Emily Koczela had been anxiously waiting for months for Wisconsin governor Scott Walkers controversial budget repair bill to take effect. Koczela, the finance director for the Brown Deer school district, had been negotiating with the local union, trying to get it to accept concessions in order to make up for a $1 million budget shortfall. But the union wouldnt budge.
We laid off 27 [teachers] as a precautionary measure, Koczela told me. They were crying. Some of these people are my friends.
On June 29 at 12:01 a.m., Koczela could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The budget repair billdelayed for months by protests, runaway state senators, and a legal challenge that made its way to the states supreme courtwas law. The 27 teachers on the chopping block were spared.
With collective bargaining rights limited to wages, Koczela was able to change the teachers benefits package to fill the budget gap. Requiring teachers to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary toward pensions saved $600,000. Changes to their health care plansuch as a $10 office visit co-pay (up from nothing)saved $200,000. Upping the workload from five classes, a study hall, and two prep periods to six classes and two prep periods saved another $200,000. The budget was balanced.
Everything we changed didnt touch the children, Koczela said. Under a collective bargaining agreement, she continued, We could never have negotiated thatnever ever. Koczela, a graduate of Smith College and Duke University Law School, is no Republican flack. She says shes a classic Wisconsin independent. I vote both parties. I voted for Senator [Russ] Feingold but I voted for [Republican state] Senator Alberta Darling too.
#1
Not one syllable of this has appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal (Madison). Wis Pub Radio had some talking head challenging the amount of saving in the Kaukauna (I posted the Kaukauna story here a few weeks ago)
Saints preserve us.
President Obama, continuing to make use of his unique White House bully pulpit, will address the nation on Monday night on the stalemate over avoiding default and the best approach to cutting deficits, Jay Carney, the press secretary, announced in a Twitter message late in the afternoon. 'Cause nothing gets highly sensitive negotiations moving more than getting on TV and calling the opposing negotiator a poopypants.
The presidents decision to intervene comes after House Republican leaders pushed for a vote Wednesday on a two-step plan that would allow the federal debt limit to immediately be raised by about $1 trillion and tie a second increase next year to the ability of a new joint Congressional committee to produce more deficit reduction. He's either going to announce a dictatorship or merely crush the stock market.
Posted by: Matt ||
07/25/2011 17:01 ||
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#1
I don't think he gets it that people are getting sick of this act. They are tired of seeing him run to the cameras to tattle and scold everyone. Hell, even my liberal friends are getting sick of his face and are getting tired of defending him.
#2
And as my daughter exclaimed- "Oh, Gawd, he's going to talk at us some more! That'll work just peachy!"Seriously, people are getting majorly sick of him talking at us. You just know that it's the only damned thing he knows how to do, and he'll keep on doing it until it finally works! Droning on, and on, and on, in that patronizing professorial sort of voice... I'm getting a massive headache even now, just thinking about it.
Barb - you got the Randburg Popcorn Concession locked up - can you do a deal for boxcar loads of some kinda migrane medication, until this administration is over? Or until he realizes that everyone else is sick to death of the sound of his voice, and his follow-the-tennis-ball head movements back and forth, and back and forth ... his cheap rhetorical tricks, veiled aggression, pathetic daddy issues ...and just about everything else about him -- and withdraws into Nixonian isolation?
November 2012 cannot come soon enough.
#3
Let me guess, "Feel free", and my favorite "Lets be honest". While pointing his finger at us all.
I wonder if he will do the pouty lower lip thingy.
#4
I reached the point a long, long time ago where I simply cannot listen to this man. He's too full of $H|T. If I can't change the channel I'll go sit out on the patio. It's nice out there. You guys will let me know tomorrow if he suspends the Constitution, right? Or, if I can't get to Rantburg, I'll just assume that he did.
#8
"Barb - you got the Randburg Popcorn Concession locked up - can you do a deal for boxcar loads of some kinda migrane medication, until this administration is over?"
It's all yours, Sgt. Mom. I've had to order so much extra popcorn I've had to put in an extra siding and still ran out of space. (And we won't even discuss the neighbors getting pissy about the noise and the boxcars blocking their view....)
Posted by: Barbara ||
07/25/2011 20:28 Comments ||
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#9
At best, Obama is a crappy lawyer whose only use for executive office is to grant himself an unlimited number of rebuttal arguments, made to a jury that can't leave.
If only Boehner had the spine to borrow Vinnie Gambini's opening statement:
"Everything that guy just said is bullshit. Thank you."
Ay Pee.
