A Fictional Emergency (Mish)

The following is extracted from Mish's post regarding teachers and other potential lost public jobs.  As he puts it, if any jobs are lost, it is the sole responsibility of the teacher's Unions for not looking inside at their own pay and pension benefits.
READ FULL POST HERE

Fictional Emergency

The emergency is all in the heads of teachers' unions, fools like Senator Tom Harkin, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Not a single teaching job in the country need be lost.

The one and only thing necessary to fix the problem is for teachers' unions to reduce wages or pension benefits. If any jobs are lost, the responsibility lay 100% with teachers' unions.

Most in the private sector have had to make cutbacks. Few in the public sector have. Moreover wages and benefits in the public sector are way out of line with the private sector.

Every teaching job in the county can be saved. All the unions have to do is give a little. Instead, fools like Senator Harkin want to waste taxpayer dollars for the benefit of public workers.

This image from the City Journal summarizes how I feel.



Please read that City Journal article if you have not yet done so. It makes the case for the above image crystal clear.

Government Cannot Fix Anything

Harkin says "This is not something we can fix in August. We have to fix it now."

Enough already. Other than establish and enforce free market principles, government cannot "fix" anything. It can only make problems worse by throwing money at them. There are however, some reasonable fixes

1. Vote fools like Harkin out of office.
2. Open up choices and competition in schools.
3. Make public unions illegal across the board.

Things have to start with number 1.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com