Let's Set the Record Straight on the Wisconsin Labor Protests

Woodstock, GA

The Wisconsin labor protests have been attracting a lot of attention since they started a few weeks ago. Briefly, Governor Walker, facing a budget deficit of about $140 million, proposed legislation shifting the cost of some state employees’ fringe benefits – health insurance and pension plan contributions – from the state to those employees. He also proposed eliminating those employees’ collective bargaining rights. Note that this didn’t affect all unionized state employees – the law enforcement and firefighters unions were exempted. Coincidentally, those unions supported Walker’s bid for election in 2010.

The GOP and T-Party folks have successfully muddied the waters here. Walker's bill isn't about having the union members "contribute a little more" to their benefits, it's about abrogating a contract (called "welshing" where I come from) and reducing the status of the workers from equals in an employment arrangement to little more than serfs.

In every employment arrangement, some of the compensation is benefits and deferred compensation (retirement arrangement - pension or savings). Wisconsin already signed a contract to pay its workers X amount of dollars plus y amount of fringes and a z amount of pension contributions. The total compensation is X+Y+Z. “Shifting costs” from the employer to the employee here means reducing the total compensation promised. When it’s done unilaterally, as Walker’s done, it’s called “welshing.”

Any employer with integrity would have called for an emergency renegotiation of the contract. Instead, Walker proposes, in effect, to impose a cut in compensation on the state's workers (except, apparently, for those who supported his election).

This fellow has a severe anti-union bias, apparently driven by ideological motivations, but not so much so that he’s blinded to the possibilities of exploiting unions for his own purposes - note how he exempts from his draconian measures those unions that supported him! Can you say hypocrisy?

As to depriving the unions of their collective bargaining rights, anyone who thinks that's a measure designed to close the current budget gap, or prevent next year's projected gap, is a fool. Collective bargaining is always a two-way street, and a very useful tool for management to discern and address the issues really important to its workers.

No, eliminating bargaining rights is Governor Walker's admission that the management of Wisconsin – appointed by him to posts of high responsibility and authority – can’t handle this important job - that even when supervised by the Governor's office and advised of budget constraints, negotiators for the state and its agencies can be counted on to give away the store every time.

So in a classic GOP one-size-fits-all strategy, instead of training Wisconsin's managers in negotiating and implementing an integrated approach to the next round of collective bargaining with state employees, he's attempting simply to strip them of their right to bargain over the terms and conditions of their employment. Walker claims to be seeking to enhance the “flexibility” of state departments. Based on what we’ve seen so far, I think we can look forward, in the near future, to such “flexible” arrangements as hiring licensed electricians and plumbers at janitors’ pay rates, and then assigning them to do electrical and plumbing work. Another “flexible” response: when a worker files a grievance, the grievance procedure itself might be cancelled in the interest of saving money, since it takes time from both the worker, the manager, and of course the in-shop union representative.

More and more, Walker's sounding like a petty tyrant. It's no surprise that the Wisconsin protests are happening at the same time as the Libyan protests. Any day now, I expect to hear Walker proclaiming that the people really love him.

Just How Free a People do we Want to Be?

This is what the lady had to say:

You have obviously never had a loved one become addicted to drugs otherwise you would never want drugs to be legal.

This was my response:

I'm sorry someone you love became addicted to drugs. However, it doesn't give you, or anyone else, the right to deny me the freedom to choose or not to choose to take drugs. Whatever happened to the land of liberty?

I knew fellows who died in Vietnam, yet they never passed legislation prohibiting war. Likewise the thousands of people who lose loved ones to automobile accidents every year never see driving banned. Alcoholism is a brutal disease, yet even after we banned alcohol, we unbanned it!

What freedom do we have if we cannot choose of our own volition to eschew drugs? And by making drugs illegal, we've enhanced their cachet for countless people and declared war on many Americans. You know, "forbidden fruit." If our ancestors defied the good Lord Himself on that, why do you think that anyone should obey a government of men on it?

By all means share your story so others can learn, but don't expect people to behave as you want them to, and don't think you have a right to expect the government to legislate such behavior.

The question is, how far does a free society go in proscribing certain behavior?

When European settlers first arrived in the New World, seeking, we're told, religious tolerance, tolerance was the furthest thing from their minds – they wanted to be free to practice their religion without interference from the state. They were as intolerant of difference as the authorities they fled, and they used the coercive power of government to enforce their morals.

