You Might Be a Liberal
Page 5
And by doing so, he has insured that the debate will continue. During this time, the dark nature and consequences of crony capitalism must be brought to light. Hopefully this will happen in time to save Granny from a death panel and us from riding around in a government Volt burning corn in the tank while going hungry and marveling at Brazilian and Russian oil rigs off Pensacola Beach.
And if you missed the irony in that last scenario, you might just be a liberal…
YMBAL’S #5
If you’ve ever treated a businessman like a criminal and a government assistance recipient like a “client”…13
If you are convinced that Mitt Romney flip-flops all the time on issues while Barack Obama evolves…
If you’ve ever been surprised when your Transgender Pottery Degree didn’t get you a six figure job right out of college…
If you knew what the term tea bagger meant without going to a search engine…
If you’ve ever had to smoke a cigarette after an encounter with a TSA agent…and liked it…
If you’ve ever dated something called a ‘composite girl friend’…
If your idea of diversity is a bunch of people who look different but think exactly alike…
If you’ve ever gone out of your way to hang around ‘structural feminists’…
If you have any idea what the hell a structural feminist is…
If you’ve ever donated any wompum to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign…
If you ever thought Elizabeth Warren is smart…14
If you have ever eaten dog while learning communism from your Kenyan father…
If you’ve ever protested for individual rights while wearing the exact same tee shirt and holding the exact same sign as the other fifty-eight people on your bus…
If the phrase, “and his husband” has ever been accurately applied to you in the same news report where you called someone else a “pansy asses”…15
If you’ve ever ordered the killing of a man you refused to believe was an enemy in a war you never supported with tactics you don’t believe in…and yet took full credit for it…
If you and your husband vacation together, except that you take separate jumbo jets…
If you are given a $300,000 a year “no show” job at a hospital and think you have the answers for health care costs…
If you have ever won, or strived to win, the “courage of restraint” medal from Obama’s military…
If the term “his gynecologist boyfriend” has been written about you…16
...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)
“The alternative would be single-payer, aka Medicare for all: a payroll tax on everyone, and a government insurance program for everyone. Wouldn’t that be simpler, easier to administer, and more efficient?”
—Paul Krugman, NY Times
“It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”
—Dr. Thomas Sowell
6: PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS VERSUS YOU AND ME
If you want me to work and pay taxes until I’m 90 so that you can retire when you’re 50—with full benefits…
Whenever you see one of those political rallies where all the people behind the politician are wearing hideous matching tee shirts and holding up hideous matching signs, you can bet it’s a liberal rally, and that somewhere tax payer jobs are going undone so that mind numbed union thugs could be bussed in to fill the auditorium.
And you can bet that the slogans on those signs will all have something to do with government entitlements. No class of folks is so pampered, and so entitled, as our government union class. It is something that has been spinning out of control for decades.
Thus, when the public union battle in Wisconsin spilled out into the common areas of Madison, my reaction was, “About time!” I’ve been waiting for this debate to mature for fifteen years. It was inevitable, and deliciously clarifying about so many issues.
The battle in Wisconsin, along with Chris Christie’s battles in New Jersey over public sector union benefits, are merely financial precursors to a much bigger ideological war that has been on the horizon now for years, if not decades. When you acknowledge the coming battle, you realize that Governors Walker and Christie—courageously as they are behaving—are only nibbling at the edges of the real issue.
Now, I’m not blaming them. They are the governors of Wisconsin and New Jersey, after all. These are two states way to the left of most of the country.
Having said that, the real issue is whether public sector unions should even be allowed to exist. Let me think? Uh, no. When even a modicum of common sense is infused into the equation, the answer is obvious. And the foundational reason is simple. There is no one at the bargaining table representing the people who are actually going to pay whatever is negotiated.
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with that?
Well let’s see what went wrong: California, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, Chicago, New York State, New York City, Wisconsin... On and on I could go, including almost every city and state where government workers are unionized. Then there’s Venezuela and Cuba and Greece and so on.
Oh, and have you seen pictures of Detroit lately? Detroit, the city that is home to what remains of the Big Three automakers, is still forced by government union rules to keep an official city horseshoer on the payroll. So, how many horseshoers does it take to shoe Detroit’s imaginary horses? One. But wait, the AFSCME local 207’s response is that they “don’t have enough people as it is now” and it’s “not possible to eliminate positions.” Perhaps when part of Detroit is bulldozed, as has been suggested, it will be ‘possible to eliminate’ positions. But never fear, at that time the city will still be paying the retirement and health care benefits of a horseshoer who never touched a single horse while on duty.
