Public Pension Millionaires

[vinoveri]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Let a person put his allegiances with his neighbors instead of some billionaire right winger and he's a liberal. Let that person use words accurately and cite actual historical events instead of ideology and propaganda, he's a leftist. If he seeks to advance the interests of his neighbors and families and communities through action and solidarity, he's a socialist. And if he can name even a few of the people whose power and interests are served by setting his neighbors and communities at war with each other, he's a communist.

Oh, woods, interesting, if only it were all true ... sorry friend, although I know a lot of "locals" who may fit those descriptions and they're better friends than most, those lefties in positions of power, academies and politics, couldn't give a rats ass about anything but their own neighbors and friends (I know you know that), their own positions of influence and perpetuating their own worn-out and mistaken ideas - they all want to "rule the world" after all and the sad thing is, they really believe they are capable.

I'll add to yours of thinking with the contrary if you don't mind -
Let a person seek liberty, the right to assemble with whom she please, speak as he pleases, be left alone to pursue her happiness and he is a right wing, racist, sexist, homophobic, generally oppressive ignoramus pawn of the right. Let a person not assent to the current secular dogma, not embrace centralized top down control from the benevolence of our gifted intellectuals and politcos, question in the least the tenets and dictates of the EPA, NEA, etc. and she is dumb right wing conservative christian barefoot and pregnant perpetuating a culture of ignorance and must be saved from her self.

I hope we can agree on this: no one is above the law and the law should apply equally to all and the test of the validity of any law is equity and justice

Orwell's animal farm is the best parody on this idea disabusing one from the silly notion that somehow a top-down government system can result in justice and liberty

[Woodsman]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Let a person seek liberty, the right to assemble with whom she please, speak as he pleases, be left alone to pursue her happiness and he is a right wing, racist, sexist, homophobic, generally oppressive ignoramus pawn of the right.

Let a person not assent to the current secular dogma, not embrace centralized top down control from the benevolence of our gifted intellectuals and politcos, question in the least the tenets and dictates of the EPA, NEA, etc. and she is dumb right wing conservative christian barefoot and pregnant perpetuating a culture of ignorance and must be saved from her self.

I know, vino, the poor oppressed right wingers. When is the right going to be recognized for its brave, unflinching and selfless advocacy of the status quo and the status quo ante? When is the country going to finally understand that the only way it can save itself from certain doom and damnation is to embrace the far right and it's 5th century understanding of the state, the church and the individual!

It's a shame we can't just miracle our way back to the golden age when all these gays and blacks and poors would just suffer in silence and let the natural aristocrats rule as God intended. But fear not, the oligarchs you worship are busy getting the 1890s back for you. Any day now.

[vinoveri]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

you sir are a master of indirection and have a great talent for selectively honing in on nuances you can leverage with your sarcastic 'self evident' rhetoric and ignoring the larger point; Same old tired tactics huh, non-sequiturs, ad hominems, downright bullying, and if those don't work, ignore and shout louder through the bull horn

[Woodsman]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

you sir are a master of indirection and have a great talent for selectively honing in on nuances you can leverage with your sarcastic 'self evident' rhetoric and ignoring the larger point; Same old tired tactics huh, non-sequiturs, ad hominems, downright bullying, and if those don't work, ignore and shout louder through the bull horn

Naw, right wingers just don't like it when they meet someone who isn't cowed by them or baffled by their bovine scatology.

[jpatter666]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

I know, vino, the poor oppressed right wingers. When is the right going to be recognized for its brave, unflinching and selfless advocacy of the status quo and the status quo ante? When is the country going to finally understand that the only way it can save itself from certain doom and damnation is to embrace the far right and it's 5th century understanding of the state, the church and the individual!

It's a shame we can't just miracle our way back to the golden age when all these gays and blacks and poors would just suffer in silence and let the natural aristocrats rule as God intended. But fear not, the oligarchs you worship are busy getting the 1890s back for you. Any day now.

There is a difference between oligarchs and the guy just wishing for a level playing field and to be essentially left alone. Just as there is a difference between my friends who honestly yearn and work for social justice and holier-than-thou fanatics who insult and demonize everyone who doesn't kowtow to their thinking.

[vinoveri]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Naw, right wingers just don't like it when they meet someone who isn't cowed by them or baffled by their bovine scatology.

Bravo, you continue to elevate (or perhaps defecate is better term) the discussion and thank you for so readily providing evidence confirming my hypothesis.

