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Governments enjoy giving money away to donors, other smaller governments and large private employers, not government employees. Ask any government employee how

Governments enjoy giving money away to donors, other smaller governments and large private employers, not government employees. Ask any government employee how easy it is to get cash or a raise

jerf 11y ago
There seems to me to be a lot of equivocation in all these replies between "unions" and "employees", substituting whichever one makes the best argument at the time. That's not valid. When discussing "governments negotiating with unions", you can't just suddenly substitute "government negotiating with employees individually"; the incentives are not the same. The governments have little incentive to pay a given individual; they have a lot of incentive to pay blocks of voters, and the especially have a lot of incentive to do so with money from the future, a point I note none of the replies cared to engage with, which I find is a big tell. Since a huge element of the problem with public unions was the enormous pension giveaways, which are now coming due and crushing the ability of the "blue model" to keep the rest of its promises. While everyone here is fiddling, the cities are burning. You can't write about these issues as if we're debating creating public unions for the first time and seeing what happened. We created them. They are, present tense, in the process of crushing city finances, in the most concretely real, dollar-based, actually happening way possible. This is a present fact that must be accounted for, not a hypothetical bad thing that may happen in the future. Unfortunately, yelling "Oh, those wacky libertarians! Well, that concludes that debate." doesn't add a single dollar to the tax base.
- spopejoy 11y ago
  "pension giveaways" "crushing city finances" Oh my goodness, look up from your Economist occasionally and read some history. New York didn't go broke in the 70s because of lazy union members, but because Wall Street hung it out to dry. California didn't bankrupt it's schools and parks in the 70s because of unions but because of prop 13. Unions didn't kill Detroit. In general, cities bend over to grant ludicrous tax breaks to corporations that then soak up city services and resources, and then bitch and moan when teachers or MTA workers want more than a 3% raise. Union-hostile city managers are everywhere, bringing Flint Michigan-water scandals your way. By your line of argument, having public transportation, or a decent homeless shelter system, or funding public schools "crushes finances" "in a concretely real, dollar-based" way -- i.e. the same zero-sum, deficit-baiting neoliberalist ideology.

Governments enjoy giving money away to donors, other smaller governments and large private employers, not government employees. Ask any government employee how easy it is to get cash or a raise

jerf 11y ago

There seems to me to be a lot of equivocation in all these replies between "unions" and "employees", substituting whichever one makes the best argument at the time. That's not valid. When discussing "governments negotiating with unions", you can't just suddenly substitute "government negotiating with employees individually"; the incentives are not the same. The governments have little incentive to pay a given individual; they have a lot of incentive to pay blocks of voters, and the especially have a lot of incentive to do so with money from the future, a point I note none of the replies cared to engage with, which I find is a big tell. Since a huge element of the problem with public unions was the enormous pension giveaways, which are now coming due and crushing the ability of the "blue model" to keep the rest of its promises. While everyone here is fiddling, the cities are burning. You can't write about these issues as if we're debating creating public unions for the first time and seeing what happened. We created them. They are, present tense, in the process of crushing city finances, in the most concretely real, dollar-based, actually happening way possible. This is a present fact that must be accounted for, not a hypothetical bad thing that may happen in the future. Unfortunately, yelling "Oh, those wacky libertarians! Well, that concludes that debate." doesn't add a single dollar to the tax base.

spopejoy 11y ago
"pension giveaways" "crushing city finances" Oh my goodness, look up from your Economist occasionally and read some history. New York didn't go broke in the 70s because of lazy union members, but because Wall Street hung it out to dry. California didn't bankrupt it's schools and parks in the 70s because of unions but because of prop 13. Unions didn't kill Detroit. In general, cities bend over to grant ludicrous tax breaks to corporations that then soak up city services and resources, and then bitch and moan when teachers or MTA workers want more than a 3% raise. Union-hostile city managers are everywhere, bringing Flint Michigan-water scandals your way. By your line of argument, having public transportation, or a decent homeless shelter system, or funding public schools "crushes finances" "in a concretely real, dollar-based" way -- i.e. the same zero-sum, deficit-baiting neoliberalist ideology.