I think an interesting efficiency study would be to compare the effectiveness of paying Michelle Obama over 300 grand a year for her concocted hospital diversity gig versus Detroit’s 60 thou plus a year expenditure to look after their mythical unicorns’ footwear. At least the job listings for both could legitimately claim no experience necessary, because there is literally no experience necessary.
Banking analyst and CNBC contributor Meredith Whitney has warned of the looming catastrophe that is awaiting all of us due to the legacy costs of government employees at all levels, as well as warning of 12-13% unemployment. With the official UE rate in the 8.5% range, Whitney has taken heat for both of her predictions. The fact remains, Whitney is keeping score the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) did under Bush. Under such a scoring system, the UE rate would be close to 12%. It took the Obama Administration to really put the BS into the BLS. Whitney’s dire predictions about the legacy costs of public union employees may well come true also. Obama’s score keeping and Ben Bernanke’s printing presses have hidden the truth in Whitney’s assessment to date, but reality has a habit of eventual intrusion into liberal fantasies.
The problem is that our country has been lulled to sleep by decades of hearing that government workers are dedicated and low paid public servants who trade good pay for security. And every time a union pay debate came up, it seems like only teachers, fire fighters and cops are mentioned. The liberal answer to every question is to hire “more teachers, fire fighters and cops.” Well, sometimes the answer is “it’s George Bush’s fault,” but you get the idea.
No one stops to think that most government workers are actually bureaucratic charmers like those we see at the DMV and other government offices—and not heroic teachers or fire fighters or crime fighters. And hiring “more teachers, fire fighters and cops” is really just liberal code for hiring more government union employees who will be forced to contribute to Democrat campaigns.
As long as the private sector was humming along, there was no reason for reality to permeate that myth in most peoples�
�� minds. But the reality is that government workers long ago passed private sector workers in pay and benefits, and now the compensation is more like a 150%, or even double, private sector pay, factoring in all the benefits, including more vacation days than private sector workers enjoy. And, of course, the inestimable benefit of job security remains intact and strengthened—while all of us in the private sector deal every day with the risk-reward constraints of a reality that is only getting riskier.
And along the way—with a public school teacher-educated population that understands virtually nothing about economics—the sheer fallacy of the concept of government unions escapes almost everybody. It’s almost as if the union teachers were lying to their students about economics on purpose.
Consider: Unions exist primarily for the function of collective bargaining, where the union bosses negotiate on behalf of all the workers with the management of a company over pay, benefits and other conditions. This built-in adversarial relationship, along with the realities of a limited resource known as operating revenues, do a pretty good job, for the most part, of keeping contracts in line. In the private sector, the union bosses represent the workers. Management represents everybody else, including the stockholders, vendors, customers and potential customers of the company. In other words, management represents everyone whose interests are served by keeping payroll costs down. This inherent tension is the invisible hand of reality that keeps collective bargaining in line.
In the case of a government workforce, those whose interests are served by keeping costs down would include all who pay taxes and fees to the government. In other words, the universe of people represented by management is far larger than that represented by the union. However, public sector “collective bargaining” is a literal misnomer, given that there are only chairs on one side of the bargaining table. The larger universe of interested parties – we, the people—have zero representation in the process. There is no natural force working to keep costs in line.
Quite the opposite is in play, in fact.
Quite often, the very politicians who are “negotiating” with the public unions are politicians who have been financed by those same unions. At least liberal Bernie Madoff ripped off his clients with some panache. No such style is required in a public sector union negotiation when the folks in charge are bought and paid for by public sector unions.
Under any circumstances and in any economy, it is simply a matter of time before these costs reach a tipping point. We are at that time. There is simply no more money to give to these public sector unions—period.
And that is why we saw what we saw in Madison, and it is why we have seen the emergence of Scott Walker and Chris Christie as national phenoms. And I welcome it. Things are finally so bad that they are good. And by good, I mean that people now cannot help but pay attention to the issue of public sector unions.
I submit that the very existence of these unions has only been allowed to happen because it’s the kind of issue an electorate is never forced to confront—until they are forced to confront it. And now they are. There is, as Charles Krauthammer said in 2011, a bit of an earthquake in the country. People are sensing that the nation is spinning off a cliff.
And of course it is, and public sector unions are one huge reason why. This conclusion is inescapable. And when you understand that, you conclude that public sector unions cannot be allowed to exist. If they are, we will never turn back from the cliff.
