[p2p-research] Post-Depression first: Americans get more money from government than they give back | csmonitor.com

[Ryan Lanham]

On 11/25/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I must say I strongly disagree about the blaming of the unions ...
>

 Unions negotiated pensions...and the right agreed because they thought that
stock markets would go up forever...so it would be cheap.  A child
demographer could have shown the error...but the greed of the financial
services industry made pensions a necessity.  Now that bird has come home to
roost.  It can't continue.  Unions are doing what organizations do...they
are fighing their death fights.

The pay and benefits aren't so much issues...real income for faculty at the
University of California has dropped over the last 20-30 years.  It's the
pensions.  Cut those and all those retirees in Montana stop living there.

I live labor economics all day every day.  The unions are irrelevant.  State
government is bloated in California...but the reasons are federalism not
unions.  The US is designed to work 200 years ago...not in the 21st
century.  We have an undemocratic Senate, a screwy 3 tiered system that
triples complexity...mostly because local yokals thought they could do
things better than Washington...and then you have the loony right who thinks
social prosperity is a zero sum game where if someone else wins, they lose.









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