What, exactly, did they agree to pay? Everything I can find on this is basically some variation of 'Look at these hippies on the street'

Doing things the Spanish way?

How many teachers have ever been fired in Wisconsin?

For a while, I was applying for government jobs that paid less than my former private sector job because I was having the damndest time finding any work. In general, people don't have a lot of choice about where they work outside of menial jobs.

What's there to "believe"?

This seems to support the theory that public sector workers get paid more, if you were getting paid $0 by the private sector.

same for the private sector

Basically 3/4th of this thread is garbage spewed by misinformed people who don't live in Wisconsin or don't have a clue as to what is actually going on here.

According to the Wisconsin legislative fiscal bureau (http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lfb/index.html), a non-partisan government organization tasked with keeping track of the state budget, the state was going to end the 2009-2011 period with a budget surplus.

"In its Jan. 31 memo to legislators on the condition of the state’s budget, the Fiscal Bureau determined that the state will end the year with a balance of $121.4 million."

In January Governor Walker began pushing massive spending to special interest groups, totaling roughly 140 million dollars of taxpayer money. This includes the following:

"$25 million for an economic development fund for job creation that still has $73 million due to a lack of job creation. Walker is creating a $25 million hole which will not create or retain jobs.

$48 million for private health savings accounts, which primarily benefit the wealthy. A study from the federal Governmental Accountability Office showed the average adjusted gross income of HSA participants was $139,000 and nearly half of HSA participants reported withdrawing nothing from their HSA, evidence that it is serving as a tax shelter for wealthy participants.

$67 million for a tax shift plan, so ill-conceived that at best the benefit provided to ‘job creators’ would be less than a dollar a day per new job, and may be as little as 30 cents a day."

So instead of having a budget surplus of 121.4 million as was estimated, we have the current deficit that was created by Walker, and it's now being used as an excuse to strip working people of their rights all over Wisconsin.

Oh, and some people might find it funny that the police, firefighters and state troopers aren't included in this bill. They were the ones who supported Walker's campaign last election. Politics as usual in America though I guess.

As a few people have eluded to in this thread but not complicity stated, Walker is giving massive benefits to corporations and people in the higher income brackets, while bending over the middle class. I fear that the citizens united decision will make for a new era in American politics, one that is not at all the will of the people, but instead of the corporations pocketbooks.

Also, if you think public workers are the ones that caused our state budget problems, and that they should have to bear such a burden, you are extremely misinformed. Teachers make next to nothing and benefits were basically all they had. Everyone seems to keep saying "Well I work in the private sector and things are going badly for me so we need to even it out for state employees to make it fair."

If you want to talk about "fairness" why not start by actually taxing the wealthy/corporations instead of the people who actually make our society run.

Inb4 right wing *****torm telling me all about how wrong I am

oh my god

grimmer, what color is the sky in your world? My head very nearly exploded after reading your post.

I mean, I don't blame you personally, because you're probably just a liberal caught up in all of the hysteria here this week. But you are woefully misinformed by your "sources."



I'm literally speechless. They have to just be completely detached from all reality to hold the belief that Wisconsin is/was running a budget surplus. There is literally NO amount of creative accounting that can make that statement true.



SO not true. Walker was supported by the MILWAUKEE unions only. 1 out of the 20+ public safety unions in the state. The rest of them all funded Tom Barrett as expected.

He made it abundantly clear why they weren't included in this. All these protests and work-stoppages happening this week? Imagine if they were all cops/firefighters. Hope your house doesn't start on fire.

I have to close this thread now before I get any infraction points by responding further.

Great rebuttal to my points, you sure showed me.

The fact that you say things like this leads me to believe you are not someone who is capable of conducting an intelligent conversation with on this subject. Rather than repudiating my points with facts you simply say things and expect people to believe them to be true.

Edit: I too will be leaving this thread now, I don't think I even want to waste my time typing things out when it will all fall on deaf ears

Also, for people who don't live in Wisconsin, you have to understand one thing.

grimmer's statement that we had a "121 million dollar surplus" might technically be true, but not for the reasons you might think.

In Wisconsin, it is against the law for the state budget to run a deficit on paper. It's one of those feel-good laws that don't actually accomplish anything.

So what happens, is just like every other state that has been run by liberals for the last decade, our spending got WAY out of control, and we were constantly hearing stories like Doyle calls for layoffs, furloughs, cuts to fill $6.5 billion hole because of how far up **** creek we were in our finances.

Well, there is this law that says we cannot run a deficit, so BECAUSE of that law, he has to figure out how to abuse shady accounting tricks and petty theft in order for the bottom line on the paper budget for this year to not have a "-" in front of it.

