Labor Day

[James48843]

Happy Labor Day- to those who are members of AFL-CIO Unions and who make a difference.
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[burrocrat]

to those who are members of AFL-CIO Unions and who make a difference.

that's a pretty narrow cohort you're pandering to there.

 

[James48843]

that's a pretty narrow cohort you're pandering to there.

Narrow? I don't know - it's about 11.5 million people connected to the AFL-CIO in one way or another, including over 3 million members.

http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/unions/

 

[nnuut]

You know I remember when the unions were the best, the thing that kept big money form mistreating the workers. Then they got out of hand and demanded too much that increased costs for the consumers, this set a president as to how much manufacturing had to give to the workers for doing their jobs and it inflated and inflated until now, NOW IT HAS TURNED AROUND, it has deflated and deflated until they don't give them ****, how can this be?. Thanks Bill Clinton, NAFTA, GATT etc.

 

[burrocrat]

Happy Labor Day- to those who are members of AFL-CIO Unions and who make a difference.

ooops, my error. i thought you said or.

numbers would be more believable that way.

unless you mean for the imported auto crowd, made a hell of a difference to their bottom line.

 

[James48843]

I think I'll go. Just because...
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[crws]

that's a pretty narrow cohort you're pandering to there.

tsk, tsk
a rising tide lifts all boats.
It's not just the Union members who benefit from union jobs.

 

[burrocrat]

tsk, tsk
a rising tide lifts all boats.
It's not just the Union members who benefit from union jobs.

is rising tide the same as trickle down? cause i feel trickled on.

you're right though, we all 'benefited' from that last union job, you know the 700 billion one where all taxpayers (that don't benefit from union jobs, hell some of 'em haven't even been born yet but they'll have to pay the bill) get to keep insolvent companies solvent, and then suck the trashed and bankrupt heatlh and pension plans too.

yeah that was a good deal.

 

[crws]

is rising tide the same as trickle down? cause i feel trickled on.

you're right though, we all 'benefited' from that last union job, you know the 700 billion one where all taxpayers (that don't benefit from union jobs, hell some of 'em haven't even been born yet but they'll have to pay the bill) get to keep insolvent companies solvent, and then suck the trashed and bankrupt heatlh and pension plans too.

yeah that was a good deal.

trickle down....funny you should mention that!


The term "supply-side economics" was thought, for some time, to have been coined by journalist Jude Wanniski in 1975, but according to Robert D. Atkinson's Supply-Side Follies [1] [p. 50], the term "supply side" ("supply-side fiscalists") was first used by Herbert Stein, a former economic adviser to President Nixon, in 1976, and only later that year was this term repeated by Jude Wanniski. It popularized the ideas of economists Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer. Today, supply-side economics is often conflated with the politically rhetorical term "trickle-down economics", but as Jude Wanniski points out in his book The Way The World Works, trickle-down economics is conservative Keynesianism associated with the Republican Party.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/26-0
Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years

by Thom Hartmann

This weekend, House Republican leader John Boehner played out the role of Jude Wanniski on NBC's "Meet The Press."

Odds are you've never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have become a "successful" president, Republicans never would have taken control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.

By 1974, Jude Wanniski had had enough. The Democrats got to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks – both programs of the New Deal – as well as when their "big government" projects like roads, bridges, and highways were built giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers. They kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things, which didn't seem to have much effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up, in fact), and that made them seem like a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class. Americans loved it. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections.
Everybody understood at the time that economies are driven by demand. People with good jobs have money in their pockets, and want to use it to buy things. The job of the business community is to either determine or drive that demand to their particular goods, and when they're successful at meeting the demand then factories get built, more people become employed to make more products, and those newly-employed people have a paycheck that further increases demand.

Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics – which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years – on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase – "supply side economics" – and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn't because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to suggest that he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, that those tax cuts would cause them to take their surplus money and build factories or import large quantities of cheap stuff from low-labor countries, and that the more stuff there was supplying the economy the faster it would grow. George Herbert Walker Bush – like most Republicans of the time – was horrified. Ronald Reagan was suggesting "Voodoo Economics," said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer's tax-cut theories would throw the nation into such deep debt that we'd ultimately crash into another Republican Great Depression.

Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes! For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, in turn, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.

There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.

When Reagan rolled out Supply Side Economics in the early 80s, dramatically cutting taxes while exploding (mostly military) spending, there was a moment when it seemed to Wanniski and Laffer that all was lost. The budget deficit exploded and the country fell into a deep recession – the worst since the Great Depression – and Republicans nationwide held their collective breath. But David Stockman came up with a great new theory about what was going on – they were "starving the beast" of government by running up such huge deficits that Democrats would never, ever in the future be able to talk again about national health care or improving Social Security – and this so pleased Alan Greenspan, the Fed Chairman, that he opened the spigots of the Fed, dropping interest rates and buying government bonds, producing a nice, healthy goose to the economy. Greenspan further counseled Reagan to dramatically increase taxes on people earning under $37,800 a year by increasing the Social Security (FICA/payroll) tax, and then let the government borrow those newfound hundreds of billions of dollars off-the-books to make the deficit look better than it was.

