3.19.2011

Give it up!!

By Jerry McConnell

What’s going on, Mr. Speaker? Are you becoming another Nancy Pelosi double talking, slick acting puppet of Obama? Why are you obstructing the efforts of two House members, Utah’s Steve King and Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann to eliminate the ObamaCare slush fund?

It seems as though every time the GOP gets control of an important part of our government they go soft and languish while the things that the liberals like to do are allowed to keep slipping out of their hands; why are you
letting that happen, Mr. Speaker?

Whatever happened to the spirit of November 2010 where the goal was to stop Obama dead in his tracks at bankrupting America? We started off with high ideals and seemed to be making progress but somehow or other the wheels kept coming off the tracks and reform suddenly took a back seat to appeasement. I really do hate to use that word, appeasement, but that’s what you are making it look like.

Obama alone does not have the power or the smarts to know how to block an entire political party from being effective, so who is it that is calling the shots and getting the leader of the party in control and his once-eager
lieutenants to back off any weighty achievements of stoppage of the ObamaCare disaster? Has the Soros consortium of Bilderberg billionaires put down its mighty and collective foot bringing shivers of fear to our 2010
elected representatives?

How many more Continuing Resolutions are we going to use to play pat-a-cake games with the spendthrift liberals?
How many more Continuing Resolutions are we going to use to play pat-a-cake games with the spendthrift liberals? How about shutting them off just once? If the government comes to a halt maybe that would be a blessing in disguise; with no government there would be no spending. Geez; even a one day stoppage could save a few bucks.

Are our new House leaders afraid the voters in 2012 will blame them or will they understand that continuing the lofty stratospheric spending that this Administration has committed itself to just had to be stopped if we were
ever to have any hopes for salvation?

According to the The Prowler, March 16, 2011 “Hand’s Off the ObamaCare Slush Funds” in the American Spectator online, the alibi for the unopposed new CR as an aide to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is “There is no way we can include their [Bachmann and King’s] amendment; it would just bog us down and undercut the leadership goal of getting real cutting done through negotiations with Democrats and the White House.”

When will these people ever learn that you CAN’T get real cutting done through negotiations with ANY Democrats
When will these people ever learn that you CAN’T get real cutting done through negotiations with ANY Democrats. As I’ve said here many times in other columns, bipartisanship to Democrats means, ‘Do it our way.’ They
will never get “negotiations” from those people; they only negotiate on one-way streets; those that lead to THEIR goals and away from the peoples’ goals. These liberal Democrats must first get the pound of flesh they need for whatever reasons they may have; after that they’ll concede to talk about the peoples’ needs.

The Prowler goes on to state that “Bachmann and King have been pressing to zero out the $105 billion that funds the Obama Administration’s implementation of the president’s health care plan. Despite broad support
among the American public for Congress to draw back spending on ObamaCare, it has done nothing to remove the $105 billion that the previous Congress had allocated. Under the terms of the funding allocation, about $5 billion is budgeted for implementation purposes in FY2011, while another $100 billion has been appropriated for FY2012 through 2020.”

The Rasmussen Reports frequently post their findings on the subject of ObamaCare repeal and spending curtailment. The most recent one of these Reports is dated March 11, 2011 and it tells us that the number of voters
advocating for outright full repeal of this ruinous legislation is now up to 62 percent of all voters! That is approaching two out of every three voters in favor of scuttling this onerous law. How can we keep ignoring the
wishes of nearly two-thirds of our populace?

Here we now have the dichotomy of one side saying we have to approve the Continuing Resolutions so we can get some “real” cutting done through negotiations, while the other side gets on his big Air Force One super jet and wings if off to South America ostensibly to communicate with those leaders, but which smells more like a vacation in warm and sunny climes with Socialist buddies and like-thinkers of wealth redistribution. Be sure to note how many billions he offers to Brazil, Chile and El Salvador. Those Socialists are probably singing, “Hey, Big Spender, Spend Your Billions Here.”
Give it up; let the cutting begin
How good are you at internationally long distance negotiations for “real” cutting, Mr. Speaker? Do you even remotely suspect that the man will be listening? He has you over a barrel, Sir, and you continue to cry “Uncle”
when it should be “traitor.”

