If you're not a worker, your position is understandable. Loaded with propaganda phrases, but understandable. So long as you are wealthy and attempting to keep and grow that wealth, I wouldn't expect you to care about the welfare of others. Humans generally don't. But if you are a worker, you are speaking out against your own best interests, and that has never made sense to me.

I am a worker. I am a teacher, and I've purposefully sought out a position where I am working for a private corporation rather than a public school district. I am not protected by any union. I will keep or lose my job based on how well I perform that job.

I'm currently the #1 GED teacher in all the country, in my company. I don't need a union to protect my job for me. I do a fantastic job, and that's what ensures I'll keep it. That's just the way I like it.

Fair enough, but for every one of you, there are a lot of other teachers who can't afford to pay off their student loans on their salaries, who face oversized classrooms and difficulties due to underfunding. Shall we fire them all and keep a few dozen top performers? Who will teach all those children you don't have time for?

There are also a lot of teachers who took district jobs because they thought they couldn't lose them then used their unions to demand more time off, more benefits, and when the budget fell apart, they got pink slips instead of all the goodies they thought they were going to get.

They killed their golden goose.

We should abolish teaching unions, and rid ourself of the dead weight teachers who signed on for three reasons only (June July and August)


If you truly only think there are a "few dozen" top performers, then education is more doomed than I even think........................

That wasn't my point. Unions don't exist for top performers, top performers will always find work. Unions also should have no problem rewarding top performers, it encourages better performance from everyone. Nor should unions tolerate outright slackers. Unions exist when working conditions and wages are unfair for the average worker, and average is what most workers are, obviously, that's why it's called 'average'. Without average workers, we have no education system and no economy.

I guess I'm a Utilitarian on most issues. I believe in pushing for what would improve the greater good. Which means making sure your average worker has what they need to do their job safely and well and is paid an adequate, fair wage for their work.

But for the greater good, I also believe excellence should be acknowledged and rewarded and leeching punished. I think that makes society better. I see no reason unions have to be incompatible with that. Some may well be incompatible, but that just means they need to reconsider their policies, not disband and allow average workers to be mistreated.

So workers truly want with their every rising day to go into their factories or cubicles and sabatoge their company? How can anyone who has worked a day in their life really believe that?

I went to high school with a lazy jerk who managed to get into UPS. He is protected by a union, and he knows exactly what he can get away with, so he pulls tricks such as, pick a package up from one location, walk (slowly.................... mosey) across the entire warehouse floor to the wrong destination, make the manager of the wrong destination "check" to see if it is supposed to go here, feign surprise when he learns that it doesn't, repeat. All day long. He brags about how few parcels he actually moves to their proper locations. He gets paid $30 an hour, has astounding health care, gets 4 weeks paid vacation every year, has a company matched 401K that he fully vested in immediately, and will retire after "working" there for 15 years on 65% of his salary. For the rest of his life. His union has insured that his laziness will be protected, and he will stay on the payroll, screwing around every day and draining the company of resources and efficiency. He laughs about this.

I can vouch for this. My bf works IN a terminal at FedEx. FedEx has independent contractors as drivers though.

If you're not a worker, your position is understandable. Loaded with propaganda phrases, but understandable. So long as you are wealthy and attempting to keep and grow that wealth, I wouldn't expect you to care about the welfare of others. Humans generally don't. But if you are a worker, you are speaking out against your own best interests, and that has never made sense to me.

I am a worker. I am a teacher, and I've purposefully sought out a position where I am working for a private corporation rather than a public school district. I am not protected by any union. I will keep or lose my job based on how well I perform that job.

I'm currently the #1 GED teacher in all the country, in my company. I don't need a union to protect my job for me. I do a fantastic job, and that's what ensures I'll keep it. That's just the way I like it.

Fair enough, but for every one of you, there are a lot of other teachers who can't afford to pay off their student loans on their salaries, who face oversized classrooms and difficulties due to underfunding. Shall we fire them all and keep a few dozen top performers? Who will teach all those children you don't have time for?

There are also a lot of teachers who took district jobs because they thought they couldn't lose them then used their unions to demand more time off, more benefits, and when the budget fell apart, they got pink slips instead of all the goodies they thought they were going to get.

They killed their golden goose.

We should abolish teaching unions, and rid ourself of the dead weight teachers who signed on for three reasons only (June July and August)


If you truly only think there are a "few dozen" top performers, then education is more doomed than I even think........................

I completely agree with you here. Teachers unions are killing education, not funding. The funding for MORE teachers is being drained by the unions who demand more or the funds.

