extent to which ignorance has taken over the liberal cause. this should be a grand first strike at the underpinnings of a bloated, unresponsive bureaucracy. we should take this as the beginning of massive stripping of power from those who have taken it by force, but you rail against it instead.
. Collective bargaining is wrong in the public sector bottom line.
