As the Occupy Wall Street movement starts to sputter and annoy people, a recent announcement by New York University pretty much sums it up.

New York University is introducing two classes for credit studying the Occupy Wall Street movement. The undergraduate course will be offered through the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. The course will be titled, “Why Occupy Wall Street? The History and Politics of Debt and Finance.” Another professor will offer a graduate level seminar on the demonstration.

In a previous post, I wrote about Charles Murray’s speech on the state of post-secondary education. His main thesis was that employer’s have no idea the value of a degree today, because of all the nonsensical courses that are being offered. So having a degree is often meaningless. He pointedly remarked that the attractiveness of a Yale degree has nothing to do with what the student learned at Yale, but rather that as an eighteen-year old he was able to get into Yale, meaning that there had to be some raw material there to work with.

So the protestors take to the street to complain that they can’t get a job and blame it on Wall Street. They leave college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and no way to pay it off. When a potential employer looks at the applicant’s transcript and sees two courses on Occupy Wall Street, what conclusions does the employer draw with regard to hiring that employee? Couldn’t the applicant have taken Advanced Statistics instead? You decide. Oh, by the way, there aren’t any courses that I am aware of that teach about the Tea Party Movement. Maybe it’s because most Tea Party protestors already have jobs.

 
That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Groundbreaking? Earth shattering? Paradigm shift? What is the right word or phrase to describe what just happened in Colorado where a local school district implemented a school voucher program where any student can go to any school and the money will follow them.

This was not done by the state legislature. It was not done by Washington bureaucrats. It is instead a free market solution to a nagging problem of not enough competition to keep schools on top of their game and work hard to attract students (and funding) rather than sitting back, raising taxes, protecting incompetent teachers, and not rewarding good ones. Despite all the union blather about being for the children, this is a masterstroke that will actually empower parents and their children to get the best education available where they live.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7QRV4sSHdc

I hope this spreads like wildfire and we can then get serious about shutting one of President Carter’s legacies, the Department of Education which has accomplished little with the over one trillion dollars they have spent since the deparment was created. Expect a massive counter attack from the teachers’ unions because if this takes hold schools will not be able to afford putting a sub-par teacher in your child’s classroom. It will also enable teachers to negotiate individual employment agreements based on what they bring to the job and let them truly be treated as professionals, not assembly line workers.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

When did the distortions start? Was it with Officer Crowley and the Cambridge Police Deparment “acting stupidly”? Was it with the distortions over ObamaCare? How about dressing down the Supreme Court while the camera catches Samuel Alito saying “not true”. His assault on Paul Ryan’s budget blueprint after inviting Congressman Ryan to come hear his speech, brings to mind Joe Wilson’s outburst, “You Lie!” during another Obama address in Congress. It is becoming all to common to hear the lies and distortions from this president, but they keep coming. The good news is that Congressman Ryan is not afraid to counterpunch.

Congressman Ryan takes apart the president’s speech on his budget proposal and injects some truth into the debate. Let us not forget it was President Obama who proposed a budget and without so much as a debate, pulled it back and submitted another. It is still too much spending for too long. The economy is crawling back when, by now, it should be roaring back. But regardless, at least let’s have an honest debate.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR7dBVM5NvQ&feature=player_embedded#at=140

Now it is time to address the debt limit and some serious scaling back of spending. Congressman Ryan’s budget would be a good start coupled with a Balanced Budget Amendment, because one Congress cannot bind another Congress to its actions. Only a Balanced Budget Amendment would put the discipline in place that we must have.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Score one for Mr. Boehner. He has been getting lambasted by conservatives for being had on the 2011 budget deal he negotiated. But if you dig a little deeper you can find a nugget of gold.

As part of the budget deal Boehner got the Democrats and President Obama to sign off on not only keeping but expanding the school voucher program in the District of Columbia. Why is that a big deal? Well, two reasons. Between 1990 and 2010 the two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have donated over $50 million to Democrats while giving $2.2 million to Republicans. Republicans overwhelmingly support school choice vouchers while Democrats oppose them. The second reason is that currently about one million kids drop out of school every year and 70% of eighth graders cannot read proficiently. A recent study shows that,

that voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91%. That’s significantly higher than the D.C. public school average (56%) and the graduation rate for students who applied for a D.C. voucher but didn’t win the lottery (70%).

It shows that vouchers work. It also shows that it even helps those who are motivated to learn in their traditional schools, it’s not just cherry picking those students who are better than average regardless. The teachers’ unions for all their talk about “being for the children,” are really about the money. Dues money. The teachers’ union doesn’t care any more for the students than the steelworkers’ unions care about the steel. The difference is that the steelworkers are honest about it.

