JayB

So you don't know. Compelling accusation you haven't made. 99.999% of mostly rural counties are subsidized by folks from the big city so it isn't a stretch to strongly suspect you belong to that list. we already know that you like to pay as little as you can for labor irrespective of whether it constitutes a living wage. As long as less comes out of your pocket you couldn't give a shit about anybody else. What - exactly - constitutes a living wage? What should happen when that wage exceeds the amount of revenue that the people who receive it actually generate for their employers? If the employer can't price his goods or services at a level that can sustain pay above a given wage level - that is, pass the expenses along to his or her customers - what happens to the employee and the business that he's employed by?

You are lying. Public employees earn less than private sector employees. There is no alternative but to pay people a living wage. This claim is never borne out by studies that actually add in the value of total benefits, much less those that account for the value of a particular skillset being employed in a particular job function. Per these ludicrous studies, someone with a BS in electrical engineering from a top-tier school, that actually works somewhere designing computer chips is put in the same basket as someone with a BA in sociology that works feeding documents into a scanner. "Look - when you don't account for the fact that this person with a sociology degree works a straight 40 hour week, or the value of all of their benefits, and pretend that a private employer would pay someone who feeds documents into a scanner the same as someone who works in chip design...public employees are underpaid." Ditto for all of the other credentials that are held by folks in the public sector that have absolutely zero capacity to enhance earnings in the private sector. What, exactly, does a PhD in Education get you in the private sector? How about a master's in Teaching? The only class of public employees that surveys that actually incorporate half-decent controls show make less than their private sector counterparts are people with professional degrees or qualifications that there's an actual market for in the private sector. Even here that's probably only true for MD's, JD's, RN's, and a smattering of engineers. I salute these folks, but no one was or is putting a gun to their head, and when and if they decide the compensation the public is offering them is inadequate, they can and should leave. If their vacancies can't be filled, we should pay more - in the form of higher salaries that show up immediately on public balance sheets as opposed to detonating decades later in the form of massive pension shortfalls.

You're totally right. First and foremost, socio-economic status in society should be predetermined by hereditary birth lottery. Even if it were possible to arrange reality so that everything from IQ to a loving, stable home, to looks and talent were completely normalized by some arbitrary formula - the aggregated choices of individuals responding to their own needs and desires would result in a situation in which some people in some occupations earned dramatically more than others. And this distribution would constantly be changing. The distribution at any particular time, and the changes from that point will always be perceived as unfair relative to some arbitrary standard or merit or virtue. I'm sure that the buggy whip and candle-stick makers felt that society owed them a certain standard of living, and thought that the demand-driven redistribution of income to people in the light-bulb and auto industries was a terrible injustice that warranted an indefinite public commitment to maintaining their incomes with taxes paid by others. Thankfully there wasn't, and the declining wages and jobs in the candle-stick sector sent a useful signal to others that society didn't have much use for what they were making, and they moved on to other occupations where they were making a good or service that people actually wanted or needed.

Arguing that some abstract definition of rank or merit should entitle someone to a pre-determined socio-economic status in society pretty much puts you in the same camp as social conservatives who can't cope with the fact that when people are free to spend their money as they please, pornographers tend to out-earn priests.

6', 165. My ex-wife was is a raw-food psycho. Looks like we actually have something in common after all. Let's hope not. It didn't end well for me. Big red flag. Seems to be a marker for a certain incapacity to engage in critical thinking and a tendency to make impulsive commitments to whatever transient obsessions happens to catch their fancy. I've also noticed that significant others pretty much also have to at least feign the same commitment to or find themselves cast as part of the sinister forces that they've dedicated themselves to fighting against. There's plenty of room for folks that don't fit that generalization, but on par with religious fundamentalism on the red-flag score board IMO.

