More than 100k people sign the petition to have Piers Morgan deported

Granted, the petition was a little silly, but it received enough votes to merit comment from the White House.

It got me to thinking about the recent fiscal cliff debate, and now the ensuing debt ceiling debate. While I am a huge fan of keeping this country solvent, and I am not a fan of raising taxes on anyone except perhaps companies like Google, GE, and BOFA who use accounting tricks to effectively avoid taxes altogether, I am also not a fan of raising the age for Medicare and Social Security as is the first stopping point for Republicans.

We may well have to raise the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security, but before that happens, something else fundamental must first take place. There are numerous studies which indicate government employees earn nearly double what their private sector counterparts take home, once pension and benefits are factored in. Considering federal employees are more likely to die of natural causes than they are to be fired from their jobs, it seems clear that government work is the first place we should be making cuts if we truly want to save money.

In that spirit, I was considering petitioning for something simple that should have no problem getting support from the average Joe. What do you think of the following ideas?

1) Move all federal employees from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions
2) Give States a period of two years to move their employees from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions, or forgo federal funding
3) Cut the salaries of all 13,000 federal employees earning in excess of 180,000 per year by 15%

If sacrifice is expected of the average American, shared sacrifice should start at the top, presumably with members of congress and their staffs. I haven't seen any well written and simple petitions that sum up one of these very basic concepts, but I can't imagine such a petition being unpopular. Your thoughts?

 

Okay, what's the catch? I would sign an Aussie version of that.

I'm surprised it stopped there.

 

Defined Pensions for Australian Fed/State employees stopped years ago.

 

Jesus Christ, did the two hard lefties on this site just find an area of agreement with me?

If people think the mortgage crisis was bad, we have two tsunami's of debt about to hit our needs to borrow. The first is the Student Loan crisis, as all the money borrowed for higher education fails to be paid back for the fact our unemployment participation rate is at a 30 year low and wages haven't gone up in more than a decade. These loans are all backed by the government and will be covered by taxpayer dollars as they default.

The second are unfunded government employee pensions. At the federal level:

Of course this is really a drop in the ocean when compared to the combined unfunded liabilities of State pensions:

While Washington fights incessantly trying to cut a few hundred billion from government spending by reducing the benefits paid out of Social Security and Medicare, programs every taxpayer has already paid into, States are drowning in debt the Federal government will have to guarantee, to the tune of 4.6 Trillion dollars, 100% of which is dedicated money to pay the small subset of our population that works for a government organization.

In California, it has got so bad that we are literally shaving weeks off the school year and hours off the school day while hiring no new teachers, just so we can continue to pay the pensions of the Teachers, Fire Fighters, and Cops we already have, and the pension programs have not been revised at all. We are quite literally stealing from young children to pay these people. It is immoral.

You guys are both lefties, so what do you think of the fact that the reason we have not been able to reform these pensions into defined contribution programs is because the state workers all belong to Unions who lobby Democrats to protect their defined benefits at the cost of public education?

 

We should just bring back Ostracism. Perhaps a constitutional amendment is in order. I actually think it would help reign in the idiots on both sides of the spectrum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

 

No agreement with you, just pointing out to Bushranger that our governments stopped entry to defined benefit schemes many years ago. The Feds also established a Future Fund to pay for existing DBF members who chose to stay in that scheme. Don't care what you blokes do, it doesn't affect me or us at all.

 

Cool, 2/3 done then. Now if we can just claw-back some of that recent (quite-hefty) pay rise they gave themselves.

 

Thanks for the reminder, I completely forgot to give myself a raise for the new year. I recommend you do the same.

 

If you decide to create your petition, let me know. Free of charge, of course -- I'll bookmark it to at least 25 sites and if you make a YouTube channel for it, I could send over a bunch of viewers and subscribers too.

 

Sweet! Thanks Rebecca!

 

yeah...why don't you include some of this information about outrageous expenses carried by the taxpayers:

1. The average compensation for the CEO's of the top 5 government contractors in 2011 was $21.5 million/CEO
(taxpayers are paying a lot of that) For those of you who can't multiply taxpayers paid a big big portion of $107.5 million to 5 guys who headed 5 companies that do the most contracting with the US govt.

