[FairMaiden]

DeMolay - you are purposefully being daft. Look at a future annuity calculator...if you pay $800/month on compounded interest your annuity will be worth 2.05 MILLION I'm pretty sure that if I'm paying $500/mo - a firefighter would be paying close to or more than $800. So guess what? His is pension SHOULD be worth that...what part of that don't you understand? If a 19 yr old entered the workforce and put $500-800 mo away from the first day on the job, s/he would be able to retire at 50 yrs old as well. What I'm saying is that private sector employees don't do this...so when they don't have 2.0 mil in retirement, they scream foul play.

The problem is that it isn't our pension fund and ppl have mismanaged and looted the kitty. Yes, as I mentioned there are loopholes that need to be closed. I don't deny that. But firefighters and policemen do dirty work (human garbage collector a cop told me once)...risking their lives running into burning buildings and we begrudge them a decent retirement.

It's all about getting us to point fingers. The municpal gov'ts overspend their budgets...and pensions should have be paid monthly from wages...if that didn't happen then they screwed up, not the firefighter/police officer.

I do agree that 50 yrs old is a little young to retire...but how many 50+ yr old can carry a 180 lbs guy down a flight of stairs anymore?

Please don't resort to name calling or flaming - stick to the discussion. Otherwise you do your intelligence a disservice.

[IsThisRealLife]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('FairMaiden', '.')..how many 50+ yr old can carry a 180 lbs guy down a flight of stairs anymore?

[deMolay]

UnfairMaiden, perhaps before you accuse me of flaming, you should get your facts straight, I did not start the flame war. Also you are telling a baldfaced lie when you state that a kid at 19 years of age working as a public servant pays 500/800 per month into their government pension out of their own pocket. The average government worker happens to recieve as high as 40% more in wages and benefits than the taxpayer paying his freight. This is because our elected officials have not looked after the rights of the taxpayer and have bowed down to the special interests of unionized labour. All of which really doesn't matter, because jurisdiction after jurisdiction is rolling back the millionaire pensions of the unionized thugs. Austerity will take root in Canada just as it has in all nations that have soveriegn debts that have exceeded the ability of the countries to meet their obligations. The sovereign debts were run up by 40 years of spendthrift governments exceeding the cash flow of the nation. Canada is prime for a fall. You have 1/3 of the people working for government, 1/3 is government and 1/3 paying the bills. Not a very promising business model. 1/3 paying freight of 2/3's is not sustainable. Especially in Canada's case, were the average working Canadian family now pays more in taxes than they do for food, clothing and housing combined. Taxes in Canada have risen 1700% since 1961. Do you really believe that is sustainable. If so you probably also believe in the tooth fairy. Even healthcare is crumbling in Canada. In many Provinces, the cost of healthcare is consuming as much as 40% of Provincial budgets. That also can not continue. In fact in Quebec last year the Supreme Court ruled that citizen's do not have to stand in line anymore. The court basically said that a right to stand in a line for life saving treatment is unconstitutional and that has meant that privatization of healthcare is happening as we speak. So best of luck on your endeavours...

[deMolay]

Here is a link FairMaiden to a National Post story showing that taxes have risen 1700% in Canada since 1961. http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blog ... -1961.aspx

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('deMolay', 'H')ere is a link FairMaiden to a National Post story showing that taxes have risen 1700% in Canada since 1961. http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blog ... -1961.aspx

[eastbay]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vtsnowedin', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('deMolay', ' ')To alert moderators, click on the red asterisk. Eastbay.

[deMolay]

Kieth and have you had a 1700% increase in your wages since 1961. Yah, I didn't think so. And inflation is a form of an additional tax.

[Pretorian]

I've met plenty of Canadians and have seen only 2 that actually DO something for a living, a farmer from Manitoba or something like that and Maddog here . Everybody else seem to provide invaluable services to each other, while munching on that farmer's food and Maddog's gas and spending export revenues. How can someone complain about taxes when he doesnt do anything of value in the first place? Boggles my mind.

[FairMaiden]

Demolay - I usually read your posts so I was simply saying name calling does not prove you point. You DID call me a squid or something but I'm too lazy to look up the post & quote. You also call my post "mewling"...which isn't even a word but I'm guessing is derogatory.

To the discussion - how can you say firefighters and police make 40% more than the private sector? Are you implying private companies would take over these services and provide 40% less pay? As I have noted, I make $5K less per year than I did in the private sector (balanced by the ability to work in your actual community). And it's my experience in Canada that the 40% doesn't hold true. In fact, BC gov't has had to implement a TMA (temporary market adjustment) to hold onto certified and qualified people in many sectors (nurses, accountants, lawyers) bc they might a LOT more in the private sector. Look up the BCGEU contract if you don't believe me.

As to taxes, again - my point is that all this info/discussion about pensions is just a way to get us NOT to look the poor choices and planning happening at city hall. They had BOOM revenues from inflated property taxes - they didn't start paying that increases in wage - NO - they spent all of it and MORE. When everyone knows there directives has always been to borrow in lean years and supposedly pay it off in boom years. But they don't do that - they just overspend even in boom years. That is the REAL issue.