So do we have to wait for another study to prove that vouchers work or can we start graduating students that can do the kind of jobs American companies need to fill without going overseas for talent? Can we now shut down the Department of Education as the dismal failure it is after spending $1 trillion of taxpayer dollars to have one million dropouts a year? Let the free market do what free markets do best. Through competition a better solution is developed. Through government monopoly we have atrophy and failure.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

In the midst of rising gas prices, chaos in the Middle East, President Obama’s muddled energy policy (buy a new hybrid mini-van), we receive reports of a small lizard potentiall bringing oil production in Texas to a standstill. How is that? Yes, the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard is crawling toward the Endangered Species List and when that happens, evolution and the economy stops, just like it did with the Spotted Owl and the timber industry, and a little minnow turning much of the most productive farmland in the country into a dustbowl.

What the hell happened to evolution? Isn’t is supposed to be survival of the fittest? Well, sorry, Mr. Lizard it doesn’t look like your going to make the cut. How about we ship a bunch of you and your closest relatives to the nearest zoo, and let us continue being the fitter species. I thought it wasn’t nice to mess with Mother Nature, but the left seems to have no problem with it.

The left will fight to the death to save a lizard, but insist it is a constitutional right to abort the life of a human being the same size. What a twisted view of life.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

(This is the second of a series of articles focusing on topics presented at the Cato Policy Perspectives 2011 conference held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel on Friday, April 8, 2011)

Kicking off the conference, Ed Crane, president of the Cato Institute, talked about American exceptionalism and how President Obama doesn’t believe in that. To illustrate, he gave the example where while in Europe the president was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, and he hedged by saying he supposed so, just at the Germans believe in German exceptionalism, the British believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. President Obama doesn’t think that America is exceptional and to the extent that he might, he is doing everything in his power to root it out.

The other key point that Mr. Crane made concerned people talking about national goals and aspirations. Nations shouldn’t have goals. People should have goals and nations should protect their right to pursue them. Who wants Washington to set some goals and then have individuals reorder their lives to fit into the grand plan? To me that is the essence of the battle between libertarianism and statism. This is also a nice segue into the Cato presentation on education provided by Charles Murray.

Education

One of the key contributors to American exceptionalism is a well educated work force, and we may be losing that edge. However, Mr. Murray found reasons for optimism. Another point of view I wish to consider was in an article in the Wall Street Journal today by Vint Cerf, one of the real forces behind the Internet.

At a time when we see the tragedy of K-12 education played out in the documentary Waiting for Superman and the pitched battle over public sector unions and teacher tenure in Wisconsin, Mr. Murray’s talk titled. “The Coming Good News About Market Forces and Education,” might seem a bit out of place. He didn’t delve too deeply into K-12 education, other than to say there are a lot more options today than there were in the past, among them: home schooling, charter schools, and vouchers. Mr. Murray’s focus was on post secondary education.

First the bad news:

• The BA degree is no longer a classic liberal education. There are precious few institutions (Murray could name four) that actually provide one.
• He called it a saccharin education with almost anything qualifying as a course. Some of my favorites are: The Stupidity Course at Occidental College (one of Obama’s Alma maters); The science of Harry Potter at Frostburg State University; The Simpsons and Philosophy at UC Berkeley; and Tree Climbing at Cornell University
• It used to be you spent four years getting a BA to mature and grow. In the old days you had a more distant relationship with your professor, more like a supervisor at work. He didn’t care how many other courses you had, he gave you an assignment and he expected you to finish it on time, if you didn’t you failed. Which brought to mind a professor I had at Manhattan College who taught math. His famous saying was, “Engineer build bridge, bridge fall down, no partial credit.” Today that’s not the case. If you miss an exam, you take the makeup test. If you don’t like your grade, you whine to the professor.
• There is now a residence staff at most colleges to do the things parents used to do, so that now four years living at school is just a way of prolonging adolescence.
• He called it a con game
  • You need a degree to get an interview
  • A degree will get you a wage premium over those who don’t have one
  • There is no relationship between a degree and what you actually learned
  • An employer sees a degree and knows two things: one, you have some level of intelligence; two, you have some level of perseverance.
  • A Yale graduate is important not because of what they learned at Yale, but the fact that they got into Yale when they were eighteen speaks to some amount of raw material to work with.

Now the good news.