[Woodsman]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Bravo, you continue to elevate (or perhaps defecate is better term) the discussion and thank you for so readily providing evidence confirming my hypothesis.

You have an argument, vino, or are you just going to keep whining?

[jk]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

it's time for more decorum here, folks. this is rapidly deteriorating and ever less edifying.

[shiny!]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

it's time for more decorum here, folks. this is rapidly deteriorating and ever less edifying.

AGREED! When post after post is laden with snark and insults, well, if I wanted that I'd be at Zerohedge, not iTulip.

[lektrode]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

rising property values don't lead to increased tax revenues because mill rates are adjusted to the new tax roll to be adequate to fund the town budget. it's the budget process and the cowardice of politicians that push taxes up.

as hudson points out, the financialization of the economy and the gov't sponsored subsidization of mortgage debt leads to increased interest revenue for the fire sector, while undercutting the ability of people to pay taxes to support proper infrastructure.

+1
at least we HOPE that "adequate" suffices - but usually what happens is they (in some places) tend to view increased valuations as an excuse for MORE MORE MORE (that typically favors those on the receiving end)

while the public sector unions + the political class on one particular side of the aisle panders to ever smaller slivers of the electorate to buy their 51.8% margin of 'victory' (after selling out/caving to/bailing-out the highest bidder - who holds The Rest of Us, particularly retirees, HOSTAGE and ransoms our future for THEIR profits and political influence TODAY

it's time for more decorum here, folks. this is rapidly deteriorating and ever less edifying.

yep...

its interesting tho - the diff in POV of those who ARENT on some .gov teat/payroll/gravytrain/insider track and those who (apparently) are and the type of info-flow/reading they pay attention to and how it influences their thinking/outlook - i mean, i'm a self-employed/business-oriented type of media consumer - so i'm typically interested more in what the business media (ok, the finance bullhorn) has to say - vs what/how the 'social activist' oriented media wants to portray things - not that i think the all-biz/all the time media is all the truth/all the time - but at least it focuses on stuff that tends to enhance business and job creation vs more .gov-dependent teat suckers who all seem to think that MORE MORE MORE (for them on the teat) is The Only Way 'forward'

take this piece, for instance - and consider what its saying to those of us who ARENT being buffaloed by their BS - and while i think taxes are too low (for the top... pick a % above 10x per capita), the social safety net needs to be maintained/strenghthened (by increasing the cap on FICA) - i also think the current occupants DONT HAVE A CLUE ON WHAT TO DO NEXT (beyond bailing out their buddies in lwr manhattan, pandering to their 'base' in the 'diversity' camp and showering the crony class with hundreds of billions for pie-in-the-sky energy scams) - to ENHANCE JOB CREATION AND PROSPERITY (for more than the teat suckers, on BOTH ends of the spectrum tween the
.gov-dependent and the .gov-enabled)

Why Can't the Left Govern?

The Left can win elections. Why can't it run a government?

March 26, 2014 7:12 p.m. ET


Surveying the fall in support for the governments of Barack Obama, New York City's progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio and France's Socialist President François Hollande, a diagnosis of the current crisis begins to emerge: The political left can win elections but it's unable to govern.


Once in office, the left stumbles from fiasco to fiasco. ObamaCare, enacted without a single vote from the opposition party, is an impossible labyrinth of endless complexity. Bill de Blasio's war on charter schools degenerated into an unseemly attack on poor New York minority children. François Hollande's first act in 2012, like a character in a medieval fable, was to order that more tax revenue be squeezed from the French turnips.


Mr. Obama's approval rating is about 43%, Mr. de Blasio's has sunk to 45% after just two months in office, and Mr. Hollande hit the lowest approvals ever recorded in the modern French presidency. The left inevitably says their leaders failed them. The failure looks self-inflicted.


Three European academics asked themselves recently how 19 United Nations summit meetings have been unable to produce a treaty on global warming. Why the cause of climate change has fallen apart is described in "Melting Summits," a paper and cautionary tale just published in the Academy of Management Journal by Elke Schüssler of Germany, Charles Clemens Rüling of France and Bettina Wittneben of the U.K.


No idea in our time has had deeper political support. Al Gore and John Kerry have described disbelievers in global warming as basically idiots—"shoddy scientists" in Mr. Kerry's words. But somehow, an idea with which "no serious scientist disagrees" has gone nowhere as policy. The collapse of the U.N.'s 2009 Copenhagen climate summit was a meltdown for the ages.


