POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Polarity Shift… For Reals, Yo!

What we are talking about here (in my opinion) is an odd situation where the New Rich (now that the middle class no longer exists) are the Public Employees (the Haves) are pitted against the down-trodden masses (the rest of us who aren't living on the Public Trough). We are the Have-Nots.

It is an odd situation because the dynamic is weird.

Here we have people who like to market themselves as fighting for parity, equity, and equality in all things, defending the Haves in spite of the wishes of the Have-Nots.

This is really made more con-fused as we have people like myself unable to enjoy the sweet opportunity to utilize tactics most usually associated with Identity Politics (which was invented by the Left) against the left.

So the Left is forced to defend the indefensible from a place which is uncomfortable for them... namely, protecting the Rich from those who are relatively Poorer.

Is it perhaps the case that Public Employees are the new Bourgeois?

UPDATE, YO! Meep was on this long before yours truly - as in months ago. I had forgotten this piece of work here: http://powip.com/2011/01/first-against-the-wall-when-the-revolution-comes/ - damn girls around here. always making me look bad.

The problem is that with public employees, many of the jobs are being done in the private market, and people are beginning to see how huge the gulf in pay, benefits, and performance expectations are between the public and private sectors. These really are your next-door neighbors.

The awareness may not have been high before, but as public finances really are going into the insupportable range, and again, a lot of that is due to demographic issues, there are going to be a lot more stories about how different the public employees are compared to the rest of us…. but not that they deserve any of this differential treatment. And the public unions expecting to have people on their side in their fight to hang onto their perks will find themselves under seige, as opposed to the supposed “rich” who can pay for an infinite amount of these goodies. People will question whether they should be allowed to unionize at all.

Watch out for the pitchforks. And hold onto your pensions, guys… if you can keep them.

It's like waking up one day and finding out that Punk Rock is Pop Rock and visa versa.

I kinda like it. In a sleazy way.

Enoch_Root

AKA. Bobby Donn Brubaker (the most popular man in Mesa, AZ), the Umbrella of Terror, Jack Ketch.

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While Detroit Shutters Half Its Public Schools

Chris Matthews can't get the facts straight about Walker:

Swift and severe changes are coming to Detroit Public Schools.

State education officials have ordered Robert Bobb to immediately implement a financial restructuring plan that balances the district's books by closing half of its schools, swelling high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidating operations.

This week, Bobb, the district's emergency financial manager, said he is meeting with Detroit city officials and will set up a meeting with Wayne County Regional Educational Service Agency to discuss consolidation opportunities in areas such as finance, public safety, transportation and other areas.

Bobb also is preparing a list of recommended school closures and Friday said layoff discussions are under way and would be announced closer to April, when notices would be issued. "We are moving forward with the plan," he said "Right now my focus is on my transition plan and the DEP (deficit elimination plan)."

Bobb's last day with DPS is June 30. After that, the state plans to install another financial manager who must continue to implement Bobb's plan, according to a Feb. 8 letter from Mike Flanagan, the state superintendent of public instruction.

In the letter, Flanagan said the Michigan Department of Education gave preliminary approval to Bobb's plan to bring the 74,000-student district out of its financial emergency. As a condition of approval, Flanagan said Bobb cannot declare the district in bankruptcy during the remainder of his contract.

Bobb was appointed by departed Governor Jennifer Granholm. Obama has in the past been said to have been considering Granholm as an economic adviser, or for possible appointment to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Obama's been caught flat-footed again with respect to Libya, where he presumably approves democracy more than he does in Madison. Also meanwhile, the Proggs think that everyone would agree with them if they could just find a way to get their message out.

In related news, NOAA rebuts Al Gore's claim that recent snowfalls have resulted from Global Warming.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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If I had a motorcycle . . .

the first thing I'd do is organize my Angry Birds Motorcycle Club chapter.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Investments in Squalor [UPDATED]

You may recall that Michelle Obama's $300k job at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Clinics largely consisted in finding ways to redirect patients to local clinics, because it wasn't possible to get reasonable compensation out of Medicaid. In other words, it was less about cost savings than it was about cost shifting, away from the institution that paid her and her husband.

I mention this because I have some sympathy for the teachers in the Milwaukee Public School system, who are now being confronted with the evidence that black 4th graders fare worse in reading under their tutelage than they do anywhere else in the country, including Washington, DC. They deserve a share of the blame, but certainly not all of it.

Earlier in the week, some were reporting that the average teacher compensation package in Wisconsin, including benefits, graded out at over $100k. That was actually the average pay package of teachers in city schools, the majority working in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, by far the largest in the state. Milwaukee's not like New York or Chicago in the sense that it costs a lot more to live there than it does in any of the smaller towns elsewhere in the state. It's marginally more expensive. Granted, teachers in Milwaukee's public schools probably deserve hazard pay, given what they have to put up with.

