The pension haves vs. the have-nots

[04SCTLS]

The long-term erosion of private-sector workers' security fuels resentment over generous public payouts.


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cap-pension-20110224,1,6276622,full.column

From Sacramento
Beyond government budget jitters, there is a much bigger dynamic at play in the far-flung battle over public pensions.

It goes beyond even anti-union hate, non-union envy and union gluttony.

These are all key motivators in the pension tussle that has been brewing for years in Sacramento and the current all-out, anti-union attacks in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other states.

But they're merely a symptom, it seems to me, of a gradually declining lifestyle for working stiff Americans — blue and white collar, college educated or not. Except for the super-rich, our financial well-being has become chillingly shaky in the global economy and downright scary during the great recession.
There's cheap labor overseas and job-killing technology at home.

Private-sector workers have been taking it on the chin for a decade or more: Future pensions frozen for current employees and eliminated for new hires; retirees at the mercy of risky 401(k) plans and Wall Street. Plus layoffs and elimination of retiree health benefits.

Now it's the public sector's turn to suffer, in the eyes of many in private enterprise. It's sort of an American civil war between government and non-government families.
"A key question that we think needs to be asked," Assistant Legislative Analyst Jason Sisney said in a recent report, "is this: Can the substantial disparity between public and private sector retirement benefits be sustained much longer? We think that it probably cannot."Presumably he was referring to sustaining the disparity fiscally. But it also cannot be sustained politically.

A statewide poll in December by Democratic pollster Jim Moore found that 62% of likely voters — including 54% of Democrats — considered "the escalating cost to taxpayers" of public employee pensions to be a "very serious" issue.

In a January 2010 poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, 70% of likely voters — including 61% of Democrats —favored changing government retirement benefits from pensions to 401(k)-type plans.

The legislative analyst has suggested that the state consider adopting a "hybrid" retirement program that would include less generous "defined benefit" pensions combined with a "defined contribution" 401(k).

"In defined contribution programs," the analyst continued, pointing out something private-sector workers already are painfully aware of, "if the investment returns don't materialize, that risk is placed on the employee, not on the employer or the taxpayer."Actually, free enterprise employees should be rooting for government workers in hopes that at least some retirement security can be retained in America.

Perhaps ultimately it will wend its way back into the private sector. But human nature doesn't function that way.

You don't need to be an economist or a psychiatrist to see that Americans are battling over pieces of a smaller pie.
This has been intensifying as the gap between rich and poor has widened.

The state Franchise Tax Board reports that during the two decades between 1987 and 2008:

Inflation-adjusted incomes of the top 10% of California taxpayers increased by 43%; the top 1% by 81%. Meanwhile, incomes of the lower 60% dropped by around 12%.

The income gap doubled between the top 1% and the average middle-class Californian. In 2008, the top 1% enjoyed 39 times the income of the middle class. In 1987, it was about 19 times.

The average inflation-adjusted income of the middle-class taxpayer actually dropped from $41,800 to $36,600.

Political generosity to public employee unions — mainly by Democrats — combined with the ridiculously high salaries and pensions paid to many local government executives, have fueled the public anger and envy."Existing benefits of our pension system are very generous," analyst Sisney notes. "Compared to other states, Californians have typically given their public employees richer benefits in recent years."

In 1999, the Legislature and Gov. Gray Davis, indebted to unions for his election the previous year, opened the vault to future state retirees, especially public safety workers. That act was largely repealed by the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last year, but too late to affect pensions earned before then.

Then we read about city managers and fire chiefs, among others, hauling down pensions well into six figures.

Marcia Fritz, president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility — a pension reform group — estimates that more than 20,000 public retirees are drawing checks exceeding $100,000 annually.The poster children for reform are the 36 whining University of California executives who have threatened to sue unless UC honors what they claim is a promise to base pensions on their full salaries, not merely the first $245,000. UC President Mark G. Yudof denies there is any obligation.

Anyone pulling in at least $245,000 annually who can't set enough aside to live on in retirement shouldn't be trying to teach anybody anything.

In Sacramento last year, Schwarzenegger negotiated with unions and the Legislature to take some significant steps toward pension savings, including requiring workers to pay more toward their retirements.

Gov. Jerry Brown has promised more but hasn't begun to deliver.

"We have to be realistic about what the state can afford and put an end to abuses of the system," the governor says on his website.But Brown has been holding back, waiting for Republicans to propose trading pension reform for his plan to place a five-year extension of tax increases on a special election ballot. Make it all part of a solution to the chronic budget deficit.