Actually, there's another option, when wages offered together with prevailing working conditions fail to attract qualified candidates. The state can/does hire poorly qualified candidates. Not long ago, a local school district posted three teaching positions for high-school mathematics. Precisely three applied, and three were hired. Each had earned a bachelor’s degree, not one in mathematics. Not one was even minimally qualified according to state standards to teach secondary mathematics. In fact, not one was licensed by the state to teach. Yet they were hired. I guess they had a pulse and a temperature, and via some “emergency” clause, they joined the force, with the understanding they would begin work on certification. One guy made it beyond the first year. Friday at lunch some members of his department explained to him how to solve the equation log(10^x)=3. I agree with the theory….let the free market (the labor market) dictate wages. If only that were the way it worked, I’d probably be making double my salary. Then I could give up my second job, and I probably wouldn’t have to pay a health care premium for my family equal to almost half my mortgage. Not a problem when seeking to fill a social-studies vacancy, I'd wager. I've always argued that it was ludicrous to pay all teachers the same salary, irrespective of their qualifications. Unfortunately for you, and the students, the teacher's unions have always insisted on paying people with a B.S. in Physics the same as those with a B.A. in Physical Education. I'm glad that there are qualified people like yourself who chose to go into teaching, but am not optimistic that your status as a relative anomaly will be going away any time soon. Not a prayer of that happening until there's massive reform of the entire sector of the kind that the free-market wackos running....Sweden...imposed a few years ago.

So...why aren't the folks at Microsoft, who also lack collective bargaining privileges also working for Walmart wages? Ditto for everyone else in the private labor market that earn higher total compensation than Walmart offers its retail employees, which are higher than the retail average. If collective bargaining is what determines wages rates, why isn't the pay for the store manager the same as the greeter's?

The political leadership is in quite a bind. The crisis is systemic, it is global, and it is occurring simultaneously, if unevenly. Politicians by definition are bound by their respective nations or states, and those in turn are bound to the dictates of the capitalist global economy. Hence you see what's outlined in the article above: competitive devaluation, a race to the bottom in terms of labor costs, and keeping the bond markets happy so you can borrow more money. All this is simply to maintain even the sickliest of growth rates. In democratic states, maintaining power means selling this to the electorate either through inciting ideological class warfare or invoking the slightly less distasteful, if essentially identical "there is no alternative" or "we're all in this together". What isn't addressed is how intensifying the dynamics already driving us to stagnation: budget cuts, cuts in wages and benefits, jobs, and services and the multiplier effect from these, is going to stimulate the economic growth that's necessary to maintain stability in our political systems. There is a strange schizophrenic separation in the current narratives that suggests jobs and growth are separate issues from the politics of austerity and debt reduction. Obama's only begun to touch on this with the "invest in the future" stuff which capitalists should be rejoicing over but as most economists would tell you would be a drop in the bucket even if America's teabagging jihadis weren't hellbent on taking us back to the 18th century. No, I don't think our politicians do know. For those who are interested in problem solving, Keynesian stimulus is essentially off the table either due to the Democrat's own shift to the right or the intractable political climate. For others, problem solving simply isn't part of the equation, those are the obfuscators, obstructionists, and petty kleptocrats who're either ideologues or they're filling their frat brothers' pockets or both (see Burlusconi). For them, maintaining power simply means appealing to the electorate's reptilian fear and pleasure centers in varying measure in what's now a permanent campaign season. In term's of strategy, I'm not sure I buy the notion that Obama and the Dems are on "our side". If they are, they need to mobilize their base, go on the offensive, change the trajectory of the story that's being told. They've done well when they paint the opposition into a moral corner as with the extension of unemployment benefits but have rolled over to the rigged cat food commission on its suggestions. They done plenty of "messaging" with regards to the budget balancing crap (as the New York Times interactive feature showed us). The framework we're being provided is short sighted groping in the dark for pols with short term ambitions. The stakes are higher than they know. Whether they're "problem solvers" or not, politicians should be recognizing that the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere are about bread, butter, and jobs not religious fervor. Keynesianism's done wonders for Japan. How does a Keynesian account for the massive economic expansion that occurred in the immediate wake of WWII when public spending as a percentage of GDP dropped by something like a factor of 5 and millions of servicemen returned to the private labor force all at once? "When this war comes to an end, more than one out of every two workers will depend directly or indirectly upon military orders. We shall have some 10 million service men to throw on the labor market. We shall have to face a difficult reconversion period during which current goods cannot be produced and layoffs may be great. Nor will the technical necessity for reconversion necessarily generate much investment outlay in the critical period under discussion whatever its later potentialities. The final conclusion to be drawn from our experience at the end of the last war is inescapable--were the war to end suddenly within the next 6 months, were we again planning to wind up our war effort in the greatest haste, to demobilize our armed forces, to liquidate price controls, to shift from astronomical deficits to even the large deficits of the thirties--then there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced." That's from Paul Samuelson's "Full Employment After the War," published in 1943.

