Teachers are extremely effective messengers to parents, community groups, faith-based groups and elected officials—and their unions know how to deploy them well. Happy unions can give a politician massive clout, and unhappy unions—well, just ask Eva Moskowitz, a Democrat who headed the New York City Council Education Committee when I became schools chancellor in 2002.

Smart, savvy, ambitious, often a pain in my neck and atypically fearless for a politician, Ms. Moskowitz was widely expected to be elected Manhattan borough president in 2005. Until, that is, she held hearings on the city teachers-union contract, an extraordinary document, running for hundreds of pages, governing who can teach what and when, who can be assigned to hall-monitor or lunchroom duty and who can’t, who has to be given time off to do union work during the school day, and so on.

Read more…

Read more at the WSJ…

2010 Wisconsin Teacher Actual Wages – Wisc Govt wages exposed

AVERAGE WAGE AND BENEFITS (for about 9 months of work)

TEACHERS:,
Milwaukee $86,297
Elmbrook $91,065
Germantown $83,818
Hartland Arrwhd $90,285 (highest teacher was $122,952-lowest was $64,942)
Men Falls $81,099
West Bend $82,153
Waukesha $92,902
Sussex $82,956
Mequon $95,297
Kettle Mor $87,676
Muskego $91,341

STAFF:
Arrowhead – Bus Mng – Kopecky – $169,525
Arrowhead – Principal – Wieczorek – $152,519
Grmtwn – Asst Princ – Dave Towers – $123,222
Elmbrk – Burliegh Elemetary – Principal Zahn- $142,315 (for a primary school!!)
Madison – Asst Principal – McGrath – $127,835

UNIVERSITY of WISCONSIN STAFF (2009) (salary alone):
Michael Knetter – Prof of Bus – $327,828
Carolyn Martin -Chancellor Mad- $437,000
Hector Deluca – Prof of Nutritional Science – $254,877 (really??)
(source:Madison.com -as the UW removed salaries from being posted online in 2007- why if they are so low?)
Madison Garbage men (2009) (salary only):
Garbageman, Mr. Nelson earned $159,258 in 2009, including $109,892 in overtime and other pay.
Garbageman, Greg Tatman, who earned $125,598
7 Madison garbagemen made over $100,000, 30 Madison garbage men made over $70,000

MILWAUKEE CITY BUS DRIVERS (salary only):
136 Drivers made more than $70,000
54 Drivers made more than $80,000
18 Drivers made more than $90,000
8 Drivers made more than $100,000
Top Driver made $117,000

These poor people. Working for such paltry wages and benefits. Kind of brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?

(The average private bus driver makes $9-13 an hour (about $20,000yr) with no pension, or healthcare.)
—

AND WE ARE SUPPOSED TO CONTINUE PAYING 100% OF THEIR GENEROUS RETIREMENT ? THEY HAVE SHUT DOWN SCHOOLS AS THEY DON’T WANT TO PAY 5.8% OF IT THEMSELVES ….REALLY?

It would be nice if this message would reach those that are feeling sorry for them, an eye opener.

Americans remain bitter about federal bailouts, even after every penny of the $309 billion rescue of banks and insurers was returned at a profit. Why? Because our government refuses to disclose all of the facts and, until it does, every poll will continue to show a lack of confidence in the government and in the companies that finance America.

More than a dozen books have been written about the collapse of the world’s biggest credit market and the government’s unprecedented steps to protect hundreds of banks from certain ruin. Yet we still don’t know: Who made the decisions? Under what circumstances? When and where was public money disbursed, and how was it allocated?

Read more…

Democrats and their allies are already rationalizing their likely defeat next Tuesday, variously blaming the economy, GOP obstructionism, corporate money, or an inexplicable collapse in President Obama’s communications skills. Whatever minor truth lies in these excuses, they obscure the larger reality: Americans appear ready to repudiate Democratic governance for the fourth consecutive time.

