Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
I'm more concerned that Mike Belotti will be able to continue to receive his lifetime monthly salary of $44,749.83 from Oregon PERS.
It's almost like you don't understand how pensions work.
And you sound poor.
Bellotti doesn't need to be suckling off the state of Oregon's teat to the tune of $44,749.83 per month.
It's almost like you don't understand obscene government waste.
That's not how pensions work.
Okay, expert: Enlighten.
You see, part of your benefits goes into a pension. Just like business offer 401k plans and put money into that. When they put money into the pension, it grows over time. Then later you have an annuity that pays you out your earnings. And if the plan is fully funded, it's fully your money. Are you saying the Boeing mechanic that gets $45k a year in pension is sucking off Boeing's teet?
Again turdfucker, you are fucking clueless. How does it feel to get repeatedly gang raped by Hondo?
Hondo is a gang?
It'll feel like it when I'm done.
Can you stop plagiarising my shit, fucko? I own rape this week.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
Srsly. Do you really fucking think primary education and public safety are private goods? If so, kill your face with a rusty cheese grater in the ass. If you're trolling, well done.
Education of any level is a legitimate private good. Coercive force is not.
Gotta disagree. Education makes the pack (flock?) smarter and better. Also keeps the little hoodlums off the streets. Show me a country with an entirely private educational system and I'll show you sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle Ages.
Perhaps we crossed terms. I meantt good as in goods & services. No question that broadly available public education is a societal good. Compulsory, publicly funded education is probably on balance a good thing(tm). Could also be the largest corporate welfare program in history.
I do think "primary education and public safety" is a false equivalency.
It's more fun when I'm not arguing with GoebbelsDuck.
I would posit that an educated society is as important to public safety, if not more so, than the police and fire departments combined.
I've more thoughts than willing type on phone.
Seems to be a fundamental theme of most people of good will along spectrum. We? basically want the same good things in life for another. The difference is the means by which to affect those outcomes. To be even more reductive: what are the things I would convince my neighbor to do, and what are the things I'd command him to do at gunpoint.
Alright, so I'm seeing "command him to do at gunpoint," and I'm interpreting that as "taxes," because my experience of libertarian cosmology is that taxes are forcibly taken from the taxpayer either by coercion or the threat of coercion or actual force.
Again, I would argue that a democratic system, with all of its flaws and shortcomings, serves as the means of convincing my neighbors. To do otherwise would be to have a system of voluntary contributions to pay for the good in question (public education), which leads us to the good old "free rider" problem or the "tragedy of the commons." But if we reduce education as a good to be received only by those whose parents pay for it, we're back in private-education land which is worse for all of us. (See, e.g. Liberia, 19th century America, other places where the overall life expectancy is somewhere between 35-50).
Put another way, "taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society." I didn't come up with that, Oliver Wendell Holmes did.
The libertarian ethos is really attractive and tempting because its logic is simple and elegant - you put in what you take out. But the world as we know it is strewn with cases where it isn't that simple.
There are no free markets for house fires, muggings, terrorist bombings, and cancer. Those are just bad things that happen to some people and not to others. But the overwhelming majority of Americans would readily agree that we should pay taxes for firemen, policemen, armed forces, and a lesser proportion who would agree that we should pay taxes to subsidize health care, because we? (society) as a whole benefit(s). Again, I think schools go in that list as well.
Democracy is the least bad way of paying for these goods - everyone has an interest, therefore everyone pays. If taxes get too high - the peasants revolt. Too low, the government either fails to function effectively or it borrows itself into oblivion. Also, history has shown that high levels of income inequality correlate strongly with corruption and societal violence.
The Scandinavian countries were among the world's poorest in the 19th century, but the overall levels of income inequality were relatively low for the time. Thus, Scandinavia sent millions of immigrants to America and Canada and also maintained strong levels of societal cohesion. When Scandinavia became wealthy, the levels of inequality remained low, and thus those countries do really well on indices of crime, public safety, health, and educational attainment. Finland is generally regarded as having the best primary school system in the world. Their system is entirely-state-run, to include subsidized meals for all students, and begins with pre-K and goes through college. Life expectancy is 84 for women and 78 for men.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with extraordinarily high levels of income inequality. 90% of Haiti's schools are non-public, corruption is high, and literacy is around 60%. It is also one of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere. Life expectancy at birth is about 63.
Without a strong public school system, I believe America is well on its way to becoming Brazil with nukes. But I also think there is still time to fix the problem.
Too much conflating. Education is not a pure public good, though it may and can be argued to have some characteristics in common with public goods. And "public" education is not the only answer to benefitting society as a whole with an educated citizenry.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
I'm more concerned that Mike Belotti will be able to continue to receive his lifetime monthly salary of $44,749.83 from Oregon PERS.
It's almost like you don't understand how pensions work.
And you sound poor.
Bellotti doesn't need to be suckling off the state of Oregon's teat to the tune of $44,749.83 per month.
It's almost like you don't understand obscene government waste.
That's not how pensions work.
Okay, expert: Enlighten.