• Universities were built to support a large library, bring together great minds for scholarship, and enable a large number of students to listen to lectures. Things have changed
• We no longer need a physical library — with the Internet and resources such as Google books you can access a tremendous amount of research material from home.
• Scholarship is now done through collaboration across the world, not across a campus.
• Distance learning works. Why listen to some adjunct give a lecture when you can sit in one room while a Nobel laureate a thousand miles away conducts the lecture?

With the expense of college seeming to be without end the status quo cannot continue. Employers know they are not being served. But there is an enthusiastic group of suppliers ready to provide solutions.

The real course work to learn a skill in college could probably be completed in one and a half to two year, Murray estimates. If a set of certifications could be developed, and Murray cites the CPA exam as an example, that would demonstrate to employers that the applicant before him has actually acquired a set of skills, what more would they need? If similar certifications for marketing, teaching, social work, etc. could be developed a new form of post secondary education might be born. Then the goal of a good education could be about learning how to find what you love and how to pursue it.

Innovation

Vint Cerf has a slightly different take;

Despite our well-developed college and post-college system, America simply is not producing enough of our own innovators, and the cause is twofold—a deteriorating K-12 education system and a national culture that does not emphasize the importance of education and the value of engineering and science.

Perhaps there is a solution in the melding of the two. Our K-12 system produces 1 million dropouts a year and 70% of eighth graders cannot read proficiently. It is broken. We need to put students ahead of job security for teachers and allow talented teachers to receive the economic rewards worthy of their talent. Unions are for just the opposite, protect the inadequate teacher and don’t reward the good teacher as they make the “rest of us” look bad.

But we do need more engineers and scientists. How do we encourage that? First we need to get education out of the hands of Washington. Washington will make sure the solution is bland and ineffective. One of the biggest backers of the creation of the Department of Education was the National Education Association the big education union, so that should tell you something. Let the fifty states come up with competing ideas on how to accomplish this.

Perhaps state schools could offer loans to engineering and science students that would cover whatever financial aid didn’t, in other words a free education. The trade off would be that they had to work in that field in that state. If they did 1/10 of the loan would be forgiven in the first year, 1/9 of the remaining principle and interest would be forgiven in the second year, 1/8 in the third year, such that after ten years, the loan would be fully forgiven. Employers would be attracted to locate near the schools to pick up the talent that graduated. The additional revenue generated from high tech businesses in the state, the income tax revenue from highly paid engineers and scientists coupled with the lower cost of dropouts who end up in prison should make this a cost effective program. All of the capabilities that Charles Murray talked about could be used to form a K-12 to post secondary bond to interest younger students to go into the engineering and science disciplines.

Charles Murray thought this would happen over the next ten to fifteen years. It should a priority to set up sooner. If we fail to act, the replacement for the iPhone won’t just be made in China, it will come from a Chinese company.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Maybe it was because he was trained as a medical doctor that Rand Paul knows that if you are going to lift something heavy you have to bend your knees and keep your back straight. Contrast that to the other members of Congress who stand on tiptoes, with their legs straight, bent at the waist leaning far over and picking through the $1.6 trillion deficit using only their thumb and forefinger, to find some morsel that they can extract from the budget, crying all the while “It’s too heavy, it’s too heavy.”

While Chuck Schumer on one side and John Boehner on the other side squabble over $61 billion to cut versus $4, or $6 or $10 billion to cut, Senator Rand Paul has put on the table $500 billion in cuts and to balance the budget in five years. The progressives are apoplectic. But even with a $500 billion cut there will still be a deficit of $1 trillion. Senator Paul explains:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Y_Dvzng-4

The progressives had no problem spending nearly $ 1 trillion in one year for the failed stimulus program. They had no problem spending nearly $1 trillion for TARP. Nancy Pelosi had no problem adding $5 trillion to the national debt since 2006 where it took over 230 years to accumulate a mere $8 trillion in debt. So why is it impossible to cut $500 billion?

