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hana maru wrote:

Deadhouse wrote:

father of lies wrote: He just said the national guard will be readied in case of unrest, to perform necessary services, like run prisons and mental institutions.
.

I can't even beging to tell you how bad of an idea that would be.

Please elaborate?

I guess it all comes down to using the right tool for the job.
National Guard soldiers are trained to fight wars. The last I heard somewhere like 85% of WI National Guard units had done at least one tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sure, they might humanitarian/natural disaster stuff, but anyone can fill a sand bag or hand out blankets.
They simply lack the training and mentality for such jobs as running a prison. Look at the complete cluster fuck that was Abu Gharib. And that was with suspected insurgents, not convicted criminals who also happen to be U.S. citizens. They simply lack the training and experience to be prison guards and not end up getting shanked by some dude with a life sentence and nothing to lose. Knowing the Army, it will give them some bullshit 2 week training course and then turn them loose. Even MP's don't have any real training in penology.
Using the military to impose order over our citizens always seems like a bad idea to me. Especially in this case considering that a lot of people in the Guard are students who are being directly effected with all the protests and walk out and such.

F/K/A HAPF wrote:The country is in fiscal trouble because the US borrows and throws billions of dollars at everyone. Isolationist policies would fix it all. Will this affect shitty beer availability?

That's not true.
[urlhttp://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/12/foreign-aid.html][/url]

The survey, conducted by the WorldPublicOpinion.org project at the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, asked the question: "What percentage of the federal budget goes to foreign aid?"

The median answer was roughly 25 percent, according to the poll of 848 Americans. In reality, about 1 percent of the budget is allotted to foreign aid.

Do you have to be in the union to be a state employee?

I think what bothers me is that the cops still have the collective bargaining. But if it gives Father of Thighs something to do besides sweat when he eats, meh.

Short term gains for first term politicians...this will likely spread.

23 states are already "right to work"...Missouri's on the chopping block next.

goodbye middle class; hello record profits.

The Torsion wrote:I think what bothers me is that the cops still have the collective bargaining. But if it gives Father of Thighs something to do besides sweat when he eats, meh.

Yep, the police retain their rights...they supported Walker. It feels like such a fuck you to education in general...it's hard to see so many people work their asses off around here and be treated like the enemy right now...

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpa ... _part.html

at first i thought this was borderline conspiracy theory, and that scott walker was just a douche who sat up late at night trying to figure out how to screw people over, but a lot of evidence seems to point to the fact that this initiative was basically drafted and then supported in the media (through commercials and what not) by a few very large conservative thinktanks with the goal of getting similar initiatives on the docket in many other states. so this isn't just about wisconsin's budget (which i think father of lies pointed out isn't in as bad shape as many states). it seems like the first big step toward dismantling collective bargaining rights around the country.

But do you have to be in a public sector union to work for the state? I'm not against labor cartels or collective bargaining, but I think they should be private.

Spooky Apparition wrote:so this isn't just about wisconsin's budget (which i think father of lies pointed out isn't in as bad shape as many states). it seems like the first big step toward dismantling collective bargaining rights around the country.

LolaFaun wrote:

F/K/A HAPF wrote:The country is in fiscal trouble because the US borrows and throws billions of dollars at everyone. Isolationist policies would fix it all. Will this affect shitty beer availability?

That's not true.

Actually, that's not quite addressing the original assertion either.

Remove the US Department of Defense and about 30% of the federal budget is freed up. We already spend more per capita on defense or as an absolute or relative value than any other country on the planet. It has never gone down since about... 1971 I think. With an isolationist federal policy, we wouldn't need much of a defense department in theory.

The bigger problems are that of defense, entitlement spending (NOT welfare - already reformed anyway to the point of uselessness), and our broken healthcare system, not the remaining what... 9% of the US budget. Cutting stuff like the department of education, department of interior, justice dept (FBI), etc. will have very real and tangible downsides because they're already underfunded. Meanwhile, defense is overfunded beyond all belief and each defense contractor easily gets $80k (that's out of college - after 15+ years of experience $170k is common too, you can retire at about 50 from most US armed service branches if you don't go to college and sit on about $6k / mo pension) that's diverted from public tax funds into the private sector.