Republicans aren't budging.

Meanwhile, pension reformers are plotting a ballot initiative campaign for next year.

The Democratic governor and Legislature, along with labor, need to recognize the new economic reality: Private-sector taxpayers won't continue to pop for pension largesse that they themselves are denied. And Republicans need to get in the game.

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A little larceny exists in all our hearts and this shows how people will typically engage in it if given a chance.

Is this the beginning of the new social justice?
The country is not as rich as it used to be.
The public sector workers have become the new objects of envy.
After all the truly rich are only 1% of the population and people aspire to be like them one day but there are millions of regular Joe government workers
at all 3 levels of government that private sector working people can relate to.

 

[shagdrum]

A little larceny exists in all our hearts and this shows how people will typically engage in it if given a chance.

Bingo!

the incestuous relationship between Public Sector Unions and Democrats simply institutionalizes theft of taxpayer money by removing all checks on that tendency of human nature, allowing it to thrive.

 

[04SCTLS]

How Chris Christie Did His Homework
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27christie-t.html?_r=1&hp

Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs, Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state’s public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn’t pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.
And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers’ union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.
The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers’ union,” Christie says, “was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey.” Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. “Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, ‘Mom.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Dad.’ ” Another pause. “ ‘Please. Stop the madness.’ ”

By this point the audience is starting to titter, but Christie remains steadfastly somber in his role as the beseeching student. “ ‘Just pay for my teacher’s health benefits,’ ” he pleads, “ ‘and I’ll get A’s, I swear. But I just cannot take the stress that’s being presented by a 1½ percent contribution to health benefits.’ ” As the crowd breaks into appreciative guffaws, Christie waits a theatrical moment, then slams his point home. “Now, you’re all laughing, right?” he says. “But this is the crap I have to hear.”
Acid monologues like this have made Christie, only a little more than a year into his governorship, one of the most intriguing political figures in America. Hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers linger on scenes from Christie’s town-hall meetings, like the one in which he takes apart a teacher for her histrionics. (“If what you want to do is put on a show and giggle every time I talk, then I have no interest in answering your question.”) Newly elected governors — not just Republicans, Christie says, but also Democrats — call to seek his counsel on how to confront their own staggering budget deficits and intractable unions. At a recent gathering of Republican governors, Christie attracted a throng of supporters and journalists as he strode through the halls of the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel like Bono at Davos.

While Christie has flatly ruled out a presidential run in 2012, there is enough conjecture about the possibility that I felt moved to ask him a few weeks ago if he found it exhausting to have to constantly answer the same question. “Listen, if you’re going to say you’re exhausted by that, you’re really taking yourself too seriously,” Christie told me, then broke into his imitation of a politician who is taking himself too seriously. “ ‘Oh, Matt, please, stop asking me about whether I should be president of the United States! The leader of the free world! Please stop! I’m exhausted by the question!’ I mean, come on. If I get to that point, just slap me around, because that’s really presumptuous. What it is to me is astonishing, not exhausting.”

There is, in fact, something astonishing about the ascent of Chris Christie, who is about as slick as sandpaper and who now admits that even he didn’t think he would beat Jon Corzine, the Democrat he unseated in 2009. Some critics have posited that Christie’s success in office represents merely the triumph of self-certainty over complexity, the yearning among voters for leaders who talk bluntly and with conviction. Yet it’s hard to see Christie getting so much traction if he were out there castigating, say, immigrants or Wall Street bankers. What makes Christie compelling to so many people isn’t simply plain talk or swagger, but also the fact that he has found the ideal adversary for this moment of economic vertigo.

Ronald Reagan had his “welfare queens,” Rudy Giuliani had his criminals and “squeegee men,” and now Chris Christie has his sprawling and powerful public-sector unions — teachers, cops and firefighters who Christie says are driving up local taxes beyond what the citizenry can afford, while also demanding the kind of lifetime security that most private-sector workers have already lost. It may just be that Christie has stumbled onto the public-policy issue of our time, which is how to bring the exploding costs of the public workforce in line with reality. (According to a report issued last year by the Pew Center on the States, as of 2008 there was a $1 trillion gap, conservatively speaking, between what the states have promised in pensions and benefits for their retirees and what they have on hand to pay for them.) Then again, he may simply be the latest in a long line of politicians to give an uneasy public the scapegoat it demands. Depending on your vantage point, Chris Christie is a truth-teller or a demagogue, or maybe even a little of both.

