Senate Bill 5 (Cleveland, Republic: to buy, taxi, budget)

[davery5872]

So everyone that has posted their number of sick days, could you post you level of education? How many years you have been with that company? From what I have read, it looks like the norm is around 11 sick days a year. More if you have a college degree and many years on the job.

And here is something else. 27% of all workers have a college degree. Less than 9% have a master's degree. Take a look at your neighborhood school and look at the education level of the teachers. In the district I live in, 80% of the teachers have at least a master's degree.

[Cleveland_Collector]

I have a master's degree (engineering), 15 years of experience (2+ with the company). Our sick days are basically unlimited. Other PTO starts at 15 per year and tops out at 30 per year. Everyone gets 12 paid holidays also. This is 100% private sector and non-union.

[voiceofreason89]

Maybe everyone is looking at this wrong. Doing away with collective bargaining may be a good thing. Why stop at that. Maybe we should privatize almost everything in government. After all, why shouldn't the government be like private business and have to balance their budgets just like everyone else does. Here's what we can do:

Privatize law enforcement - The public can buy police coverage just like an insurance policy. If you don't want to buy police coverage, you don't have to pay for it, you just wouldn't be allowed to report any crimes that have been committed against you. The police companies can establish different rates depending on how much police coverage you want. You can pay the minimum which would cover you against misdemeanors or you could pay for full coverage which could cover the most complicated cases, worst felonies and most time consuming investigations. If you report too many crimes the police company can raise your rates. This will create private sector jobs and the market will determine what the appropriate wage would be for someone to put their lives on the line on a daily basis. Also, the community will receive better customer service (and less complaints of police brutality) from the employees in this new service industry because customers will be expected to tip the employees like every other type of employment in the service industry. This would also lower our taxes because government would no longer have to fund law enforcement or the Dept. of Rehabilitation and Corrections.

[voiceofreason89]

Privatize the Fire Departments and EMS - No need for insurance for this (although that would work as well). If your house is burning down or you are laying on the side of the road bleeding to death, you can just check the yellow pages to find what company you want to help you. Of course you can't call 911 because that also is a government service that we wouldn't need. If you don't want to pay whatever price the company decides your life or all of your worldly possessions are worth you can just let your house burn or try to find a cheaper discount / budget company that may cut corners to increase their profit margin while trying to save your life.

[voiceofreason89]

Privatize schools - Let the schools compete. Parents can decide for themselves how valuable a quality education is to their children. Parents will pay tuition with the tax money they save from not having to pay taxes to fund public schools. The market will decide how much a teacher is worth. The best teachers will find their ways to the most expensive schools and the worst teachers will work teach the children whose parents don't really care about kids education anyways.

[voiceofreason89]

With all this privatization the government should be able to cut taxes by about 10 to 15 percent. Think of all the money that will mean back in our pockets. I'm sure all of these new private companies would never charge us more for their services than the government charges us in taxes. After all, private business is always more effcient than government, never has waste, never has corruption, never overpays its executives and isn't even the least bit concerned about profit or shareholders.

[voiceofreason89]

You say "What about the poor who can't afford all these private services?" I say "screw-em" just like the private sector does. After all we want government services to be run like private business, right? Or, the privatized businesses can just raise their prices on everyone else who does pay their bills so the poor won't have to pay for the services they use.

All this being said, I would think any public worker would welcome the chance to work in their field as a private sector job. Anyone that thinks a public worker wouldn't be paid more and have better benefits in the private sector for doing the same job is delusional. How any tax payer can support SB5 and think public employees are overpaid and their pensions and benefits are too generous is beyond me. I cannot understand why the worthless unions don't bring up the simple fact that the services the public employees provide the public are already deeply discounted compared to what similar services would cost in the public sector.

Screw Kasich.

[Droolrockworm]

VoR89 Well stated! Let's return to segregation based upon class rather than race.

[davery5872]

Essentially SB 5 eliminates, for teachers, collective bargaining and state regulations for a salary schedule, minimum sick days, sick days accumulation, seniority, and health care. At first glance it would seem that local control of these issues would be better than sate control. Upon further reflection I have hard time seeing how this will a positive step for education in Ohio for the long term. If this passes I see wealthy school districts being able to continue the existing benefits much more than poorer districts. The only fair way to implement SB 5 would be to guarantee that all school districts have the same amount of money to work with. Otherwise, passing SB 5 will make it impossible for the poorer school districts to attract and retain quality teachers. In essence, will passage of SB 5 be setting these poorer districts up for failure?

I'm worried that we have not really thought this bill through. It was only proposed at the beginning of Feb.

[Crew Chief]

I guess there's something wrong with me. I bust my butt driving a truck every day. I make pretty good money. Even if I didn't have a teacher spouse or a military penison, I have no problem with public sector unions OR what public employees earn. I have no envy; if I'd wanted to teach or run into burning buildings, I would've done so when I was young. People who, perform those valuable services SHOULD be well-compensated. What I DO want is for the politicians to quit taxing me and redistributing it to worthless government programs, duplication of efforts across multiple agencies and hiring only the workers we REALLY need....