The Next Contentious Issue

There once was a day....

....when you made real money in the private sector.

....when public jobs didn't pay well, but had some pretty decent benefits.

But now that relationship has been reversed.  Public sector jobs not only pay well, they generally have great working conditions, and they continue to have great benefits including pensions and frequently lifetime healthcare.  The private sector....not so much.  We have defined contribution retirement plans and our healthcare coverage ends when we retire.

It turns out that we have overextended ourselves with respect to public employee pensions.

There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.


The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.


The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks.


At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a "t," as in titanic and terrifying.

I have relatives that are retired public employees.  And friends.  And my brother and his wife plan on being teachers in the future.  So I've got some sympathy for that side of table.

The state’s case turns, in part, on whether it is an "actuarial necessity" for the Legislature to make a change. To Meredith Williams, executive director of the Public Employees’ Retirement Association, the state’s pension fund, the answer is pretty simple. "If something didn’t change, we would have run out of money in the foreseeable future," he said. "So no one would have been paid anything."


Meanwhile, Gary R. Justus, a former teacher who is one of the lead plaintiffs in the case against the state, asks taxpayers in Colorado and elsewhere to consider an ethical question: Why is the state so quick to break its promises?


After all, he and others like him served their neighbors dutifully for decades. And along the way, state employees made big decisions (and built lifelong financial plans) based on retiring with a full pension that was promised to them in a contract that they say has the force of the state and federal constitutions standing behind it. To them it is deferred compensation, and taking it away is akin to not paying a contractor for paving state highways.


And actuarial necessity or not, Mr. Justus said he didn’t believe he should be responsible for past pension underfunding and the foolish risks that pension managers made with his money long after he retired in 2003.

This problem has been exacerbated by government managers who have failed negotiate aggressively with public sector unions.  As a result, wages and benefits have continued to increase at a pace well beyond what private sector employees can earn.  It is a problem that is similar to that faced by GM, Ford, and Chrysler as a result of their continuing to cave in to demands by the UAW.

Locally, we have had our city, county, and state government employees agree to accept unpaid days off and other compensation package reductions in order to balance those respective budgets.  Not everyone thinks the same way that Mr. Justus does.

Long term we are all going to need take a long hard look at public employee compensation packages.  We should never be in the position of promising more than we can ultimately deliver.  That may very well mean reducing wages, benefits, and pension plans for current employees.  At the very least, we can minimize the pain for everyone by reducing the rate of increase until the problem is resolved.

Perspective

You may have heard that the US Ambassador to Japan will be attending the upcoming ceremonies at the Hiroshima memorial?  As current and long time allies, our solemn respect is certainly appropriate.

To provide some perspective, the Belmont Club asks if anyone knows of any events that caused a larger loss of civilian life than Hiroshima.  And indeed there were at least two.

The difference?  Those people who fought on the side of freedom then are forgotten.  Those who we fought simply omit those atrocities from their national histories.  And time marches on.

What Hypocrisy? Tax Edition

From Victor David Hanson comes a brief broadside regarding the hypocrisy involved in continually calling for the government to enact higher taxes on the rich while simultaneously avoiding higher taxation in the hypocrite's personal finances.

The money line:

Does the technocratic guardian class believe that, as an overseeing nomenklatura, the laws should not apply to thems?(sic)

Of course they think they are above the law.  Laws are for little people.  And unlike Leona Helmsley, they don't even bother to try and abide by the law.

Time For You To Waste Your Time

Play free games at Kongregate

Clueless...Quality Cluelessness....But Clueless Just The Same

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs decided to take on Rush Limbaugh over the latter's criticism regarding the government bailouts for GM and Chrysler.  But something seems amiss:

“I’ll let those that sat in the cheap seats a year-and-a-half ago and wanted to walk away” from a milion workers, he continued, “explain to every one of those workers why they made that decision.”


Finally, he wrapped it up: “And then you should ask Mr. Limbaugh — I don’t know what kind of car he drives, but I bet it’s not an F-150.”


The F-150 truck, we should note, is made by Ford, which didn’t get federal rescue funds.

I suppose that you can't expect to have a rational discussion of the issues at hand with a person who doesn't understand the difference between profits generated by a company that wasn't bailed out with [much smaller] profits generated by a company that was bailed out.

From the 'cheap seats', I'll offer a question for Mr. Gibbs;  Where does the U.S. Constitution grant the federal government the authority to "bail out" any private company?