To say that New Jersey has a budget problem wouldn’t really be accurate. The state has at least three major budget problems related to the costs of the public workforce, all of which contribute to a shortfall that the state’s legislative accounting office projects to be almost $11 billion this year — an amount that’s more than a third of the state’s total budget. And in order to understand what’s happening in statehouses all over the country, and what Christie is trying to do about it in New Jersey, it helps to have some sense of how these problems tie together.

First, there’s the local aid. New Jersey sends 40 percent of its annual budget to an overlapping tangle of 566 municipalities and 600-plus school districts, in order to help them slow the mutantlike growth of local property taxes, which are among the highest in the country. Each of these little hamlets and districts negotiates its own labor contract with the police and firefighters, sanitation workers and, most consequentially, teachers, which means the contracts established by the most affluent communities end up setting a statewide standard — a process that drives up everyone else’s costs to a level that the local governments simply can’t sustain by themselves.
Second, in the long term, New Jersey doesn’t have nearly enough money on hand to cover its pension obligations to teachers and other state workers. At no time in the last 17 years has New Jersey fully met its annual obligation to the pension fund, and in many of those years, the state paid nothing at all.

(That didn’t stop one governor, Donald DiFrancesco, a Republican, from increasing payouts by 9 percent and lowering the retirement age before he left office, which would be kind of like Bernie Madoff writing you a $1 million check before heading off to jail.) Even had the state been contributing faithfully to the fund as it was supposed to, however, there would still be trouble ahead. That’s because New Jerseyans, who are glass-half-full kind of people, have assumed an improbably healthy return of 8.25 percent annually on the state pension fund. The actual return over the last 10 years averaged only 2.6 percent. Finally, the state will pay close to $3 billion this year in health care premiums for public employees (including retired teachers), and that number is rising fast. New Jersey has set aside exactly zero dollars to cover it. All told, in pensions and health care benefits, New Jersey’s “unfunded liability” — that is, the amount the actuaries say it would need to find in order to meet its obligations for the next 30 years — has now passed the $100 billion mark.

There was little in Christie’s uninspiring campaign to make anyone think he would address these issues with more tenacity than the governors who preceded him. A U.S. attorney whose only overtly political experience entailed serving on the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders (seriously, they still call it that), Christie had only a fraction of Corzine’s public exposure or personal fortune. About the only thing he had going for him was that Corzine was pervasively unpopular. And so rather than come up with a lot of actual ideas, which Corzine would then be free to oversimplify and distort in a barrage of television ads, Christie simply offered up a bunch of conservative platitudes and tried to make the campaign a referendum on the Democratic governor. (When we talked during the campaign, Christie could articulate little by way of an agenda, except to say that he would “get in there and make it work.”) Even a lot of Republicans thought Christie was underwhelming as a campaigner.

In the end, Christie won by about four points on Election Night in 2009, with little notion of what he was going to do next. When I asked him if there was any one moment of clarity that put him on the path from cautious candidate to union-bashing conservative hero, Christie pointed to a meeting about a month into the transition, when his aides came to him brandishing an analysis of the state’s cash flow produced by Goldman Sachs. They advised the governor-elect that, without some serious action, the state could fail to meet payroll by the end of March. After scrutinizing the budget, Christie told me, his team came to the conclusion that the only way to get control of local taxes and state spending was to go after the pension and health care benefits that the public-sector unions held sacrosanct. From that point on, it seems, Christie has conducted his governorship as if he were still a grandstanding prosecutor, taking powerful unions on perp walks with evident enthusiasm.

The centerpiece of Christie’s frenzied agenda, which passed the Democratic-controlled Legislature last July, is a strict cap on local property taxes, which will be allowed to rise no more than 2 percent every year. When combined with a reduction in state aid, what this means, practically speaking, is that New Jersey’s townships and cities will have to hold the line when negotiating municipal labor contracts if they want to remain solvent, because they can’t rely on either their residents or the state for more money.