In looking over Senator Paul’s plan (click here to view it), what struck me is the number of areas of the government that are completely ineffective that Senator Paul rightfully says should be eliminated. Some examples:

• Eliminate the Government Printing Office: “In 2010 alone, GPO spent nearly $30 million in taxpayer dollars to provide Congressional offices with the rarely read Congressional Record, and in September they released their first-ever comic book, ‘Squeaks Discovers Type,’ meant to teach children ‘why printing is important.’”
• Eliminate the Agriculture Research Service: “Most American industries fund their own research and development programs. The agriculture industry is a notable exception. USDA spends about $3 billion annually on agricultural research, statistical information services, and economic studies.”
• Eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development: This department has no constitutional basis for existing. “Rather than providing a one-time stop for families on their way out of poverty, public housing has largely been a failure. Public housing projects have become havens of crime and dysfunction, driving away the very business investment and homeowners that would revitalize a city block.”
• Eliminate the Bureau of Reclamation: “Owning a majority block of energy and water resources is not the business of the federal government. Water rights should be controlled by the states and agreements can be made between the states to ensure water supply to all.”
• Eliminate the Bureau of Indian Affairs: “For far too long, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has swindled and mismanaged billions of dollars in Indian trust funds. Former Special Trustee Thomas Slonaker in 2004 testified that the Department of the Interior and the BIA were incapable of reform and were unwilling to hold people accountable for their actions. In addition, Paul Homan also has testified before Congress saying that a “vast majority of upper and middle management at the BIA were incompetent. Instead of wasting taxpayer funds throwing money into a bureau of corruption and incompetency, eliminate them and allow the tribes to manage their own trust funds independently without government intervention.”
• Eliminate the Office of Justice Programs: “The Office of Justice Programs does not directly carry out law enforcement or justice activities, rather OJP performs studies on the pressing crime-related challenges that confront the justice system and provides grants to try and help cities and counties reduce their crime rates. In effect, OJP has evolved into a multi-billion dollar subsidy to the budgets of local governments.” “Each state, county, and city communities and police departments are forced to address many different forms of crime. The federal government can set guidelines on how to address criminal issues, but only the states and local communities can determine what the best way to counter and deter violence and crime.”
• Eliminate Amtrak Subsidies: “Created by an act of Congress in 1970 to provide passenger rail service, Amtrak has yet to turn a yearly profit. During its first 35 years, federal assistance amounted to approximately $30 billion. Yet from FY2007 to FY2010 that number has increased by $7 billion. Of the 44 routes and 21,000 miles of track the trains travel over, only 625 miles are actually owned by Amtrak. Congress has forced freight rail companies to allow Amtrak to use the lines the freight rail companies own and maintain. We need to allow the states to have a greater say in trail service between their cities. To provide better service, Amtrak must learn to make the difficult decisions on routes and coverage to develop a sound business model, which will push them toward becoming profitable.”
• Repeal Davis-Bacon Act (and watch the unions attack): “In 2008, for metropolitan areas, Davis-Bacon prevailing wages rates for all projects were 62.4 percent higher than the average hourly wages reported by the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES). Davis-Bacon forces government contractors to pay wages that are higher than they normally would. These wages increase the cost of the federal construction project, without increasing the labor productivity, quality, or timeliness in completing the project.”
• Affordable Housing Program – Eliminated
• Commission on Fine Arts – Eliminated
• Consumer Product Safety Commission – Eliminated
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting – Eliminated
• National Endowment of Arts – Eliminated
• National Endowment for Humanities – Eliminated
• Privative the Smithsonian Institution – Privatized
• State Justice Institute – Eliminated
• End TARP (how many of you knew it was still going?): “The September 2010 Outlay of TARP funds report put out by Treasury comparing committed amounts and actual disbursements, shows a $87.39 billion savings if no more money was disbursed.”
• Sell Unused Federal Assets: “Of that property the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) claims more than 21,800 federal properties are abandoned assets, which could be sold for approximately $19 billion.

A Top To Bottom House Cleaning

One of the management methods employed in the private sector is called zero based budgeting. What that means is that every year, you don’t take last year’s budget and tack on a growth factor but you take a look at why you continue to do a particular function at all. If you can no longer justify it, you eliminate it. What Senator Paul’s report has uncovered is that we need a complete top to bottom house cleaning of the federal government and leave no corner of the government unexamined with a bright light. It appears there has been too much of “the way we have always done it.” This gets reinforced with the standard progressive argument that the reason any government program doesn’t work is that it wasn’t big enough. If we only expand it to hit that tipping point, all things will be wonderful.

How about this instead: Take out a copy of the Constitution and turn to Article I, Section 8. It starts with, “The Congress shall have the power to…” Take every function of the federal government and match it up against that list. If there is no match, eliminate it. But fear not, all you statist hand wringers, you can have the states or local government step in and choose to continue any program eliminated if they desire. When the people get the bill for those services they can take out their newly sharpened pencils.

In five years, after the Paul plan has balanced the budget and the economy is growing crisply again, federal taxes can be cut to return money to the citizens who have been robbed to sustain these useless and ineffective programs.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.

