Scotty

When times are rough, it's always handy for a demagogue to pick out a group which he can then blame for the troubles in hopes of directing people's anger away. Hitler wasn't the first, and Walker won't be the last. Even so, while Walker claimed the need to cut back on pay and pension for "those evil public servants" I doubt many voters were aware of his intent to destroy unions across the state.

I rather doubt the governor put his union busting plans into his election platform for people to judge.

Having a sewer next door creates all sorts of problems here. You guys should know that given your southern border problems.

Real good ones, I'm sure. Isn't there a teacher shortage in the US? Yay! Back to the 19th Century! When life was gooood!

I hadn't realized the West Block proposal included an expansion of the existing building.

That's okay. We take in far more immigrants than we need anyway. And if we're going to be taking in immigrants in part to combat an aging population we should be focusing on young immigrants, not middle aged ones who bring in their aged parents.

It's not that easy. Its not a black and white calculation. First, those who 'resent immigration policy' tend to be conservatives. How does that figure in the calculation? Well, the Liberals and NDP can pretty much ignore them because they're not likely to get their votes anyway. As for the Tories, Harper has clearly decided, with some justification, that conservative oriented voters will vote for his party anyway because the alternatives are even worse. So many of his core base might not be happy with mass immigration, but where exactly are they going to go to express that at election time? As to the immigrant vote, it's not spread across the country, but centralized in certain urban ridings where the immigrant vote plays a substantial role. The Liberals used to have a hard lock on immigrants, but their numbers have fallen since they've been out of power. in 2000 they used to get 83% of the immigrant vote. That's down to 49% while conservative support has risen ten percentage points. Conservatives court immigrant vote

It's not altogether untrue. No, they're not indoctrinated. However, it's a well known fact that most immigrants tend to vote for the part which is in favour of immigration and which let them in. This is why the Liberals were and remain so pro-immigration, and why the Tories now are so pro-immigration. Immigration policy is designed entirely around political ambitions with very little thought to what is right for Canada, either now or in the future.

A troll is someone who posts message they don't actually believe in just to provoke a lot of people to respond. That can be inflammatory material, or it can just be a deliberately obtuse posting designed to draw a response. An example would be, say, someone posting Justin Bieber was the greatest pop star of all time - in a forum for adults. Or someone going into a black oriented group and posting how he thinks Black people are ugly. In MLW it's usually people exaggerating their political views or being deliberately insulting or taunting just to make people upset. Saying derisive things about Canada, for example, while identifying yourself as a non-Canadian...

I think I have a pretty good idea of what a troll is, and I have not witnessed that behaviour from AM.

Ah yes, back to the good old days! When cringing employees could be beaten at ones will, and thrown out the door the moment they get old or sickly! What a wonderful society American will build where the wealthy live in their walled palaces and the rest of the country crawls in the gutters begging for food.

You keep ignoring the fact they're also being 'asked' to let their unions be busted by RTW legislation which would make union dues voluntary, which would stop the employer from collecting them, which would require recertification every year, and which would forbid them bargaining about anything but salary - and then refuse them the right to bargain for salary above the rate of inflation!

My list of who would make a good facilitator was hardly all-encompassing. I would add American Woman to it.

It doesn't matter if you're a liberal or a leftist or a card carrying Nazi, so long as you abide by the rules of posting, refrain from insults and inflammatory words, and can recognize them in other posters regardless of their political views or your feelings about them. If, on the other hand, your views of what constitutes insulting or disrespectful words is influenced by how close to your political views the poster is then you're probably not the best for the position.

I don't think so either. No offense, Mr. Weber.

But wait a minute. You selected New Jersey as an example. I've posted a cite which shows that the workers of New Jersey have been dutifully making their contributions to their pension plans while the state has ignored its own obligations. Why do you then lay the blame on the workers as well as management? They've done their share. It's management which has failed its obligations.

Is it? Have you ever attempted to quantify it? Health care costs for the elderly can be extremely expensive, running into hundreds of thousands of dollars even without a serious medical ailment. If their immigrant child is a millionaire then I suppose they're likely paying enough in taxes to support the services for their parents as well as themselves and their children. But what if the child is a taxi driver? Those under a certain income - and that income rises with children - pay no income taxes, remember. Taxpayers are a + or a - on the rolls, insofar as paying to the government more than they collect in services. A taxpayer in a lower paying job with a stay-at-home wife and three or four children probably is a net loss to the treasury and has to be supported by other taxpayers who earn more and consume fewer services. The more immigrants we bring in who are net losses the worse off our budgetary problems will be.

How the government gets its money depends on the policies and laws in place. If you owe them taxes, they can do just about anything, including seizing your bank account without prior notice. However, most of their efforts are not governed by such sturdy enforcement laws. Those who defaulted on student loans, for example, learned the government would do nothing to get the money back other than withholding their tax refunds or GST credits. The unpaid loan didn't even hurt their credit record. Sponsorship agreements run the gamut because it is generally the provinces which try to collect money they have spent on sponsored immigrants for social services.

I said European workers have a higher productivity than us. They do. I am writing from Canada. Not sure about you. And to repeat, I never made a claim that I had looked anything up as you did. So how about looking stuff up and telling us what you find?

Well, I don't claim to be an expert on New Jersey public pension plans but I did a cursory search and came up with the following: Gov. Christie is expected to outline his proposal for "reforming" New Jersey's public employee pension funds in his annual budget message on Feb. 22. Any discussion about the reform of New Jersey's public pension funds for workers, including state employees, teachers and school support staff, county and local employees, should start with the state's failure to live up to its financial obligation to these funds and not end until that has been fully rectified. For 13 of the last 17 years, the state has willfully ignored that obligation. During that time, employees have, without exception, made their contributions. In the case of one of the funds, the Teachers Pension and Annuity Fund (TPAF), that amounts to worker contributions of nearly $7 billion -- almost seven times as much as the state's contribution. Successive administrations have turned a well-respected pension plan into a Ponzi scheme -- that is, it pays current recipients with the contributions of current participants while making no contribution of its own. Successive administrations willfully did this, all the while issuing statements to workers telling them what their benefits would be, based on a statutorily based formula. If this failure to put a single dime into the pension funds for those 13 years isn't willful neglect, then what is? New Jersey Times Comment?

That would be me. I didn't claim to have looked up anything. I've spent a few summers in Europe and prefer to go to non-tourist places where you meet more real people and get more of a feel for life there. So as I asked, have you been there?

Odd that those lazy, coddled European workers have higher productivity than us, isn't it?

Shady, the problem of unfunded pension plans is not the responsibility of unions but of a series of governments which preferred to keep taxes low in the name of their own election chances, and thus preferred to NOT fund their growing pension requirements properly. It wasn't like this was a secret. It wasn't like they agreed to pensions and then forgot to fund them. They were short-sited and focused only on their own immediate election plans, and preferred to ignore what would happen down the road. In Canada, by comparison, federal public servant pensions are fully funded, which unfortunately allows the government to raid the pension fund for surpluses when it wants to - to the tune of $36 billion.

If someone here had called anyone Hitler you'd have more of a point...

You did? What did you look up? Could you cite it so we could read too and become convinced of the error of our thinking?