Your tax dollars at work

[halhiker]

We could agree this a terrible economic crisis, though it doesn't apply to government workers. The states work force grew by 1% from June 2008 to February 2009. The private sector shrank by 3.3%.

It guess it would be nice to be on the government cheese and retire at 50 with 90% of your salary for the rest of your life.

Counting the total compensation costs (pensions, health care, etc.), state and local government workers average $34.13, while private sector employees receive only $23.41. Hence, on average, nationwide, state and local government employees receive 45.6 percent higher compensation than private sector employees. Those are national average figures, in California compensation levels are beyond anything even imagined in the other 49 states.

In short, the REAL "public servants" are the hard-working California people in the private sector who pay excessive taxes to provide our public employees with FAR more compensation than the free market says they deserve.

I would rather walk around a downed tree than have my taxes raised.

I guess the only thing we agree on is that this is off topic.

The lesson is that maybe we should all aspire to become a public servant. They problem with averages is that they don't take into account the TYPICAL worker. The TYPICAL workers is probably earning less than the average wage because the TYPICAL CEO is bringing home hundreds or thousands of times what the average worker brings home.

I have no problem with government workers earning a decent wage and being able to care for their families; I only wish workers in the private sector were able to do the same. Unfortunately, economic justice has not reached that far into our economy.

Personally, I wouldn't care if taxes on millionaires were raised to the levels of when Eisenhower was President. The people whose business utilizes a greater percentage of the countries infrastructure should pay for it. The business oligarchy in this country has skimmed too much of the cream off for too long and it's time for them to pay.

We've had eight years of lower taxes and less regulation of business and we've seen how that turned out. Let's try it the way we did in the 90's again because if I remember correctly that seemed to work quite a bit better. And how funny that even with higher taxes, the rich seemed to do OK during that decade, don't you think?

(you can rejoice: I'll stray off topic no longer here).

[Tim Le]

I find it funny that some people will rejoice when the government actually does something they're suppose to do but only after having raised your taxes or mortgaged more of your future and your children's futures. It's like being happy that your child does his homework but only after you paid him to do it. Have we already forgotten that the Adventure Pass was suppose to pay for this stuff?

We've had eight years of lower taxes and less regulation of business and we've seen how that turned out. Let's try it the way we did in the 90's again because if I remember correctly that seemed to work quite a bit better.

Sorry for taking this more off topic but I have to set the record straight on this. The American people have been duped for way too long with this kind of partisan finger pointing. The truth is we've long been sold out by BOTH the Democrats and the Republicans.

So let's take a look at the 90's:

1. In 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law which prohibited the merger of commercial banking and investment banking. Clinton signed this into law and to this day doesn't think it had anything to do with the financial meltdown. In reality, repealing this law allowed Citicorp to merge with Traveler's Group (this was the main reason why the repeal was done) and it created the "too big to fail" syndrome. It also put at risk people's deposits in the banks because now the banks were fooling around with toxic financial derivatives.

2. The Clinton administration blocked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating financial derivatives -- which became the basis for massive speculation. Most people are not aware of this but the deep dark secret of this financial meltdown is the derivatives market, not the housing market. Wall Street ran amok with Credit Default Swaps (CDS) which are basically side bets on the default of debt instruments. You can insure any amount you want against a bond default (even more than it's worth) and you don't even have to own the bond or have any connection to it at all. CDS defaults is why AIG has to be constantly bailed out, but what you don't know is that the bailout money is actually being paid to AIG's counterparties in the CDS contracts. One of the biggest counterparty payees is Goldman Sachs!

3. Congress in 2000 prohibited regulation of financial derivatives when it passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. This law is terrible. It was created by Republican Senator Phil Gramm and supported by Clinton's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Deputy Secretary Larry Summers (yes the same guy that now advises Obama). There are all sorts of ways to game the system because of this law. This is how oil ran up to $147 a barrel. This is how Enron ripped everyone off with their manipulation of the energy markets.

4. NAFTA was a complete failure. Even Hillary Clinton now admits it was a mistake. From 1997 to 2000 the trade deficit almost quadrupled to nearly $400 billion.

5. Exponential growth of debt started in the early 90's fueled by the growth of GSE's and consumer borrowing.

6. Economic Inequality Grew in 90's Boom, Fed Reports http://www.dsausa.org/lowwage/Documents ... ality.html

If you want to read more about how we were sold out, check out this report: http://www.wallstreetwatch.org/soldoutreport.htm

Some highlights:

The betrayal was bipartisan: about 55 percent of the political donations went to Republicans and 45 percent to Democrats, primarily reflecting the balance of power over the decade. Democrats took just more than half of the financial sector's 2008 election cycle contributions.

The financial sector buttressed its political strength by placing Wall Street expatriates in top regulatory positions, including the post of Treasury Secretary held by two former Goldman Sachs chairs, Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson.

These companies drew heavily from government in choosing their lobbyists. Surveying 20 leading financial firms, "Sold Out" finds 142 of the lobbyists they employed from 1998-2008 were previously high-ranking officials or employees in the Executive Branch or Congress.

In summary, the bulk of the deregulation problems (repeal of Glass-Steagall and the passage of CFMA) occured during the 90's while the Democrats were in power. The Republicans made it worse during the 2000's. Conclusion: Our government is broken and has been for a long time.