Some time later, after proclaiming that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, those settlers' descendents fought a bloody war for the right to govern themselves, rather than bow to a distant King. Yet in forming their government after winning that war, they managed to craft a government that officially recognized the right of some people to own other people. It took another war to end the practice of slavery in the USA.

The issues generating controversy today – drug use, sexual activities, and marriage, to name some of the most visible – don't approach slavery in terms of the extent to which one group of humans abuses the rights of another group. Nevertheless, in our own nation's evolution, the fact that a majority of our citizens (and not the same majority in all cases) is willing to use the power of the government to impose its will on the minority is troubling, especially when one considers that most of those majorities are self-described conservatives – that is, people who believe in a small government that doesn't involve itself in the private affairs of the governed.

Happy Fathers' Day!

It was a little surprising listening to Mr. Boortz on Friday (June 18). I'm not talking about his seemingly endless rants about President Obama, his virulent opposition to labor unions or his crusade against what he calls “government schools.” What surprised me was his reckless misuse and abuse of statistics.

Now, understand that of all the right-wing talk radio hosts, I admire and respect Neal Boortz the most. (How could anyone not like someone whose own web page characterizes him as the “America's most under-rated and overpaid talk show host?”) He doesn't take himself too seriously, and frequently advises listeners not to believe anything he says unless they personally know it to be true, or confirm it from an independent source. He's got no problem laughing at himself, and I've heard him take issue with right-wing callers who go out of bounds. For example, I've heard him on multiple occasions berate callers who've claimed that the President hates America, and yesterday he berated a caller who suggested that the President's involvement in establishing the BP fund of $20 billion was motivated by a desire to line his own pockets with some of the money.

And on the occasions he manages to talk about something other than politics, I find myself agreeing with him more often than not. He's definitely an excellent companion for morning driving.

Anyway, the Friday before Fathers' Day, Mr. Boortz was discussing the importance of fathers in a child's life. First, let me point out that I generally agree with all he had to say; what disappointed me was this very intelligent man so egregiously abusing statistics.

Now, I don't remember the exact figures, so don't hold me to them – you'll get the idea.

Boortz started out by saying that of all prisoners in the US, some large percentage of them – let's say 80% - grew up in households without a father. He then said something along the lines of “that's proof enough of the importance of a father in a child's upbringing,” as if the existence of the stat proved some sort of causative relationship.

Now, if he'd had a stat that showed that a greater percentage of those from fatherless homes wind up in prison than those from two-parent homes, then there's stronger proof of cause.

See, if there were no fatherless households at all – if our world was ideal in that respect – there'd still be people in prison, and 100% of them would be from households with fathers, and what would that prove? Or let's say that only a dozen households in the US were fatherless, and all of the children from those households were in prison – then the stat being through out would be that out of the over 2 million prisoners in the US, less than 50 came from fatherless households – leading to the inevitable conclusion that if you want your kid to stay out of prison, throw his father out of the house!

Of course, that's not the fact – the important statistic isn't the percentage of the prison population that's fatherless, it's the percentage of fatherless people who are in prison.

Who knows? Perhaps he was just cutting corners and using that particular statistic to emphasize something I think most of us take as fact – kids need both parents in the home if they're going to have the best chance at a successful life. Take either parent out of the household and you present the kids involved with an enormous stumbling block which many can't overcome.

It being Father's Day today, it's appropriate to give a few moments thought to this idea. I think too many people of parenting age are enthralled by the idea of enjoying all the privileges of adulthood without concomitantly accepting the responsibilities – that is, not being willing to face up to the consequences of their actions. Birth control is the responsibility of both adults having sex, and abortion is a terrible form of birth control. And if you're adult enough to make a baby, you ought to be adult enough to stick around for the next couple of decades and help that baby become an adult!

So Happy Fathers' Day to all the dads out there, but I'm here to tell you that it's at best bittersweet if you can't share the day with your kids.

Is it Really all that Tough to Spell Correctly?

I went to play tennis with my gorgeous wife this morning. The idea was hers; on Saturday morning, my first impulse is to stay in bed; upon getting up, my first impulse is to return to bed.

We're northwest of Atlanta, and we're experiencing a heat wave this week. Thus, we decided that if we're going to do something like play tennis, we should do so before it got too hot. Joan's idea was to get up early and be on the court by nine.