You see, part of your benefits goes into a pension. Just like business offer 401k plans and put money into that. When they put money into the pension, it grows over time. Then later you have an annuity that pays you out your earnings. And if the plan is fully funded, it's fully your money. Are you saying the Boeing mechanic that gets $45k a year in pension is sucking off Boeing's teet?
Again turdfucker, you are fucking clueless. How does it feel to get repeatedly gang raped by Hondo?
That's not how Bellotti's pension is funded, at all, Hondo. It's a Defined Benefit Plan, not a Defined Contribution Plan, where a particular amount is pre-determined and the plan administrators then try to maximize the fund's return to keep all the promises they gave away to people like Belotti. Yes, a fraction of Belotti's salary or benefits package goes to fund the pension, but not nearly enough to cover it's cost, without presuming fantastic annual returns by the fund. The assumed annual returns on the Oregon PERS Plan have been 7.5%, which is ridiculous and because the fund has been earning returns of around 3% to date, will have to rise to 10.5% to catch up with it's obligations and prevent a massive budget crises for the State of Oregon this year. The classic "Defined Benefit Plan" is more akin to Social Security where many beneficiaries withdraw far more than they ever paid into the fund, than a 401k, so you get a "D+" on this assignment for not knowing the difference.
Nothing's funnier than watching a burger-flipper talk above his pay grade and rope-a-doping him into hanging himself with his own rope.
Did you read about"fully funded"? If they put in 4% of his salary over 21 years into the pension plan, the payments make more sense.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
I'm more concerned that Mike Belotti will be able to continue to receive his lifetime monthly salary of $44,749.83 from Oregon PERS.
It's almost like you don't understand how pensions work.
And you sound poor.
Bellotti doesn't need to be suckling off the state of Oregon's teat to the tune of $44,749.83 per month.
It's almost like you don't understand obscene government waste.
That's not how pensions work.
Okay, expert: Enlighten.
You see, part of your benefits goes into a pension. Just like business offer 401k plans and put money into that. When they put money into the pension, it grows over time. Then later you have an annuity that pays you out your earnings. And if the plan is fully funded, it's fully your money. Are you saying the Boeing mechanic that gets $45k a year in pension is sucking off Boeing's teet?
Again turdfucker, you are fucking clueless. How does it feel to get repeatedly gang raped by Hondo?
That's not how Bellotti's pension is funded, at all, Hondo. It's a Defined Benefit Plan, not a Defined Contribution Plan, where a particular amount is pre-determined and the plan administrators then try to maximize the fund's return to keep all the promises they gave away to people like Belotti. Yes, a fraction of Belotti's salary or benefits package goes to fund the pension, but not nearly enough to cover it's cost, without presuming fantastic annual returns by the fund. The assumed annual returns on the Oregon PERS Plan have been 7.5%, which is ridiculous and because the fund has been earning returns of around 3% to date, will have to rise to 10.5% to catch up with it's obligations and prevent a massive budget crises for the State of Oregon this year. The classic "Defined Benefit Plan" is more akin to Social Security where many beneficiaries withdraw far more than they ever paid into the fund, than a 401k, so you get a "D+" on this assignment for not knowing the difference.
Nothing's funnier than watching a burger-flipper talk above his pay grade and rope-a-doping him into hanging himself with his own rope.
To give Hondo a 'slight' benefit of the doubt, there are varying degrees of the PERS plan. My gravy train is on PERS II, for instance. PERS 1 is the shit but that's kind of going the way of the dinosaur - newbies don't get that any more.
But, in general, his interpretation is fucked up and @TurdBuffer's is spot on.
Srsly. Do you really fucking think primary education and public safety are private goods?
No, I don't think they are private services. I'm saying they could be. Hondo's comment implied that there is no other way to pay for these services other than taxes, which is incorrect.
I guess it's hard for people to imagine a society where people were actually free to make their own choices on how to protect themselves, and how their children will be spending 15,000+ hours of their childhood development, so they just go along with the one-size-fits-all model we have going on, and assume that if it's taken away, there would suddenly be no such thing as safety or education anymore.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
There's a rather simple reply to this. We want an educated population. Not that we are guaranteed to have one, but kids in the US need to be educated and by doing so, we raise better citizens that we all have to share the community with. Empowerment of individuals is a noble goal, even for the kids of total bums who sit on the couch all day. At least the kids have a chance someday. There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
I wish people wouldn't have kids they can't support and educate, but the government needs future taxpayers, so the policy will always be to grow them like crops.
And honestly, one skim of these boreds tells us we have enough losers already. We don't need more.
The problem is that we have the worst public schools in he developed world and about 40% of my property taxes go to support them. And in Oregon we are at the bottom of the barrel. I realize that we need to fund a public school system, but they need to be managed 300% better than they currently are being managed. But there is no check nor balance to see that better results are attained. It's a lot like that in most government entities.
There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
What if I said that if helping poor kids get an education was important to you, that you are free to open up your wallet and help pay for it? And what if I said you could have more money to pay for it if you weren't taxed for it in the first place?
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
I'm more concerned that Mike Belotti will be able to continue to receive his lifetime monthly salary of $44,749.83 from Oregon PERS.
