Right but you mentioned income taxes. From what I understand Walker's cuts were to businesses. The bottom line is Walker created the budget crisis with his tax cuts. There was no budget crisis at all until Walker imposed the tax cuts, and now he's making teachers and public workers pay for it rather than those that benefit from the tax cuts.
Sorry I should've added the Dakotas have very low taxes including corporate taxes besides no income tax.
Maybe. I hope they have better luck than the way it turned out here. I support the Wisconsin members leaving to prevent/delay a vote, just as I supported those in Texas attempting to do the same. Considering the result in Texas, I wish the best for the members from Wisconsin. What the governor is doing there is outrageous. It's using the excuse of a budget crisis to bust the unions. What bull ****. The GOP in Texas was more honest. Open lustful greed without any regard for tradition or comity in the legislature.
On the plus side, the WI Senators have more popular support in terms of protests, filling the Capitol, etc. That makes it seem a bit less cheesy than what Texas did, which had no real endgame that was going to work. On the flipside, from my understanding, all it takes is 1 Senator to be "caught" and they'll have the quorum. And given that this happened just 1 day into this, I wouldn't hold out much hope that these guys are going to make this work: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2011/02/cops_now_pursuing_missing_wisc.html State Senator Chris Larson, one of the Democrats who is remaining in Illinois to stall the vote on Governor Scott Walker's measure, tells me that another Dem Senator -- who he declined to name -- returned home late yesterday to try to get some sleep. That Senator's staff reported to Larson that police visited his home, but that the Senator had managed to slip away before cops could apprehend him. "Police were sent over to his house, but he was able to get out of there," Larson told me. If he couldn't make it a day without going home, I'm guess he gets caught at some point. On a side note, this also makes the Texas fleers sound like wimps: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...onsin-lawmakers-conjugal-visits_n_825033.html "It is a nightmare," said Harold Cook, the man who staffed Senate Democrats when they fled to Albuquerque on their quorum break. "First off you are going to a place you are not familiar with, and you will be around people you don't know, and you will be going to try and get out your message to your constituents through a reporter you may never have met. You are going to be short on staff because they are going to be back in the capital ... It was just about the toughest thing I did professionally and I think a lot of the senators would say it was the toughest thing they did in their legislative careers." They didn't have all their staff and had to deal with reporters they didn't know? The horrors! Being in New Mexico is just sooo horrible and difficult.
Yes, more or less. mc mark's partisan link that started the mess might not have been fair, depending on the governor's intended use of National Guard, though I get the feeling he was hoping to intimidate a bit by using their name. Glynch was urging people not to be complacent as the people in Egypt recently were not complacent, and goes on to say that Wisconson is Egypt "in the American context", which I understand to mean that in the scale of injustices within the USA, this is the biggest of the assaults on freedom (and I can't disagree). The scale is obviously different from the middle-east, but Walker's attack on unions is about as shocking within the American political paradigm as Mubarak's dictatorship is in world politics (if not moreso, given how tame we are). So, I think that's fair. What inspired my reply was mostly tallanvor (I should know better, I know) relying on this strawman that Wisconsin is a democracy. Sure, it's a democracy and this law has gone through the proper democratic channels (until its opponents fled the state), but that doesn't have much to do with the comparison, which speaks more to the end-run around collective bargaining. To accept that rationalization, I'd have to accept that anything Wisconsin chose to do is ethical because they are democratic.
The United States is a republic. It's defined as such in Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a democracy and why the former was preferable in Federalist No. 10. Or you can read this crazy liberal guy's explanation, who also explains that a certain ex-president was also not aware of the difference. In either case, Egypt will likely be a democracy before the US will ever be. I also think threatening the jobs of teachers if they don't willingly give up their right to collective bargaining is exploitative. Threatening to use the National Guard to break a protest is authoritarian and is absolutely no different than the sort of abuse a third world dictator would inflict. So I don't think glynch is out of line to draw the comparison. People anywhere have a right to protest and that right (and any right) is not given to them by any government, it is something we are all born with. I'm really proud of the teachers and their supporters for standing out in the cold and standing up for their rights. So called "conservatives" and "libertarians" that use red-baiting to justify stifling the rights to unionize, should kindly admit what they are: phalangists.
We could do this all day, but I'll cut to the chase. You are playing too fast-and-loose with the public-servant idea. The tax dollars are irrelevant to the question of who is the boss. By that reasoning, the girl at GAP works for the People because it's revenues from their purchases that fund her wages. This is specious reasoning. The People do not have the power to hire or fire a teacher, so they are not the boss. The administration of the school and district have that power, so they are the boss. And the function of these teachers is to provide a service (a corallary of which can be found in the private sector) and they operate in all ways as employees, not representatives of the People. On the other hand, when it comes to positions like the Governor, the People do have the power to hire and fire. And we hire them specifically to represent our interests. When it comes to Walker's actual remarks, I agree in principle -- he should not be bullied by a particularly strident minority interest group at the expense of the good of the People. However, I'm not so sure he's serving the public good with this bill and if it genuinely is the will of the People. I suppose we will see what his bosses think about it come the next election.