Thus, if you continue to support the notion of public sector unions, then you just might be a liberal.
YMBAL’S #6
If you support cancellation of benefits from a marine who exercises his first amendment rights and yet support teachers accused of sexual assault and other crimes keeping their salaries and jobs…
If you’ve ever celebrated an insurance company going out of business or being hit with a huge law suit, and then filed a claim against your company hoping to get a big check…
If you routinely axe a question…
If you’ve ever stripped searched an eighty-seven year old lady looking for explosive materials or guns…
If you get the warm fuzzies when you hear the word bureaucrat…
If you’ve ever felt good about yourself after giving away someone else’s money…
If you ever lost track of time on a government website by shooting down “gay epithets” with little penile missiles…17
If you have ever passed a law that no cigars can be smoked in a private party in a restaurant until dessert is served—even if the party is a “CIGAR PARTY”…18
If you’ve ever been ticked off that you were turned down for a loan from a bank after going to a rally in favor of Dodd- Frank…
If you love every kind of fossil, except for fossil fuels…
If you blame speculators for taking oil to $150 a barrel and think that those same speculators had nothing to do with oil tanking to $32 a barrel…
If you quoted Michelle Obama about her husband “bringing us into the light” at your last Atheist Club meeting…19
If you’ve ever used the phrase “my atheist club” under any circumstances…
If you have ever shut down a car wash because the top four layers of bumper stickers came off your old Volvo and gummed up the cleaning equipment…
If you’ve ever attended a rally on a lush college quad and complained about the carbon footprint and nitrogen usage of the local country club golf course…
If you’ve ever written a letter to the editor about keeping Christians out of campus buildings and one in favor of forcing Augusta National to accept female members in the same week…
If you ever complained about the “Republicans’ War on Women” while drinking a Dr. Pepper TEN…20
...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)
“We have a single payer program in Vermont right now, ... It’s called Dr. Dinosaur. Ask any parent who uses it and they’ll tell you they love it.”
—Bernie Sanders, Socialist Senator from Vermont
“There are, of course, unlimited utopian constructs, for the mind is capable of infinite fantasies. But there are common themes. The fantasies take the form of grand social plans or experiments , the impracticability and the impossibility of which, in small ways and large, lead to the individual’s subjugation.”
—Mark Levin, Ameritopia
7: MARGARET THATCHER VERSUS BEN BERNANKE
If you think the Fed’s job is to make sure our socialist government never runs out of your kids’ money…
Back in the day when people used checkbooks, I remember thinking the first time I saw one that “Wow, a checkbook must cost a lot of money.” Because after you have a checkbook, you don’t need money. They are like genie lamps with more than three wishes. You just write checks for anything you want.
Eventually I figured out that it doesn’t work that way. So did you. Liberals have never figured this out. It’s one of the really charming things about them.
Margaret Thatcher has been quoted as saying that “the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money [to spend].” Well, Barack Obama and the Reid-Pelosi Congress has given us plenty of socialism, and Ben Bernanke is trying to keep us from noticing that these socialists have run out of other people’s money. That would be our money. And our kids’ money.
Oh, you forgot there was a Reid-Pelosi Congress? Check the history books and you’ll see there was. Liberals won power in 2006 and took over congress in January of 2007. It would be instructive to chart the performance of the United States economy since early 2007 for any correlation.
But I digress.
Interest rate historian and contrarian guru James Grant put the double-whammy actions of Ben Bernanke and President Obama into perfect perspective in August of 2011 when, on CNBC, he noted that the Fed had moved past “central banking into central planning.” Well, BINGO! Grant went on to say that the Fed was “trying to impose prosperity through manipulation.” Bingo again!
Think about that phrase “to impose prosperity through manipulation.” It is brilliantly succinct and accurate in describing what is going on in our nation’s economy. Only a liberal would possibly think it could work. Then again, they believe in imposing what they want by manipulating every phase of our lives.
And indeed, it is exactly what has been going on for months, and it explains why Wall Street has done infinitely better than Main Street since the meltdown of 2008 bottomed out. Reality tells us that all of this central planning and manipulation is unsustainable. It is not based in Main Street reality. This is why we are seeing the incredible ups and downs in the market currently. Call it the “there’s no there there” volatility. Because there is no there there. There is no real recovery. There is simply “money on the sidelines” and the Fed chairman’s confusion on what causes the fear that firmly planted it there.