The Tea Partiers would eliminate basically everything but defense, which is demonstrated as far, far, far, far less efficient than any other part of the federal government while bitching about government inefficiencies. This is part of why I despise the Tea Party - they have no fucking idea of what actually goes on in our government while criticizing how it works.

I actually was going to mention something about defense being much larger, but I was speaking specifically to the misconception that people have about foreign aid.

Gookstorm wrote:The bigger problems are that of defense, entitlement spending (NOT welfare - already reformed anyway to the point of uselessness), and our broken healthcare system, not the remaining what... 9% of the US budget.

that, plus overall revenues being lower than they've been (relative to GDP) in 60+ years. what a clusterfuck of a country right now. i was really hoping obama would use this situation as an excuse to reduce defense spending in real numbers, but instead it's "slowing the growth of defense spending." so they're going to "save" $70 billion or so by not increasing it as much as they'd like

LolaFaun wrote:I actually was going to mention something about defense being much larger, but I was speaking specifically to the misconception that people have about foreign aid.

So you called out the common misconception that foreign aid and foreign defense are tied.
Gookstorm got what I was thinking.

Molester Stallone wrote:

eh_d wrote:

Molester Stallone wrote:http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-best ... in-capitol

those all sucked

17 and 18 are what i was talking about earlier, fuck those signs

What if they had a dog jacking off animated poster

Haha wtf IWW...

Spooky Apparition wrote:that, plus overall revenues being lower than they've been (relative to GDP) in 60+ years.

Nope, it's roughly about the same, we're just looking at the last few years relative to the previous oh... 10. We're about consistent as a percentage of GDP within about +/-3% aside from the bigass spike for WWII. Government spending is a problem in the US mirroring consumer habits of overspending, except even worse at the governance level. Our spending for about 2002-2007 was done with the assumption that GDP growth would continue the same for basically forever. The problems we're seeing now have always been there for a long time, it's just we're now being more critical of it due to the general national discourse being so fuckheaded.

See: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_history

Meanwhile, house Republicans have passed a bill to cut off Planned Parenthood from federal funding completely to somehow address a deficit of trillions with maybe what... $300 million that benefits our economy by supporting poor women from becoming pregnant. What, do Republicans expect people that are poor to not have sex, too? It's one thing to say that poor people shouldn't breed, it's another to basically make it impossible for them to not do that while punishing them.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/house-vo ... d=12951080


I'm just stunned at how people are so divided in this country with almost zero call for a peaceful secession because neither side is budging on ideology whatsoever. John Titor may have been on to something, shit. Fuck. This. Gay. Country.

ahh, it is mostly level, except in the 2000s. oh well, the fed says 4 percent growth is ahead so everything's cool now.

p.s. did any of you go to see the protests and see russ feingold? sweet, sweet russ...

Might go to Madison on Sunday...

bwahahah...."Fox lies, Fox lies, Fox lies!" "Do you have an opinion other than that?" "..... FOX LIES!"

I love the look on his face when he nods.

Only like 100 tea party xasthur fans showed up. That takes some balls, 100 people in front of 80 000...

Of course they wont. The fact that the unions agreed to the financial cutbacks as long as collective bargaining stays and they said NO should prove that.

Shit was never about the money...

father of lies wrote:The fact that the unions agreed to the financial cutbacks as long as collective bargaining stays and they said NO should prove that.

i didn't know until this morning that the unions already agreed to double their health care contributions and contribute another 6% of the salaries to their pensions and the GOP is still saying no. fuck these subhuman assholes.

Employee wages are only like 9% of the budget, so this shit saves less than .1% or some such meaningless number. As it stands, the bill is like a 10% pay cut, plus frozen wages, plus when wages are unfrozen they can only go up with the CPI. I've seen multiple articles predicting thousands of jobs lost and devastated government income due to decreased consumer purchases.

Unions are the last bit of democracy we've got left, and as much as I don't like them overall, their pros are certainly better than their cons compared to most Fortune 500 companies. The right to bargain being lost would put us back TWO centuries - quite literally to before the rise of the robber barons given how few (meaningful) regulations we have upon businesses at the federal level with no groups left to defend workers.

Oh for Christ's sake...