As IF Times

link Chris Rock disses the tea party – PATRICK GAVIN | POLITICO CLICK.

No matter how much money is spent on education, it only takes the rantings of a handful of ‘entertainers’ to wipe out the benefits.  When Chris Rock declares that the Tea Party is a racist group, it’s hard to know if Mr. Rock is playing to his base, which is likely a younger, self professed cooler audience, or if he actually believes what he spouts.  Chris Rock is a disciple of the Don Rickles school of stand up humor but Rock’s material predominantly and predictably centres on racial themes.  Specifically, the nuances of black/white interactions.  While there will always be an audience for this humor, the one note aspect of it must get old as people mature.  The Three Stooges for example still command an audience despite the fact that the poking eyes with fingers shtick lost its novelty decades ago. 

Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinions, that’s the benefit of freedom.  But some opinions are more valid than others, because they are actually based on fact.  Being educated means you have been exposed to critical thinking, that any conclusions you arrive at are based on a logical process.  If someone like Rock were to pick on redheaded people as the butt of his humor, deride their intelligence, their habits, their views of the world, most rational people would see this as caricature and accept it for what it is, attempts at humor.  Sadly, there will always be that contingent that will absorb some of that humor and subliminally accept it as truth, people who somehow think entertainers are on some higher intellectual plane. 

Luckily it was only Politico that aired his comments so it’s unlikely many people would notice them except for news junkies like yours truly. However, by giving Rock airplay, it clumps him into the usual gaggle of people who view everything through the lens of race.  This makes him look bad.  The irony of this may be lost on Mr. Rock, but what he implies in his recent publicized comments  are both irrational and racist.  Despite what he thinks, black people can be wrong.  They can be guilty of crimes.  They make mistakes. They can do stupid things.  Just ask Michael Vick.  Or Tiger Woods. They can be just as dumb as anyone else.  Speaking of Tiger, his golf game has gone to zero.  There have been negative comments on his swing changes, his demeanor on the golf course.  Is this racist? 

Just because people object to the President’s direction on policies doesn’t make them racist.  Nancy Pelosi is widely considered a force behind the errant Democratic agenda as well.  I have yet to hear anyone call the Tea Party sexist.  If a building owned by a black person is on fire, pointing it out does not make one a racist.  Guys like Rock and notable others, have played the race card so many times, it’s a one card deck.  It’ a pretty loyal audience who listens to jokes to hear the same  punch line.

Mr. Rock has made a career of tapping into the latent paranoia of racism.  There will always be an audience for this stuff, as there is for the slapstick  humor of the Three Stooges.  It gets old though and it’s all funny until someone loses an eye.

link Hundreds protest Wis. plan to cut worker rights – Yahoo! News.

For most Canadians, what happens in Wisconsin may appear distant and abstract to the degree that they are aware at all.  But what is happening there may be regarded as a seminal event in years to come.   Anyone paying attention to the news will know that the most pressing issue facing all governments, which means all citizens, is the spiralling and unsustainable debt being accumulated at all levels of government.   On the west-coast here in Canada, this may have escaped a large part of the population who are mainly concerned with their cholesterol intake or eating sustainable seaweed.

In the U.S., the prime battle going forth in the next generation will be between public sector employees and private sector employees.  The old wisdom was that public sector employees are paid less than their private sector counterparts because of better job security and less onerous work.  This old wisdom has never been more erroneous than it is now.  Sheltered from the vagaries of the economy which impact workers in the private sector, public (and that means typically union) employees have been able to ride out most economic downturns.  Shrewd bargaining and effective lobbying by labor have enabled their flock to benefit from regular pay increases and covetous retirement and medical coverages not affordable to many private sector workers.  This is all nice when things are going well.  This is not so nice when economies take prolonged downturns and the cost of maintaining such programs keeps ratcheting up even as revenues to support them fall.   A link to the Reason Foundation website gives a more thorough discussion of this:

http://reason.org/news/show/public-sector-private-sector-salary

There are only two ways to resolve this.  Increase taxes to pay for the entitlements, or decrease entitlements.   This is elementary school logic and math.  If you want to keep your teenager in designer clothes and exotic vacations, better hope that you’re making enough money or else shop at the Gap and stay home for the holidays.  In some parts of the world, you can always sell the teenager, but I digress.  There has never been a case in my recollection when the public sector have been forced to make wage sacrifices in order to maintain fiscal balance.  I do recall that they have suffered the horror of no pay increase for a short time, but the cycle of pay and benefit increases happen again at first opportunity.  In other words, the baseline never goes down.  This sounds like we’re picking on the poor union worker, but in fact this applies to all who are directly or indirectly in the employ at any government level.  In our neck of the woods, we have the head of the ferry corporation making a million dollars a year and whose contribution  to efficiency is to raise fares regularly.  Apparently, to retain someone of this qualification and skill, a million dollars is the going rate.  Naturally, our hero claims that he could make much more money in the private sector but is doing a public service by taking only this pittance.  That’s quite the bluff.  Are there no good poker players in government?

It begs the question of whether someone could be found who would and could perform the same job at $800,000… or $600,000…. or $300,000.   Extrapolate this to all sectors of the public arena which includes, teachers, firefighters, policemen, university administrators, sanitation workers, meter readers, clerks, librarians, medical administrators and administrator administrators.  It makes little sense to guarantee wage and benefit increases every year if the tax paying private sector does not expand enough to sustain it.  For the better part of the last 2 or 3 generations, tax increases  have funded all kinds of laudatory and non laudatory expenditures whether or not it was responsible.  The expression used most often is ‘kicking the can down the road’ for the ensuing administration.  That can is approaching a brick wall. 

The same battle in the U.S. will happen in Canada as well, and particularly on the west coast.  A recent Vancouver Sun article which includes a database on public sector salaries was quite illuminating,  http://www.vancouversun.com/business/public-sector-salaries/index.html .  An intriguing statistic revealed that the number of civil servants making over $100,000 per year rose by 22 percent in just two years and as well, those public servants being paid greater than $200,000 per year number 750.  This of course does not take into account benefits and retirement concessions.  It’s unlikely that statistic is matched in the private sector.

Given all of these high salaries, you would think things all run tickety boo.  As if.  We still get cost overruns, bureaucratic bungling and shortcomings in service resulting in  the predictable tax increases.  Not that this isn’t expected of all government programs.  Why can’t we just have it with smaller payrolls?