2. The average worker/taxpayer made $45,230 in 2011. So it takes a lot of taxpayers to support these 5 guys.

3. According to the Congressional Budget office median compensation (including salary, allowances, tax advantages, etc) for US soldiers with 10 years of experience was $64,000. Boy...those 5 guys, whose salaries are mostly borne by taxpayers could pay for about 1700 deep experienced US military personnel.

4. In 2011 the Average CEO of a S&P 500 company made $9.6 million/year in 2011.

Now that is interesting. CEO of taxpayer supported companies make TWICE as MUCH as a CEO for an entirely Private business.

Wow...its good to be a CEO living off the public trough from taxpayers...it beats the hell out of competing in the private marketplace.

hey some of these CEO's make more than the income of the 5 biggest defense contractor CEO's. The CEO at Honeywell,,,which makes some money off of taxpayers and contracting...but not huge...that guy made $35 million in 2011. I wonder if he'd give back some of his money to help cover the debt.--> hey maybe that portion of the $35 million in one year that represented contracting income (paid for by taxpayers).

Hey O-nation!!! weren't you going to come up with some of the above statistics? Oh...I guess you were too busy nibbling on fois de gras.

 

@Earlpearl: Sorry, was there a recommendation for an improvement to my petition in your post some place? If so, I must have missed it. It read like a bunch of whining that some people make more money than others, without proposing even a single idea towards solving our nation's debt crisis.

By your own account, you are a guy who has made money in his life, so I have to wonder, were you raised to despising and envying the rich, Is it something you picked up later in life, or is it simply something you peddle to push a political agenda like Al Gore peddling green energy?

I can appreciate opportunism, cynicism, and profiteering as much as the next guy, and I respect your efforts to increase the money pipeline to the DC, N. Virginia area. Hell, I myself have been considering opening up a few liquor/lottery ticket stores in the inner city ghettos to fatten myself on other people's misery.

It doesn't mean the idealist in me wouldn't be completely thrilled if we could get rid of the inner city ghettos, even if it meant the loss of my liquor/lottery ticket business or my voter base.

In that spirit, why don't you look for the idealist in you and come up with something other than idiotic class hatred and partisanship that might actually make a change for the better on our chunk of this little rock?

 

So O-nation: I see that you APPLAUD and wish to promote 5 guys getting rich to the tune of $107.5 million directly from taxpayers.

I didn't realize you were so liberal and loose with taxpayer money and so willing to take the hard working tax payers funds to enrich 5 guys.

for shame o-nation. and I would be careful with the these widely radical ideas. Young impressionable pre teen right wing extremists like gr will see these right wing ideas for what they are....enrich minute special interests on the backs of the tax payers. Oh my....they actually might think for a few moments and read through the Right Wing propaganda.

damn...then you'll lose another person to the daily demographic losses of the tea party fanatics.

again, I repeat ...careful...careful...careful o-nation....when people start thinking for themselves they quickly see through the right wing propaganda.

 

Another post laced with partisanship, without a single idea.

Do you want to know why Tea Party support persists in the face of all the hype and propaganda being delivered by your handlers? Simple ideas. Don't spend more than you earn. Limit the size of government. Respect the rights of the individual. These simple ideas used to be what people referred to as liberalism. Simple ideas can't be destroyed with hype and bullshit.

Rather sad to think of what the liberal agenda has devolved into, isn't it? Even the liberals overseas can't figure out why Democrats have their heads so firmly lodged up their asses.

 

so let me get this straight. you, o-bamanation the tea party propagandist both believes that to quote you-->

but you are willing for the taxpayers to pay 5 guys $107.5 million per year.

so...that means you would ensure that the feds maybe should cut $107.5 million from the care of wounded veterans, at least...just to make sure the 5 ceo's of contractors make their total of $107.5 million/year.

So that is pretty clear. thanks for clarifying

 

You sound like you are starting to develop an actual proposal. Are you?

Are you saying you want Obama to throw Jeffery Immelt, a corporate tax evader and chair of Obama's economic jobs council, off his council and terminate his myriad of government contracts? If so, just say it outright, because I think I can get behind that proposal.

If you are proposing that the government do away with private contractors like Raytheon, Applied Signal Technologies, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Blackwater, Halliburton, or any of the thousands of others, because they make a profit and their CEO's make a CEO's salary? I'm all ears. What do you propose? Have the government internalize those job functions they are outsourcing, as if the government could do those jobs more cost effectively? Or did you have some other idea?

