A good hockey player plays where the puck is.
A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
Wayne Gretzky
Image of the Day
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| I'm sure the radical environmentalists love the North Korean compliance with climate change legislation. via the Independent Institute |
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| Via the Independent Institute |
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| via Libertarianism.org |
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| via Protect Internet Freedom |
Facebook Corner
(Libertarian Catholic). Not to mention that the Indiana law is modeled after an active US law and no one is boycotting the entire country because of it... #boycotIndiana #fools
(I'm not going to republish some excessively long LGBT-agenda rant here which wants to revisit the history of alleged sins of straights against the gay community.)
This is convoluted and ill-focused. I'm not even going to attempt to read it in its entirety--the ex-professor in me would flunk the OP. Are you seriously attempting to argue that any self-anointed special interest group has the right to compel that other people have to do business with them at the point of a gun? That's the issue, man: in real life, you can't force other people to like you, to date you, to invite you into their home for dinner. Some guys may date women for superficial reasons, like their looks, their ethnicity, hair color, body type, etc. So what if some bakery doesn't want to bake you a cake? For example, you can buy a standard wedding cake and decorate it yourself; I've never been asked about my (straight) sexual orientation in buying items from a local or online baker; I'm sure that there are LGBT bakers available (baking is not exactly rocket science).
If I own a business, I do not have to tolerate abusive customers, and if I choose to sell my rare stamp to my nephew rather than on some politically correct/protected interest group member, that's none of your business. I don't have to explain myself to some Statist.
The LC is exactly right: the idea of a politically favored laundry list violates the rule of law. You cannot force other people to accept you on your own terms; it may not be fair, but you have no right to use force, directly or through the authorities that be, to get your way. You have every right not to do business with vendors for whatever reason--but if you want to enforce business policies of your preference, compete in the marketplace of voluntary transactions. Forcing other people to do business they feel violates their religious and/or economic liberty, a matter of conscience, is authoritarian and morally corrosive.
(IPI). Thoughts? (Re: Illinois constitutional change to deal with pension reform.)
It is a contract. Breaking it breaks the law. Period. Would it be ethical to take your 401k or other investments to help pay your bosses debt? Where is the thinking on this? I am sick of the worker being picked over for broken policies and budgets. Fix the problem, politicians that took from the fund should be incarcerated and stripped of their pensions and pay. This is the same crap with social security. They steal our money and cry broke. It is wrong and people should be held accountable for once!!!
How many self-interested morally corrupt parasites are going to preach to us taxpayers that we have to bail out their asses because Democrats made them promises that EVERYONE with a functioning brain KNEW they could never pay. So many ignorant government whores keep repeating false rhetoric of politicians raiding their pension fund That's not the issue; the issue is you have overly generous payouts, sometimes to people who will live longer in retirement than in their career, whose contributions are barely a down payment on what future taxpayers (without pensions of their own) are being forced to make up the difference from what corrupt legislators and greedy employers/retirees have pushed off. There's no reason to engage in union propaganda conspiracies--businesses since the 1980's realized that a tsunami of the largest, longest living Baby Boomer retirees was simply unaffordable. Why public employees think they are more equal, that a different set of actuarial statistics reflect their own retirements, is simply hubris.
I particularly loathe the pretentious simpletons who repeat "a contract is a contract". Here's the reality--everyone else who makes a contract with the state/local government for goods or services has just as much, if not more standing than overcompensated public employees/retirees. What the hell makes the corrupt public sector retirees' contracts "more equal"? If and when the government has run its finances into the ground, somehow the multiple claims on government assets have to be reconciled--that's what bankruptcy is all about, where the rule of law prevails, not the rule of cronies.
(IPI). The state’s 2016 pension cost is projected to increase to nearly $8 billion – or $0.25 of every dollar the state spends during the next budget year
I do not have an Illinois pension. But I am astonished that those in Illinois who have pensions are not crowding the streets with protests. If having your pension stolen by corrupt officials like Madigan does not inspire you to civil disobedience, we are doomed as a state. I guess the answer is to keep voting for incumbents and pray for a miracle. What a sound financial retirement strategy.
State employees are entitled to their pension. Because, it's their money. We, as state employees have No Choice but to put money into our pension fund. Then some Republican f*** comes along wants to steal it from the people that put it there in the first place? S*** is messed up.
Okay, some self-entitled parasites like Ms. XXX are so ignorant about finances, it boggles the imagination. Nobody is "stealing" from the pension fund; if state loans are in the pension fund, there is still an obligation to pay those off. The problem is that the pension fund is not self-sustaining--it's not big enough to cover the distributions of pension payments.
No, you did not pay for decades-long distributions of half-pay or better. The figures I've seen is the average pension-eligible worker contributes under $200K over his/her career while expecting up to $1M or more in payouts. There's a reason why the top-heavy retiring Baby Boomers are requing escalating taxpayer bailouts at up to a third of local/state government budgets or more. Decades of governments and their employees have illegally shifted the burdens of pensions to future taxpayers. And there's not an investment guru on the planet that can make up for decades of underfunding.
(separate comment)
To the OP: keep in mind that Illinois government workers have politically supported Democrats for decades, whom have agreed to ever-more generous retirement perks without fully paying for the promises they were making--and everybody, including the unions, were aware that the Baby Boomer tsunami would sharply strain pension resources; they knew on a paygo basis that a rising proportion of retired to active government workers meant the money had to come from somewhere.
The real question is not why pensioners aren't taking to the streets but why the private sector taxpayers aren't--being asked to make up for decades-long underfunding by governments and their workers. Asking those of us--who don't have gold-plated million dollar pensions funded by the State--to guarantee the greedy, self-serving government retirees who made their corrupt bargain with Democrats at the expense of taxpayers: where were the unions, whose actuaries must have been aware of what most businesses have known since the 1980's or earlier and have shifted to 401K (defined contribution) plans, over the past few decades while their favored Democrats were frittering away stolen tax dollars on other failed priorities at the expense of union-member retirements?
An even bigger mystery is why the union members are directing their frustrations at the GOP and taxpayers, versus the Democrats and union leadership which have been scamming them for decades. Asking taxpayers without gold-plated retirement pension plans of their own to bail them out is unconscionable.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Gary Varvel via Townhall |
John Denver, "Rhymes and Reasons"
