34 billion for 2 companies? Mine made 40 billion for 2010 (record) [winning] woot! woot!

Nevermind the cheezewhiz, we're having caviar tonight! Old Milwaukee is on the house.
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A..._l9m10uCig&t=1

Regarding inflation, milk prices just went up 10 more cents.

Mike, What ever happened to Gov. Thompson? Is he still in state (Wi) politics?

That is got to be one of the more comical displays of ignorance I've seen on this forum in awhile. Maybe you should go back and read the op before you embarrass yourself even more.

Ha! Good 'Ol Tommy's still around. For every major policital seat in Wisconsin that opens up, his name is tossed around (a perception he feeds) until he ultimately bows out. :O:

But he's still a well-regarded Republican, although he really doesn't have much in the way of any official capacity.

No Milwaukee's Be(a)st? :|\\

*sigh*

And this conversation had been going so well...

Heh, I'm a Stella guy myself. Miller Lite for the easy nights. :cool:

Well, one outa two ain't bad - Stella's my girl; I'll save that blue-collar union swill (Miller Lite) for you. :D

so I'm wrong about that. They wanted to make sure their jobs weren't edged. The point still stands though. People complain how much money bus drivers make and say its union pork. Its just because plow drivers and school bus drivers get a lot of overtime. I read some article about about the issue. Thought thats what you were referring to anyways.

I don't think it's Greedy at all to make sure you aren't having your work taken away. Obviously there was some reason for the grievance.

Well yeah gimpy, union greed. If there is another explanation i'd be interested in hearing it.

Is it greedy to make sure your job is protected?

They aren't protecting their jobs, they are trying to maximize their profits at the expense of public safety. Just like you accuse those evil corporations of doing.

ehhh...not so sure. It's a slippery slope. They start not watching out for their jobs and every time theres anything over a few inches of snow they'll get pushed out for private businesses. Just look at the union busting attempts now. Maybe theres a reason they feel under siege.

Actually they filed that grievance the same day the state senate dems fled the state. That means they intended to do this before the brouhaha ever got started. There was no reason for them to feel under siege so we're back to basic greed as a motive.

Here's a question - if private businesses can do the job better and cheaper, why not?

Not so much a slippery slope as a viscious circle. Employers don't care about employees, and working conditions are atrocious - "I owe my soul to the company store". Government won't do anything about it. Workers organize, create unions. Bloody wars are fought. Government steps in. Workers have rights too. Employers (some of them) become more sympathetic. Unions gain power. Sometimes union activities are legitimate, but some unions begin to like their power. Employers don't want some other organization telling them what to do. Unions make their workers go on strike in sympathy with some other workers they really don't know or care about. Employers retaliate by trying to force unions out. Many employees like the companies they work for and actually don't want unions. Both empoyers and unions try to use government to attain their goals, and the workers no longer have a say in it.

Today there are good companies and bad companies, and there are good unions and bad unions. The average worker is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and is used by both sides, and is worse off than ever (where actual power is at stake) and better off than ever (having things that his older counterparts couldn't dare even dream about).

If you say the companies are bad, you're a bleeding-heart liberal leftist. If you say the unions are bad, you're a knee-jerk neocon righty. Problem is, both of you are right, and both of you are wrong, and your one-sided politicking is the biggest part of the problem, and rather than work on an actual solution you spend all your time blaming each other and proving that you're right and the other guy is an idiot.

Congratulations. You've wasted everybody's time, resolved nothing, accomplished nothing (unless patting yourself on the back is an accomplishment) beyond taking up space.

Now that I've wasted everybody's time, resolved nothing and accomplished less, I'm going back to taking up my own space. At least I know I'm wrong.

Steve, and excellent post on the macro-scale of union versus employer scale!

However, your last line IS wrong, in the sense that there are underlying principles surrounding this particular debate.

At the end of the day, labor unions existed to create fair compensation for skilled workers. On the other hand, public unions (to the detriment of FDR's advice) have advocated COMPENSATED workers over genralized labor, despute the fact that the former is more costly.

In other words, unions are bargaining for more than they are worth.

If you think that government exists to provide jobs, you're hopeless.

Well, I'm hopeless no matter what, but I do recognize the great truth that government has nothing worth selling, so generates no revenues, and all government employees are payed by the taxes of people who do produce something.

I also realize that a certain amount of government is actually necessary. The argument comes from the question "how much?"

The amount of government necessary is that which is required to ensure the "unalienable" rights of the governed; no more than that is required.

Unfortunately, over the years, we have been content to let our elected politicians decide what that means, rather than doing so ourselves; now, they tell us what rights we can have, rather than us telling them how we want our rights preserved. It's flipped; the lobbyists tell the politician what and how to vote, the politician does so, and we live with the consequences.

Until we vote all the bums out and take a stand against unions and every other special interest lobby controlling our communities, nothing's going to change significantly; one side will vote in a measure that will hold until the other side's in power to overturn it. Never in history has a government expended so many resources and so much time and effort to stand still.

To add to Growler's point, over the last couple of weeks I've been working on a position piece detailing local government spending reduction concepts. In doing so, I've concluded that a roughly 20-30% reduction in the overall government workforce could occur with no loss of service availability.

There are far too many redundancies. What often happens is that there is an immediate need for some type of service that would fall under the purview of one agency but said agency is, at the time, unable to attend to said need. As such, a new department is created, and it manages to exist well beyond its necessity. Ultimately, these leads to taxpayer funded unneeded redundancy.

A great example of this is the 1.2 billion commissions out there studying the Great Lakes invasive species problem. You have groups (yes, not just a group, but GROUPS) from Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and the Federal Government all studying the same thing, but doing so essentially isolated from one another. This could easily be consolidated, but it won't because, even easier than such a consolidation is the unabated spending necessary to keep the studies underway as is.

The key problem with government is that nothing that it creates that costs money is EVER removed from the bankroll, and there is NEVER any evaluation is to what is needed and what is not.