Why? A guy that retired making $3.5 million annually and had almost 20 years there should have a pension to match.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
I'm more concerned that Mike Belotti will be able to continue to receive his lifetime monthly salary of $44,749.83 from Oregon PERS.
Why? A guy that retired making $3.5 million annually and had almost 20 years there should have a pension to match.
Bad logic. His rather prodigious income during employment is irrelevant except to act as a lightning rod pointing to the lack of need for a pension in his case. However, regardless of gluttony, he is entitled to the pension that was agreed upon in his terms of employment, period, end of argument.
Seriously. It's right there, in the Contracts clause of the Constitution.
Who gives a fuck. Rip it up.
Again. The money is paid in during his tenure. What part of that don't you understand?
If Belotti lives another 20 years from this month forward, he will have been paid $10,739,959.20 from Oregon PERS. Please to be providing stats showing Belotti paid this much or more into PERS. And after you do that, please to be bungee jumping off the Space Needle without a bungee cord.
I like top use Oregon's highest paid employee as a baseline in my argument that employees don't pay enough into pensions. It's what I like to do.
The State of Oregon offered way too generous of pension plan for employees for decades and then made some changes to where it isn't as abusive to the tax payer. However there are still plenty of Tier 1 folks out there that will live 20 or more years and there is no answer to funding that so far other than lowering the pension programs of existing state employees. It's what needs to be done as about 90% of the states private employees have not pension and about half have access to a 401K or like retirement account.
But for those that say that workers that DO have a pension are leeches, they need to become aware of the total cost of benefits as related to a job.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
Srsly. Do you really fucking think primary education and public safety are private goods? If so, kill your face with a rusty cheese grater in the ass. If you're trolling, well done.
Education of any level is a legitimate private good. Coercive force is not.
Gotta disagree. Education makes the pack (flock?) smarter and better. Also keeps the little hoodlums off the streets. Show me a country with an entirely private educational system and I'll show you sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle Ages.
Perhaps we crossed terms. I meantt good as in goods & services. No question that broadly available public education is a societal good. Compulsory, publicly funded education is probably on balance a good thing(tm). Could also be the largest corporate welfare program in history.
I do think "primary education and public safety" is a false equivalency.
It's more fun when I'm not arguing with GoebbelsDuck.
I would posit that an educated society is as important to public safety, if not more so, than the police and fire departments combined.
I've more thoughts than willing type on phone.
Seems to be a fundamental theme of most people of good will along spectrum. We? basically want the same good things in life for another. The difference is the means by which to affect those outcomes. To be even more reductive: what are the things I would convince my neighbor to do, and what are the things I'd command him to do at gunpoint.
Alright, so I'm seeing "command him to do at gunpoint," and I'm interpreting that as "taxes," because my experience of libertarian cosmology is that taxes are forcibly taken from the taxpayer either by coercion or the threat of coercion or actual force.
Again, I would argue that a democratic system, with all of its flaws and shortcomings, serves as the means of convincing my neighbors. To do otherwise would be to have a system of voluntary contributions to pay for the good in question (public education), which leads us to the good old "free rider" problem or the "tragedy of the commons." But if we reduce education as a good to be received only by those whose parents pay for it, we're back in private-education land which is worse for all of us. (See, e.g. Liberia, 19th century America, other places where the overall life expectancy is somewhere between 35-50).
Put another way, "taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society." I didn't come up with that, Oliver Wendell Holmes did.
The libertarian ethos is really attractive and tempting because its logic is simple and elegant - you put in what you take out. But the world as we know it is strewn with cases where it isn't that simple.
There are no free markets for house fires, muggings, terrorist bombings, and cancer. Those are just bad things that happen to some people and not to others. But the overwhelming majority of Americans would readily agree that we should pay taxes for firemen, policemen, armed forces, and a lesser proportion who would agree that we should pay taxes to subsidize health care, because we? (society) as a whole benefit(s). Again, I think schools go in that list as well.
Democracy is the least bad way of paying for these goods - everyone has an interest, therefore everyone pays. If taxes get too high - the peasants revolt. Too low, the government either fails to function effectively or it borrows itself into oblivion. Also, history has shown that high levels of income inequality correlate strongly with corruption and societal violence.
The Scandinavian countries were among the world's poorest in the 19th century, but the overall levels of income inequality were relatively low for the time. Thus, Scandinavia sent millions of immigrants to America and Canada and also maintained strong levels of societal cohesion. When Scandinavia became wealthy, the levels of inequality remained low, and thus those countries do really well on indices of crime, public safety, health, and educational attainment. Finland is generally regarded as having the best primary school system in the world. Their system is entirely-state-run, to include subsidized meals for all students, and begins with pre-K and goes through college. Life expectancy is 84 for women and 78 for men.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with extraordinarily high levels of income inequality. 90% of Haiti's schools are non-public, corruption is high, and literacy is around 60%. It is also one of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere. Life expectancy at birth is about 63.
Without a strong public school system, I believe America is well on its way to becoming Brazil with nukes. But I also think there is still time to fix the problem.
There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
What if I said that if helping poor kids get an education was important to you, that you are free to open up your wallet and help pay for it? And what if I said you could have more money to pay for it if you weren't taxed for it in the first place?