Just like with the 'big three' auto companies. Unions killed them also. The average wage of a UAW employee is $80 per hour. Not to mention full benefits. The unions also required that the auto plants pay 80% of an employees wages while laid off or in a "bullpen" waiting for someone to go home sick. Around $60 dollars an hour to NOT work.

$80 an hour to work in a factory is not a fair wage... That's extremely excessive.

My friend's husband is an union ironworker and never works when it rains. His facebook status every time he gets a rainout... "Woo, it's a rainday and I'm still getting paid!" Who absorbs thoses costs? The consumer, who has to pay an inflated rate for services or products so the unions can continue to push for higher wages.

I think we've beat the Outsourcing and Unions issue until it is bloody and unrecognizable. Time to start finding the other reasons that made America great in the 1950's even with a higher tax rate. 'K????

^Read my post above. Most of the industrialized world had been leveled by war and the U.S. was untouched for all intents and purposes. It gave us a huge advantage.

I agree with Brett, not only for the reason he posted but for a much larger umbrella problem with initial question. We don't live in the fifties anymore. The entire world has changed, corporate and fiscal law is vastly different, concept of wealth is vastly different, you simly can't apply or usefully compare the fifties with the present day. Any attempt to do so is just rhetoric and can be shaped and molded for whichever political end one desires.

I'm not asking for comparison.

You are. It's the entire point of the thread. And you go on to do it more here:

Besides, who the hell wants to go back? We must move forward. But do we do so ignorantly as the screamin' no-tax people say, or do we review history and evaluate what worked as well as what didn't? The question is not flawed, your interpretation of it is because you equate only the negative with the 50's or do you equate only the negative with President Eisenhower? If today's conservatives can bow at the altar of Ronald Reagan, also a figure of the past btw, why can't they acknowledge another conservative, Eisenhower, who was actually a war hero and not simply a B-rated movie star who served in the war in a movie studio???

The irony is that often we modern Americans look on the 50's as totally negative, yet we forget the good things. Both of these extremes is to our detriment. We had a trade surplus in the 50's, the dollar was strong. We still made steel here. Infrastructure was important - hell, Eisenhower's policies built the interstates to name just a few. So, were those investments in American infrastructure for nothing? Are those same investments today not worthy? The jingoists today say that increasing the tax rate will ruin the country and completely disregard the past when it worked. The jinogists today, I argue, don't care one whit about a competitive America but instead seek to make the rich richer.

-Debra

You mention the trade surplus. Yes there was one. And like I said, it's because the rest of the world was just getting out of WWII. Shall we have another one of those?

Yes we made steel here. Specifically HERE, where I live. My city is still known for it's steel past. And only now, many decades later, is the air starting to be clear again. These are not simple issues.

It's not just numbers. It's not tax rate and GDP alone. If it were it would be easy.

I'm not asking for comparison.

You are. It's the entire point of the thread. And you go on to do it more here:

Besides, who the hell wants to go back? We must move forward. But do we do so ignorantly as the screamin' no-tax people say, or do we review history and evaluate what worked as well as what didn't? The question is not flawed, your interpretation of it is because you equate only the negative with the 50's or do you equate only the negative with President Eisenhower? If today's conservatives can bow at the altar of Ronald Reagan, also a figure of the past btw, why can't they acknowledge another conservative, Eisenhower, who was actually a war hero and not simply a B-rated movie star who served in the war in a movie studio???

The irony is that often we modern Americans look on the 50's as totally negative, yet we forget the good things. Both of these extremes is to our detriment. We had a trade surplus in the 50's, the dollar was strong. We still made steel here. Infrastructure was important - hell, Eisenhower's policies built the interstates to name just a few. So, were those investments in American infrastructure for nothing? Are those same investments today not worthy? The jingoists today say that increasing the tax rate will ruin the country and completely disregard the past when it worked. The jinogists today, I argue, don't care one whit about a competitive America but instead seek to make the rich richer.

-Debra

You mention the trade surplus. Yes there was one. And like I said, it's because the rest of the world was just getting out of WWII. Shall we have another one of those?

Yes we made steel here. Specifically HERE, where I live. My city is still known for it's steel past. And only now, many decades later, is the air starting to be clear again. These are not simple issues.

It's not just numbers. It's not tax rate and GDP alone. If it were it would be easy.

The only thing you can really take away from the discussion is that there is little or no correlation between marginal tax rates and economic prosperity. In our times of great prosperity we had extremely high marginal tax rates, during the 1990s marginal tax rates were increased yet we experienced economic growth. For the past decade we have the lowest tax rates most of us have experienced in our lifetimes, with weak and anemic growth. In the 1980s, cutting the highest rates probably contributed to economic growth (although not as much as the significant increases in Federal spending), and the subsequent 11 tax increases during Reagan administration didn't seem to have much negative effect either. Different times call for different measures.