Candidate Barack Obama said to Joe the Plumber, spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody; he also said, I want to give those coming up behind the same chance you had. It sounds altruistic, caring, full of hope. But if Barack Obama turned and looked over his shoulder he might be surprised to see that there are fewer and fewer people coming up from behind. What he might see is the fear of reckoning for one hundred years of progressive policy and programs. Policy and programs that were sold to allay earlier generations’ fears coupled with the promise that the bill was easily paid and a long way off. But the bill collector is now at the door and the next generation is huddled in the corner with no sign of hope and no confidence that Barack Obama will change anything.

Destroying Public Schools

I had an opportunity to watch the documentary Waiting for Superman that chronicles the hopes of five school children desperately trying to get the education they have a right to from the public school system. Their hopes hinged on winning a lottery for a seat in a charter school.

Ponder these two statistics.

1. Fully 70 percent of eighth-graders are not proficient in reading, and most of them will never catch up. To parents, if their child is failing in their early teen years, it means failure for life.
2. Each year, more than 1 million high school seniors fail to graduate. Everyone understands the consequences of education failure, and this number quantifies that failure in black and white – Research from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation

Kids fall behind and drop out because the feel they are losing ground, they have no future, they have no hope. It is not necessarily because of individual teachers, but because of the system and the system is welded in place by the teachers’ unions.

One of the key elements is teacher tenure. The concept of tenure started in colleges and universities as a way to protect professors from dismissal for political views or controversial positions. It was that tenure would allow independent research and inquiry without fear and reprisal. It was hard for a professor to get tenure. It required years of teaching and surviving a tough vetting process. Tenure was copied by the teachers unions and in most schools all that it requires is to show up and keep breathing for two to three years to have a job for life.

Michelle Rhee, as superintendent of the Washington DC public schools, tried to offer an alternative. She proposed giving teachers a choice. They could choose to keep tenure and their contract would give them a modest raise. Or, they could forego tenure and be eligible for additional merit pay that could double their salary. The teachers union would not even let the proposal come up for a vote.

So  the first reason we need to redistribute the wealth is that we are rapidly producing an underclass that doesn’t choose not to take care of themselves, but is unable to take care of themselves because the progressive movement and teachers unions care more about keeping incompetent teachers employed and paying union dues ahead of educating the children. It is estimated that 80% of our public schools will fall short of the No Child Left Behind goals targeted for 2014. The Obama administrations answer for this is, naturally, to move the goal posts. The program has changed to Most Children Left Behind the Rest of the World. Billy Joel summed it up in one of his songs No Man’s Land:

 I see these children with their boredom and their vacant stares,

God help us all if we’re to blame for their unanswered prayers.

Minimum Wage

Okay so you can’t graduate high school. Maybe you can get an entry level job and learn the ropes from there. What’s  that you say? What the young adult brings to the table isn’t yet worth $7.25 an hour?  Too bad. That is the least amount of money you can be paid by law. It is called the minimum wage.

Earlier this year, economist David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, wrote on these pages that the 70-cent-an-hour increase in the minimum wage would cost some 300,000 jobs. Sure enough, the mandated increase to $7.25 took effect in July, and right on cue the August and September jobless numbers confirm the rapid disappearance of jobs for teenagers.

The September teen unemployment rate hit 25.9%, the highest rate since World War II and up from 23.8% in July. Some 330,000 teen jobs have vanished in two months. Hardest hit of all: black male teens, whose unemployment rate shot up to a catastrophic 50.4%. It was merely a terrible 39.2% in July. – Wall Street Journal, Oct. 3, 2009

In the midst of the most prolonged high level of unemployment since the Great Depression a progressive policy is enhanced that costs 330,000 teen jobs, just as predicted. So first we destroy their education and then we tell them they can’t get a job because they are not skilled enough to earn $7.25. But that’s not all. Local bureaucrats join in the fun.

A 575,000 square foot armory in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx in New York City was given to the city by the National Guard who no longer needed the space. The city tried to find developers for the space and finally succeeded, choosing Related Companies as the developer. The project was to develop retail space and other amenities, create 2200 jobs and invest $300 million in the neighborhood. However, because it came with $17 million in tax breaks to attract a developer it also came with the stipulation that no job could be offered in the space that paid less than $10 per hour plus benefits or $11.50 per hour without benefits. When it was clear that the developer couldn’t get any tenants to bite on the higher minimum wage, the project was killed. The progressives crowed that they stopped a developer who wouldn’t commit to paying a living wage but people in the neighborhood had a different view.

