And now for that rant I was going to do.
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." –Dom Helder Camara
Where did all the money go? Did it really go to the public sector unions? Let's have a look at what a teacher makes in Wisconsin. Hmm. Seems to top out at around $52k. That's around about the median income for the US (the amount at which half the people make more and half make less). Overpaid? Hardly. Unproductive? Well, people can argue about that (and they do) but kids do end up learning stuff so the teachers can't be completely useless.
If you think about how the money flows in a state it isn't even terribly costly to pay public workers well. Immediately a chunk of the money in the salary is taxed back by the state. Money payed to public employees will be mostly spent in the state which will also be taxed at the point where the money is transferred from one person to another and also as the money goes to pay a private sector worker who is making a living providing services to the public sector worker. Money paid to state workers for their work mostly comes back to the government. On the other hand, when large private companies are hired, (and the bigger they are the worse this is) a large chunk of the money goes straight out of state to the big-wigs at the top and the investors around the world and when that money DOES come back it comes back in the form of a loan which just sucks more money out of the state.
Where the money has gone is to Wall St. Partly it's gone to Wall St as interest payments on loans to states and cities. Partly it's gone to Wall St as the financial industry sucked the life out of the working people with credit cards and home refinance and gaming the house prices with false appraisals to convince people to borrow more and more against equity that didn't really exist. And then when it all fell over the finance industry got the government to bail them out. The unions didn't cause any of that but parasitic fraudsters did.
The guys that sank the economy and made huge bonuses are now still making huge bonuses because they got the taxpayer to bail them out. Wall St execs are getting billion dollar payouts each year and 1 billion dollars is enough to pay the salary of 20,000 teachers. Those are the guys who took all the money and they didn't produce anything but bubbles and a crisis.
The amount the Governor of Wisconsin is looking to save from the public sector is only about $150 million which is the cost of keeping 150 soldiers in Afghanistan. $2 trillion has gone into wars and the pay back has been not even close to the expenditures, nor is it ever likely to be. That's $200 billion a year over the last decade which is enough to pay the salaries of $4 million teachers - with the added benefit of there being a considerable number of educated people about with skills. Most of war spending consists of building things that get blown up or blowing up things that are already built - which is the OPPOSITE of capitalism.
The "crisis" is manufactured. It follows in the footprints of four decades of "starve the beast", a strategy to dismantle all public works and good that the "people's" government can do, basically to defang "we the people" and to leave the oligarchs to rule as they wish. The government (particularly the GOP contingent) have funneled public money toward private interests and undermined public programs to the point that the government is worse than broke but NOT because of what it gives to the public.
Social security, for example, isn't broke because it's an unfunded liability. It is broke because the money to fund it was stolen from social security to give to private interests. The government is broke because a small group of powerful interests has turned the country into a giant slush fund to pour money into their favourite projects which they can skim from as they wish.
It's a scam and a fraud and it always happens when there is a big pot of someone else's money sitting around unguarded and the height of hypocrisy is to steal the public money then blame the public sector for the money being gone.
As to what the unions make, you are just jealous (or at least that is what the righties always like to shout when you question whether the multi-billionaires should be allowed to keep all of that money they stole). If wages had kept pace with the cost of living then everyone would be making a union wage but instead the incomes for the non-wealthy leveled off (while the top 1% curve trended strongly upward). The unions are only making what everyone else should be making but instead of recognizing that the right wing media (because if it was left wing it would be have a "labour" section in the news instead of a "business" section) repeat the mantra that the unions are greedy (because they want a pension but The Wall St. execs are merely "worth" the billions they make).
If labour reverses the losses of the last forty years then the Republican voters can kvetch and moan but they will freeload off the victory just as they enjoy their Medicaid and Social Security. If labour was able to push through public healthcare, the Republican voters would use that too and cuss and moan if anyone tried to take it away.
There IS a class war on and the owners of the world are winning because, for the most part part, the other classes don't realize that the war is on. The vast majority of the people are being neutralized by classic divide and conquer. The "republicans" and pitted against the "democrats", the whites against the blacks against the Hispanics etc. And the middle class is being pitted against the poor and against itself. Yeah, America, the problem with the country is all those people who earn 20% more than you do - but please ignore those good people in the suites who make five million percent more than you.
Rant completed.