The country is in the very best of hands.....

Happy Birthday Bugs Bunny!

He's 70 years old!  Not bad for a rabbit.

Here's a short he filmed back when he turned 51 and a half.  Regrettably, it is not embeddable.

More Chris Christie

Any chance he could fix the US after he's done fixing New Jersey??

Marines Needed.....

Mark Shields is a columnist with whom I agree on a very infrequent basis.  He prefers a greater level of government influence than I believe to be compatible with living in a free country.

But Mr. Sheilds recently offered the following thoughts that I believe are right on the mark.  I am glad to share some of those thoughts with you here.

I was not a great Marine. I never saw combat. I got a lot more from the Marines than the Marines got from me. But I believe fervently that this nation today needs the values of the Marine Corps as much as the nation needs the Marine Corps.


Of course, honor, courage and commitment are always in short supply. But the Marines teach personal responsibility and accountability by example, that any chain is only as strong as the weakest individual link. As a unit, we are stronger working together than the individual members can separately be.


Marines take care of their own - and they take care of their fellow Marines before themselves. The well-being of the country and of the Corps is more important than our individual well-being.


This may best be stated in the hard-and-fast Marine rule: "Officers eat last." The Marine officer does not eat until after his subordinates for whom he is responsible - the corporals and privates - have been fed. Marines live by the rule that loyalty goes both up and down the chain of command. Would not our country be a more just and human place if the brass of Wall Street and Washington and executive suites believed that "officers eat last"?


The Marine ethic emphasizes responsibility to duty and responsibility to others before self. This is the very opposite of the unbridled individualism that elevates profit and personal comfort to high virtues. The selfish and self-centered CEO or senator who disregards and discards his loyal "troops" would be shunned in the Corps.


Civilian Americans must understand that the greatest civil rights victories have been won by the Marines and the U.S. military, the most successfully integrated sector of our national life. Why? No racial reference and no racial discrimination. The first time I ever slept in the same quarters with African-Americans or Latinos - or took orders from them - was as a private in the Marines Corps.


Yes, America really does need more Marine values and influence.

Apologies Required....

As noted elsewhere, Shirley Sherrod is due an apology or two.  Her firing is unjustified given the context of her remarks.

While we are at it, how about some apologies for these transgressions as well.

Oppressing Iraqis.....With Subtitles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTzSAstxMkY

Sadly, no embedding is possible.  Equally sadly, I think I hurt myself watching it.

Dive Down Where?

National Geographic has a series of dive photos from the Bahamas. Some of the scenes are quite stirring.

Although getting sucked down the Chimney Blue Hole doesn't really sound like a lot of fun.

"All of a sudden, it's got you," says photographer Wes Skiles of the "insanely dangerous" vortex in Chimney Blue Hole off Grand Bahama. Like a giant bathtub drain, it sucks down millions of gallons when the tide comes in. "It's like going over a waterfall—there's no escape." Keeping his distance, a diver sets up equipment to measure the whirlpool's flow rate.

Mistrusting The Government - Classic Examples

There are good reasons why I do not trust the government when it comes to my health.  They have a demonstrably long track record of considering my health to be of secondary importance to their ability to do....something.

As this post demonstrates:

This is a dead end street.  The FDA does not recognize aging as a treatable condition and only approves treatment for "Disease."  Since Alzheimer's is not a Disease but a predictable variant of  aging, the only treatments allowed and currently being developed are those that slow down the progression of the "Disease."  Alzheimer's could quite likely be cured if the money now spent developing means to slow down the condition were devoted to finding ways to directly remove the toxic neurofibrillary tangles that form the Alzheimer's plaques.

It gets worse.  Because the FDA only evaluates treatments for Diseases, and its definition of disease versus aging is completely arbitrary (why is Type II Diabetes a disease while Sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass and function that accompanies aging, is not?) we are forced to develop treatments that primarily address symptoms rather than either repairing damage or rejuvenating systems.  In such a bureaucratized environment we might well be better off as mice than men:

Gene Therapy Trains Immune Cells Against Cancer

Some day you'll be able to get your immune cells reprogrammed to go on hunter killer attack missions against tumors.

Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center created a large, well armed battalion of tumor-seeking immune system cells and watched, in real time using Positron Emission Tomography (PET), as the special forces traveled throughout the body to locate and attack dangerous melanomas.