In some of the photos of pro-union picketers in Madison, I saw signs saying, "If you can read this sign, thank a teacher." Indeed, I've been thankful towards my own teachers all my life, and I've enjoyed my stints of teaching, as well. I can say, though, that I and virtually all of my friends learned to read at home before we ever went to kindergarten. Put in place as many Head Start programs as you like, nothing can replace the tutelage of a parent, because nobody's as deeply invested as a parent.

For many years, Chicago sloughed off the burden of its dependent citizens on Wisconsin at large, and Milwaukee in particular. It was a common practice among social workers to urge people to move to there in order to collect the superior social benefits that generous Wisconsinites offered for the needy. If Illinois gets irritated by the idea of Wisconsin or any of its neighboring states trying to poach away businesses now that they've boosted their state income tax so high, they ought to keep that in mind.

The squalor of dependency sought is worse than the squalor of dependency suffered, so it's not surprising that Wisconsin's black students do poorly, no matter how much their teachers are paid.

The variety of benefits paid out by ever-proliferating social programs is now such that it's possible for economists to argue, convincingly, that families on social benefits have more discretionary income than working families making $60k/year. That sends kind of the wrong message, don't you think? In effect, it subsidizes stupidity and incapacity.

The collective bargaining "rights" that unionized public employees have that you don't.

Meanwhile, the CBO estimates that ObamaCare is liable to cost 800,000 jobs. The unions who pushed for ObamaCare seem to think that's just fine, as long as they are exempted from having to comply with its provisions. And Obama wants to take away conscience exemptions regarding abortion for some health care workers.

If you don't like any of that, the answer is more education for you, even if it's performed by government-sponsored propaganda bots on social media sites paid for with your tax dollars, and brainbirthed by Cass Sunstein. Because it's not ethical to disagree.

UPDATE:

State education officials have ordered the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools to immediately implement a plan that balances the district's books by closing half its schools.

The Detroit News says the financial restructuring plan will increase high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidate operations.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Wisconsin’s Delayed Day of Reckoning

Largely lost in the discussions of the Wisconsin-Teachers Unions Showdown has been the role of the federal government in the timing. The collapse of the markets gave Obama the opportunity that he needed to ride roughshod over (weak) Republican candidate McCain, and in the wake of his election, he and his advisers--true believers in Keynesian fantasies--justified their lavish spending by guaranteeing that the federal government could create jobs. The shovel-readiness of shovel-ready projects turned out to be a figment of their collective imagination, though, and the enormous debt purchased by Obama the administration failed to deliver the stimulus that was promised.

Among the monies that were set aside to salvage the economy were the $670 million the feds set aside for Wisconsin's public schools. This amount, and comparable per capita amounts for the other states, was paid for by creating a larger federal debt burden on every American taxpayer. At the time, there were many analysts who said that these federal donations of tax monies would simply forestall the day of reckoning, but Obama and company were either convinced that that wouldn't matter in a couple of years, or that their economic policies were such that the economy would have made up its lost ground within that period, or that it was still worthwhile as a matter of politics to reward the unions that had helped put him over the top in 2008's campaign--or some combination of the above.

Clearly, they could not have foreseen their utter repudiation in 2010's elections. Had they not been drubbed, the policy of forestalling the inevitable would have been continued, provided that the Democrats could have continued finding creditors willing to fuel their Spendapalooza. But the day of reckoning is upon us.

Most of the states, unlike the feds, are required to balance their budgets. Most of them see that they are broke because of the exorbitant cost of public payrolls and pensions. Indeed, in Wisconsin the previous Governor added to the shortfall by raiding pension funds to avoid having for the moment to have to make cuts in payroll and services. Similarly, the feds have resorted to "quantitative easing" to forestall actually meeting debt obligations, the result of which has been voracious (even if undeclared by the MSM) inflation of consumer prices. Real wages are stalled, and that means that Americans are poorer than they were.

Cunctation can be a brilliant battlefield strategy, because armies are comprised of human beings who can be wearied, and supply lines, which can be cut. Compound interest never tires.

The administration has similarly bought time with regard to physicians' salaries with the so-called "Doc Fix," which expires in two years. It will run out, and when it does, the federal government will be forced to require that they accept 20% less in compensation, even while being beholden to the massive bureaucracy that is being created to oversee them. At the same time, there is no real federal attempt to deal with the bubble in higher education, the cost of which has been increasing for decades at rates much higher than the growth of personal income.

How much of that out of control growth is due to the creation of "diversity officers" and other absurdities, I don't know. What I do know is that people in the comments have been stating that teachers and other personnel in the public education systems deserve their levels of compensation because they have acquired degrees. Unfortunately, many of the degrees they've acquired have been in . . . education, which is a fashion system that pretends to more content than it contains. Thus it is that school systems have decided that students' attitudes toward polar bears are more important than their capacity to calculate home mortgages.

I hope, as well, that coming to grips with priorities will mean the end of idiocies such as this.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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