Reagan, Greenspan, Winniski, and Laffer took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today. They and George HW Bush ran up more debt in eight years than every president in history, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined. Surely this would both starve the beast and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton by 1999, Winniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part: "We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the 'Two Santa Claus Theory' in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts..."

George W. Bush embraced the Two Santa Claus Theory with gusto, ramming through huge tax cuts – particularly a cut to a maximum 15 percent income tax rate on people like himself who made their principle income from sitting around the pool waiting for their dividend or capital gains checks to arrive in the mail – and blowing out federal spending. Bush even out-spent Reagan, which nobody had ever thought would again be possible.

And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when a series of three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent. In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that – like an inexorable law of nature – would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005, when Jude Wanniski died and George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush supply-side-created bubble economies in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

In reality, his tax cuts did what they have always done over the past 100 years – they initiated a bubble economy that would let the very rich skim the cream off the top just before the ceiling crashed in on working people.

 

[burrocrat]

trickle down....funny you should mention that!

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/26-0
Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years

interesting read.

i still feel trickled on, and the forecast calls for pain.

 

[burrocrat]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...s-your-neighbor-unemployed-kevin-hassett.html

Your Fat Paycheck Keeps Neighbors Unemployed: Kevin Hassett

...Finally, unions should be willing to reopen collective bargaining agreements and accept lower wages.

 

[crws]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...s-your-neighbor-unemployed-kevin-hassett.html

...to go from a 2 income household to a 3 income household?
Is the price of goods reflected in a wage reduction?
bogus, man. It's all posturing. How much less than 50k minus taxes is liveable?

 

[crws]

No Shortage of Propaganda

In light of "Labor" Day and the Union worker, now the USPS has jumped into the media circus to show how overcompensated postal workers are.
//public outcry\\ Not.
http://apwu.org/news/webart/2010/10-092-negotiations-pr-100908.htm
Union Denounces
USPS Attempts to 'Work the Refs'
Says Contract Negotiations Are Ill-Served by Public Misstatements

APWU Web News Article 092-2010, Sept. 8, 2010

American Postal Workers Union President William Burrus has denounced efforts by the Postal Service to influence the outcome of contract negotiations by issuing demands in public forums.

“It is extremely disappointing that the Postal Service is attempting to circumvent the bargaining process through the issuance of demands in the media,” Burrus said.

“Unfortunately, the Postal Service has begun posturing and manipulating numbers,” the union president said. “Management is ‘working the refs’ in an effort to influence the outcome of contract negotiations.”

“It is troubling that the USPS has chosen to recite the false and misleading claim that the pay and benefits of postal employees amount to 78 percent of total revenue – as though that figure is relevant to APWU negotiations. Contract negotiations are ill-served by such public misstatements,” he said.

“The wages and benefits of the employees represented by the APWU have been reduced from 28 percent of revenue in 2003 to 23 percent in 2010, a number that is dramatically lower than that cited by the Postal Service,” Burrus said.

“The Postal Service’s deceptive figures must not be used as a barometer for collective bargaining,” he said.

 

[Show-me]

That would be $94,800,000,000.00 overpayment or 215,454,545,454.5 stamps. And, who needs a pay cut? LOL :nuts:

 

[crws]

That would be $94,800,000,000.00 overpayment or 215,454,545,454.5 stamps. And, who needs a pay cut? LOL :nuts:

That's an excellent placard statement!

 

[crws]

Somehow I missed the MSM report about this march of 3000+ APWU Postal workers through downtown Detroit.
Rev. Jesse Jackson, adopted at 3 years old by a postal worker, led the way.
@ 2:20 Mark Gaffney, Michigan AFL-CIO President speaks about Harkin-DeFazio, with GM Headquarters in the background.

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

 

[nnuut]

OK Postal Workers, who are you going to vote for in November!

 

[alevin]

nnuut, it was a GOP strategist that dissed USPS workers-on FOX. Rep beating on Rep strategist. Party infighting-nothing to do with the other party. :suspicious:

HufPo just happened to report on the incident.

 

[crws]

OK Postal Workers, who are you going to vote for in November!

Not that party, wild horses & too many wheels off the wagon.

 

[crws]

nnuut, it was a GOP strategist that dissed USPS workers-on FOX. Rep beating on Rep strategist. Party infighting-nothing to do with the other party. :suspicious:

HufPo just happened to report on the incident.

Thanks for the clarification. The link did show up rather prominently, not my intent to "confuse & mislead".