I am not trying to say "high taxes = good, low taxes = bad". I am just saying that the histrionic bleating of conservatives that ANY raise in income taxes would cause economic Armageddon is beyond stupid. It's just another distraction preventing a serious discussion of how to tackle our economic problems.

And what are we actually talking about here? An increase in the top marginal tax rate from 35% to 39.6% for people making over $250,000 per year. Bahet can correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this is $250,000 AFTER all deductions and adjustments. And only income > $250,000 is subject to the extra 4.6% .

So someone who is subject to this tax, first of all, will be making a LOT more than $250,000.

For someone with a taxable income amount of $275,000, the extra tax would be $1,150. For someone with a taxable income of $1,000,000, the extra tax would be $34,500. Not exactly a proletarian uprising.

I don't make anywhere near that kind of income, but I endured a tax increase this past year almost quadruple what someone with a net income of $275,000 would face under the Obama plan. Our income increased modestly last year (my wife is one of those greedy, lazy public school teachers who got a raise-- we spend the summers sipping mint juleps on the veranda and watching our dressage horse in the back yard). It wasn't that much, but it was enough to push us above the threshold where we lost a number of deductions and we also lost a child tax credit. The result was that my tax bill almost doubled from 2010.

That sucked, and I missed getting the big refund, but it's not like it destroyed us financially.

So using the "I knew a guy......" and "N=1" standard of evidence that seems to be the preferred norm here, I can conclude definitively that raising taxes on the rich would have no negative effect whatsoever.

Perhaps it helped that from the top down there was respect from the bosses to those who did the work!

So explain to me why we needed to create giant powerful unions whose greed has torn apart our country? Because of all those happy, well-respected workers living behind picket fences in your imaginary utopia?

be realistic.

You wouldn't have the right to vote as a women if it wasn't for unions & the support given back & forth for the women's suffragists.

It's amazing how the average person in the world is so incredibly dense that they are against the only organisation in the last 200 years which has really improved their standard of living.

The utter stupidity over the average person knowns no bounds, working class people defending a system which systematically uses & abuses them.

Most the USA is suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

Perhaps it helped that from the top down there was respect from the bosses to those who did the work!

So explain to me why we needed to create giant powerful unions whose greed has torn apart our country? Because of all those happy, well-respected workers living behind picket fences in your imaginary utopia?

be realistic.

You wouldn't have the right to vote as a women if it wasn't for unions & the support given back & forth for the women's suffragists.

It's amazing how the average person in the world is so incredibly dense that they are against the only organisation in the last 200 years which has really improved their standard of living.

The utter stupidity over the average person knowns no bounds, working class people defending a system which systematically uses & abuses them.

Most the USA is suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

Do not call us stupid for this, please. We were never taught this as part of our history. If it was even mentioned at all, it was never emphasized. Americans are also not taught important skills in early education such as logic, debate, and ethics. I sometimes am guilty of holding my countrymen in contempt for that, but it's really not fair to.

Our education system is designed to create and maintain a mental state that is not conducive to reasoning or problem solving. We desperately need an overhaul of that system and a new emphasis on teaching children not what to think, but how to think.

I think that all this talk about how the 50s were different because we exported to a devastated Europe or because we built steel or because unions hadn't yet ruined everything is disproved by this one graph.



[From: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/compensation-too/ ]

Despite the trade deficit, despite the decline in manufacturing employment, despite the evil unions, the US produces 3.5 times as much per person as in 1950. Yet since the mid-70s, none of the benefit of that increased production has gone to workers.

Ahhh, that's a great question. My opinion? Don't vote for the party whose primary goal since 1980 has been transferring even more of that productivity growth to the top 0.1%.

I think that all this talk about how the 50s were different because we exported to a devastated Europe or because we built steel or because unions hadn't yet ruined everything is disproved by this one graph.



Despite the trade deficit, despite the decline in manufacturing employment, despite the evil unions, the US produces 3.5 times as much person as in 1950. Yet since the mid-70s, none of the benefit of that increased production has gone to workers.

Oh now that's an eye opener. Now what can workers do about it?

Your graph illustrates an interesting point. When compensation was at its peak we were in the beginnings of a significant recession. As wages dropped, millions of jobs were created. Any correlation?

Best way to stop workers from wanting to be in unions is to not treat them like ****.