But for now this sort of thing only gets done for those tricky lab mice who have done such a great job of convincing researchers into developing medical treatments for them first.

If I had terminal cancer and a large sum of money I'd hire medical researchers to do this to my own immune system.

 I don't go all wishy-washy around here very much.  And not very much truly terrifies me beyond the occasional vampire dream.

But I am terrified of growing old.  I watched my Grandmother slowly drift away with Alzheimer's.  I'm seeing some of the same pre-behaviors in my dad.  I'm seeing them in me, too.

And the thought of drifting off into a darkness where thought and conviction and humor and spontaneity and inventiveness and everything else that makes my life worth having slips away quite simply terrifies me.  To have rational thought be uncatchable like smoke.  To have memories sought but never quite found.  To be a rat caught in a maze for which there is no end.

I can imagine few things more terrifying.

Except being in such a condition and having one's government deny the development or application of successful treatments in order that we not inconvenience regulators with the messy problem of occasionally being wrong.

What Media Collusion?

Nah....must have been my imagination.

Felonious And Fraudulent

Why all the concern over fraudulent voter registrations?  Why the concern over keeping voter rolls clear of those that are ineligible to vote?

Because they affect the outcome of close races.  Not theoretically.  Actually.

The six-month election recount that turned former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota's Twin Cities.


That's the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

Of course, some folks just won't care....because they approve of the outcome when fraudulent ballots are used.

Tar, Feathers, Railroad......Premature

I haven't spent any time delving into the firing of Shirley Sherrod; formerly with the USDA.  She was fired when video surfaced of her speech to the NAACP in which she said she had not provided all of the service to a white farmer that she was obligated to supply.  The audience of the NAACP apparently applauded that particular line in her speech quite enthusiastically.

I am still not going to spend much time on it, except to note this post from Eric Scheie over at Classical Values.  In it Eric suggests that Ms. Sherrod's speech included the suggestion that she was wrong to withhold her valuable services and that she has a different view of her job.  The one from which she was fired.  Give the larger context of the speech, it seems appropriate to suggest that her dismissal was unjust.

His other comments regarding the commitment to free speech and pointing out racism among the NAACP audience are also worthy of your time.

What Media Bias?

This media bias.  Read the whole soul crushing thing.  Gutenberg and Franklin must be rolling in their graves.

Climategate......Questions Remain Unanswered

Some time ago, an anonymous individual released emails and computer model coding that suggested that climate researchers that University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit had been less than "scientific" in their research.  Investigating committees were appointed.  The results are out....and disappointing.

When the Climategate e-mails were released last year, the evidence of misconduct by the scientists involved was so strong that the climate establishment was forced to commission a series of tribunals. Yet the conclusions of those inquiries are as specious as the science they were supposed to investigate. By asking the wrong questions -- or not asking them at all -- they have failed to advance the climate debate one iota.


...


Yet the hearings did not include testimony from the most severe critics of the hockey stick graphic, such as Canadians Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who could have explained exactly why the e-mails did suggest impropriety.


...


Further, the inquiry failed to ask the most basic questions of the CRU scientists, such as whether Professor Phil Jones had actually deleted inconvenient e-mails. Britain's freedom of information office said that the Cimategate e-mails provided the most cogent evidence imaginable that there had been efforts to avoid FOI requirements, yet the Muir Russell review did not investigate this appropriately.

Why The Silence.....Indeed

As my many....erm several....uh...regular reader(s) will attest, I remain quite concerned about the current decision by the Justice Department to drop the federal charges against the New Black Panther Party.  During the election of 2008, NBPP members stood outside of a polling place and threatened voters with violence if they didn't vote a certain way.  One was holding a nightstick.

The Bush Administration filed charges.  The Obama Administration was on the verge of obtaining a default judgment when an apparent political decision was made to drop the charges against all but one of the defendants.  I believe the idea of race-neutral law enforcement is one worth defending.  Apparently, elements of the Obama Administration feel differently on the subject.

I mention all this because the Ombudsman for the Washington Post has published a piece about the delay in WaPo's decision to cover this issue.

For months, readers have contacted the ombudsman wondering why The Post hasn't been covering the case. The calls increased recently after competitors such as the New York Times and the Associated Press wrote stories. Fox News and right-wing bloggers have been pumping the story. Liberal bloggers have countered, accusing them of trying to manufacture a scandal.


...