To help them do that, Christie has put forward 33 measures that are part of what he calls his “toolkit” for reform. These include, for instance, a proposal that would allow localities to opt out of the civil-service system altogether, giving them more control over hiring and firing local officials, and another that would limit the cash payouts that retiring workers can take for their unused sick days. On the pension front, if Christie has his way with the Legislature, most union members would contribute more to their plans than they have up to now, and all of them would retire later and receive lower benefit payments.
The crux of Christie’s argument is that public-sector contracts have to reflect what has happened in the private sector, where guaranteed pensions and free health care are becoming relics. It’s not surprising that this stand has ingratiated Christie to conservatives in Washington; advocacy groups and activists on the right have carried out a long campaign to discredit the ever-shrinking labor movement in the private sector, and what Christie has done, essentially, is to blast his way into the final frontier, taking on the public-sector unions that have come to wield enormous political power. More surprising is how the governor’s proposals are finding sympathy from less-partisan budget experts, if only because they don’t see obvious alternatives. “I’ve tried to look at this objectively, and I just don’t know of any other option,” says Richard Keevey, who served as budget director for a Democratic governor, Jim Florio, and a Republican governor, Tom Kean. “You couldn’t tax your way out of this.”
Union leaders, on the other hand, are howling. The heads of the police and firefighters’ unions say that Christie’s cuts to local aid have already cost the state several hundred firemen and police officers, and they warn that his 2 percent cap on property taxes will have dire effects on public safety, as more towns and cities try to shave their payrolls to conform with the cap. “I don’t think they’re going to get it until the body bags pile up,” Anthony Wieners, president of the police union, warns darkly.

Leaders of the teachers’ union, meanwhile, are apoplectic about Christie’s proposed changes to their pension plan, which they say will penalize educators for the irresponsibility of politicians. After all, they point out, it wasn’t the unions who chose not to fund the pension year in and year out, and yet it’s their members who will have to recalibrate their retirements if the benefits are cut.
When I made this same point to Christie, he simply shook his head. What’s done is done, he told me, and it’s time for someone to tell these workers the truth, which is that the state is simply never going to have the money to make good on its commitments. “Listen, if they want to travel in the Michael J. Fox time machine and change time, I guess we could try that,” he said. “We could get the DeLorean out and try to go back there. But I think realistically that that was just a movie and make-believe. So we’ve got to live with what we’ve got.”
Chris Christie is fat. You can use nicer words if you want — rotund, portly, big-boned — but it is what it is, and the governor will be the first to tell you so. And because he’s fat, a lot of people, consciously or not, tend to assume certain things about Christie — that he’s undisciplined and impulsive, graceless and bullying. (Corzine’s most brutal campaign ad accused Christie of “throwing his weight around.”) At times, Christie seems to exploit this persona. He likes to present himself as the proverbial bull in the china shop, the ungainly, somewhat boorish guy who lacks the artifice to keep from saying whatever obvious truth pops into his head. “I don’t think you elected me because of my charm and good looks,” Christie likes to say, just to show he’s in on the joke.
And yet, to portray Christie in this cartoonish way, as so many critics do, is to vastly underestimate his skill as a politician. The most sophisticated communicators of the modern era hammer at a consistent argument about their moment and the response it demands, and they choose carefully constructed metaphors to make the choices ahead seem obvious — think of Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, or Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century. And Christie’s communications strategy is about as sophisticated as any you will find in American politics right now.
Take Christie’s choice of a somewhat mundane image, the “toolkit,” as a unifying frame for his proposals. As a metaphor, the toolkit works on two levels, depending on the audience. You can visualize it either in the sense of screwdrivers and hammers or, if you work in an office all day, you might envision it more as a software suite. Either way, the toolkit symbolizes flexibility and local control. It’s a way of saying that Christie isn’t putting unwieldy restrictions on towns and cities, as the cops and firefighters charge — he’s just empowering those towns and cities with a variety of implements and gadgets with which to attack their budget problems themselves.
In sustaining his assault on the public-employee unions, Christie knows he has to make his subject comprehensible. One reason that leaders in a state like New Jersey haven’t been able to get a handle on pension and benefit costs, despite years of dire warnings from good-government advocates, is that the subject is agonizingly dull and all but impossible to explain. There are myriad plans for all the different public-employee unions, various contribution formulas for each one and actuarial projections that require an advanced degree to unravel.

5 more pages at above link


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Interesting how the wealthiest township contracts wind up being the norm for all the others.
Typical behavior.

I for one want to see what these dire consequences will be if we lay off some of these people we can't afford.
I think these fears are hollow and self serving.
We have volunteer fire departments.
People will do some of these jobs for free because they want to.
Maintaining parks comes to mind as an example.

The country is not as rich as it used to be and despite Ronald Reagan( the father of our current situations) convincing the typical american that deficits don't matter..... they eventually do especially with the situation we have now.