More historical denialism from Laissez Faire boy: public workers without collective bargaining rights were systematically fired when they tried to improve their conditions by demonstrating, striking, etc .. it's well known that pay scale, working conditions, etc... in non-union, "right-to-work" states is conditioned by working conditions in neighboring states where workers have collective bargaining. Dickensian squalor already exists in many industries where collective bargaining is denied. Yes - we've all seen the starving public sector workers milling about the ruins of the administrative buildings in the wake of rulings that don't allow them to bargain collectively... If wages and working conditions in the public sector become comparatively less attractive than options outside of the public sector, state and local governments won't be able to attract and retain the staff with the skills necessary to deliver public services and they'll have to respond by increasing wages or improving working conditions. It's not like people working in the public sector have been forcibly conscripted and locked in fenced compounds. Presumably the reason they're working in the public sector because the tangible and intangible benefits of doing were more appealing than the alternatives available to them in the private sector. If the tangible and intangible benefits of working for the public sector are no longer satisfactory - they can and should leave. If enough public sector employees do so and the state or municipality can't fill the position at the same wage and benefit level, then the state will have to....increase the wages and benefits until they are sufficient to attract a replacement. Where is the nightmare scenario here?

Kidding about what?

Are you seriously suggesting that workers were treated just fine back then, and had the full recourse of law behind them to deal with mistreatment? Do you really believe that? Do you have evidence of systematic abuse of non-unionized public employees before they were granted collective bargaining rights at the state and federal level? How about in the states like Virginia that don't grant public employee unions collective bargaining rights? Is the state falling apart? Hovels full of assistant file secretary IV's and public diversity liaison III's living in Dickensian squalor via the depredations of the state's avaricious and cruel electorate?

There's no employment crisis that central planning can't make worse. Transferring resources to the unemployed to help them stay afloat and letting employment expand wherever the real growth actually occurs is a much better option than having a central committee attempt to predict the future and borrow to make massive investments in a particular sector in anticipation of demand that may never actually materialize.

1. I personally love hearing the folks hearken back to the nightmarish days before collective bargaining, when the only thing standing between public employees and grievous exploitation by a rapacious electorate and their representatives was the full suite of civil service code protections, plus the full complement of legal and statutory protections available to workers in the private sector. 2. Kind of amusing to reflect back on the original progressive movement's campaigns against corruption, waste, graft, and inefficiency in government and contrast it with the priorities of today's progressives. Boss Tweed would have a much more congenial relationship with the progressive activists of today.

I've actually advocated liberalizing the health care market quite a bit before - and don't think that anyone working within it should have the government jacking up their wages. As a class doctors are no different than anyone else, and if they can profit by constraining the supply of physicians - as a class they'll do so. I'm all for eliminating barriers that are designed to keep qualified foreign doctors from practicing in the US, and for maximizing price transparency in medicine in general.

yes. seem to recall something very simliar to this in texas a bunch of years back? That was a fight over who got to rig the game of redrawing the congressional districts to favor their own party.

Yes - absolutely. The fact that that there's a soviet-style medical price setting body embedded in the public sector in the first-place is insane, and the fact that it's composed of doctors is even crazier. The RBRVS has lead to massive distortions in to the incentive structure that physicians respond to, and is one of the primary factors driving the shortage of primary care physicians in the US. Ditto for the process of determining how many residencies are available in what specialities, etc, etc, etc. Doing away with the central planning apparatus would mean that some types of physicians would make more money, and others would make less - but I don't think that the government should be engaged in perpetuating distortions that allow them to earn more than they would otherwise. Same as any other profession.

BTW - how do you personally define the classes here? There are those who gain from their capacity to use collective bargaining to extract more compensation from the public treasury and there are those who lose via public sector service delivery that is more expensive and less cost-efficient than it would be otherwise, but that's about it.

Wonder if Intrade has a line on this one yet...

Yeah, more quixotic horseshit. "We must first eliminate the State and then..." Put your money where your mouth is on eliminating subsidies by backing efforts to reduce corporate influence over our political process or STFU. Eliminating the state is something quite different than attenuating the incentives for rent-seeking. Speaking of which - quite an impressive display of that going on today in Madison. Unionized public sector patronage networks can clearly give private commercial interests a run for their money when someone threatens their preferred rent-extraction mechanism.