We play at public courts in Cherokee County because the subdivision we live in was built before they invented tennis. When we got to the courts, I was surprised to see that all four courts were empty, despite it being 10:00 or so.

After playing for a while, I took a break to use the restroom, a little shed about ten yards from the courts, an ideal location. Both the men's and ladies' rooms had nice, freshly-printed signs on them. Both, alas, were locked. I wondered about that as I wandered off to use the restrooms by the baseball fields. After going to all that trouble to print the signs to identify the two restrooms properly, why had they been locked? Was someone concerned that they'd be misread?

It's a nice sports complex at Hobgood Park, by the way, and the park gets a good amount of use, especially on weekends. If you like to watch or play tennis, soccer or basebalol, or just enjoy hanging out in a place where lots of people are doing just that, I highly recommend it! Today, all the baseball fields were in use by the various little league teams, and the walkways were filled with kids and their parents. A nice scene.

Then I saw it. On one of the gates to the complex, designed to be seen easily from the parking lot when the gates are licked, a painted metal sign: “Field's Closed” It would have been okay if there'd been only one field, but there are three of four field's – ahem, fields – protected by that gate. I looked around and saw a couple of other examples of misused apostrophes used in plural words.

Now, I know that many people are rolling their eyes. What's the big deal? I'll tell you the big deal – these are kids, children. They're in school. They're being brought up like good Americans, to have respect for authority. They see the signs placed around the park, and they assume they're properly spelled and punctuated. And so they pick up a bad habit and perpetuate it.

My real question is this – why are these things allowed to happen? Don't the people in charge of signage in our public places know how to spell? How long would a misspelled word last on a sign erected by the public library?

For years, every time I got a communication from my daughter's school, I'd read it carefully. When we lived in New Jersey, I'd say that about half of them contained some sort of spelling or punctuation error, or worse. Here in Georgia, that percentage declined significantly, but every now and then there'd be something from the school that was, well, challenged.

Perhaps I should have contacted the schools about this, but I didn't want my daughter to get stigmatized for having a picky dad. I know that my estimation of their capabilities was affected by my realization that they cared so little for parents' sensibilities that they would send out communications that contained errors of the sort they claimed to be teaching our children to avoid.

The same thing happens in everyday life. I'd never walk into a restaurant with a misspelled sign in the window, and I've gotten up and walked out of restaurants with misspelled menu items (“bacon and egg's”). If you have so little respect for your customers that you can't be bothered to spell menu items correctly, in what other ways will that lack of respect manifest itself?

So that's today's rant – if you're going to go to the trouble of making a sign or printing a menu or sending a letter home to your students' parents, take the time to express yourself clearly and make sure you spell and punctuate your words correctly. It's one of those things that few people will notice when you do it right, but many will notice when you do it wrong.

The First Step in Solving our Financial Crisis

The President says that we need to get a grip on healthcare costs if we're going to get a grip on the economy.

I understand his point, but I disagree with him. Health care is only a sixth of our economy - our government itself represents a much larger portion of our economy, and the way we fund it is designed to confuse and subjugate the American taxpayer, taking power from the people and settling it on the Congress in a way I doubt our founders intended.  I think the most important thing we need to do is get a grip on how we fund our government, and I think we can do it in a way that significantly returns power from lobbyists and an increasingly elitist Congress to the people in whose name our government supposedly operates.

As currently structured, our tax code is highly complex and terribly confusing.  The Congress is able to reward or punish Americans in groups large or small, depending on how they tinker with the Code, and they can isolate groups of Americans from each other by disparate treatment in the Code. Thus, changes to the Tax Code made by Congress often are designed to affect small groups so as not to raise the ire of the population as a whole.

American industry and commercial interests employ literally thousands of lobbyists to monitor Congress and influence its actions with respect to the Tax Code.  These lobbyists, handsomely compensated by the many interests that employ them, ae far more powerful than any individual citizen and sometimes wield more power than even individual Representatives or Senators, with respect to their ability to influence Tax Code legislation favorable to the interests they represent.

Thus, the Congress can make significant changes to the Tax Code that have very little impact on the overall opoulation but can make or break small groups.  In the last administration, tax cuts were passed that gave huge amounts of money to a small group of taxpayers, while most taxpayers got a relative pittance.  By contract, the current Congress seems hellbent not only on reversing those decisions, but on saddling the wealthy with even greater tax burdens.

The FairTax would change all this.