I would tell you not to phrase your shitty hypothetical question like a Morpheus meme.
Seriously. It's right there, in the Contracts clause of the Constitution.
Who gives a fuck. Rip it up.
Again. The money is paid in during his tenure. What part of that don't you understand?
If Belotti lives another 20 years from this month forward, he will have been paid $10,739,959.20 from Oregon PERS. Please to be providing stats showing Belotti paid this much or more into PERS. And after you do that, please to be bungee jumping off the Space Needle without a bungee cord.
Belotti was at Oregon for 21 years. You don't think over that time, that contributions for his benefit package don't add up to that amount? Have you heard of the time value of money?
The reason there is outrage is that private industry went away from the defined pension plan in the 1980's and replaced it with 401ks. Salaries generally were higher than in public service.
Government entities on the other hand stuck with that model - and in exchange workers received less in the way of salaries and wages.
As time has passed, government workers have hung on to the pension system AND progressively increased their wages. All with essentially no risk of termination due to civil service and public employee unions - a total farce.
Belotti is the winner of a fucked up system.
Belotti had to live in Eugene and survive parking lot rapes for 21 years. I don't call that winning.
Step One of Hondo's cop-out pathology always starts with a little joke like this when he's first cornered. He's already scurrying along the wall, looking for his mouse hole.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
There's a rather simple reply to this. We want an educated population. Not that we are guaranteed to have one, but kids in the US need to be educated and by doing so, we raise better citizens that we all have to share the community with. Empowerment of individuals is a noble goal, even for the kids of total bums who sit on the couch all day. At least the kids have a chance someday. There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
I wish people wouldn't have kids they can't support and educate, but the government needs future taxpayers, so the policy will always be to grow them like crops.
And honestly, one skim of these boreds tells us we have enough losers already. We don't need more.
The problem is that we have the worst public schools in he developed world and about 40% of my property taxes go to support them. And in Oregon we are at the bottom of the barrel. I realize that we need to fund a public school system, but they need to be managed 300% better than they currently are being managed. But there is no check nor balance to see that better results are attained. It's a lot like that in most government entities.
My kids go to public schools, my oldest scored in the 99th percentile on every college placement test she took, and thanks to that saved me a shitload of tuition money at her out-of-state college. My younger kid is a 3.6-3.8 kid and got perfect math scores that placed him in pre-Calc as a Frosh. It's a triangular relationship requiring teacher, student and parent all being on the same page. If that's in place, the kid will do well in any school they attend, whether the parents are nerds or not.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
Srsly. Do you really fucking think primary education and public safety are private goods? If so, kill your face with a rusty cheese grater in the ass. If you're trolling, well done.
Education of any level is a legitimate private good. Coercive force is not.
Gotta disagree. Education makes the pack (flock?) smarter and better. Also keeps the little hoodlums off the streets. Show me a country with an entirely private educational system and I'll show you sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle Ages.
Perhaps we crossed terms. I meantt good as in goods & services. No question that broadly available public education is a societal good. Compulsory, publicly funded education is probably on balance a good thing(tm). Could also be the largest corporate welfare program in history.
I do think "primary education and public safety" is a false equivalency.
It's more fun when I'm not arguing with GoebbelsDuck.
I would posit that an educated society is as important to public safety, if not more so, than the police and fire departments combined.
I've more thoughts than willing type on phone.
Seems to be a fundamental theme of most people of good will along spectrum. We? basically want the same good things in life for another. The difference is the means by which to affect those outcomes. To be even more reductive: what are the things I would convince my neighbor to do, and what are the things I'd command him to do at gunpoint.
Alright, so I'm seeing "command him to do at gunpoint," and I'm interpreting that as "taxes," because my experience of libertarian cosmology is that taxes are forcibly taken from the taxpayer either by coercion or the threat of coercion or actual force.
Again, I would argue that a democratic system, with all of its flaws and shortcomings, serves as the means of convincing my neighbors. To do otherwise would be to have a system of voluntary contributions to pay for the good in question (public education), which leads us to the good old "free rider" problem or the "tragedy of the commons." But if we reduce education as a good to be received only by those whose parents pay for it, we're back in private-education land which is worse for all of us. (See, e.g. Liberia, 19th century America, other places where the overall life expectancy is somewhere between 35-50).
Put another way, "taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society." I didn't come up with that, Oliver Wendell Holmes did.
The libertarian ethos is really attractive and tempting because its logic is simple and elegant - you put in what you take out. But the world as we know it is strewn with cases where it isn't that simple.
There are no free markets for house fires, muggings, terrorist bombings, and cancer. Those are just bad things that happen to some people and not to others. But the overwhelming majority of Americans would readily agree that we should pay taxes for firemen, policemen, armed forces, and a lesser proportion who would agree that we should pay taxes to subsidize health care, because we? (society) as a whole benefit(s). Again, I think schools go in that list as well.
Democracy is the least bad way of paying for these goods - everyone has an interest, therefore everyone pays. If taxes get too high - the peasants revolt. Too low, the government either fails to function effectively or it borrows itself into oblivion. Also, history has shown that high levels of income inequality correlate strongly with corruption and societal violence.