From your article, "Fast-forward to 2007 and the average Canadian family earned $66,496 and paid $30,213 in taxes. On a percentage basis, the average Canadian family gave 45.4 per cent of its income to governments in the form of taxes while spending 34.9 per cent of its income to provide itself with food, clothing, and shelter, with only a scant 19.7 per cent surplus."

Numbers and stats can be manipulated. Look at 1961 - families did not have UCC & CTB. Add those to the mix and how does the percentage change? At $66K w/2 children, you would receive approx $250/month back from the gov't. That change your "percentage basis"...also, the gov't invested in transit (with an eye to shipping) with it's gateway funding. That has allowed private sector to bring in tens of thousands of extra shipping containers from China - keeping your costs on Chinese mfg goods low. I'm willing to guess we have a lot more than we did in 1961 as far as living standards go. But I guess that's debatable.

As to what Canadians do, let's be real here. Just bc you don't know them doesn't mean ppl aren't working here. We produce enough electricity, wood, food, metals, etc to export them so ppl must be working!

[deMolay]

Chicago Property Taxes could rise 60% to pay for Government worker pensions. http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illin ... -says.html

[deMolay]

Oxford Dictionary: Mewl, To cry feebly.

[Fishman]

Back to the topic.
Best article I've read this year (ha ha ) about the why of the municides.

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishans ... inst-them/

The why is liberalism, as I forecast long ago, peak oil is the demise of modern liberalism.

[deMolay]

Fishman Excellant Read. From your link. $this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t’s All Greek to Us

In very un-Icelandic fashion, last week protestors in Athens tried to blow up a downtown courthouse. Over a year after the Hellenic meltdown, the Greek newspapers still reflect the popular fury—protests, strikes, senseless violence—at the mandatory cutbacks, the public sector layoffs, and the high-interest needed to attract investors to shaky Greek bonds. And yet amid the furor, 60% of the public still polls in favor of the European Union. How are we to diagnose the drowning non-swimmer who eagerly grasps—and yet hates—the life preserver?

A bit of story-telling: When I lived in Greece in the 1970s, it was a relatively poor country. The road system was deplorable; the airport at Athens was little more than an insulated warehouse. I usually stayed in hotels with bathrooms down the hall. A bus trip of about 200 miles translated into about a six hour marathon. The buses were often of eastern European make and spewed black smoke into the Athenian air whose toxic bite could devour marble. Rail travel was nightmarish (biking was quicker). There was no bridge across the Gulf of Corinth. The Athens “subway” was little more than a 19th century electric carriage.

Greeks’ second homes were one bedroom village affairs. It was rare to see a Mercedes in Athens. I knew one Greek who had a swimming pool. Getting off an island ferry boat usually meant meeting a swarm of older ladies trying to hawk you their extra bedroom for rent.

You get the picture:1970s Greece reflected a small southern Balkan population wedded to a siesta lifestyle, on a rocky peninsula in which there was little wealth other than tourism, a poorly developed agriculture, some shipping, and remittances from Greek expatriates in the United States and Germany.

Fast forward to the post-Olympics Greece: five star hotels, 20,000 plus private swimming pools (most of them unreported for tax purposes), half the work force ensconced in cushy government or government-related jobs, Attica dotted with Riviera-like second homes, BMWs more common than Mercedeses, billions of euros worth of new highways, and a new airport and subway system.

In other words, somehow a country without a manufacturing base and with poor productivity, a small population, an inefficient statist economy, and bloated public sector suddenly went from near third world status to a standard of living not that much different from a Munich or Amsterdam. How? Did Greek socialism produce all that wealth?

Well, we know the answer: northern European cash—borrowed, given, or swindled. The radical new affluence in part was justified by the fact that Germans and Scandinavians wanted good infrastructure and facilities when they went on their annual summer Greek vacations—along with pan-EU pipe dreams and fraudulent Greek book keeping that disguised massive debt.

Now? Oz is over with and the Greeks are furious at “them.” Furious in the sense that everyone must be blamed except themselves. So they protest and demonstrate that they do not wish to stop borrowing money to sustain a lifestyle that they have not earned—but do not wish to cut ties either with their EU beneficiaries and go it alone as in the 1970s. So they rage against reality.

California Got What It Wanted

The same is true of California. Our elites liked the idea of stopping new gas and oil extraction, shutting down the nuclear power industry, freezing state east-west freeways, strangling the mining and timber industries, cutting off water to agriculture in the Central Valley, diverting revenues from fixing roads and bridges to redistributive entitlements, and praising the new multicultural state that would welcome in half the nation’s 11-15 million illegal aliens. Better yet, the red-state-minded “they” (the nasty upper one-percent who stole from the rest of us due to their grasping but superfluous businesses) began to leave at the rate of 3,000 a week, ensuring the state a Senator Barbara Boxer into her nineties.