Hilly says partisan bickering is just a regular part of the DC Follies, not to worry. World's stock markets worry anyway, open lower, oil falls to $99 a barrel silver lining?
Ass. Press sez their stuff can't be "published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed." Gee, did I re-write their story, of just summarize it?
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/25/2011 06:53 ||
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kinda funny because other Obama officials tried to stampede the foreign markets yesterday
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
07/25/2011 8:07 Comments ||
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#2
Both most Asian market, with the exception of Shanghai, were slightly down, and this was cemented with a slightly negative "meh" from the European markets.
This supports Boehner's contention that reducing the budget a lot is the way to go. Obama's duplicity has become so annoying that even Reid is (hopefully) cutting a deal with Boehner, leaving Obama to stop his feet and threaten a veto.
Obama is a lily liver, so if there is an agreement, he will cave. Boehner even snarkingly said to him that it was Obama's job to sign or veto, not wheel and deal.
#5
Press sez their stuff can't be "published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed." Gee, did I re-write their story, of just summarize it
The press can say you can't rewrite until they are blue in the face, by the fact is that once facts are published they are public domain. There is no copyright on facts, just how they are presented.
As it is, any individual can go to Yahoo Finance, for examples and get the latest market summary and write a story saying Obama's recalcitrance fails to sooth markets, and the WaPo can go pound sand.
Dateline May 17, 2002 for a little perspective
The United States government will, for the first time in its history, fall into financial default on June 28 unless Congress acts before then to raise the legal limit on the national debt.
The June 28 deadline was announcement earlier this week by Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who had previously not set a deadline by which Congress needed to increase the current $5.95 trillion debt limit. President Bush's budget projects that the national debt could rise to $6.099 trillion at the end of fiscal year 2002 and to $6.489 trillion at the end of 2003. So the debt has more than doubled in the last nine years. Somebody find me a clue bat.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/25/2011 06:39 ||
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#1
They don't understand what default means. But the market does. That's why the panic is all in the media, which otherwise would not have a story now that Casey Anthony can't even generate a line at a dunk tank.
#2
US Debt-to-GDP is officially no longer at late 60's when I was a young child, nor even IIRC the 96% from just a couple of years ago as in the present - whatever direct andor indirect reserves or assets the Congress could had used to offset was used up empowering the NANNY-WELFARE STATE IN AMERICA = AMERIKA.
US GDP = ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE is officially at US$14.3Trilyuhn while US Debt is US$14.4-14.8Trilyuhn + rising.
What are the US Congresscritters going to achieve save for moving towards GREECE-STYLE OR JAPAN-STYLE SUPER-DUPER, "WHY YES, WE CANNOT CONFIRM OR DENY OUR DEBT IS MEGA/OMNI-MASSIVE" INSOLVENCY???
D *** NG IT, WE ARE NOT SATISFIED WID "SPEND SPEND SPEND BECAUSE THE MOON IS NOT MARS OR MERCURY, + NEITHER IS RIGEL OR BETELGEUSE!
Only Leftist-Socialists + anti-US "Globalists" [OWG-NWO], + Nuclear Islamists, Militants-Terrorists will be happy.
Its 1945, the NOT-5000-SHIPS, 285-VESSEL US NAVY IS OFF OKINAWA, + THE CHINESE, RADICAL ISLAMIST "NUCLEAR" KAMIKAZES = CAMEL-KAZES HAVE NOT BEGUN THEIR MASS ATTACKS YET. THEY HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT.
#2
Well, Shirley some of that has been paid back by now. Citigroup got 2.5 Trill, so that has to show up on some books.
The report also mentions loans that 'were outstanding', suggesting there are some that are no longer outstanding. In fact, the graph on page 137 suggests very nearly all of it is not outstanding.
Still, I look forward to seeing how Obumble will spin this one!
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/25/2011 6:34 Comments ||
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#3
What is there to spin loans were made and the people paid not them!
#4
Some of it has been paid back, according to what I've read. Most of the larger banks and insurers returned the money if for no other reason than to get get the Federales off their backs.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/25/2011 8:00 Comments ||
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#5
Just curious - HOW was the Fed able to loan out 16T bucks? Did they just 'create' it out of think air? Where did the money come from?
#6
The miracle of electronic banking. Credit them a trillion, debit Fed a trillion. It's an asset of the Fed. They will keep printing money until no one will take it.
#9
Another opinion on secret liabilities: Boston Universitys Professor Laurence Kotlikoff goes further: America is already bankrupt. Writing for Bloomberg, he explained that US debt is much greater than has been declared: Congress has been very careful to label most of its liabilities as 'unoffical to keep them off the books and far into the future This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.