The Scandinavian countries were among the world's poorest in the 19th century, but the overall levels of income inequality were relatively low for the time. Thus, Scandinavia sent millions of immigrants to America and Canada and also maintained strong levels of societal cohesion. When Scandinavia became wealthy, the levels of inequality remained low, and thus those countries do really well on indices of crime, public safety, health, and educational attainment. Finland is generally regarded as having the best primary school system in the world. Their system is entirely-state-run, to include subsidized meals for all students, and begins with pre-K and goes through college. Life expectancy is 84 for women and 78 for men.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with extraordinarily high levels of income inequality. 90% of Haiti's schools are non-public, corruption is high, and literacy is around 60%. It is also one of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere. Life expectancy at birth is about 63.
Without a strong public school system, I believe America is well on its way to becoming Brazil with nukes. But I also think there is still time to fix the problem.
There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
What if I said that if helping poor kids get an education was important to you, that you are free to open up your wallet and help pay for it? And what if I said you could have more money to pay for it if you weren't taxed for it in the first place?
I would tell you not to phrase your shitty hypothetical question like a Morpheus meme.
So what you're saying is that I got my point across, but because there's no way to argue my point, the best course of action is to attack the way I chose to get my point across.
Seriously. It's right there, in the Contracts clause of the Constitution.
Who gives a fuck. Rip it up.
Again. The money is paid in during his tenure. What part of that don't you understand?
If Belotti lives another 20 years from this month forward, he will have been paid $10,739,959.20 from Oregon PERS. Please to be providing stats showing Belotti paid this much or more into PERS. And after you do that, please to be bungee jumping off the Space Needle without a bungee cord.
Belotti was at Oregon for 21 years. You don't think over that time, that contributions for his benefit package don't add up to that amount? Have you heard of the time value of money?
The reason there is outrage is that private industry went away from the defined pension plan in the 1980's and replaced it with 401ks. Salaries generally were higher than in public service.
Government entities on the other hand stuck with that model - and in exchange workers received less in the way of salaries and wages.
As time has passed, government workers have hung on to the pension system AND progressively increased their wages. All with essentially no risk of termination due to civil service and public employee unions - a total farce.
Belotti is the winner of a fucked up system.
Belotti had to live in Eugene and survive parking lot rapes for 21 years. I don't call that winning.
Step One of Hondo's cop-out pathology always starts with a little joke like this when he's first cornered. He's already scurrying along the wall, looking for his mouse hole.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
There's a rather simple reply to this. We want an educated population. Not that we are guaranteed to have one, but kids in the US need to be educated and by doing so, we raise better citizens that we all have to share the community with. Empowerment of individuals is a noble goal, even for the kids of total bums who sit on the couch all day. At least the kids have a chance someday. There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
I wish people wouldn't have kids they can't support and educate, but the government needs future taxpayers, so the policy will always be to grow them like crops.
And honestly, one skim of these boreds tells us we have enough losers already. We don't need more.
The problem is that we have the worst public schools in he developed world and about 40% of my property taxes go to support them. And in Oregon we are at the bottom of the barrel. I realize that we need to fund a public school system, but they need to be managed 300% better than they currently are being managed. But there is no check nor balance to see that better results are attained. It's a lot like that in most government entities.
My kids go to public schools, my oldest scored in the 99th percentile on every college placement test she took, and thanks to that saved me a shitload of tuition money at her out-of-state college. My younger kid is a 3.6-3.8 kid and got perfect math scores that placed him in pre-Calc as a Frosh. It's a triangular relationship requiring teacher, student and parent all being on the same page. If that's in place, the kid will do well in any school they attend, whether the parents are nerds or not.
Um. No, read the thread. Turdfucker.
Nice bragging about your kids. Holy funk. Like anyone here gives a shit. You are still a dumbfuck.
Srsly. Do you really fucking think primary education and public safety are private goods?
No, I don't think they are private services. I'm saying they could be. Hondo's comment implied that there is no other way to pay for these services other than taxes, which is incorrect.
I guess it's hard for people to imagine a society where people were actually free to make their own choices on how to protect themselves, and how their children will be spending 15,000+ hours of their childhood development, so they just go along with the one-size-fits-all model we have going on, and assume that if it's taken away, there would suddenly be no such thing as safety or education anymore.
Today's public education (in Seattle at least) is in no way a "one-size-fits-all model." Public education in bumfuck areas might be, but they don't usually have a private option except for homeschool.
Seriously. It's right there, in the Contracts clause of the Constitution.
Who gives a fuck. Rip it up.
Again. The money is paid in during his tenure. What part of that don't you understand?
If Belotti lives another 20 years from this month forward, he will have been paid $10,739,959.20 from Oregon PERS. Please to be providing stats showing Belotti paid this much or more into PERS. And after you do that, please to be bungee jumping off the Space Needle without a bungee cord.
Belotti was at Oregon for 21 years. You don't think over that time, that contributions for his benefit package don't add up to that amount? Have you heard of the time value of money?