Far from being a unique historical event, a GOP victory on Tuesday will repeat the pattern we have seen since the 1960s. Four times Democrats have won control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and four times they have attempted to govern from the left. Each time Americans saw that agenda and its results, and they rejected it at an early opportunity. Maybe there’s a lesson here.

Read more…

When it meets next week, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is widely expected to signal its desire to increase the rate of inflation by providing additional monetary stimulus. This policy is based on a false—and dangerous—premise: that manipulating the dollar’s buying power will lead to higher employment and economic growth. But the experience of the past 40 years points to the opposite conclusion: that guaranteeing a stable value for the dollar by restoring dollar-gold convertibility would be the surest way for the Federal Reserve to achieve its dual mandate of maximum employment and price stability.

From 1947 through 1967, the year before the U.S. began to weasel out of its commitment to dollar-gold convertibility, unemployment averaged only 4.7% and never rose above 7%. Real growth averaged 4% a year. Low unemployment and high growth coincided with low inflation. During the 21 years ending in 1967, consumer-price inflation averaged just 1.9% a year. Interest rates, too, were low and stable—the yield on triple-A corporate bonds averaged less than 4% and never rose above 6%.

Read more..

Taking office in January 2009 as president, Barack Obama’s achievement was everywhere called historic. He was at the pinnacle of American life. Two years later, he may be on the cliff’s edge of another historic achievement—the electoral wipeout of his party with some of the Democrats’ longest-serving and revered members of Congress disappearing in the avalanche.

Presidencies and parties decline for lots of reasons, but looking back, one of the pivotal events in writing the history of the first Obama term is likely to be the tongue-lashing he gave several Supreme Court justices seated before him at his 2010 State of the Union message.

The reason for this unprecedented public criticism of the Court by a president was its 5-4 decision the previous week in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which permitted corporations and unions to make unlimited, non-coordinated independent expenditures during political campaigns.

Read more..

The September state unemployment numbers came out last Friday, and we couldn’t help noticing that three of the four states with the highest job losses were California (-63,500), New York (-37,600) and New Jersey (-20,200). The other was Massachusetts (-20,900). Texas, meanwhile, gained 4,000 jobs.

This continues a longer term trend.Over the last year, as the economy was beginning to grow again, the Lone Star State has led the nation with the addition of nearly 153,000 jobs, while California surrendered 43,700, New Jersey lost 42,300 and New York dropped 14,600. This superior jobs recovery builds on the fact that Texas also weathered the national recession better than most states. According to a new Texas Public Policy Foundation study, Texas experienced a decline of 2.3% from its peak employment, while California fell nearly four times further, with 8.7% of jobs vanishing.

Read more…

Anyone who cares about the U.S. economy is breathing easier now that cap and tax appears to be on the political garbage barge, but don’t be so sure. The White House is still pursuing its carbon agenda through regulation, albeit with almost no public attention, and a new study shows the damage that is already being done.

Yesterday the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a highly regarded federal energy advisory body, released an exhaustive “special assessment” of this covert program. NERC estimates that the Environmental Protection Agency’s pending electric utility regulations will subtract between 46 and 76 gigawatts of generating capacity from the U.S. grid by 2015. To put those numbers in perspective, the worst-case scenario would amount to a reduction of about 7.2% of national power generation, and almost all of it will hit coal-fired plants, the workhorse that supplies a little over half of U.S. electricity.

Read More…

As Democrats and Republicans jockey to set Congress’s agenda for after the midterm elections, President Obama has already dismissed one reform that would improve Americans’ financial standing: allowing workers to save and invest some of their Social Security taxes in personal accounts.

That’s an “ill-conceived” proposal, Mr. Obama said in August, because it means “tying your benefits to the whims of Wall Street traders and the ups and downs of the stock market.” The financial crisis, he said, should have put this idea to rest “once and for all.”

Missing from the president’s statements is any acknowledgment that, to date…

Read More…