 

[shagdrum]

I for one want to see what these dire consequences will be if we lay off some of these people we can't afford.

You may very well get your wish in Wisconsin.

Unions seem to consistently vote in favor of keeping as much money in their pockets, even if that means a few noob's to the Union get laid off in the process.

 

[04SCTLS]

You may very well get your wish in Wisconsin.

Unions seem to consistently vote in favor of keeping as much money in their pockets, even if that means a few noob's to the Union get laid off in the process.

Despite my Reagan baiting he had to fire the air traffic controllers for them to take him seriously which then cemented his image and set the tone of his presidency.

 

[shagdrum]

Despite my Reagan baiting he had to fire the air traffic controllers for them to take him seriously which then cemented his image and set the tone of his presidency.

Obama won't do that. He supports the Union's efforts in this...

 

[04SCTLS]

Obama won't do that. He supports the Union's efforts in this...

They're not his authority to fire.
My comparison is it takes the right dramatic action at the right time to make change.
Wisconsin is a watershed moment that shares some similarities.
It's up to the state governments and governors like Christie and Walker
to do the firing.

 

[04SCTLS]

The whole pension model has become obsolete.
Who can plan for 20 or 30 years down the road any more especially
since the rest of the world is catching up with us.
Businesses don't want to pay workers once they no longer work
for them especially now that people live longer and can be in retirement for 30 years instead of the 5 or 7 years it used to be in the pension heyday.
Things come and go with business and the economy.
Small companies cannot fund workers retirements in their economic models.
Once the worker is gone there is no value to the company to keep paying him.
May as well just throw money out the window.
The responsibilty ends with the employment.
You came to work and I paid you for that time.
I don't owe you anything more is the reality.
Other than a 401k if workers want to retire and not work it is up to them to fund that and not the concern of business and now also government.

 

[04SCTLS]

Pensions: Little Hoover Commission urges overhaul


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/25/BAJQ1HU9IP.DTL

A government commission has recommended sweeping changes to state workers' pension benefits, including freezing the current plan and creating a more sustainable alternative.
The report by the Little Hoover Commission also recommended capping the maximum salary used to calculate benefits at $80,000 to $90,000, setting eligibility ages that do not encourage early retirements, and requiring that employees and employers share the costs of funding pension benefits.
"The only way to manage the growing size of California governments' growing liabilities is to address the cost of future, unearned benefits to current employees, which at current levels is unsustainable," the report states.
The independent commission is made up of five citizen members appointed by the governor, four citizen members appointed by the Legislature, two senators and two Assembly members.
Some Democrats criticized the report as a product of a commission stacked with nominees from former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Many Republicans praised the report. Assemblyman Allan Mansoor, R-Costa Mesa (Orange County), has introduced legislation to end collective bargaining for pension benefits.
"This is one more clear example of why we need to remove collective bargaining when it comes to pensions, because the public employee unions are not going to agree to the reform that is needed," he said. "And quite frankly, the taxpayers are expecting us to address the situation, and if we don't, we're not going to solve our budget problems."
Officials from the governor's office were more circumspect:
"Our office is reviewing the Little Hoover Commission's findings. The governor agrees that California faces serious challenges, which is why he rolled out a comprehensive framework to reform pensions during his campaign," spokesman Evan Westrup said in a written statement.
But Gov. Jerry Brown, in comments to the Legislature on Thursday, at least hinted at some areas he might be open to changing.
"I believe people should be working longer," said the 72-year-old governor. "I think institutional memory is a good thing. I don't have a problem extending how long people have to work."​

 

[shagdrum]

The whole pension model has become obsolete.

And yet Unions are willing to destroy anything and everything to defend that business model. Just look at the "Big 3" automakers and how they had to get their buddies in Washington to bailout the auto companies to keep that business model going.

The more they put off the inevitable, the more economic damage will be done when those unsustainable business models collapse.

 

[04SCTLS]

And yet Unions are willing to destroy anything and everything to defend that business model. Just look at the "Big 3" automakers and how they had to get their buddies in Washington to bailout the auto companies to keep that business model going.

The more they put off the inevitable, the more economic damage will be done when those unsustainable business models collapse.

I suppose pensions can work for government but not the overly generous open ended underfunded taxpayer guaranteed models we have now.

 

[cammerfe]

Sounds like...