Yes, we are proud that we have changed the attitude, lifestyle, and demography of the state, made it “green,”and have the highest paid public employees and the most generous welfare system—and do not have to soil our hands with nasty things like farming, oil production, or nuclear power. And now we are broke. Our infrastructure is crumbling and an embarrassment. My environs is known as “Zimbabwe” or “Appalachia” for its new third-world look that followed from about the highest unemployment and lowest per capita income in the nation. Again, thanks to the deep South, our schools are not quite last in reading and math. So of course, like the Greeks, we are mad at somebody other than ourselves. Californians are desperate for a “them” fix. But who is them? “Them” either left, is leaving, or has been shut down.

Consumers are furious at spiking gas and food prices, and the collapse of state revenues. The illegal alien cadre is furious that there are cutbacks in their entitlements. The Latino community says that it cannot support anyone who wants to close the border and opposes amnesty. The public employees are furious in Greek-like fashion at the thought of cuts to pensions and lay-offs. The professors and UC administrators are either suing the state or turning on each other. Where are a few hundred Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts who would gladly pay more in taxes for the rest of us from their ill-gotten gains?

The Statist Religion

What strikes me is not that leftism does not work, but that when it is indulged and doesn’t work, its beneficiaries scream at the unfairness of it all—in the fashion that a theorist who claimed 2 plus 2 equals 5 blames the construct of mathematics because his equation is not true. Why don’t Germans just give Greeks the hundreds of billions of euros that they “owe” them?

The green lobby got all it wanted—subsidies, insider dealers, fame, money, influence. And then came Climategate, the multimillionaire Al Gore’s personal and professional meltdown, the coldest, iciest, and snowiest winters in memory, all the false warnings about record hurricanes and tsunamis becoming the new norm, the Orwellian metamorphosizing nomenclature (global warming begat climate change that is now begetting “climate chaos”).

Gorism is becoming a permanent fixture of late night comedians. When the New York Times keeps publishing op-eds about how record cold proves record global warming, the world wonders: what would record heat prove?

But whom to blame? The bad earth that is not boiling this winter? Right-wing zealots who cannot comprehend that very cold proves very hot. Red-state yahoos that don’t understand the brilliance of cap and trade? Broke governments that did not subsidize enough green power, green farming, and green energy?

The New Liberal Age

By January 2009, I was reading brilliant new books promising an end to conservatism, a new 50-year-old liberal ascendancy, the final triumph of John Maynard Keynes, and of course the apotheosis of the omnipresent “god” Barack Obama. By May 2009 we were lectured that the nascent tea party was an Astroturf fake movement, then a racist dangerous movement with Nazi undertones, and then a splinter nihilist know-nothing movement without political consequences.

By November 2010, all the above vanished in a blink. Furor followed from the Left that Obama was not a Great Stone Face savior, that the tea party was all too real, that the conservatives were back, and that liberalism had suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1938. How can all this be? Whom to blame?

Inconvenient Truths

Yet why not carry on with the progressive agenda? Would not the Greeks be happier if the Germans said, “Sorry, we won’t loan you anything at any interest rate, so please by all means riot all you wish”?

Would Californians be happier if we let in, say, 10 million more illegal aliens, and shut down east-side San Joaquin Valley water deliveries as well to save far more fishlets than just the smelt? Are not we still discriminating against transsexual and transgendered in the military? Why is there not diversity/affirmative action redress for underrepresented gay officers? Why are not these legitimate questions?

Cannot liberals press on with their dream and insist on amnesty, go for single-payer health care, lobby for a 50% income tax rate on higher incomes? If spring is delayed by frost and snow this year into June or July, would that even more so prove the case for global warming? Will Al Gore make another film, A Really Really Inconvenient Truth?

In short, there is no “them” who wrecked Greece, ruined California, subverted the climate change movement, sidetracked a half century of liberalism to come, or discredited mega-deficit spending.

“Them” you see is simply a shorthand for “I got what I wanted, and I am mad at someone or something for not allowing the world to become what I think it should have been.”

[Chuckmak]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Fishman', '
')The why is liberalism, as I forecast long ago, peak oil is the demise of modern liberalism.

[Chuckmak]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('deMolay', 'P')ension Armageddon in Pittsburgh. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... state.html

[deMolay]

One state is now looking at a 90% Tax on Fat Cat Union Pensions. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... -curb.html

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Chuckmak', 'G')reat article, btw.

[deMolay]

Illinios Income Taxes to jump 75% to try and pay back loans. http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2011/01/06/ ... -expected/

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('deMolay', 'O')ne state is now looking at a 90% Tax on Fat Cat Union Pensions. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... -curb.html

[deMolay]

And you don't like the facts. Fact #1 The Welfare State has hit the wall. More Socialist Programs will be flung on the dung heap of history. Rage away VM and Keith, but shooting at the messenger will not change the outcome. Socialism is dying.