“It’s sitting here and it’s wasting space and a lot of people around here definitely need jobs,” said Joel Bekker, a teacher at Kingsbridge International High School. “We keep talking about raising taxes and paying for the poor, but here’s an opportunity for people to earn their own way.” – New York Post, December 12, 2010

There is another battle I will call the Wal-Mart Wars. Wal-Mart has tried unsuccessfully to open a store in New York City running up against the progressives and the unions every step of the way. Wal-Mart’s tag line is “Save money, live better.”  With all the hubbub about a living wage, you would think that allowing a company that eats, lives, and breaths low prices would be welcomed as a hero to help those living wages go further. But nothing could be further from the truth. Wal-Mart is non-union. Wal-Mart pays low wages but it also touts opportunities for advancement saying that 70% of its managers started out as hourly workers. But that’s not good enough to fit in the progressive mold despite being able to bring jobs to the city and lower prices to the community.

Reason number two for redistribution of wealth is a large number of unemployed, not because they don’t want to work, but because progressives have decided for them the parameters by which they can be hired. You can’t eat, but at least no one’s exploiting you. The progressives have made sure of that.

Crime and Drugs

If you drop out of school uneducated and can’t get a job what do you do? If your morals went the way of your dreams and aspirations you can always turn to crime. Go into the drug business, the money is good while it lasts if you stay one step ahead of the odds. You can walk around flush with cash and if you die young, so what. What else were your prospects?  If you go to jail, at least you get “three hots and a cot,” that is, meals and a bed and free medical care

If a life of crime is not for you, perhaps you can use some drugs as sort of a cheap mini-vacation from your dismal life. That is, of course, until you reach the point where you become addicted to your escape, and then you can check into a new hell hotel.

Reason number three for the distribution of the wealth. If you sign up with the government to redistribute your wealth you may have some level of control over how much that turns out to be. Otherwise you may be negotiating with people who have little regard for your life but a lot of lust for your belongings.

The Forgotten Man

While these and other progressive programs and union initiatives were put in place, who is left with the bill. For those pulling the wagon they are finding it harder because more and more people are riding on the wagon. The forgotten man is handed the bill but has little say in the negotiations. So, should the forgotten man accept this fate or should he fight back?

Education

One of the bargains the forgotten man did agree to was to provide tax dollars in return for a public school system. It benefits all of us if we have an educated work force not predicated on the ability to pay for a private education. But what the forgotten man did not agree to was to provide lifetime employment to teachers without regard to the quality of the education provided to the children in their charge.  

“Every morning in Africa a gazelle awakens knowing it must today run faster than the fastest lion or it will be eaten. Every morning a lion awakens knowing it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It matters not whether you are a gazelle or a lion, when the sun rises you had better be running. – African proverb

The forgotten man wants the teachers to wake up each morning running, not sauntering to the schoolhouse to put in their time.

Right to Work

Everyone should have a right to work and not have to be forced to join a union to hold a job or be told he can’t work for a wage less than some bureaucrat says is fair. It is called individual responsibility. The employer and employee should be able to negotiate over the terms and conditions of employment freely without government interference.

Crime

One of the striking examples illustrated in the documentary Waiting for Superman, was that for the cost of incarcerating a prisoner for four years, you could pay for twelve years of private school and still have money left over for college. It is not about money. It is about freedom. But freedom has a cost and to the unions that cost is stark. They stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in union dues. Here it is in their own words:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwxiRXqH_hQ

Educating our children before giving teachers a comfortable and unchallenged lifetime position is anathema to the teachers unions.

The issue is clear. Either surrender the wealth you have accumulated for your family through your hard work to the progressives, or turn the tide to make our future generations self sufficient and productive. Make no mistake it will be a battle. Are you ready for the fight? If so, let’s get to work.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.

I got an opportunity to watch the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” and it confirmed much of  what I have been saying. Teachers are a national treasure. Teachers’ unions are the new empire of evil. Whoa! That’s harsh. Yes, but not nearly as harsh as flushing thousands of uneducated children into the streets to fend for themselves, when we should be educating them for our future.

The reason I chose the word “evil” is the patent dishonesty the teachers’ unions use to advance their agenda. The steelworkers’ union doesn’t talk about looking out for the steel; they say they are looking out for their members. The United Auto Workers union doesn’t talk about looking out for the cars, they say they are looking out for their members. The Teamsters union doesn’t talk about looking out for the trucks they drive; they say they are looking out for their members. But listen to any pitch from the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers and they are always “fighting for the children.” What utter twaddle. If that is true they should all be horsewhipped for the awful job they are doing. Who are they fighting with? The parents? The taxpayers?  It is a bald faced lie. They are fighting for the teachers and the children be damned.