The whole pension model has become obsolete.
Who can plan for 20 or 30 years down the road any more especially
since the rest of the world is catching up with us.
Businesses don't want to pay workers once they no longer work
for them especially now that people live longer and can be in retirement for 30 years instead of the 5 or 7 years it used to be in the pension heyday.
Things come and go with business and the economy.
Small companies cannot fund workers retirements in their economic models.
Once the worker is gone there is no value to the company to keep paying him.
May as well just throw money out the window.
The responsibilty ends with the employment.
You came to work and I paid you for that time.
I don't owe you anything more is the reality.
Other than a 401k if workers want to retire and not work it is up to them to fund that and not the concern of business and now also government.

GEEZO PEEZLE---

You sound exactly like a...Conservative!!

KS

 

[04SCTLS]

GEEZO PEEZLE---

You sound exactly like a...Conservative!!

KS

I'm a business man and an economic conservative.
I like the Republican economic policies and them keeping my taxes down which are already 45% in NY but not their moral
positions regarding the individual and their embrace of the religious right.
I enjoy arguing the other side for sport!

 

[shagdrum]

I suppose pensions can work for government but not the overly generous open ended underfunded taxpayer guaranteed models we have now.

Government is simply able to avoid economic reality for a lot longer. They can print money, they don't have to maintain a profit, etc. However, just like the private sector, it is ultimately unsustainable and the house of cards eventually collapses. It is only a question of whether responsible people will be able to act to fix things before that collapse because such a collapse in the public sector will not simply shut down a business but an entire economy.

 

[shagdrum]

I'm a business man and an economic conservative.
I like the Republican economic policies and them keeping my taxes down which are already 45% in NY but not their moral
positions regarding the individual and their embrace of the religious right.

You do realize that the economic issues are tied to the social issues, right? They both go hand in hand.

 

[04SCTLS]

Government is simply able to avoid economic reality for a lot longer. They can print money, they don't have to maintain a profit, etc. However, just like the private sector, it is ultimately unsustainable and the house of cards eventually collapses. It is only a question of whether responsible people will be able to act to fix things before that collapse because such a collapse in the public sector will not simply shut down a business but an entire economy.

It was sustainable 40 years ago but things have changed much since then.
We don't own 1/2 the world GNP anymore probably 25% now.
It's sad really what we're fighting for here is sharing a lower standard of living, spreading the misery but the country cannot afford what it used to
because we're not what we used to be.

 

[04SCTLS]

You do realize that the economic issues are tied to the social issues, right? They both go hand in hand.

Yes I understand all that but things were better and clearer before Reagan brought the Religious Right and the Moral Majority into the Republican party.
I don't think being gay is a sin or a choice because I've seen from personal experience that some people are born that way and who would choose that difficult disliked lifestyle.
There's also intererference in availability and dispensing of birth control drugs which has somehow been hysterically elevated to an abortion equivalency or something.
But we've discussed this before.
My late father used to say a human being is a contradiction so think about that when you deduce your reasoning.
Anyways I'll bet even Obama is good with his own money.

 

[shagdrum]

Yes I understand all that but things were better and clearer before Reagan brought the Religious Right and the Moral Majority into the Republican party.

So...your a Goldwater conservative?

 

[04SCTLS]

So...your a Goldwater conservative?

By "Goldwater conservatism" George Will meant "muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural questions."

Will was merely restating the consensus view. Darcy Olsen, president of the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, argued on the fifth anniversary of Goldwater's death that "Goldwater conservative" had "a different meaning than just saying, 'I am a Republican,' because when you say 'I am a Republican,' people assume that you're involved in the Moral Majority. It's its own brand...very libertarian." Senator John McCain said that Goldwater "disliked the religious right, because he felt they were intolerant, because Barry was not only conservative, but he was also to a degree libertarian."

______________________________________________________________

I suppose you could call me that.
Not huge on the nationalism but ok with the unapologetic part unless we do something like shoot down an Airbus as US Vincennes did in 1988 when it violated Iranian waters to which Bush 41 said "I'll never apologize, I don't care what the facts are"
Instead he gave the captain a medal while quietly paying the Iranian Airbus families 125 million dollars.


Goldwater couched the Religious Right as intolerant but I'll go further and say on some things they are just plain wrong and a bunch of goofs self rightiously sticking their noses where they don't belong but that's my opinion.

 

[cammerfe]

Woo-Hoo

You just went all serious an' s h it!

KS

 

[04SCTLS]

You just went all serious an' s h it!

KS

Intellectually refreshing just calling goofs goofs?
Yes cam
I knew you were watching