The FairTax is a single tax.  It's designed to replace ALL current federal taxes.  If the FairTax were enacted, there'd be one single thing that the Congress could change - the FairTax rate.  There'd be no more tinkering with the Tax Code to reward or punish small groups of taxpayers, and no more stealth legislation on taxes ignored by most of us because they don't affect our taxes.  When the FairTax is in place and the Congress wants to change it, that decision will be something that affects each American equally, and so will attract a great deal of attention.  Never again will we wait until tax time to find out how the rules and rates have changed - with the FairTax, we can be confident that every attempt to change the rate will be eagerly watched by an alert public.

And make no mistake about it - the ability to tinker with the Tax Code is one of the single greatest sources of Congressional power - a power they guard jealously.  The FairTax would remove that power from the Congress and return it to the people in a way I'll point out in a later post.

Now, the FairTax has generated a good amount of controversy, and it's got a lot more to recommend it than simply ridding our Capital of the thousands of parasitic lobbyists who advance the cause of special interests over the people.  It's also got a  lot to recommend it in terms of reducing the cost (currently estimated in the billions of dollars annually) of complying with the dizzying array of tax laws.  It'll make much more visible the actual sums we're paying to government for its operations, eliminating the current crazy quilt of income taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, fees, and the like - which serve the interests of the status quo by making it almost impossible for each of us to determine exactly how much of our resources actually goes to government.

But all these things cannot be pointed out in a single post.  The FairTax has been developed carefully and thoroughly by teams of economists and other experts who spent much time and millions of dollars in the process.  I'll point out some of the main reasons I support the FairTax in future posts, and I hope I can contribute not only to a more enhanced understanding of the FairTax, but also by improving understanding and perhaps clearing up some misunderstandings, I can help persuade those who aren'tyet sure of its benefit to our great nation.

For those who can't wait, and want to get a headstart, here are a couple of interesting links:

Americans for Fair Taxation: www.fairtax.org

Neal Boortz (one of the FairTax's most well-known proponents): www.boortz.com

 Thanks so much for your time.  Please leave a comment, and may God bless us all!

Welcome! And what shall we discuss today . . .?

Just a short note to say hello and welcome you to this little corner of the Internet.

I love to read, and I love to write.  I seem to live for sensory input - why, I can't even go sit down in Dunkin' Donuts and enjoy a cuppa without having something to read - thank goodness for newspaper machines!

Actually, I usually carry a sudoku book in my car so that I can work on a puzzle while eating.  I'm getting most of my news nowadays from the internet, with a smattering from more traditional outlets, primarily radio.  I try to keep the television turned off because even if it's just tuned to the news, it winds up attracting and distracting me, and I'm learning that life's far too short to lose any of it tied to the idiot box.

I never understood why it was a curse, "May you live in interesting times."  I think all times have been interesting at least since the discovery and colonization of the New World.  Our times today are intensely interesting, and here in the United States, the changes we're going through while we struggle to maintain our position as leader of the free world ensure that life is never boring!

Living in the Atlanta metro area, I hear a great deal of the regional Big Four: Neal Boortz, Clark Howard, Sean Hannity and Herman Cain.  Sometimes I'll listen to Michael Savage in the evenings - he's a smart and clever man, but when he goes off on politics and political issues, he sometimes gets to be too full of himself and I'll turn him off.

Don't misunderstand - there's no way you could call me a conservative, although I have a number of libertarian beliefs.  I just think it's important to hear what the other side (the cons) are saying.  And I've got a friend who listens to Sean Hannity on the ride home because, as he puts it, "the man makes my blood boil, but at least I won't fall asleep driving home!"

There are a number of things I want to share here.  Obviously, the pressing issues that face our nation demand comment because it's our responsibility as citizens to participate, and vigorously, in the ongoing national debate.  But there are many other things about life that make it worth living and those things deserve attention as well, things like cooking and eating, reading, fishing and canoeing . . . and trying to shape the world while raising children in it.

I love life, and I love where we're living, even as much as I love the town I grewup in for a while (New York City).  I love Pennsylvania, where I went to high school, and Connecticut, where I attended college.  I've been blessed to visit more than forty states in the course of my life, to see their sights and meet their people, and I know that there's more than enough beauty and greatness there to keep a sould busy without ever setting foot beyond our nation's borders.

Thanks for your kind attention.  I hope that over time I can provide a thought-provoking blog here that'll encourage you to visit often and share your thoughts.