What's a billion dollars & Do we need Unions

A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

A billion hours ago our ancestors were
Living in the Stone Age.

A billion days ago no-one walked on the
earth on two feet.

A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes ago,
at the rate our government Is spending it.


While this thought is still fresh in our brain...tell me
again why your entitlement must survive while someone
else's must be abolished.

Can we get real together for just a moment? We can't
keep this spending up and we all know it. It is an
absolute joke to see those in the streets of Wisconsin
demanding that their barganing rights for their future
entitlements be left in tack. To hell with the fact that
their state is near filing for banruptcy.

The unions say the same pay for all. Doesn't that say
to the teachers that mundane skills are just fine and
doesn't it say to the finest teachers, that they should
find a new carear or, go to the private schools where
you get paid for your skills and not your tenure?

Does the volenteer fireman in mine as well as thousands
more cities mean that if they don't have bargining rights then
they will do a lousy job?

LABOR UNIONS ADD TO COSTS AND DISCOURAGE PRODUCTIVITY!

Would you want to work for a company that treats all
workers exactly the same, no matter how hard they work?
What about one that promotes only on the basis of
seniority and not merit?

Few Americans want a job with an employer who ignores
their individual efforts. Yet that's what labor unions
offer employees today. Small wonder membership is
steadily declining and why labor bosses do not want
to give the union worker the choice as to his/her dues
being deducted from their check.

The premise of collective bargaining is that by
representing all employees a union can negotiate a
better collective contract than each worker could get
through individual negotiations. But because the union
negotiates collectively, the same contract covers
every worker, regardless of his or her productivity or
effort.

In the manufacturing economy of the 1930s, this worked
reasonably well because there was less education. An
employee's unique talents and skills made little
difference on the assembly line.

In today's knowledge economy, however, collective
representation makes little sense. Machines perform
most of the repetitive manufacturing tasks of
yesteryear. Employers now want employees with individual
insights and abilities. The fastest-growing occupations
over the past quarter-century have been professional,
technical, and managerial in nature.

Additionally, economic changes mean that unions can
no longer deliver large gains to their members;unions
make it virtually impossible to lay off under-performing
workers. Unions boast that their members earn higher
wages than non-union workers. But they don't create
money out of thin air. They use their bargaining power
to take it from someone else. Contrary to popular
impression, that someone is usually not business
owners. It is consumers, who pay higher prices when
companies pass on the added cost of the union-wage bill.

The union mentality fits well with government workers;
government employees are used to bureaucracy that does
little to reward individual initiative therefore they
cross back and fourth nicely.

New workers who vote to join a union, however, do not
earn more than they would have if they had stayed
non-union.These modern realities are colliding with
problems that have long turned off workers, such as
corruption, unaccountable leadership, and members'
dues funding union bosses' lavish salaries. Not to
mention excessive political activism. One specific
example was that Unions spent $300 million to defeat
John McCain and to get the Union organizer elected
Barack Hussein Obama.


Despite decades of repeated failure, President Obama
and Democrats in Congress continue to promote the myth
that government can spend its way out of recession.
Proponents of President Barack Obama's $787 billion
stimulus bill continue to insist that the massive
government bailout played a decisive role in moving
the economy out of the recession. Yet assuming no
destructive government actions, the economy's self-
correction mechanism was widely expected to move the
economy out of recession in 2009 anyway. With a parade
of "stimulus" bills the past two years (going back to
President George W. Bush's tax rebate in early 2008),
it was entirely predictable that some would link the
expected end of the recession to whichever stimulus
bill happened to come last. During the 1930s, New
Deal lawmakers doubled federal spending--yet
unemployment remained above 20 percent until
World War II. In 2001, President Bush responded
to a recession by "injecting" tax rebates into the
economy. The economy did not respond until two years
later, when tax rate reductions were implemented. In
2008, President Bush tried to head off the current
recession with another round of tax rebates. The
recession continued to worsen. Now, the most recent
$787 billion stimulus bill was intended to keep the
unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. In
November 2010, it topped 10 percent.

The economic theory behind the stimulus builds on
the work of John Maynard Keynes eight decades ago.
It begins with the idea that an economic shock has
left demand persistently and significantly below
potential supply. As people stop spending money,
businesses pull back production, and the ensuing
vicious circle of falling demand and production
shrinks the economy.

Keynesians believe that government spending can
make up this shortfall in private demand. Their
models assume that--in an underperforming
economy/government, spending adds money to the
economy, taxes remove money from the economy,
and so the increase in the budget deficit
represents net new dollars injected. Therefore,
it scarcely matters how the dollars are spent.
Keynes is said to have famously asserted that
a government program that pays people to dig
and refill ditches would provide new income for
those workers to spend and circulate through
the economy, creating even more jobs and income.

The Keynesian argument also assumes that
consumption spending adds to immediate economic
growth while savings do not. By this reasoning,
unemployment benefits, food stamps, and low-
income tax rebates are among the most effective
stimulus policies because of their likelihood
to be consumed rather than saved.

If deficits represented "new dollars" in the
economy, the record $1.2 trillion in For
Year 2009 deficit spending that began in October
2008--well before the stimulus added $200
billion more--would have already overheated
the economy. Yet despite the historic 7 percent
increase in GDP deficit spending over the
previous year, the economy shrank by 2.3 percent
in year 2009. To argue that deficits represent
new money injected into the economy is to argue
that the economy would have contracted by 9.3
percent without this "infusion" of added deficit
spending (or even more, given the Keynesian
multiplier effect that was supposed to further
boost the impact). That is simply not plausible,
and few if any economists have claimed otherwise.

And if the original $1.2 trillion in deficit
spending failed to slow the economy's slide,
there was no reason to believe that adding $200
billion more in 2009 deficit spending from the
stimulus bill would suddenly do the trick.
Proponents of yet another stimulus should answer
the following questions:

(1) If nearly $1.4 trillion budget deficits are
not enough stimulus, how much is enough?

(2) If Keynesian stimulus
repeatedly fails, why still rely on the theory?

This is no longer a theoretical exercise. The
idea that increased deficit spending can cure
recessions has been tested repeatedly, and it has
failed repeatedly. The economic models that
assert that every $1 of deficit spending grows
the economy by $1.50 cannot explain why $1.4
trillion in deficit spending did not create a
$2.1 trillion explosion of new economic activity.

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