Attention public employees; what's the most money you can steal from taxpayers without feeling guilty?

Couldn't get lunch catered!? (gasp!) You can't be serious! How can gov't employees be expected to work without being provided a free lunch? WTF?! Especially after they got a free lunch every day at skool, courtesy of that shrinking number of us still paying taxes.

I've driven by many a government employee office bldg & something always strikes me as odd: the sheer number of schmucks taking a smoke break. Must be a skeleton staff thing. Poor fed employees are working so hard - sometimes for up to 20 minutes at a time between coffee breaks! - that they need to rest/recover multiple times/day I guess.

Steve, you wild & crazy guy! Please quote where I stated teachers were fed employees. I'll wait right here til you get back.

I liked my civics teacher. Odd man, but a good teacher.

I have respect for some individual teachers, but zero respect for the system many of them/you defend..

As I've already stated here, my hysterical rants are geared more to non-military fed employees than teachers.

"He probably is not as poorly educated as tou insinuate"

Quick, Steve - can you find the irony in your sentence? If so, thank a teacher!

MAURICE = Mick? AKA PaulK!

Good to see you, you old dog. Well not really, but you're obviously up to your old tricks of flame bating and bludgeoning.

MAURICE wrote:

Steve, you wild & crazy guy! Please quote where I stated teachers were fed employees. I'll wait right here til you get back.

I liked my civics teacher. Odd man, but a good teacher.

I have respect for some individual teachers, but zero respect for the system many of them/you defend..

As I've already stated here, my hysterical rants are geared more to non-military fed employees than teachers.

"He probably is not as poorly educated as tou insinuate"

Quick, Steve - can you find the irony in your sentence? If so, thank a teacher!

Here ya go Mo:

Give me a decent rebuttal to this guy, who's much more articulate than me...

greene or jones-drew, this one probably works better... more research-based than anecdotal...

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/09/27/100927taco_talk_lemann

Maurice?

Dudes! Huffington commie Post and the New Yorker pinko rag?! Really? Why not just quote Chooma Hussein or one of his minions? Are you not capable of judging for yourself the steep decline in Amerika's education system over the last 50 years, based on simple observation & a basic, general knowledge of recent history?

Love how the New Yorker begins by comparing today's stats vs. 100 yrs ago. Gee, that's not trying to spin anything at all, huh? 100 years ago it was customary to drop out of school in the 8th grade. Shall we pat ourselves on the back because that's no longer true or should we have the balls to compare our system to the best in the world, i.e. developed Asian nations & a few European countries?

So let me get this straight you work in the insurance industry - the most corrupt industry just behind banking and yet you have a problem with teachers?

So weird given that your industry routinely loses its investments, renegs on contracts and generally is underhanded and sneaky all so that you can make a buck.

Hmm - who would I rather be, a teacher, or Maurice.

Man, it's kind of sad to observe MAURICE's descent into madness during the course of this thread. He started out with decent arguments, but now he's just been reduced to incoherent baiting and flailing. Pretty soon he'll be taken away.

Mmmmmm yes...those damn greddy capitalist pigs! Let's get rid of them all & move to utopia in Pyongyang! We won't have to put up with insurance companies or banks. Yeah!

You remind of the assclowns I talk with every week: "So I'd like to buy a health insurance policy for $50/mo. that'll cover my $400/mo. of prescriptions. What? pre-existing conditions! Damn insurance companies are corrupt & greedy!"

I like how you conveniently leave out military employees from your ignorant tirade. I mean, how dare anyone claim these "heroes" don't deserve every penny they earn, while teachers and other slackers should be slammed for the pittance they earn.

Will you take on the military in peacetime, when they basically sit around and do nothing? I mean should they even be paid if they haven't done a rotation in Iraq or Afghanistan? Sure sounds like a cake job otherwise, no?

it sure does, Tommy!

I still have some pals scattered around various USMC bases. What say we send you on an all expense paid field trip vacation to train with a grunt battalion for a week or so? You'd be crying for your Mommy & puking out your sorry ass in a day or so...but it'd be great fun to watch! Plus maybe you'd learn a thing or 2. Maybe we could post the video here so all your pus#y pals who think they're BAMF cause they can run 10 miles could see it.

Whaddaya say, Tom?

Touchy, touchy Maurice, seems a few weeks of physical training justifies a lifetime of leisure and moving from base to base doing nothing..to be followed by an amazing retirement and lifetime free top notch medical.

But thats ok in your book, and in fact easily defended by your frothing at the mouth response.

So if teachers did 6 weeks of boot camp they would be ok too?

Hi Tommy!

If teachers would do 6 weeks of boot camp in the summer when they're on paid vaca........er, sorry forced unpaid leave, I think that would do wonders for their mental & physical well being. That's a great idea!

For some reason you remind of the dbags I come across occasionally who tell me about "almost joining the Marines.." I do enjoy those tales, Tommy. They're riveting!

I'll chime in my opinion from having plenty of teacher friends and being a private employee.

Teachers have a ridiculously nice retirement plan. Not as nice in some states as it is others, but it is generally a damn good deal for them.

Teachers have a pretty good starting salary relative to their level of education. Depends on a lot of factors obviously. One of my friends started super low but didn't have a Masters. Another friend who did started pretty darn close to my salary once coaching pay was factored in, and that's not counting any summer work he did which probably made us even.

Speaking of coaching, PLEASE don't try to sell me some sob story about your paltry payment for coaching. I would love to leave my job at 3:30 to coach kids for a couple hours.