Give it up; let the cutting begin

3.12.2011

Union myths

By Jerry McConnell

A few days ago on Real Clear Politics online, one of my and the country’s favorite journalists, Thomas Sowell, wrote about the subject that I covered in my last column, Labor Unions. He titled his column, “Union Myths” and in this column I touch on some of their ‘myth-stakes’.
Sowell stated in his article, “the biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers.” And in my column I remarked that labor unions created, in their own minds, a “to be there” scenario for the worker. Both of us are correct in our assumptions. If either the myth or the mind scenario were true then union membership numbers in business and industry would be in vastly greater numbers than is the case currently.
This then is one of the labor union leaders big “myth-stakes” as union membership totals nationwide are falling off each year as opposed to growing as they would like and like you to believe. These same leaders also have this distorted belief that the workers, their members, absolutely love their unions because they get so much in benefits and financial advantages.

If that is true than why is it that U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics in their January 21, 2011 Current Population Survey of Union Members show the rate of union membership of wage and salary workers for 2010 to be only 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 the previous year? Another “myth-stake” perhaps? The actual number shown by the Labor Department of “workers belonging to unions declined by 612,000.”

Commenting on his ‘biggest myth’ remark that unions are for the workers, Sowell added that “unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.”

And I might have even added, “and union members are for union members.” We’ve just recently witnessed that in Wisconsin where the teachers abandoned the pupils in the schools to take to the streets to loudly and boisterously demonstrate against any loss of pay to help the state with staggering deficits in their budgeting processes. Their ugly aggressiveness, as captured by the television cameras, was not warmly received by a majority of the viewing public which most certainly will spill over into the other states of Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, to name a few.

Governor Walker’s crafty victory over the union’s hand-maidens, the Democratic Senators of the Wisconsin Legislature who may have been part of the “myth-stakes,” out-foxed themselves by being cowardly and running for cover in a neighboring state, where their kind of politics is daily routine. Had they shown a bit of intestinal fortitude and fought it out with the fiscally prudent Republicans they may have at least registered some degree of respect from their constituents instead of the scorn and derision they deserved.

Some of the Wisconsin public openly called for the political Recall of Governor Walker and the Republican legislators; they would be wise to switch those calls to the cowardly Democrats that didn’t have the courage to stay at home to defend their cause.

They might also choose to study the causes for the serious budgetary problems in Wisconsin; certainly not from any initiatives put forth by the Republicans, but surely a lot of blame to be assessed to the public employee unions and their insatiable demands for more of anything that costs money. A Washington Examiner article by Phillip Suderman on March 10, 2011 stated in its headline that “One-third of U. S. wages are provided by the government.”

Where was it in our Founding Fathers’ notes and records where it called for a full one-third of all the employees wages in the total fifty states would be paid out to government sources? I would wager a farthing or two that those exact and frugal planners of the middle seventeen hundreds never would have believed that government employee wages would ever exceed probably five to ten percent of the country’s overall outlays for employees of all kinds. Now they capture THIRTY-THREE PERCENT of the employee payouts.

And it all leads back to just one thing: Labor Unions. And not content with such an overly large share of total employee payouts these ‘out-for-themselves’ gangsters still want their Congressional pawns and Obama the ‘giver of goods to labor unions’ to get the fallaciously named legislation, “Employee Free Choice Act” which is exactly the opposite in reality.

As Thomas Sowell said in his column and as you have read several times right here in mine, it actually would remove the free choice that workers now enjoy with the secret ballot and force the workers to bow even further down to their union parasites by having to declare openly whether or not they want to be represented by the union.

This deceptive misconstrue is another “myth-stakes” that these ugly and selfishly motivated thugs called labor unions have and continue to make, taking the rest of us for fools.

We have to stop this farce of freedom taking from the workers and all their other ‘myth-stakes’.


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3.07.2011

Priced out of jobs!!