The reason there is outrage is that private industry went away from the defined pension plan in the 1980's and replaced it with 401ks. Salaries generally were higher than in public service.
Government entities on the other hand stuck with that model - and in exchange workers received less in the way of salaries and wages.
As time has passed, government workers have hung on to the pension system AND progressively increased their wages. All with essentially no risk of termination due to civil service and public employee unions - a total farce.
Belotti is the winner of a fucked up system.
Belotti had to live in Eugene and survive parking lot rapes for 21 years. I don't call that winning.
Step One of Hondo's cop-out pathology always starts with a little joke like this when he's first cornered. He's already scurrying along the wall, looking for his mouse hole.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
There's a rather simple reply to this. We want an educated population. Not that we are guaranteed to have one, but kids in the US need to be educated and by doing so, we raise better citizens that we all have to share the community with. Empowerment of individuals is a noble goal, even for the kids of total bums who sit on the couch all day. At least the kids have a chance someday. There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
I wish people wouldn't have kids they can't support and educate, but the government needs future taxpayers, so the policy will always be to grow them like crops.
And honestly, one skim of these boreds tells us we have enough losers already. We don't need more.
The problem is that we have the worst public schools in he developed world and about 40% of my property taxes go to support them. And in Oregon we are at the bottom of the barrel. I realize that we need to fund a public school system, but they need to be managed 300% better than they currently are being managed. But there is no check nor balance to see that better results are attained. It's a lot like that in most government entities.
It's a triangular relationship requiring teacher, student and parent all being on the same page. If that's in place, the kid will do well in any school they attend, whether the parents are nerds or not.
True to the extent that it requires all 3 parties to be involved. I'll take slight issue with "all being on the same page." Students and parents don't always have their best interest in mind.
In today's society, many "parents" leave the "parenting" to the school. Which leads to poorer outcomes across the board. It's a societal issue.
Yes, there is some waste, mismanagement, etc in the public school system. What institution, public or private, doesn't have these issues? And many will point directly at the teacher's unions as the number one reason. It is more nuanced than that. Teachers, at least in Seattle, are underpaid. Period. I'll ignore the "they only work 9 months" out of the year because that's not true.
Voucher's might be a good answer, but I'm not sold yet. I think it will lead to the further economic segregation. Segregation that hurts everyone in the long run.
We've paid for K-8 private school for all 3 kids, and went the public high school route for the older 2. I happily pay my taxes and approve levies to support public education because I know it is one of the most important public services we can provide.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
Srsly. Do you really fucking think primary education and public safety are private goods? If so, kill your face with a rusty cheese grater in the ass. If you're trolling, well done.
Education of any level is a legitimate private good. Coercive force is not.
Gotta disagree. Education makes the pack (flock?) smarter and better. Also keeps the little hoodlums off the streets. Show me a country with an entirely private educational system and I'll show you sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle Ages.
Perhaps we crossed terms. I meantt good as in goods & services. No question that broadly available public education is a societal good. Compulsory, publicly funded education is probably on balance a good thing(tm). Could also be the largest corporate welfare program in history.
I do think "primary education and public safety" is a false equivalency.
It's more fun when I'm not arguing with GoebbelsDuck.
I would posit that an educated society is as important to public safety, if not more so, than the police and fire departments combined.
I've more thoughts than willing type on phone.
Seems to be a fundamental theme of most people of good will along spectrum. We? basically want the same good things in life for another. The difference is the means by which to affect those outcomes. To be even more reductive: what are the things I would convince my neighbor to do, and what are the things I'd command him to do at gunpoint.
Alright, so I'm seeing "command him to do at gunpoint," and I'm interpreting that as "taxes," because my experience of libertarian cosmology is that taxes are forcibly taken from the taxpayer either by coercion or the threat of coercion or actual force.
Again, I would argue that a democratic system, with all of its flaws and shortcomings, serves as the means of convincing my neighbors. To do otherwise would be to have a system of voluntary contributions to pay for the good in question (public education), which leads us to the good old "free rider" problem or the "tragedy of the commons." But if we reduce education as a good to be received only by those whose parents pay for it, we're back in private-education land which is worse for all of us. (See, e.g. Liberia, 19th century America, other places where the overall life expectancy is somewhere between 35-50).
Put another way, "taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society." I didn't come up with that, Oliver Wendell Holmes did.
The libertarian ethos is really attractive and tempting because its logic is simple and elegant - you put in what you take out. But the world as we know it is strewn with cases where it isn't that simple.
There are no free markets for house fires, muggings, terrorist bombings, and cancer. Those are just bad things that happen to some people and not to others. But the overwhelming majority of Americans would readily agree that we should pay taxes for firemen, policemen, armed forces, and a lesser proportion who would agree that we should pay taxes to subsidize health care, because we? (society) as a whole benefit(s). Again, I think schools go in that list as well.
Democracy is the least bad way of paying for these goods - everyone has an interest, therefore everyone pays. If taxes get too high - the peasants revolt. Too low, the government either fails to function effectively or it borrows itself into oblivion. Also, history has shown that high levels of income inequality correlate strongly with corruption and societal violence.
