http://www.cnn.com/...gaining/index.html?hpt=T2

"Democrats argue that it is little more than an attempt to gut public sector labor unions, one of their core constituencies."

Democrats pay their voters by giving them jobs and ensuring that the American Tax payer is the one who suffers for their promises.

i should just quit paying taxes again. if they can go on strike, i can go on strike.

Dude, this is old news. And, uh, wrong on all counts. BTW, without labor unions and their collective bargaining rights, we end up with minimum wage teachers (who are supposed to be helping our kids become smart, sensible adults) and minimum wage auto workers (who are supposed to be making good, safe vehicles to drive). You turn them into minimum wage workers, and we get idiots for kids and cars that are worthless. At minimum, we should be paying teachers 6 figures for putting them through the hell they go through teaching today's youth. Auto workers should be earnings around what they're getting now - I've seen quite a few of them take "breaks" where they just go and get drunk and high, which is BS. If they can afford to be doing that, they don't need higher wages.

we already got idiots for kids and cars that are worthless.

Because we're not paying teachers enough and retaining the best talent, and auto workers get high and drunk on breaks. :) Exactly my point.

we could afford to have minimum wage teachers if we paid the kids to learn instead of paying the teacher to babble, err, teach. might even reduce the crime rate because then the kids wouldn't have to mug people to be able to afford buying crack.

GK, that is absurd. Why then do we not have minimum wage lawyers? Where is the lawyer union? Its because there is a supply and demand for labor that is brought into equilibrium through wages.

hmmm, yah, where is the lawyer union? people have the right to a legal defense even if they have to settle for a public defender... how come they haven't formed a union to protect their rights to fair wages and health benefits?

South Korean teachers are getting paid less than minimum wage, but their students are learning more. maybe they don't give a dang that they're underpaid and they just want their students to achieve a better future.

whereas, American Pank Teachers keep bragging about being in a union or being offered tenure....

If we didn't have Republicans trying to do crap like this:

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/...eaching-creation-science/

then maybe we'd have a decent public education system. Get the stupid teachers out of the schools by offering better salaries, making it worthwhile for our brightest talent to make teaching a career instead of, say, medicine or law. You wanna know why we don't have a lawyer's union? Cause they make a butt-load of money as it is. Smarten up, guys. You're making this too easy.

how decent does it have to be? 12 years of education just so people can go flip some burgers to pay for college so they can get a decent job?

A decent public education system would be much better than the total crap one we have now. Lots of people work while going to college - someone has to flip the burgers. :P That's how you get ahead in life, more often than not... hard work and dedication. Not everyone gets a silver platter handed to them.

What do you know, my point went way over GK's head, but what else is new?

Two points: 1) Oklahoma has silly term limits that produce results such as this. If it makes you feel better, I attended public school in a very liberal country (albeit more than a decade ago) where they taught the Big Bang Theory as scientific law--they refused to consider scientific alternatives to it because they were equally ignorant in their beliefs. Be careful what you wish for.
2) You made your own point. Many attorneys become attorneys for the money (not all). I don't want someone becoming a teacher for the money because then they're playing the game of quarterly profits with our children's future and that's a damaging notion. We're invested in the long-term for our kdis because education is based on a system of building blocks. In your world you want a bunch of money-grubbing people teaching to the test who backstab each other for promotions. They call that rich and elite private schools--sort of the epitomy of what you seem to despise.

As for the broader topic here...unions had a time and place they were needed and specifically for generating worker safety laws (I'm thinking more mines and early textile factories than the modern day equivalents). And that time has come and passed. Today's employment sector is noted by a person switching jobs well over a dozen times in their career. It's a defined contribution instead of a defined benefit because the defined benefit model was unsustainable. It's a competitive structure that favors your education, skills, and experience over your time in place.

Oklahoma term limits were a bad idea. I've seen brillaint 30 something legislators, terminated. It takes 6-8 yrs just to learn the system. Like many jobs, you odn't get good at it in year one.


2. Oklahoma, just went through a completel Republican takeover, while it has voted Red in presedential and federal elections for decades, it ahs been mostly D locally and statewide till the last ten years. And, trust me, the new State Superintendent, is not qualified, and doesn't belong, to be a state superintendent, they've allready changed the rules, on how the system works, to circumvent things so the R's can plase their huge Souther Baptist base. (1/3 of Oklahoms is Souther Baptist Fundamentalist)

3. Good think I got out of Oklahoma, it had made some great strides in the last ten years in catching up witht he country in education, and now it will tank.

Disclaimer being they have very good federal representation. I've worked with them in various capacities and am impressed at federal side.

Not too surprised on an unqualified person in a position, but of course it happens in other states. In my home state (sorta former now) of Maryland, the current Gov appointed a guy from his band to Business and Economic Development...the guy had a masters and that was about the summation of the then-30year old's qualifications.

30 - 6 = 24. hmmm, why did i subtract 6... ahh, 6-8 years to learn the system

5 + 12 = 17. 17-18 year old graduates high school.

24 - 17 = 7. 7 years of real life trying to live with a high school education.

7 + 6 = 13. 13 years to actually learn how the system works before you run for office, assuming that they didn't learn anything during the 12 years that they attended school.

I'm not sure you can really quantify the time it takes to learn the system. If you're working in it as a legislative aid/analyst/etc of some sort then I would say it will take you a year to get a basic grasp, 2 years for a detailed grasph and probably 3-5 years for a very technical understanding--but my opinion is solely based on one state/experience.

don't think it needs to be done because there aren't any educational requirements when it comes to running for public office. don't need to know jack-diddly squat to get elected. hmmm, maybe they've passed some laws about that since i last thought about it.

Age is often the only requirement for holding an elected legislative office. Other offices that are legal or sometimes financial do have minimal requirements.

But that's the whole case against term limits. So you've never worked in elected office and they put you on the Finance Committee and Pensions Subcommittee. It's a lot like going to college. Your first year is just grasping at the basic concepts of government financial workings such as other post-employment benefits (OPEB), base revenue estimates (BREs), rule of 50, etc etc. The next year you learn why these are all stupid programs that lead you down the road to insolvency. The third year you're deluged with people saying you can't cut or touch any of it. Your fourth year you're in relection. In the Okalahoma system, you only have four mroe years so by the time you're an expert you only have a year or two to change the damn thing.

So people advocating term limits strike me as misunderstanding the system entirely. If their goal is to provide for a competitive system then they're looking at it backwards. What they should be advocating is for non-partisan redistricting that is determined by computer software ranking an agreed upon set of factors--population, geopolitical boundaries, educational zones, etc etc. Then the representation is closer to equal to the population. Term limits sans non-partisan redistricting just means you keep it in the family and the elected officials often pick their successors by having PACs/industry groups donate heavily to those campaigns.