When Google made their “page speed is now a ranking factor” announcement, it wasn’t a significant new ranking factor, but it is significant because it means Google wants to use usability metrics to help rank pages. Your site speed should be a priority as slow sites decrease customer satisfaction and research has shown that an improvement in site speed can increase conversions.
To better understand how fast the web is (as of February 2011), I collected site speed data from approximately 100 different sites. This data allowed me to create a very close approximation of the equation that Google currently uses to report (in Webmaster Tools) how fast sites are relative to each other:
y = 122.32e-0.31x
In this equation, x is the time it takes your page to load (in seconds) and the result, y is approximately the percent of pages that your page is faster than. If you grab your load time from Google Webmaster Tools, you can use this equation to gauge how fast you are compared to the rest of the web. If you don’t want to bust out your calculator, grab this spreadsheet and use the calculator I set up.This equation is charted in the graph below.
The x axis in this graph shows the page load time (in seconds) and the y axis represents the per cent of sites that the corresponding time is faster than. So if a page loads in 4.3 seconds, it is faster than 31% of other pages on the web.
This data set allowed me to view the following data points:
If your site loads in 5 seconds it is faster than approximately 25% of the web
If your site loads in 2.9 seconds it is faster than approximately 50% of the web
If your site loads in 1.7 seconds it is faster than approximately 75% of the web
If your site loads in 0.8 seconds it is faster than approximately 94% of the web
So now that you can test how you stack up to the rest of the web, the next question becomes how do you compare to your competitors. You can check this pretty easily a couple different ways. Web Page Test is a good web interface you can use to check page speed and Show Slow has automated tracking tools that let you continually monitor pages. I really like using Web Page Test as you can set the location to San Jose (fairly close to Mountain View).
How Important is Site Speed?
My interpretation of what Google has said
At this point, the question becomes how important is load time. While increasing your site speed is really important and should be done for the user’s experience, it can also improve your conversion rate, this section will only look at how page speed affects SEO.
If we look at Google’s official blog post announcing site speed as a factor, we read:
“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal”
I think this means that site speed will affect only queries where other ranking signals are very close or when the load time is exceptionally poor. If competing pages have high relevancy scores and close link metrics (which isn’t probable), page speed may come into play. Additionally, I believe that site speed could negatively hurt you if your page takes an excruciatingly painful amount of time to load.
Matt Cutts was nice enough to blog about this topic when he was on vacation and added onto the above statement with:
“That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.”
Basically, this isn’t going to shake up the top ten; when it is seen, it will probably be seen in keywords ranking much lower than the top ten.
My Unscientific Experiment
I decided to do a bit of unscientific research, I took a few of the mostpopular search terms for 2010 (iPad, chatroulette, free, Justin Bieber) as well as two keywords that get a lot of link love (here, home) and collected the load time for the top 20 results of each keyword. The data ranged from 1.062 to 58.881 seconds.
As you can see in the above chart, there are some REALLY slow sites ranking in the top 20. I wanted to see if these sites just happened to be running slow at the time or if a second measurement would show that the slow sites are really faster. A week after I took the original measurements, I re-timed any page with a time over 15 seconds (which totaled 18 pages). While some sites showed significant variance the majority did not change that much. The average change was an improvement of 1.72 seconds, or 4%.
The average site speed for the 120 different results was 9.58 seconds while the standard deviation for this data set was 9.86 seconds.
According to the normalized distribution (as well as simply looking at the data), you are categorically slow if your page takes more than 19.44 seconds to load as only 15.86% of sites in the top 20 results from this sample were slower than this. Using the site speed equation described earlier, if your site takes 19.45 seconds to load, you are only faster than 0.3% of the web.
How to Improve Your Site Speed
If you want to improve your SEO, I would suggest buildingalink instead of focusing on speed (unless your site is currently extremely slow). That said, speed is a metric you should be trying to improve in order to improve the overall user experience. To decrease your load time, there are a few best practices you should follow:
Minimize HTTP Requests - Your pages will load faster if they have to wait for fewer HTTP requests. This means reducing the number of items that need to be loaded, such as scripts, style sheets, and images.
Combine all of your CSS into an external file and link to it from the <head> section each page instead of loading it in the HTML of a page. This allows the external page to be cached so that it loads faster. JavaScript should be handled in a similar fashion as CSS.
Use CSSsprites whenever possible - This combines images used in the background into one image and reduces the number of HTTP requests made.
Make sure your images are optimized for the web - If you have Photoshop, this can be done by simply clicking “save for web” instead of “save”. By optimizing the formats of the images you are essentially formatting the images in a smarter way so that you end up with a smaller file size. Smashing Magazine has a nice article on optimizing png images.
Use server side caching - This creates a html page for a URL so that dynamic sites don't have to build a page each time that URL is requested.