In an interview with the Academy of Management about her paper, Bettina Wittneben of Oxford University, who supports a climate-change treaty and has attended 13 climate meetings, summarized the wheel-spinning: "Sometimes I just find myself shaking my head after talking to participants in recent COPs [the U.N.'s climate meetings]. They'll come back from the meetings simply brimming with enthusiasm about the networking they've done, the contacts they've made, the new ideas about their research they had or the new angles to lobbying they thought of. But ask what progress was made in terms of global policy initiatives, and all you get is a shrug."


Put differently, it's not about doing something serious about global warming. It's really all about them (a virus threatening American conservatism as well). The "them" at the U.N. summits included not just the participating nations but a galaxy of well-financed nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs.
They travel under their own acronyms. The environmentalists are ENGOs, the trade unions are TUNGOS, indigenous peoples are IPOs, business and industry are BINGOs and women, gender and youth groups are YOUNGOs.


These are the left's famous change agents. The authors dryly describe what they actually do as "field maintenance." Instead of being "catalysts for change," they write that "more and more actors find COP participation useful for their purposes, but their activity is increasingly disconnected from the issue of mitigating climate change."


And little wonder. The failed efforts to get the global-warming treaty done reflect the issue's departure from anything practical. It's impossible to read this history of global warming's demise without hearing resonances of ObamaCare's problems.


The text of the climate-change treaty at Copenhagen in 2009 included "thousands of 'brackets,' or alternative wordings." A participant described the puzzle palace: "There are more and more parallel processes, and everything must be negotiated at the same time. The number of . . . negotiation issues has increased and many of these issues . . . are discussed in different places at the same time. . . . Very few people understand the whole thing." Maybe they could just pass it to find out what's in it.


One organization specialist calls this phenomenon "social deadlock." ObamaCare is social deadlock. But the American left keeps doing it. This isn't the 1930s, and smart people on the left might come to grips with the fact that the one-grand-scheme-fits-all compulsion is out of sync with the individualization that technology lets people design into their lives today.


Rather than resolve the complexities of public policy in the world we inhabit, the left's default is to simply acquire power, then cram down what they want to do with one-party votes or by fiat, figuring they can muddle through the wreckage later. Thus the ObamaCare mandates. Thus candidate de Blasio's determination, cheered on by the city's left-wing establishment, to jam all its kids through an antique public-school system. The ObamaCare mandates are a mess, and the war on charter schools is an embarrassment.


Making the unworkable work by executive decree or court-ordered obedience is one way to rule, and maybe they like it that way. But it isn't governing.


Write to henninger@wsj.com

[lektrode]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

There is a difference between oligarchs and the guy just wishing for a level playing field and to be essentially left alone. Just as there is a difference between my friends who honestly yearn and work for social justice and holier-than-thou fanatics who insult and demonize everyone who doesn't kowtow to their thinking.

+1
but that doesnt mean we want anybody to just shutup/go away (woody) - altho the back n forth on stuff that will never be 'settled' does get old/tiresome - esp all the dredging up of the 1960's issues - that no matter how much gets spent, no matter how many new policies (with all their unintended consequences, usually landing on those who were intended to be helped) - while the political class just keeps twisting their heads 360degrees around saying whatever they have to, to whomevah they have to, to get re-elected and to hell with actually accomplishing much of anything else (unless the party in power benefits) sides re-arranging the deck chairs and feathering their own nests

[leegs]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

it's time for more decorum here, folks. this is rapidly deteriorating and ever less edifying.

Yes it is, and it's even more shameful because the perpetrators are people that I know from their other contributions here to be smart, knowledgeable, articulate, and even (sometimes) fair.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Woodsman - how about some data .......

It’s easy to conclude there isn’t any real data out there.



Iraq and gulf wars cost 2 to 6 trillion.

Unfunded public pension obligations 1 to 4.4 trillion

Gain/loss to taxpayers after TARP plus 10 billion to minus 3.8 trillion.

Actual corporate tax rate 8 - 29 percent

People paying federal taxes 45 – 95 percent

[vt]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Unfunded State pensions $4.1 Trillion

http://reason.com/archives/2013/09/0...trillions-in-u


Unfunded federal pensions $761 billion

http://www.federaltimes.com/article/...ties-skyrocket


Unfunded Social Security and Medicare is $106 trillion

http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/A_Bleak_Future.pdf



Total federal debt is $17.4 trillion

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current

How will be fund all this?

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Public Pension Millionaires

Exactly what I'm saying. The definition of unfunded has been trashed.

Seems like you are a little low. Many websites list unfunded federal pensions + SS at way over 200 trillion, some go to 300.