Bobsticks

I get it but at some point individual amassed wealth is a problem. It's a scale - there is only so much money and it needs to be "balanced."

What I suggest you do is take a trip to Wenzhou China and live there for one month. This is the Republican party dream scenario.

What Right wing voters don't get is that ALL public works are paid for through tax dollars. When you walk down a street and see garbage everywhere, lamp lights out, cracks in the roads, homeless people everywhere, an education system putting out massively illiterate numbers of people - that is the result of a lack of funding. It is not government lazy workers, it is not government wasting money on stupid things, it's not even government crooks stealing money. It's because all the money is going to ONE guy who buys a 50,000 square foot home, a fleet of cars, a private jet, probably tons of money on cocaine parties. And when they run a business - they make $10 billion a year but gee I can make another $3 billion if I fire all the U.S. workers and move the plant to China and have little girls work 15 hour days for peanuts.

We gave corps tax breaks to supposedly create jobs - not in China - but here. You bailed out, with your tax dollars, the automakers. I would like to see their employee list and compare U.S. full time jobs in 2012 to say 1972 and 1982. CEOs are probably 20 times richer (factoring in inflation) while employees are not.

Wenzhou is the future. The rich skirt tax laws by bribing Red Party members. Communism bought by capitalism. So the government receives no taxes - there are no street cleaners, no road fixes, no building codes that get checked, no water treatment, no food safety regulations, no pollution control standards. The U.S. is only marginally better as it is. There is no real pollution control - sure there's a law but companies don't have to follow it - they wait for a lawsuit which if they get caught killing people is lower than the cost of paying the fines and damages. So they elect to choose profit over lives. And then they often settle out of court to avoid any bad press.

These people are socio and psychopaths that run these types of companies - they are typically drawn to power and the "game" and they have powerful lobby organizations and the ability to control media (see Fox News) which convinces poor mostly semi-retarded people to vote against their interests. Give more money to the rich and they will protect you and give you a job. Rich people don't care one iota about the poor. The poor are lazy leeches who should be sterilized (it's happened and some states advocate offering women a couple hundred dollars to be sterilized). Money stays within families so a new generation is born into that easy wealth and there is no empathy for the other half cause again if you're poor you're lazy. Even though they never worked a day in their life (see Paris Hilton).


Unions were formed to protect employees from dictators. America is supposedly a free country but your boss can invade your privacy in dictator fashion. You can be fired without cause, you can be tested for drugs, smoking, alcohol. Businesses are asking for people's Facebook password - don't give it to them - you don't get hired. All the power is with the business and zero power is with the employee. A nice looking woman doesn't give the boss a blow job and you can be fired for some concocted reason they'll make up later.

Before that businessmen had 5 year olds going up chimneys to clean them for pennies - and if the kid dies - well there are more where they came from. See Dickens.

Business people care about money - that is the one thing they care about more than anything else - they may also care about their family but not your family - your family can rot so long as they get theirs. So the choice was to form unions or pull a Guillotine out and ensure they get some cake by stuffing the bosses head under the blade.

My dad who was not a big fan of unions noted that companies tend to get the union they deserve. And you probably have a union because you're screwing your employees over. I worked for a Steel Foundry in Canada for 7 years. no union - nobody even hinted at a union. That's because unlike every other shop like it - they treated people properly, paid well, etc.

If you have unions battling for better working conditions it's because you're a cheap ass owner or incompetent fool who runs an unsafe place and putting people into harm's way. If they're battling for salary it's likely because every other place selling the same crap is paying considerably more than you are. Unions will get ultra testy if you cry poverty while driving a top of the line B&W, Porsche, or flying around in a private jet and the CEO salary is $14million. You're idea of poverty may be that a "hey a B&W is no Bentley" but without the workforce you walk.

As for public sector - I've said this before. Public workers are typically on contracts. When the contract ends it's time to negotiate. That's the ONLY time you get to negotiate and so you make a list of requests.

Unlike the private sector - whatever you ask for as a union body will get into the papers. It's a negotiation - you ALWAYS ask high hoping to get half or 1/4 or hell 1/8 of whatever you ask for. if you don't ask you get zero. Government like a businessman isn't giving you something for no reason.

The major problem I have seen in education (I'm a teacher) in Canada is that the government is receiving tax money to offer families a service. that service is to provide education that will give their child (and Canada's future workforce) the tools to be competitive in a tough global world where those countries don't mess around molly coddling everyone's self-esteem.

The quality of education in the west has dropped dramatically - and it wasn't the unions - the unions never get anything anyway. When was the last time the teacher union truly got something. Teacher buying power is 50% of what it was in 1985. So teachers have taken a 50% pay cut while tripling their workload. This is just one part of government service but if education has been gutted then so to has everything else. Meanwhile the top earners are paying less taxes and because people have taken 50% pay cuts it's not like you can get more taxes from them!

And yes I get the arguments - there's a recession so you should not ask for more money - it's a global recession and I got a 5.8% raise due to cost of living. Private sector increased. If we're going to base C.O.L increases on how the private sector did only - then perhaps the reason the private sector is failing is because the kids who have gone through a weakening education system are incompetent fools who don't know how to run a business. Hong Kong who uses a science methodology of "survival of the fittest" has put ALL the resources into the best and the brightest. The best and brightest all go to schools where there are no Thugs and autistic special needs and "integration" touchy feel good BS.

So they put out brilliant people who run companies that make money. While in the West "everyone is equal" and no one knows who the hell to hire because everyone comes from mixed classes.

No in Hong Kong a company knows what high school you went to. you went to a band one school they know you're bright - you went to a band 3 they know you're suited to be a dishwasher or cab driver.

You want to fix things - public service - you want money - more taxes (or hell just equal taxes) for the rich and cut the defense budget by half. America has to get over their paranoia. No one is going to attack you - hell they've already got the oil. Asia and Europe make the best cars and stereo equipment. What the hell would they want the U.S. for? To pick up the trillions in debt?

Rich people are not creating wealth for the middle class and poor. They are creating wealth for themselves. You gotta stop that. Individual wealth caps - if the world had no billionaires we'd be better off.