By Senator Jeb Bradley

Several weeks ago I wrote a blog: “The New Hampshire Retirement System’s (NHRS) Day of Reckoning" which has elicited a lot of response. Opinions run the gamut. Virtually everyone agrees promises made to present retirees must be kept. Many believe reform is long overdue and that avoiding today’s tough choices increases future problems. Unions contend retirement benefits are locked in the instant someone completes their probationary period and no changes can be made. Lastly, some feel this legislation is “alarmist”.

Regardless of one’s views, what no one can escape are the implications of the numbers and what they mean. Consider the following facts:

1. The current unfunded pension liability is $3.72 billion.

2. The current unfunded medical subsidy liability (a pension adjunct) is $976 million -- leaving a total unfunded liability of $4.69 billion.

3. Only 58.5% of the assets needed to fund future pension commitments are available. 80% funding is considered healthy.

4. According to a September 2010 Bloomberg survey, NHRS’s 58.5% funding ranks fourth worst in the nation.
Furthermore, pension systems rely heavily on investment earnings to pay benefits. The NHRS assumes an 8.5% return, but the NHRS average for the last 20 years has been 7.8% and, more alarmingly, only 2.3% for the past 10 years. Under-performing investments didn’t overcome two terribly shortsighted public policy choices made by previous Legislatures that went unchallenged for years by the NHRS Board. An accounting methodology understated employer costs for over a decade and $900 million was skimmed from the pension plan to pay higher employee benefits than required.

These shortsighted choices, combined with recent stock market losses, have dropped the NHRS funding level from 90% in 2000 to today’s precarious 58.5%. If the NHRS board accepts actuary recommendations on investment assumptions, the unfunded liability would grow -- dropping NH’s rank to second worst in the nation.

While those claiming the NHRS is solvent are correct, what they ignore is that taxpayers, primarily property taxpayers, are getting walloped with the bills.

Here’s how the unfunded liability will clobber taxpayers. Employees such as teachers and municipal workers pay 5% of their salary to the NHRS. Police and firefighters pay 9.3%. Employers / taxpayers -- making up for past mistakes – now pay 10.7% of salary for teachers, 19.51% for police and 24.69% for firefighters. In 2014 those costs are projected to escalate to 13.61% for teachers, 29.20% for police, and 33.90% for firefighters. When investment assumptions are lowered to reflect reality, the costs to property taxpayers will explode again and stay high for a long time.

Meanwhile, retirement benefits paid are growing by $40 million in 2010 alone. Much is made of the average pension for every retiree in the system being $18,650. That’s accurate but doesn’t portend the future. For teachers who retired in 2010 their pensions averaged $29,800, for police $49,200 and firefighters $59,100.
Teachers must work 30 years, police and firefighters 20 years. Just using 2010 snapshots for the average salary, employee pension contributions and pension benefits; a teacher should recoup their 8% compounded contribution in about 10 years and police officers and firefighters in about 5 years.

Perhaps that’s why the two sides are at loggerheads with taxpayers demanding reform and employees threatening to go to court to prevent any reform. That’s why I filed SB-3: to equitably share this $4.69 billion unfunded liability.

Under SB-3, public safety employees with less than 10 years of service would be expected to work 25 years rather than 20, be eligible to retire at 50 not 45, have pensions determined by the highest 5 years of pay rather than 3, and could not count unused sick time, vacation, or career buyouts to increase their pension. For employees like teachers, 30 years of service would remain but the other provisions would apply. No one would be able to supplement pensions through special details outside the scope of their jobs. Newly hired employees would contribute more to the NHRS. The Legislature will study implementing a defined contribution plan for new employees and the NHRS board would be balanced between employers and employees. SB-3 reforms will not impact current retirees!

These changes are equitable to employees and taxpayers and are long overdue. These reforms will reduce the unfunded liability and the crushing property tax burdens, and for employees ensure a viable retirement system.

Only with compromise and each side walking in the other’s shoes will this result be possible. Postponing the day of reckoning only makes the medicine much worse.

Taxpayers are on the hook for the entire unfunded liability right now and those costs are unsustainable. Employees can claim unfairness and threaten litigation all the way to the court house door – but they miss the bigger point --- they will have priced themselves out of jobs.
 

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