Election 2010: Teabaggin' the Ds & Rs

[Cletus Miller]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

But blaming the teachers unions for the state of the schools is a fool's errand. They're just profit-maximizing, like any firm would. They have every right to call for the return of a school board, however misguided that is.

You're dangerously close to "won't SOMEONE think of the children?".

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Cletus Miller

You're dangerously close to "won't SOMEONE think of the children?".

For a lot of people, It's much more appealing to ask the teachers unions to make sacrifices for the children than it is to find real solutions.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

For a lot of people, It's much more appealing to ask the teachers unions to make sacrifices for the children than it is to find real solutions.

the board: what solutions Ty?

Ty: more $$$!


is there a way you can get more money for schools while saving the taxpayers, you know like you did with HCR?

[Cletus Miller]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

For a lot of people, It's much more appealing to ask the teachers unions to make sacrifices for the children than it is to find real solutions.

Of course it is, because the alternative is to ask a lot of people to make sacrifices for the children and it's almost always more appealing for someone else to sacrifice something than for one to do it oneself.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

isn't history basically all about 1 kind of people killing other kinds?

So you think Arizona just banned the teaching of history?

Can they teach the Bible instead, or will they need to redact big sections?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

the board: what solutions Ty?

Ty: more $$$!


is there a way you can get more money for schools while saving the taxpayers, you know like you did with HCR?

Yes. Michelle Rhee raised money from outside (private) sources so that she could offer more comp to teachers who chose to give up some of the seniority protections. Win-win, except that that the union fought her on it.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Here you go, club -- more evidence that the parties are equally bad on the budget:

There is now no doubt that all of the GOP talk during the campaign about reducing the deficit was nothing more than a ploy to get elected and that Republicans have no plans to do anything but make the federal government's red ink larger than it already is and would otherwise be. The proof? Take a look at this outstanding report by Bob Greenstein and Jim Horney of The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities -- two of the most respected federal budget analysts anywhere -- published just before Christmas about how House Republicans are about to put in place new budget procedures that make it likely the deficit will be increased rather than decreased.

The first is a change in the pay-as-you-go rules that will no longer require proposed tax cuts to include offsets so that there's no increase in the deficit. Under the new GOP rules, that would only apply to proposed increased in mandatory spending. In addition, proposed mandatory spending increases could only be offset with reductions in other mandatory spending. The previous PAYGO rule that allowed the offset to be either spending cuts or revenue increases would be eliminated.

The second change is that the reconciliation procedures in the congressional budget process would be changed so that they could be used to increase the deficit if the increase was the result of a tax cut (The House democratic leadership several years ago revised the reconciliation rules so that it could be used only to reduce the deficit).

Finally, as the CBPP report says, the new rules would allow a number of potentially huge deficit increasing policies to be adopted without offsets:

• Extending or making permanent the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts (including the tax cuts for the highest-income taxpayers) and relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax;
• Extending or making permanent the hollowing out of the estate tax included in the just-enacted tax-cut compromise legislation; and
• Legislation to provide a major, costly new tax cut — a deduction equal to 20 percent of gross income for “small businesses,” which Republican lawmakers typically have defined very expansively so the term covers a vast swath of firms and wealthy individuals that do not resemble what most Americans think of as a “small business.”

In the wake of the GOP's insistence in the lame duck session on the tax deal option that would increase the deficit the most, it has become obvious that all of the deficit reduction talk Republicans used during the 2010 election had nothing to do with what the party was really about or what it plans to do over the next two years.

Based on the record in the 10 weeks or so since the election, it seems clear that the GOP rhetoric about reducing the deficit will remain but that, instead of proposing things that will reduce it, Republican-proposed legislation will increase the deficit and federal borrowing substantially...

Stan Collender

[Cletus Miller]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

So you think Arizona just banned the teaching of history?

Can they teach the Bible instead, or will they need to redact big sections?

I think they would need to redact big sections based on "promot[ion of] resentment of a particular race or class of people".

And, yes, it seems that there was a mole on the drafting committee. Link to full text of the Bil.