Ponzi schemes survive as long as they are able to attract increasingly bigger contributions from ever more participants. Eventually they collapse under the burden of impossibility. This is where America is heading. It is beyond the point at which it can cut benefits or raise taxes sharply enough to prevent exponential debt growth.
Key word is 'exponential debt growth'.
Lots of arm twisting on banks. The CEO of Northern Trust, for example, sed his bank was essentially forced to take TARP money. They didn't need it, but were told that "all banks were getting it" so that the ones that needed it wouldn't get a black mark from consumers.
They tried repaying it as soon as they could, but the Feds had no mechanism in place to take repayments.
#12
Essentially, the feds were loaning loaning out borrowed money at zero interest. The banks then turned around and bought short term treasury notes at a few percent interest. The interest difference being pure profit. A massive transfer of US taxpayer wealth to world financial institutions.
If a corporation tried this to boost profits, every official down to janitor would be in jail. Instead this gangster government in collusion with a gangster press stole, and continues to steal, tens of billions of taxpayer dollars for their favored contributors.
#13
I take back everything I have ever said about hollywood bookkeeping and major league sports accounting.
This is worse than I thought. It is a classic example of assuming a quick economic turn around generating the revenue to pay down this mess. Unfortunately the same people advocating this also advocating fiscal policies that chased jobs overseas and discouraged businesses from hiring as well as allowing banks to hold TARP money and not making the business loans for which it was intended. This is a scandal that makes Greece and Spain and Ireland look like small potatoes.
What do they think they are going to do? Confiscate all of the assets of every worker in the US? I still believe the end game is an intentional creation of a Weimar Republic style economic melt down, martial law and the creation of a dictatorship with youknowwho as the figurehead.
I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist but every other scenario I play through doesn't explain what Pelosi, Reid and Obumble have done.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
07/25/2011 12:43 Comments ||
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#14
They're gonna need the army for martial law. You really think they can get it?
#15
..with the downsizing of DoD, I believe that will leave China as the largest armed force followed by the American public. Meanwhile, screwing with the troops pay and trying to employ the National Guard which is largely composed of the people the Beltway despises, doesn't make that a viable option.
#16
There is no "plan". You give them far, far to much credit.
They are in a tailspin, desperately trying to figure out how to salvage the ponzi scheme for at least a little longer. I have watched in disbelief for the last 3 years as politicians and too big to fail institutions were obviously going for broke. The game is coming to an end and they know it, they are just trying to make a stash to run away with when it all comes unwound. I'm sure they think they have an exit strategy.
Since I've been furloughed from my resident engineer position at the FAA I can hang out all day online and be a pest. :)
#17
Try this on for size:
from (of all places...Slate)"
"If the entire U.S budget were cut to zero, effective immediatelythe military, all entitlements, the electricity bill for the Capitolthere still wouldn't be enough money to cover the payments on old debt that come due every day."
#22
When did the US Govt stop being the largest buyer of Gold, Silver, + other Precious Commodities?
The Gold at Fort Knox, etc. - i.e. the former US "Gold Standard" - is supposed to be the backup for the $$$, i.e. the "Money Standard" - IFF VLAD PUTIN + MSM + IMF IS TO BE BELIEVED, THE US HAS NEITHER, NOT EVEN MOM'S OR GRANDMA'S PRETTY SILVER???
#23
These people will be hunted. After the coming World War that is.
Posted by: Secret Asian Man ||
07/25/2011 20:10 Comments ||
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#24
Debt goes exponential when future growth (in tax revenues) is insufficient to pay the interest on debt from past deficits.
That point was past years ago for most governments in the developed world.
That money has to eventually come from somewhere; lenders thru default, savers thru inflation, foreign debt holders thru currency depreciation, and a few others,
#25
the problem is that we are putting entirely too much faith in Biffy and Buffy, on their way to their morning lattes' getting involved with news; if whatever the MSM passes that can even be classed as news. they deal in sound bites. a good frined @ work thinks we have already passed the point of no return. i don't. in two weeks ( or less) i tink we will see who was right.
there are still too many kool aid drinkers out there among us......
Posted by: Lemuel Prince of the Platypi8406 ||
07/25/2011 21:03 Comments ||
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#26
that previous post by Lemeuelwatts-his-name was me, the Cookie Monster ate my nyme.....
#27
The way I interpret that report, the only way to get to 16.5 trillion is if you count each overnight loan as a separate transaction, and add them all up. If that's correct, then the claim is just demagoguery.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