Use Gzip - Gzip will significantly compress the size of the page sent to the browser which then uncompresses the information and displays it for the user. Many sites who use Gzip are able to reduce the file size by upwards of 70%. You can see if sites are using Gzip and how much the page has been compressed by using GID Zip Test.
Use a Content Delivery Network - Using a CDN allow your users to download information in parallel, helping your site to load faster. CDNs are becoming increasingly affordable with services like Amazon CloudFront.
Reduce 301 Redirects - Don’t use 301 redirects if possible; definitely don’t stack 301’s on top of each other. 301 redirects force the browser to a new URL and require the browser to wait for the HTTP request to come back.
If you want to do further research on improving your site speed, Google has a good list of helpful articles for optimizing your page speed here that are much more in-depth than the above suggestions. To get suggestions specific to your website, tools like YSLOW and the HTML suggestions in Google Webmaster Tools are great resources.
President Barack Obama talks on the phone with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon about developments in the Middle East, backstage at Intel Corporation in Hillsboro, Ore., Feb. 18, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
In Case You Missed It
Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.
Weekly Address: Winning the Future at Intel The President speaks from the Intel campus in Oregon about educating our kids for the jobs of tomorrow so we can make sure America wins the future.
Labor and Management Working Together For Student Success Education reform is only possible with the cooperation of both teachers' unions and administrators. Read about how Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is helping to bring both sides together.
A powerful marketing tactic: tell me exactly when I'm going to get it.
"This project will be done noon on Tuesday."
"You'll get the shipment at 4 pm."
Fedex has made billions shipping packages that didn't even have to be there fast, they merely needed to arrive at a time that we knew about in advance.
We don't want to hear, "up to 11 business days." We hope you care more about our project than that.
Hats off to Iceland for a second time for telling the IMF, the UK, and Netherlands to "Go to Hell" over the most recent Icesave proposal, better thought of as Ice Torture.
For the second time, Iceland's president vetoed a bid by the island nation's Parliament to repay the U.K. and the Netherlands more than $5 billion lost by depositors in Iceland's epic 2008 banking collapse—sending the matter to a referendum by a deeply skeptical public and complicating the country's application to join the European Union.
The dispute over Icesave—the online arm of a failed Iceland bank that took deposits from British and Dutch savers—has percolated for more than two years, reflecting the Icelandic people's dissatisfaction with paying the price for what is almost universally regarded as the hubris of a few bankers.
A first attempt at a repayment deal in 2009 faced stiff opposition in the Icelandic parliament. A modified bill passed later that year, but President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson vetoed it in early 2010, triggering a referendum, which failed.
The new deal carries substantially better terms—Iceland has until 2046 to repay, at an interest rate of about 3%—but Mr. Grímsson said in a statement issued Sunday that the Icesave issue is so weighty and so contested that it wasn't up to Parliament to decide.
"There is support for the view that the people should once again, as before, act together with the Althingi as the legislator in this matter," Mr. Grímsson said, using the local name for Iceland's thousand-year-old Parliament.
The presidential veto is rare. It has now been used just three times since Iceland's independence from Denmark in 1944. The Icelandic president approves nearly all bills passed by Parliament; under the constitution, he may only approve or call a referendum.
If history is a guide, the deal once again faces nearly certain defeat. In the first plebiscite, 93.2% of voters, or 134,392, rejected the bill. Just 2,599 picked "yes," badly trailing even the 6,744 who left their ballots blank. The British and the Dutch governments stepped in in 2008 to compensate depositors in their countries who had placed money with Icesave, since Iceland's tiny deposit-insurance program was woefully short of cash. The two nations soon demanded their money back—about £2.35 billion ($3.8 billion) for the U.K. and €1.32 billion ($1.8 billion) for the Netherlands.
The total amounts to about half a year's economic output.
Talks on how Iceland will repay more than 3.8bn euros (£3.3bn) of debt it owes to the UK and the Netherlands have broken down without agreement.
The collapse of the Iceland-based Icesave online bank in October 2008 hit savers in both countries.
The UK and Dutch governments are seeking repayments from Iceland after they compensated savers themselves.
However, the three governments have been unable to agree on revised payment terms after a week of negotiations.
"We had hoped to be able to reach a consensual resolution of this issue on improved terms, but this has not yet been possible," said Iceland's finance minister Steingrimur Sigfusson.
In a statement, the UK and Dutch governments said they were "very disappointed that despite all the efforts over the past year and a half, Iceland is still unable to accept our best offer on the Icesave loan".
Iceland plans to hold a referendum on the Icesave repayment on 6 March, but the government is hopeful it can reach a different deal ahead of that.
Opinion polls suggest that a majority of Icelandic voters would reject the repayment plan.
The dispute has delayed International Monetary Fund help for Iceland, which Reykjavik needs to shore up its stricken economy.