The Scandinavian countries were among the world's poorest in the 19th century, but the overall levels of income inequality were relatively low for the time. Thus, Scandinavia sent millions of immigrants to America and Canada and also maintained strong levels of societal cohesion. When Scandinavia became wealthy, the levels of inequality remained low, and thus those countries do really well on indices of crime, public safety, health, and educational attainment. Finland is generally regarded as having the best primary school system in the world. Their system is entirely-state-run, to include subsidized meals for all students, and begins with pre-K and goes through college. Life expectancy is 84 for women and 78 for men.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with extraordinarily high levels of income inequality. 90% of Haiti's schools are non-public, corruption is high, and literacy is around 60%. It is also one of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere. Life expectancy at birth is about 63.
Without a strong public school system, I believe America is well on its way to becoming Brazil with nukes. But I also think there is still time to fix the problem.
There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
What if I said that if helping poor kids get an education was important to you, that you are free to open up your wallet and help pay for it? And what if I said you could have more money to pay for it if you weren't taxed for it in the first place?
I would tell you not to phrase your shitty hypothetical question like a Morpheus meme.
So what you're saying is that I got my point across, but because there's no way to argue my point, the best course of action is to attack the way I chose to get my point across.
What if I told you that the pros and cons of public ed had already been discussed in this thread ad nauseam?
Seriously. It's right there, in the Contracts clause of the Constitution.
Who gives a fuck. Rip it up.
Again. The money is paid in during his tenure. What part of that don't you understand?
If Belotti lives another 20 years from this month forward, he will have been paid $10,739,959.20 from Oregon PERS. Please to be providing stats showing Belotti paid this much or more into PERS. And after you do that, please to be bungee jumping off the Space Needle without a bungee cord.
Belotti was at Oregon for 21 years. You don't think over that time, that contributions for his benefit package don't add up to that amount? Have you heard of the time value of money?
The reason there is outrage is that private industry went away from the defined pension plan in the 1980's and replaced it with 401ks. Salaries generally were higher than in public service.
Government entities on the other hand stuck with that model - and in exchange workers received less in the way of salaries and wages.
As time has passed, government workers have hung on to the pension system AND progressively increased their wages. All with essentially no risk of termination due to civil service and public employee unions - a total farce.
Belotti is the winner of a fucked up system.
Belotti had to live in Eugene and survive parking lot rapes for 21 years. I don't call that winning.
Step One of Hondo's cop-out pathology always starts with a little joke like this when he's first cornered. He's already scurrying along the wall, looking for his mouse hole.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
There's a rather simple reply to this. We want an educated population. Not that we are guaranteed to have one, but kids in the US need to be educated and by doing so, we raise better citizens that we all have to share the community with. Empowerment of individuals is a noble goal, even for the kids of total bums who sit on the couch all day. At least the kids have a chance someday. There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
I wish people wouldn't have kids they can't support and educate, but the government needs future taxpayers, so the policy will always be to grow them like crops.
And honestly, one skim of these boreds tells us we have enough losers already. We don't need more.
The problem is that we have the worst public schools in he developed world and about 40% of my property taxes go to support them. And in Oregon we are at the bottom of the barrel. I realize that we need to fund a public school system, but they need to be managed 300% better than they currently are being managed. But there is no check nor balance to see that better results are attained. It's a lot like that in most government entities.
My kids go to public schools, my oldest scored in the 99th percentile on every college placement test she took, and thanks to that saved me a shitload of tuition money at her out-of-state college. My younger kid is a 3.6-3.8 kid and got perfect math scores that placed him in pre-Calc as a Frosh. It's a triangular relationship requiring teacher, student and parent all being on the same page. If that's in place, the kid will do well in any school they attend, whether the parents are nerds or not.
Um. No, read the thread. Turdfucker.
Nice bragging about your kids. Holy funk. Like anyone here gives a shit. You are still a dumbfuck.
Fine. Call it bragging, but it's not the schools that are "the worst." It's not that hard if you send kids to school to learn, and do your follow-up as a parent. Too many parents use public schools as daycare, then bitch like crazy when little Johnny gets a 57 out of 100 on a math test, believing the teacher failed to teach the kid. Maybe Johnny would do better if he did his homework?
Wherever you find the proverbial "bad schools" people complain about, you always find absent parents, disinterested principals doing little to no oversight and burned out teachers who had the passion squashed out of them years ago. Problem is, any principal who holds parents and students accountable doesn't last long in areas where education is viewed as more of an inconvenience or daycare, instead of the key to a better future.
Seriously. It's right there, in the Contracts clause of the Constitution.
Who gives a fuck. Rip it up.
Again. The money is paid in during his tenure. What part of that don't you understand?
If Belotti lives another 20 years from this month forward, he will have been paid $10,739,959.20 from Oregon PERS. Please to be providing stats showing Belotti paid this much or more into PERS. And after you do that, please to be bungee jumping off the Space Needle without a bungee cord.
Belotti was at Oregon for 21 years. You don't think over that time, that contributions for his benefit package don't add up to that amount? Have you heard of the time value of money?
The reason there is outrage is that private industry went away from the defined pension plan in the 1980's and replaced it with 401ks. Salaries generally were higher than in public service.