I've never really dirtbagged but after encountering a few folks that have I do have a few thoughts. The first would be to realize that for all but a handful of people, dirtbagging is going to be a transient phase in your life and it's best to have a plan for what you are going to do afterwards. The people that seemed to get the most out of the experience and were able to maintain the carpe diem mentality while living out of their cars knew they'd be heading off to grad/professional school, starting an apprenticeship for a skilled trade, etc at some pre-determined date and this seemed to make them wicked motivated to get after it as much as possible before re-joining the real world. The second group of folks who seemed to have it wired were people who had more or less figured out what they wanted to do and were dirt-bagging during a sabbatical from a career they enjoyed, and which enabled them to sock away a stash of cash beforehand that made life much more pleasant while playing the dirtbag game. I knew a guy who spent 2-3 months in J-Tree doing the whole dirtbag thing - all the way to dumpster diving for food and getting 1/2 of his calories from the stuff that the local bakery tossed out after it had sat on the shelf for a couple of days - who had enough cash socked away to cover the mortgage on his 400K home, health insurance, etc while he was out doing the minimalist living thing. When it was time to come home and his head gasket blew on the trip back - he had the cash set aside to swipe his card and cover it without sweating the bill. While he was there he ran into more than a few people who literally had no money for food, gas, etc and were making the rounds trying to sell all of their gear to get a ride home, scrounge up enough money to take their dog to the vet, etc, etc. I know what position I'd rather be in, but YMMV. If all of the above is a bunch of quasi-philosophical yammering that you could do without and you're looking for technical knowhow on the ins and outs of day-to-day dirtbagging, I totally understand. Here's a previous thread to help you out. http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/837896/

Opposition from established wealthy communities to rail service? Georgetown and Metro being a shining example - it doesn't have a stop because they didn't want the poor. Various uppity Bay Area subs (Palo Alto, etc) who oppose high speed rail being secondary. Wealth follows public trans in America, not vice versa Couldn't agree more.

you clearly don't ride the bus very often. hyperbolic blowhard. I don't ride the bus because I commute by bike. I've walked or biked to work or school for all but three years since 1992, so I see your eco-righteousness and raise you a dozen worn out chainrings. What percentage of Metro ridership is below the poverty line? How about on The Sounder and the S.L.U.T. I ride past the S.L.U.T. every day, and when all 20 tons of it aren't almost completely empty on off-peak hours, it's filled with people that work for Microsoft, Amazon, and whoever else has operations in SLU..

It sure is, but it's no excuse to claim that Islam as a whole is worse than judeo-chritianity based on rhetorical hypocrisy about 'suicide bombers' and 'collateral damage', and big fucking blank in response to the historical record of who used terror, and of colonial-imperialism in the ME. It's not just the slaughter of non-Muslims, it's the entire apparatus of intimidation and repression that has been perpetuated in the name of Islam for centuries, and it's clearly Muslims themselves who have and will continue to bear the brunt of the suffering meted out by Islamists via the death-penalty for apostasy, etc, etc, etc. Even if Islamists hadn't engaged in a single act of aggression against anyone outside of their borders/faith there'd still be plenty for any principled liberal to criticize.

What evidence do you have to suggest that plotting rail-based mass transit routes has anything to do with the transportation needs of poor people? If anything, the study that you linked suggests a tendency for rail transit to price them out of neighborhoods that are in close proximity to rail lines. When push comes to shove, as it has with Metro - service is the first thing that gets cut. If getting poor people from point A to point B was the foremost priority, just the opposite would happen. It's much easier to understand the priorities that actuate the development and maintenance of public mass transit operations as a heavily unionized patronage network with benefits that aggregate primarily to the non-poor than a means of helping poor people getting too and from work.

Love the fact that you keep trotting this argument out despite the fact that Tawfik Hamid, Ayan Hirsaan Ali, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, have articulated precisely the same arguments. While they are in the distinct minority, the incredibly weak geographic/experiential variant of the ad hominem that you keep rolling out over and over again simply doesn't apply to any of them. Don't give up on that one though! I'm looking forward to equally compelling arguments like "Have *you* ever been beheaded? Well then, you're clearly in no position to make an informed argument against beheading then, are you, hotshot..." Keep them coming. How about applying that one to clitorectomy, etc....?