The country's parliament voted for a referendum on the Icesave bill after President Olaf Ragnar Grimsson vetoed the repayment to the UK and the Netherlands.
Opponents say the repayment plan forces Icelandic taxpayers to pay for bankers' mistakes.
The dispute has also overshadowed Iceland's application to join the EU, which was submitted in July.
Iceland's economic crisis persuaded many of its politicians that it would be better off inside the 27-nation bloc.
Arrogance of UK, Netherlands
Note the arrogance of the UK and Netherlands issuing a statement "Iceland is still unable to accept our best offer on the Icesave loan". It is up to Iceland to make its best offer not for the UK and Ducth governments to make demands of 100% repayment.
Why should Iceland crucify its taxpayers with a "loan" when the correct procedure is a massive haircut.
Ireland should immediately counter with its "best offer" of one cent on the dollar. That will set the tone for reasonable expectations.
Somehow the Icelandic Parliament does not get it. Fortunately the president does.
Commending Iceland's President
I commend the decision of the president to send this to the people to vote. Moreover I encourage Icelandic voters to vote the same way they did last time.
Here's the deal. When you make stupid investments, don't expect to be bailed out. There is no reason the people of Iceland should have to pay for the stupidity of others.
If the UK and Dutch governments were dumb enough to guarantee those deposits, then the UK and Dutch governments should pay the price, not Irish citizens.
Unions don't really want to save jobs. Rather they want every union worker to extort every possible cent from every possible taxpayer. The goal of unions is to do the least work at the most cost.
Governor Walker's proposal will save 12,000 jobs. The union does not care. It would rather fire 12,000 teachers than for all of them to make modest concessions.
I have countless examples to prove that, yet the myth goes on.
If this was really "about the kids" rather than about the greed and arrogance of the public unions, teachers would be in the classroom teaching instead of fraudulently calling in sick, with help of doctors aiding and abetting that fraud.
If changes aren't made to the benefit contributions paid by Wisconsin's nearly 300,000 public sector employees, about 10,000-12,000 workers will lose their jobs, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker warned Sunday.
"I don't want a single person laid off in the public nor in the private sector and that's why this is a much better alternative than losing jobs," Walker told "Fox News Sunday."
"If we're going to be in this together, (cut) our $3.6 billion budget deficit, it's going to take a whole lot more than just employee contributions when it comes to pensions and health care," Walker said. "But it's got to be a piece of the puzzle because as I saw at the local level, it's like a virus that eats up more and more of the budget if you don't get it under control."
President Obama, whose group Organizing for America, has bused in some of the nearly 70,000 protesters outside the state capitol on Saturday, last week called the bill "an assault on unions."
Under the governor's proposal, unions still could represent workers, but they could not force employees to pay dues and would have to hold annual votes to stay organized. Only wages below the Consumer Price Index would be subject to collective bargaining, anything higher would have to be approved by referendum.
Walker Too Generous
That last paragraph shows that Walker is too generous. Wages should not be subject to collective bargaining at all. Who knows what the CPI will be in a few years? The proposal could in theory balance out given the amounts the workers have to contribute to benefits is not subject to collective bargaining. However, in all likelihood, we would see the same sort of public union reaction during every collective bargaining session.
The ideal approach is to end collective bargaining altogether. Public union workers who do not like their offers would have the same choice as everyone else: accept the job or leave.
Those who think they can make more in the private sector are free to do so. Yes, it really is as simple as that.
Even FDR Understood the Problem
Public unions get into bed with management and politicians and work out sweet deals for themselves at taxpayer expense. No one looks out for the taxpayer. Even FDR understood the problem.
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.
Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.
A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.
What a poetic phrase, starting with 'declaring'. Not sighing or announcing or admitting, but Declaring!
Chapter 11 refers to part of the bankruptcy code that covers reorganizations. In Chapter 11, you don't shut down your business. Instead, faced with failure, you suspend certain agreements and debts and negotiate in a way that permits you to continue.
Chapter 7 is very different. It means "I give up." You shut down, it's over.
Metaphorically, we have the chance to declare either kind of bankruptcy whenever we work on a project or consider a habit, a social media addiction or even a job.Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy is painful. Declaring is often a relief.
Acknowledging that you're stuck is the very first step in getting unstuck...
Perhaps it's time to stop fighting a losing fight and start creating value doing something else instead. Bankruptcy is never fun, but when you give up something that wasn't getting you where you needed to go, sometimes you discover a future better than you ever expected.
The G20 is a dysfunctional, totally useless organization. All 20 member nations have to agree to every proposal or there is no agreement. Thus, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia all have the power to nix any agreement.
The dispute this time however, had to do with trade imbalances in general and China in particular.
The fight was over a single 53 word sentence. 19 countries agreed to the statement but China would not. At the last moment, France (which is part of the G-20 through the EU) managed to come up with a wording change China could agree to.
