Fantastic article explaining what’s REALLY happening:

[CA renter]

[quote=briansd1]CA renter, I think you will enjoy this latest by Paul Krugman.

By all means, let’s talk about visionary ideas; but we can take a big step toward full employment just by using the federal government’s low borrowing costs to help state and local governments rehire the schoolteachers and police officers they laid off, while restarting the road repair and improvement projects they canceled or put on hold.

Krugman is right that state and local governments have been cutting back a lot.

But, IMO, that doesn’t mean that pensions don’t need to be adjusted. I’d rather see pensions cut back than cuts in education and social services. The role of state and local governments is to provide services, not support former employees’ cushy retirements.

Unfortunately, pensions are contracts that come first. And why would local politicians and administrators cut their own pensions?[/quote]

Brian,

You, and a lot of other people out there, still don’t seem to get it. Public sector workers HAVE taken cuts, even cuts related to their pensions.

Let me state this one more time, since so few people seem to get it: TAXPAYERS DO NOT PAY THE BENEFITS FOR PUBLIC RETIREES. They pay for the employers’ portion of the *contribution* amount. This taxpayer-funded portion amounts to anywhere from 15-25% of the benefit amounts (depends on the fund and the employer).

What’s been happening during recent contract negotiations, is that public employers have been shifting more and more of the contribution requirements onto the employees. In other words, PUBLIC EMPLOYEES are taking the hits on their pensions, reducing the amounts that taxpayers are paying toward their pensions.

This has been going on now for the past few years.

[Arraya]

Uneconomic Growth Deepens Depression

By Herman Daly

05 March, 2012
The Daly News

The US and Western Europe are in a recession threatening to become a depression as bad as that of the 1930s. Therefore we look to Keynesian policies as the cure, namely stimulate consumption and investment—that is, stimulate growth of the economy. It seemed to work in the past, so why not now? Should not ecological economics and steady-state ideas give way to Keynesian growth economics in view of the present crisis?

Certainly not! Why? Because we no longer live in the empty world of the 1930s — we live in a full world. Furthermore, in the 1930s the goal was full employment and growth was the means to it. Nowadays growth itself has become the goal and the means to it are off-shoring of jobs, automation, mergers, union busting, importing cheap labor, and other employment-cutting policies. The former goal of full employment has been sacrificed to the modern ideology of “growth in share holder value.”

Growth has filled the world with us and our products. I was born in 1938, and in my lifetime world population has tripled. That is unprecedented. But even more unprecedented is the growth in populations of artifacts — “our stuff” — cars, houses, livestock, refrigerators, TVs, cell phones, ships, airplanes, etc. These populations of things have vastly more than tripled. The matter-energy embodied in these living and nonliving populations was extracted from the ecosystem. The matter-energy required to maintain and replace these stocks also comes from the ecosystem. The populations or stocks of all these things have in common that they are what physicists call “dissipative structures” — i.e., their natural tendency, thanks to the entropy law, is to fall apart, to die, to dissipate. The dissipated matter-energy returns to the ecosystem as waste, to be reabsorbed by natural cycles or accumulated as pollution. All these dissipative structures exist in the midst of an entropic throughput of matter-energy that both depletes and pollutes the finite ecosphere of which the economy is a wholly contained subsystem. When the subsystem outgrows the regenerative capacity of the parent system then further growth becomes biophysically impossible.

But long before growth becomes impossible it becomes uneconomic — it begins to cost more than it is worth at the margin. We refer to growth in the economy as “economic growth,” — even after such growth has become uneconomic in the more basic sense of increasing illth faster than wealth. That is where we are now, but we are unable to recognize it.

Why this inability? Partly because our national accounting system, GDP, only measures “economic activity,” not true income, much less welfare. Rather than separate costs from benefits and compare them at the margin we just add up all final goods and services, including anti-bads (without subtracting the bads that made the anti-bad necessary). Also depletion of natural capital and natural services are counted as income, as are financial transactions that are nothing but bets on debts, and then further bets on those bets.

Also since no one wants to buy illth, it has no market price and is often ignored. But illth is a joint product with wealth and is everywhere: nuclear wastes, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, gyres of plastic trash in the oceans, the ozone hole, biodiversity loss, climate change from excess carbon in the atmosphere, depleted mines, eroded topsoil, dry wells, exhausting and dangerous labor, exploding debt, etc. Standard economists claim that the solution to poverty is more growth — without ever asking if growth still makes us richer, as it did back when the world was empty and the goal was full employment, rather than growth itself. Or has growth begun to make us poorer in a world that is now too full of us, and all our products, counted or not in GDP?

Does growth now increase illth faster than wealth? This is a threatening question, because if growth has become uneconomic then the solution to poverty becomes sharing now, not growth in the future. Sharing is frequently referred to as “class warfare.” But it is really the alternative to the class warfare that will result from the current uneconomic growth in which the dwindling benefits are privatized to the elite, while the exploding costs are socialized to the poor, the future, and to other species.http://www.countercurrents.org/daly050312.htm

[blake]

California lawmaker writes ‘Public Employees Bill of Rights’

[quote]
Requires employers exercise “preventive and corrective” actions before administering harsher employee discipline.
[/quote]
*sigh*

[Author]

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