Government entities on the other hand stuck with that model - and in exchange workers received less in the way of salaries and wages.
As time has passed, government workers have hung on to the pension system AND progressively increased their wages. All with essentially no risk of termination due to civil service and public employee unions - a total farce.
Belotti is the winner of a fucked up system.
Belotti had to live in Eugene and survive parking lot rapes for 21 years. I don't call that winning.
Step One of Hondo's cop-out pathology always starts with a little joke like this when he's first cornered. He's already scurrying along the wall, looking for his mouse hole.
Property taxes are just another form of state sanctioned theft and should be abolished. As long as property taxes exist, no one truly owns the land they live on and the basement they sleep in, they are just renting it from the government. Fuck property taxes.
Great idea. We don't need schools and police and shit.
Why pretend like taxes are the only way to pay for stuff? Are you incapable of spending money yourself?
There's a rather simple reply to this. We want an educated population. Not that we are guaranteed to have one, but kids in the US need to be educated and by doing so, we raise better citizens that we all have to share the community with. Empowerment of individuals is a noble goal, even for the kids of total bums who sit on the couch all day. At least the kids have a chance someday. There's no way we'd be a better society or have safer streets to walk on if we didn't pay taxes to help kids other than our own.
I wish people wouldn't have kids they can't support and educate, but the government needs future taxpayers, so the policy will always be to grow them like crops.
And honestly, one skim of these boreds tells us we have enough losers already. We don't need more.
The problem is that we have the worst public schools in he developed world and about 40% of my property taxes go to support them. And in Oregon we are at the bottom of the barrel. I realize that we need to fund a public school system, but they need to be managed 300% better than they currently are being managed. But there is no check nor balance to see that better results are attained. It's a lot like that in most government entities.
My kids go to public schools, my oldest scored in the 99th percentile on every college placement test she took, and thanks to that saved me a shitload of tuition money at her out-of-state college. My younger kid is a 3.6-3.8 kid and got perfect math scores that placed him in pre-Calc as a Frosh. It's a triangular relationship requiring teacher, student and parent all being on the same page. If that's in place, the kid will do well in any school they attend, whether the parents are nerds or not.
Um. No, read the thread. Turdfucker.
Nice bragging about your kids. Holy funk. Like anyone here gives a shit. You are still a dumbfuck.
Fine. Call it bragging, but it's not the schools that are "the worst." It's not that hard if you send kids to school to learn, and do your follow-up as a parent. Too many parents use public schools as daycare, then bitch like crazy when little Johnny gets a 57 out of 100 on a math test, believing the teacher failed to teach the kid. Maybe Johnny would do better if he did his homework?
Wherever you find the proverbial "bad schools" people complain about, you always find absent parents, disinterested principals doing little to no oversight and burned out teachers who had the passion squashed out of them years ago. Problem is, any principal who holds parents and students accountable doesn't last long in areas where education is viewed as more of an inconvenience or daycare, instead of the key to a better future.
That point I'll agree with, at least about parents. Parents have a responsibility to work with their kids. If their kids aren't making it in school, it's mostly because the parents DGAF. At least until a certain age.
Comments
But, in general, his interpretation is fucked up and @TurdBuffer's is spot on.
I guess it's hard for people to imagine a society where people were actually free to make their own choices on how to protect themselves, and how their children will be spending 15,000+ hours of their childhood development, so they just go along with the one-size-fits-all model we have going on, and assume that if it's taken away, there would suddenly be no such thing as safety or education anymore.
The State of Oregon offered way too generous of pension plan for employees for decades and then made some changes to where it isn't as abusive to the tax payer. However there are still plenty of Tier 1 folks out there that will live 20 or more years and there is no answer to funding that so far other than lowering the pension programs of existing state employees. It's what needs to be done as about 90% of the states private employees have not pension and about half have access to a 401K or like retirement account.
But for those that say that workers that DO have a pension are leeches, they need to become aware of the total cost of benefits as related to a job.
Kill the Boomers
Nice bragging about your kids. Holy funk. Like anyone here gives a shit. You are still a dumbfuck.
In today's society, many "parents" leave the "parenting" to the school. Which leads to poorer outcomes across the board. It's a societal issue.
Yes, there is some waste, mismanagement, etc in the public school system. What institution, public or private, doesn't have these issues? And many will point directly at the teacher's unions as the number one reason. It is more nuanced than that. Teachers, at least in Seattle, are underpaid. Period. I'll ignore the "they only work 9 months" out of the year because that's not true.
Voucher's might be a good answer, but I'm not sold yet. I think it will lead to the further economic segregation. Segregation that hurts everyone in the long run.
We've paid for K-8 private school for all 3 kids, and went the public high school route for the older 2. I happily pay my taxes and approve levies to support public education because I know it is one of the most important public services we can provide.
Wherever you find the proverbial "bad schools" people complain about, you always find absent parents, disinterested principals doing little to no oversight and burned out teachers who had the passion squashed out of them years ago. Problem is, any principal who holds parents and students accountable doesn't last long in areas where education is viewed as more of an inconvenience or daycare, instead of the key to a better future.