In New York City, where Mayor Mike Bloomberg has shut down 110 poor performing schools, they are trying a new approach, turning around schools. The experiment would consist of replacing the principal and half the teachers at two schools but keeping the schools and their programs running. Here is the union’s position:

Union leaders might be seen by their rank and file as acquiescing to the replacement of teachers, though those teachers would be entitled to their full salaries and jobs elsewhere in the system. But if those schools were closed, they could be replaced with charter schools, which tend not to be unionized.

That’s the basic union formula, keep incompetent teachers at all costs. They do not want to lose one dollar of union dues and the power that flows from those dues.

In the documentary a bold approach was tried by Michelle Rhee, superintendent of Washington DC public schools perhaps the worst school system in the country, where she proposed a merit pay system where teachers could earn as much as $150,000 a year in return for giving up tenure. The union would not even allow it to come up for a vote. Hmmm…merit pay, rewarding teachers for doing a good job, which means actually educating the children, but the union says, NO! We won’t even vote on that. Can we queue the violins and roll one of the union’s commercials about “the children” now, please.

In New York City they finally shut down the “rubber rooms” where teachers accused of misconduct waited, sometimes as long as three years, for an administrative hearing on their case for dismissal. At the time of closing there were 550 teachers in the rubber rooms costing the city $30 million per year. The teachers in the rubber room continued to receive full salary and their benefits grew with the seniority they accumulated while in the rubber rooms. Psst…it’s for the children.

Another expert in the documentary estimated if only the bottom 5%-8% of teachers could be culled from the schools, the progress improvement would soon put the United States back near the top of the world in educational performance. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if after three years on the job a teacher is guaranteed their job for life, that no matter how motivated, they lose their edge. When the going gets tough, instead of doubling their efforts, they can just say, “the hell with it,” I will get paid whether anyone learns or not, and next year I’ll get a raise.

The counter argument, if they were honest enough to make it, is that the unions are fighting to keep teachers’ jobs in a period of high unemployment. But how many uneducated of our youth will be and remain unemployed for much of their life because of failure factories? Why are high tech companies with jobs crying out for more visas for foreign workers? Because our own schools can’t graduate enough people to do these jobs. This is a national disgrace. Imagine if these children, our children, could graduate high school and actually be able to read and write, put together a coherent sentence, and do basic math.

The solution is not the federal government throwing money at the problem. The federal government should get out of the way. It is the teachers’ unions that are the problem. I ask this question to teachers and no one can seem to answer it. Why would a competent and skilled teacher want to link themselves to an incompetent teacher and be sold to a school district as a package? Anyone? Beuller?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.

It seemed an unlikely place. But then so was Gettysburg. If you asked anyone at about the time the Tea Party started if Wisconsin would be a major battleground, I don’t think they would have agreed. But in the last few days, a new Republican governor has taken on the public unions and they have fought back with a vengeance. It is a battle they can little afford to lose.

Wisconsin is facing a budget shortfall this year of $137 million for the current fiscal year and $3.6 billion for next year. Like many states around the country, and the federal government too, there is no time for small steps. The governor wants the public sector unions to pay more for their retirement and medical care and he also wants to end collective bargaining on anything but wages, and those to be increased no more than the Consumer Price Index. In return there will be no layoffs.  The battle lines were drawn.

Let’s be Civil

After Tucson, the main stream media and Democrats were all over the airwaves admonishing us (conservatives) to be civil. My Congressman came to my daughter’s high school to give a ten minute lecture on civility and how we have to be nicer to politicians who are trying to do their job. This is the same Congressman who ran for reelection primarily by calling his opponent a liar, and running from his own record. Very civil.

There were the numerous references to Hitler (just what is it with the left’s Hitler fetish anyway?). Posters with the Hitler moustache painted on Governor Walker, a picture of the governor with crosshairs drawn over his face. So much for the outrage after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

Fakin’ It

Many teachers called in “sick” so that they could abandon their students and classrooms to protest in Madison against the governor’s proposals. Since everyone knows that virtually all of these sudden “illnesses” are bogus, some teachers started to worry about covering their tracks. Not to worry though, doctors or doctor impersonators were on the scene to hand out fake sick notes. No mention of any illness or disease is necessary. They were handing them out like candy on Halloween.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjFbMDp5Pg8

The doctors or doctor impersonators should be tracked down and charged with fraud. If they are doctors, they should lose their license. If they are not doctors they should be charged with practicing medicine without a license.