[Cletus Miller]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Yes. Michelle Rhee raised money from outside (private) sources so that she could offer more comp to teachers who chose to give up some of the seniority protections. Win-win, except that that the union fought her on it.

If the union fought her, they believed it wouldn't be win-win.

Or were they acting against their own interests?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Cletus Miller

If the union fought her, they believed it wouldn't be win-win.

Or were they acting against their own interests?

I never could understand their hostility to a scheme in which anyone who had seniority protections could keep them but people who wanted to take the cash could drop them. It seemed to me that they were working against their own interests, if by that you mean the aggregate interests of individual teachers, but that they perceived that they were protecting the institutional interests of the union, and that they may have perceived that this was essential to protect the long-term interests of individual teachers.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

So you think Arizona just banned the teaching of history?

maybe someone can show that all people are not equal?

[Cletus Miller]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I never could understand their hostility to a scheme in which anyone who had seniority protections could keep them but people who wanted to take the cash could drop them. It seemed to me that they were working against their own interests, if by that you mean the aggregate interests of individual teachers, but that they perceived that they were protecting the institutional interests of the union, and that they may have perceived that this was essential to protect the long-term interests of individual teachers.

That's a fundamental problem with unions, just like the differing investment timelines b/t management and investor/owners is a fundamental problem for profit-making corps. You can attempt structure around it, but (1) the union/management will tell you that it's against your interests to do so, and (2) it's hard to design a structure that both works and does not, in fact, damage the interests of the teachers/investors.

ps: the paternalism of unions is occasionally shocking.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I never could understand their hostility to a scheme in which anyone who had seniority protections could keep them but people who wanted to take the cash could drop them. It seemed to me that they were working against their own interests, if by that you mean the aggregate interests of individual teachers, but that they perceived that they were protecting the institutional interests of the union, and that they may have perceived that this was essential to protect the long-term interests of individual teachers.

unless by "interest of individual teachers," you mean the "interest of union board members" you don't get how unions work.

the people who run a union have their phony baloney jobs secure with the way things are; why let someone start playing around with seniority?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Cletus Miller

That's a fundamental problem with unions, just like the differing investment timelines b/t management and investor/owners is a fundamental problem for profit-making corps. You can attempt structure around it, but (1) the union/management will tell you that it's against your interests to do so, and (2) it's hard to design a structure that both works and does not, in fact, damage the interests of the teachers/investors.

ps: the paternalism of unions is occasionally shocking.

is it ironic in a conversation about education failure, that those few of us who do understand stuff constantly try, like in the above, to teach any common sense to the lesser who post here, but clearly get no where?

[sgtclub]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Here you go, club -- more evidence that the parties are equally bad on the budget:



Stan Collender

Not quite:

The federal government has accumulated more new debt--$3.22 trillion ($3,220,103,625,307.29)—during the tenure of the 111th Congress than it did during the first 100 Congresses combined, according to official debt figures published by the U.S. Treasury.

The $3.22 trillion in new federal debt run up during the 111th Congress exceeds by 64 percent the $1.957 trillion in new debt run up during the 110th.

Although the 111th Congress cast its last vote on Dec. 22, it will not officially adjourn until next week.

Democrats controlled both the House and Senate in the 110th and 111th Congresses.

The 108th Congress ($1.159 trillion in new debt) and 109th ($1.054 trillion in new debt) take third and fourth place among all U.S. Congresses for accumulating debt. In both these Congresses, Republicans controlled both the House and Senate.

Still, the $3.22 trillion in new debt accumulated during the record-setting 111th Congress is more than three times the $1.054 trillion in new debt accumulated by the last Republican-majority Congress (the 109th) which adjourned on Dec. 8, 2006.

During the Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) tenure as speaker, which commenced on Jan. 4, 2007, the federal government has run up $5.177 trillion in new debt. That is about equal to the total debt the federal government accumulated in the first 220 years of the nation's existence, with the federal debt rising from $5.173 trillion on July 23, 1996 to $5.181 trillion on July 24, 1996.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/...debt-first-100