This results in the budget deficit being transferred off the current books on to the next year's budget. Year after year they just find ways of kicking that giant deficit rock down the street a little bit.

So that's why you will get statements like grimmer posted even though our state is HORRIBLY under water due to the out of control spending by our entirely democratic state government for the past 8 years. Governor/senate/assembly were all heavily weighted toward the dems and the people got sick of it and made a complete 180 in November 2010.


So that's why I sound frustrated when I see people in Wisconsin who I presume know this, spout off about how we were actually running a surplus even though we had several billion dollars in structural deficits for the next budget cycle. It's no different than people with $100,000 in personal debt payments due this month and getting a $110,000 payday loan that will come due next month to pay for it and saying, "Look, we have a $10,000 surplus!!! YAY!"

Yeah like I said, it's not a personal attack on you because clearly a large portion of people believe what you do.

But the entire system is set up as a giant room of smoke an mirrors that allows you to make statements that, while are technically true (budget surplus), nobody who spent more than 5 minutes actually investigating it would come to the conclusion that it was intellectually honest.

It is precisely the fact that our overlords ran around fixing budget deficits by raising every tax imaginable and stealing money from the next fiscal year that Scott Walker was elected. They saw what he did (tried to do) in Milwaukee and were eager to see someone like that in the governors mansion.

Not your fault, you're just getting your info from the people who are cooking the books.

Nah, not really. In the private sector, a bunch of people get laid off, too.

Comparing a small farm town school to urban schools is misleading. You basically give as an example the most attractive public school job out there and expect it to say something about the pool for teachers everywhere.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2...nment-workers/

Living in a 400 person town is the most attractive public school job out there?????? Not exactly everyone's dream. Especially in Wisconsin, where there aren't any dangerous inner cities except for maybe select parts of Milwaukee.

Yes, people like to teach in small rural schools for a variety of reasons: traffic, class size, demeanor of students, quality of life.

You can't build an argument on a single data point.

Well, she applied to >100 jobs in WI and MN, in markets from Minneapolis to 1 horse towns. All the openings had hundreds of applicants. The school in question sent an email to all the applicants and didn't blind the recipients so we were able to see there were 402 applicants. There were <402 people that lived in the town.

Again, you guys arguing about relative compensation are ignoring the massive premium that accompanies being fire-proof. The average person changes jobs every few years, often amidst significant financial and emotional stress. This is true even for 'skilled' workers whith education levels similar to teachers. Of course teachers generally have worthless, expensive graduate degrees that are correlated very weakly if at all to student performance whereas private sector workers are generally educated in ways that make them better at their jobs, but that's a different discussion.

My wife worked her first 5 years out of college in the inner city of Milwaukee at a charter school. (non union contract) That school was shut down by MPS during a union war against charter schools and she has since moved to another Milwaukee choice school.

She's been trying to get a job at MPS since day one but there are 200+ applicants for every opening. Everyone wants to ride the MPS gravy train.

Don't even ask about the suburbs. It's essentially impossible to get a teaching job in the suburbs without knowing someone because 400+ applicants is probably a low number for every opening. You get the same if not better pay/benefits as MPS, without the guns and knives.

Schools across the state today are shut down because teachers went on strike. She will be GLAD to go take one of those sweet Brookfield positions if they're unhappy with what we're asking them to do.

But if you think just because you might get shot at MPS on any given day means they're hurting for staff, you'd be mistaken.

I'd love for my wife to upgrade her current contract to the MPS one if even Walker's plan goes through because it will still be better.

This. There are way, way more job applicants than openings in the teaching profession. You really need a master's degree to be guaranteed a job.

Friend of mine would love to get a job with MPS but good luck. She currently makes around $25-30k a year with minimal benefits teaching kindergarten at a small private school.

I like how you keep asserting that public workers are unfireable. Maybe because I actually work with public union workers I know this to be absolutely absurd or maybe because I don't work with teachers (other school classifications though).

We have to do rep meetings all the time for people getting written up and/or fired.

Read my posts in this thread, mainly on the first page, its already been posted what they agreed to do.

One thing that people tend to ignore (because it's a fairly technical thing) is that in the last decade the compensatory value of public sector pensions has increased substantially as long-term interest rates have fallen. So even when when people try to account for generous public sector pensions in compensation comparisons they still often understate the value. Note that at the same time that the value of public sector DB pensions has been rising as interest rates have been falling, in the private sector companies have been converting as quickly as possible to DC pension plans where the lower interest rates hurt employees. This is a fairly nuanced economic effect that people tend to miss.

Further note that the opposite effect will happen if long-term government interest rate go up a lot - the corresponding value of public DB pensions will go down but most private sector employees won't see the same effect (unless they have their 401k's invested in long-term bonds, of course).