Public employees I know seem to think of their weekly working hours as how long they were at work. I think of it in terms of how many hours I was chargeable to clients. Teachers for the large part aren't working to hard during passing periods and lunches (I know, monitoring, tough stuff) but always count them in their "x hours per week". Corporate jobs are almost never 9-5 like you see in pop culture.

Tenure is a joke. Shouldn't exist. Most good teachers agree.

Not getting paid OT is a moot point. Teachers don't get paid for planning/grading outside of work; corporate salaried employees don't get paid any OT for working late hours.

Summer vacation for teachers is a good gig. Don't try to paint it otherwise with all of the "planning" you have to do.

But...

I work almost exclusively with intelligent people whereas they have educate kids all day and call deadbeat parents. I really enjoy the dynamic I have with my co-workers and clients because they are intelligent.

While the starting salary is fairly comparable, public employees, especially teachers, get shite for raises. Locally, there has been a 3 or 4 year pay freeze. I got a 15% raise last year and 10% this year. So the feeling I had when I first started out and wondered why the hell I didn't go into teaching has diminished. Now, money isn't everything, but I want to be compensated for how much more I work than a teacher. I live with a teacher and know that I work over 150% of the hours in a given year than he does. Now I couldn't do that forever but I can do it for 5-8 years and then switch to a more lax job with a less steep pay increase.

I don't want to deal with the red tape teachers have to deal with on a daily basis. There is red tape in all jobs, but generally worse in public jobs and generally for worse reasons.

I could easily get a job anywhere in the country. It is not as easy for public employees.

I get promotions every few years and get to oversee people who work under me. Teachers have very low mobility on an organizational chart and not a lot of people to delegate mundane tasks to.

I get a lot of variety in my job. Never doing the same thing one month to the next, and certainly not one year to the next. I'm always learning new things which makes time go by quickly.

So...

You teachers can have your jobs. I'm envious of your summer vacation and relatively low amount of weekly working hours (I'll admit that not all private folk have to work as much as I do). I think you have a pretty solid retirement program. I don't want your job though. I'll probably teach in my retirement so that I can coach, but in the meantime I'll keep working my way to a nice fatcat job and not have to worry about state standardized tests.

well said!

But Maurice we know how your industry works - don't insure anyone who will make a claim, then charge the rest of us for the few that slip through the cracks.

If any of us make a claim - deny it, no matter how sleazy the reason. Then deny some more. If that doesn't work you then never insure that person again.

In the meantime your industry does a terrible job of managing its investments, so it jacks up rates and there is nothing we can do about it - great system you got there Maurice.

Talk about rip offs.

12fl wrote:

With every paycheck, you are likely stealing some money from the taxpayers. How much can you steal without feeling guilty?

As a highway engineer, who works for a state Department of Transportation, I listen to this kind of garbage at nearly every public meeting I attend. Let's look at some numbers-

The highway department for which I work has a budget of about 800 million dollars a year. About 400 million of that goes for maintenance-snowplowing (mountainous western state with areas that get 300 inches of snow per year), guardrail repair, pothole repair, rockfall mitigation, removal of hazardous trash on the roads (blown out tire remnants, bumpers, misc. crap on the roads). Every inch of our highways has maintenance crews that pass through 3 times a day, minimum. A network of 10,000 miles of roadways takes a lot of people and equipment to keep clear. Most of these maintenance guys make 15 or 20 dollars an hour-and during winter, often work 80 or 90 hours a week. Of the 2400 maintenance workers in my state, 5 have been killed in the last 4 years. Were these guys thieves? Every penny of the 400 million dollars comes from State gas tax of 18 cents per gallon. For a car that gets 20 miles per gallon, that's about a penny a mile.

About 400 million a year goes for capitol construction and repaving projects. A highway with low traffic generally needs repaving every 20 years or so. One with heavy traffic, in a harsh climate, can need repaving every 4 or 5 years. A lane mile costs somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 to pave. This is not generally done by "government workers" but by contractors who must competitively bid. Government workers are in place to prepare plans for the work, insure the bid is fair and equitable, and ensure the work is performed in accordance with the project specifications. We also construct and replace bridges. The smallest, most inconsequential 2 lane bridge you can imagine, crossing a small brook or stream generally costs at LEAST a million bucks-again competitively bid. My state replaces around 50 such bridges a year-as well as 10 or 15 much more major structures-costing anywhere from 10 to 50 million each. This capitol construction is funded 80% by the federal gas tax (23 cents per gallon) and 20% by the aforementioned state gas tax. So, for the 41 cents per gallon tax, -or 2 cents per mile- the citizens of my state, and tourists from the rest of the country, get to drive on 10,000 miles of road. Let's say you drive 20,000 miles per year, at 20 miles per gallon-it costs you about 400 bucks to pay for the roads.

If you don't think 400 dollars a year is worth it to have a viable transportation system, you are a fool. If you view me as a thief, rather than a licensed engineer who makes decisions every day upon which your LIFE hinges-you are a fool to drive on the roads I help to provide for you. Perhaps instead of using your energy trolling on message boards, I would prefer you said thank you, and went on your way.

at 87 dollars and 57 cents i feel no guilt.

at 87 dollars and 58 cents i feel some guilt.

at 87 dollars and 59 cents the guilt is unbearable.

Oh booya. The virtuous highway engineer blows the doors off the immoral insurance guy. Nice.