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• The Budget Control Act of 2011, which President Obama signed on Tuesday after Congress passed it by wide margins, is as contrived as the artificial crisis that spawned it. The bill, like a tired opera production, is full of clumsy staging and failed gimmicks left over from previous decades. It is not only bad policy in its goals of cutting spending too much, but it is bad procedure. It allows members of Congress to avoid responsibility for their actions through a cutout committee, a spending limit and the pretense that this Congress can tell the next one what to do.
  
  The budget act does its initial damage with a $917 billion cap on spending over the next decade, then turns everything over to a special joint committee to do the rest. Between now and Thanksgiving, this committee is supposed to come up with as much as $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures. In theory, that can be anything: tax increases, tax reform or cuts to the military, domestic programs or entitlements. In practice, don’t expect much.

Posts: 9976 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by sbalax:
It would have been nice if they had refunded the FAA before taking off on their August vacations. They have created a windfall for the airlines and left thousands out of work as airport construction projects, mostly already under way, have ground to a halt.

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Posts: 2808 | From: Olive Branch MS | Registered: Nov 2002  |  IP: Logged | 

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• Changes to Railway Labor Act Voting Rules. Until a recent rule change, in a RLA election the union needed to receive a majority of the votes from all eligible bargaining unit members, not just a majority of votes cast. Thus, a union trying to organize a bargaining unit of 100 employees would need to gain at least 51 votes to become certified as monopoly bargaining representative.
  
  However, on July 1, 2010, the Obama NMB made some changes to the RLA’s voting rules—which had stood for 75 years—to require for a union to win only a majority of votes cast. Thus, under the new rules, if the union is trying to organize a 100-employee bargaining unit but only 80 show up to vote, then the union would only need 41 votes to win the election. In other words, the new rules could make it possible for a union to become certified as the monopoly bargaining representative of a group of workers with only minority of the workers having voted for union representation. It is worth noting that the NMB made absolutely no effort to educate eligible voters of the changes.
  
  To further complicate the voting process—and skew the process in unions’ favor—there is more than one way for a union to receive “yes� votes under the new rules. First, the new NMB ballot includes a “write in� section in which any vote cast counts as a vote for the union, because “no union� votes may only be entered in the section so labeled. Second, the runoff may only include the top two union vote getters. For example, take a union election at a bargaining unit of 100 workers, in which “petitioning union� gets 30 votes, “write-in union� gets 20, and “no union� gets 40, with 10 workers not voting. Clearly, “no union� won a plurality, but under the NMB’s new rules, only the petitioning union and the write-in union will appear on the runoff ballot.

Posts: 9976 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002  |  IP: Logged |