I'm still waiting for something other than partisan hype and bullshit from you. Just one single idea or proposal. One.

 

See, this is the difference between a Republic and a Democracy.

A Republic protects and defends people's rights.

A Democracy grants and rejects people's rights.

Ostracism is allowed in a pure Democracy. So are lynch mobs.

 

well, I see you are back at standard operating procedure for the tea party. Name a person or group and turn them into a target/villain. I guess you don't know that Immalt is a registered republican. You probably didn't bother to research his actual poliitical contributions to politicians and probably don't realize that he is not one of those millionaire contributors to the GOP or to the Dems or Obama or anybody for that matter.

Doesn't matter to the tea party. They like to invent villains out of the thin air so they can arouse old folks and get them pissed off.

You probably don't know that GE is NOT one of the 5 largest contractors to the feds...and its total contracting income is relatively small compared to its total revenues. It is a contractor to the US feds though. Years ago I real estate represented one of its divisions doing work with NASA in DC and in need of office space. It was eye opening. I later represented other contractors. They don't give a shit about rental costs. If the feds rewrote repayment rates with contractors, contractors would have skin in the game and not be so soft on negotiations on rental rates. Then the feds would get to pay them less for that component of payments and it would save taxpayers some money.

That would be good. Make the contractors act like real firms competing in a real market and not get guaranteed profits by selling to the feds.

That would be good. A great way to save some taxpayer money. You probably aren't aware of that.

And you probably don't know that the other year Immalt's GE salary for a really huge company was mucho high...$14 million...but for an admittedly uber huge company one of the handful of biggest in the world.

His salary though was less than the average for the CEO's of the 5 biggest contractors to the US feds. You probably didn't know that .

I'm all for tightening on contractors. That is a fat city industry. Its a rip off to tax payers and runs business completely contrary to the general rules of economics. the contractors sell to ONE client typically, the feds. The feds should tighten the screws on them and ramp down on the profits and the excessive salaries of those 5 guys who made $107.5 million off of tax payer money. Those guys AVERAGED 1.5 times what Immalt made working for a much bigger company and one that is dramatically private more so than the 5 biggest contractors.

So I say tighten up on the contractors. That would save billions in total.

You on the other hand want the tax payers to fatten the wallets of the contractors. If gr reads this and comprehends it, he'll be very disappointed in your thinking.

 

You mean, like how YOU name the Tea Party and YOU turn them into a target/villain?

Earl, I know you're not stupid, so I don't know if you are deliberately hypocritical, or if you just don't see it.

 

His party affiliation concerns me less than Dick Lugars. At least ol' Dick could be primaryed out of existence, douched out onto the yeast heap of history. Guys like Immelt have no real party affiliation at all, just like most of Wall St. They are more than happy to attach to whatever political party happens to hold office.

Talk about a counter factual argument. Unlike the Democrats, the Tea Party is actually cleaning house in the Republican party. The Democrats absolutely refuse to clean house in their own party, which is why guys like Charlie Rangle still hold office. Its why Tim Geitner can be made Sec. of Treasury after accdentally forgetting to pay hundreds of thousands in back taxes. Most normal people would go to jail, or at least be considered completely disqualified for the job.

Finally!! A Proposal!! Granted, it was buried in a hodge podge of acrimonious blather and silly claims, but it is a proposal nevertheless. Tighten up on the contractors. Now you just need some details. How? I'm not sure if you've been keeping track of the scandals emitting from the GSA, but the organization that was created to save the government money by consolidating its purchasing has been getting caught with it's pants down egregiously wasting taxpayer dollars. If this is how a federal agency meant to be a watchdog operates, how on earth are you going to make a contractor watchdog agency function?

I like the idea, it just needs a mechanism. A tangible and simple means of implementation. Again, I'm all ears, and I won't even call you a dirty left wing pink commie extremist as you present it, because that type of banter is highly unproductive.

Like I said, highly unproductive. I won't even waste my time asking you to produce a quote from me to that effect because both you and I know it doesn't exist.

I know,I know, our president sets the tone, he leads by example, and you can't help but follow, but please, for the sake of progress, do try and fight it.