A couple of relevant tweets illustrate the differences between the union organized protestors and the Tea Party. From a union supporter, “Tea Partiers protest on the weekends – which were won for them by unions.” The claim about weekends being won by unions is dubious, but even the union supporters acknowledge that the Tea Partiers don’t steal their pay from their employers by calling in sick, they wait until they are on their own time. I can’t say if the union supporter is mocking the Tea Partiers for being ethical or not. From a Tea Party supporter, “Gov. Walker, sorry we’re late, we work full time.”

Organizing for America

According to our federal form of government the states and the federal government are both sovereign entities, meaning one is not subordinate to the other. Instead of focusing on getting the federal budget in order, President Obama is taking time to weigh in on Wisconsin. Not only that, but there is an organization called Organizing for America that is actively involved.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkc-diFmcb8 

This political arm is encouraging teachers to violate their contract. So let’s take a step back. The unions are outraged that the governor wants to curtail their collective bargaining rights. The unions negotiate a contract with the government and then violate it with impunity when it suits their ends. The unions want to hold the state accountable but they don’t want to be accountable.

Dereliction of Duty

To help their union supporters, all of the Democrat Wisconsin State Senators fled the state to prevent their being a quorum to vote on the measure curtailing union power. These senators took an oath to do their job and they are hiding out in Illinois. The far left web site Daily Kos is actively raising money to help these senators violate their oath. This is an excerpt from an e-mail sent to their supporters: 

Even though you don’t live in Wisconsin, there’s a way you can help. The 14 Democratic state Senators who kept the fight alive are on Act Blue, and we’ve put their party committee on our Orange to Blue 2012 page.

Please, contribute $14 to the Wisconsin State Senate Democratic committee, $1 for each of the heroic Senators.

Republicans hold a 19-14 edge in the Wisconsin state Senate, but 20 Senators are needed for a quorum. So, in response to a Republican attempt to pass a bill making public sector unions virtually illegal, all 14 Democrats simply left the state. If even one of these Democrats had remained in Wisconsin, then s/he would have been rounded up by the police, forcibly brought to the state Capitol, and the bill would have passed. At great personal and electoral risk, these 14 Democrats are protecting workers’ rights and making resistance to the Tea Party the top news story in the country.

When the Democrats held the House, Senate and White House and rammed through ObamaCare despite polling showing the American people were opposed, did the Republican members of Congress flee to Canada? No. They fought at the ballot box to elect Scott Brown in Massachusetts. They fought in the Senate using Senate rules like the filibuster. They lost the battle and ObamaCare passed, but they stayed and did their duty representing their constitutents.

They fought at the ballot box again winning big in November 2010. Among those wins was both houses of the state government in Wisconsin and the governor. Now, with the tables turned, the left shows their true colors. Instead of fighting within the system, they lie, violate contracts, cheat with fraudulent sick notes, they abandon their responsibilities to hide out in another state, while still claiming to hold their office. This is the left’s vision of America, and all the while holding signs equating the legitimate government to Hitler, Mubarak, Cairo, Bahrain, etc. It pretty much speaks for itself.

If the senators do not go back to the state house to do their jobs, then the only alternative to balance the budget may be to fire about 5,000 state workers.

Public Sector Unions

The issue with public sector unions is collusion. Unions collect dues from their members. Their members, like the general public come from all parts of the political spectrum: Democrats, Republicans, Independents and even people not registered to vote or who don’t vote. Parts of those union dues are steered toward political activism which in short means electing as many Democrats as possible. The amount of money raised and spent is staggering. The Democrats that get elected are then in a position to negotiate contracts with those same unions and reward them for their support. As long as those Democrats are out of office before the bill comes due, they are happy to oblige.

What is happening in Wisconsin is ending that collusion. An alternative would be that public sector unions are not allowed to collect any dues for political purposes or participate in any political activity. In the private sector, unions don’t appoint the management that they eventually negotiate with for their contracts, why should it be different in the public sector? In the private sector if a company negotiates a lousy contract with the unions and it bankrupts them, they go out of business. In the public sector, if the government, generously helped into office by the unions, negotiates a lousy contract with the unions, the government doesn’t suffer, the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.

In Wisconsin those taxpayers said, “enough,” and turned out the Democrats and elected the Republicans to fix the problem. The Republicans are trying to do what they were elected to do.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.