That's prompted many readers to accuse The Post of a double standard. Royal S. Dellinger of Olney said that if the controversy had involved Bush administration Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, "Lord, there'd have been editorials and stories, and it would go on for months."


To be sure, ideology and party politics are at play. Liberal bloggers have accused Adams of being a right-wing activist (he insisted to me Friday that his sole motivation is applying civil rights laws in a race-neutral way). Conservatives appointed during the Bush administration control a majority of the civil rights commission's board. And Fox News has used interviews with Adams to push the story. Sarah Palin has weighed in via Twitter, urging followers to watch Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly's coverage because "her revelations leave Left steaming."


The Post should never base coverage decisions on ideology, nor should it feel obligated to order stories simply because of blogosphere chatter from the right or the left.

What Mr. Alexander his missed is that it appears that the influence of latent politics is the cause for the delay in covering this issue in the first place.

Were we talking about the Klan threatening voters with clubs, the WaPo would have been among the first to point out how far we have yet to go on the subject of race relations.  They would have called for immediate federal intervention and questioned the character of any administration official that did not move forward with the requisite alacrity.

We already know via the JournoList that members of the media colluded to soften the blow of the Jeremiah Wright story on Mr. Obama.

What Mr. Alexander continues to miss is the fact that were our media truly unbiased, we never would have seen the rise of Rush Limbaugh, FoxNews, or any other conservative media outlet.

Where Did All The Jobs Go?

The NYTimes was recently holding forth on the "missing jobs" that are no longer in the economy.  Glenn Reynolds links to a few reasonable explanations.

The best explanation is that governments do not run economies efficiently.  Government policies distort the economy.  Sometimes those distortions work out well. [Think EPA air and water pollution regulations.]  Sometimes they do not. [The Depression Era restrictions on working hours in the National Recovery Act come to mind.]

We have had a bit of both recently.  The 2009 stimulus bill included up to $8,000 for new, first time home owners.  The purpose of that money was to help sop up the newly created surplus in homes created by the housing bubble.

Quite frankly, I thought this was one of the few occasions of masterful law-making by Mr. Obama.  New home owners buy a lot of things; lawn mowers, refrigerators, stoves, washers, dryers, etc.  Getting those homes out of the market helped slow the fall in home prices while at the same time created demand for other goods.

Another example of positive legislation is the spending of money on road projects.  If we are going to throw money at the labor market, we may as well do so in a way that results in real improvements to our infrastructure.

A negative example would be the "cash for clunkers" program that took a lot of very serviceable vehicles off the market and then junked their motors.  Essentially, it was a subsidy for people with enough money to be able to confidently afford a new car purchase.  Their used cars might have served as good upgrades for second tier car owners that cannot afford to buy a new car.  [Like me!!]

So where did the jobs go?  Health Care Reform and Banking Reform.

Those two laws have created a great amount of uncertainty among employers.  They simply do not know how much these laws are going to cost.  We are already seeing even greater increases in health care insurance costs due to government action.  We have no idea how much the banking reforms are going to cost our banks....and in turn cost us.

I talk to business owners and managers everyday as a part of my usual employment.  Whenever the subject of the economy comes up....and it does....the insecurity of the current regulatory and tax environment is almost always identified as being the prime cause for companies to not hire new workers.  I have had business owners tell me that they have more work to be done, but they won't hire any new workers because they don't know how much it is going to cost in the long run to hire them.

Governments don't run economies.  They ruin them.  It is a hard lesson that we are going to have to re-learn.

Unfortunately.

Unsurprising

For those of concerned about the media's 'kid gloves' treatment of Mr. Obama, and the concomitant savaging of everyone else, this is no surprise.

“CALL THEM RACISTS:” JournoList Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

Update: Karl Rove, man of tolerance and equanimity:

Rove played down the notion that members of the mainstream press agreed with Ackerman but he said he found it curious that such talk was tolerated within the group. It was important, he added, not to judge the motives of members who chose not to respond.

“I thought it was a revealing insight in the attitude of one minor player in the D.C. world of journalism,” Rove said of Ackerman’s comments. “It’s an even more important insight into a broader group of more prominent journalists that they seem to be willing to tolerate the suggestion that they should all tell a deliberate lie or that they should take somebody’s head and shove it through a plate glass window. I would hope that somebody would say, ‘Mr. Ackerman, do you really believe we ought to fabricate a lie about people just because we don’t agree with them?’”