G-20 Deal Reached, No One Knows What The Agreement Says
Negotiators from the world's leading economies haggled all night over seemingly technical details regarding how to measure global economic imbalances. They eventually produced a 53-word sentence intended to appease all sides—and open to interpretation by all sides.
All 20 countries must agree on any technical detail for there to be a deal. If one country walks away, no deal.
The key agreement they came up with on Saturday—one sentence in the four-page "communiqué"—essentially says that exchange rates and fiscal and monetary policies will be taken into consideration when determining whether a country's policies lead to imbalances.
To draft that sentence, officials from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, China, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil and India were just some of the members who weighed in—at times with much different views—according to several people present. The sentence had one colon, one semi-colon, three commas, and the word "and" appeared six times. And officials acknowledged that it could create as much confusion as it does attention.
Just before the deal was reached, officials from three different countries said talks had collapsed and perhaps everyone would regroup in Washington in two months.
Ultimately, officials from France and a number of other countries convinced China to agree to a deal if the wording was altered significantly.
The result was the convoluted 53-word sentence, which says exchange rates and fiscal and monetary policies will be taken into "due consideration" as part of a broader measurement when determining whether a country's policies lead to imbalances.
"The way it's written, the French can say it's an indicator and the Chinese can say it's not really," said one G-20 official after the meetings.
"It means what it means what it means, just like a rose is a rose is a rose," Christine Lagarde, France's finance minister, told reporters after emerging from the Group of 20 talks.
The Agreed Upon Sentence
Amazingly the Wall Street Journal did not even give the final sentence that took 3 days to produce. I tracked it down in the complete G20 Communiqué.
The sentence causing so much consternation is in red.
3. We reaffirm our commitment to coordinated policy action by all G20 members to achieve strong, sustainable and balanced growth. Our main priority actions include implementing medium term fiscal consolidation plans differentiated according to national circumstances in line with our Toronto commitment, pursuing appropriate monetary policy, enhancing exchange rate flexibility to better reflect underlying economic fundamentals and structural reforms, to sustain global demand, increase potential growth, foster job creation and contribute to global rebalancing. We discussed progress made since the Seoul Summit and stressed the need to reduce excessive imbalances and maintain current account imbalances at sustainable levels by strengthening multilateral cooperation. We agreed on a set of indicators that will allow us to focus, through an integrated two-step process, on those persistently large imbalances which require policy actions. To complete the work required for the first step, our aim is to agree, by our next meeting in April, on indicative guidelines against which each of these indicators will be assessed, recognizing the need to take into account national or regional circumstances, including large commodity producers. While not targets, these indicative guidelines will be used to assess the following indicators: (i) public debt and fiscal deficits; and private savings rate and private debt (ii) and the external imbalance composed of the trade balance and net investment income flows and transfers, taking due consideration of exchange rate, fiscal, monetary and other policies.
Please note the apparent goal was to set guidelines to assess indicators for the next non-binding meeting a year from now. No targets were set, just a hope to produce "indicative guidelines" at some point in time.
But hallelujah, we have a meaningless agreement for now. Unfortunately, no one knows exactly what the agreement to agree really means other than what they say it means. This means there will be a major disagreement in a year.
"It wasn't easy, there were obviously diverging interests," French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde told reporters after chairing the Paris meeting. The goal is "to test economic policies and determine to what extent they are favorable for all countries together and not just the basis of domestic economic policy."
In what Geithner called "deft diplomacy," the French hosts massaged the statement to include the current account's components -- trade and investment income -- while labelling it the "external imbalance" to appease Chinese sensitivities.
Deft Diplomacy or Deft Idiocy?
As with the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg failed to produce the key sentence or a link to the communiqué. Why is it so hard for news organizations to link to sources they are quoting?
Look at the entire communiqué, it should be crystal clear there is no agreement to do anything, and even if there was, the agreement is not binding.
Nonetheless, we can be 100% certain that Geithner and President Obama will be trumping up the "deftly" worded non-agreement.
Some people are so blinded and obsessed with one problem they fail to see any other problems or the significance of them. As a case in point, and in a totally misguided rant, Prof77 on Dregs of the Future claims I am Scapegoating Public Employees.
Here is my rebuttal.
The Real Deal
Public unions have bankrupted cities and states and receive unjust pay and benefits by tactics that include coercion, extortion, bribery, political pandering, and fear-mongering. That is a simple statement of fact and I have numerous videos to prove it.
Public unions get into bed with management and politicians and work out sweet deals for themselves at taxpayer expense. No one looks out for the taxpayer. Even FDR understood the problem.
Attempts to tie public union pay to problems of executive pay is preposterous. The problems are separate and distinct.
Taxpayers foot the bill for public unions, Taxpayers do not foot the bill for executive salaries.
No one protested more than I did the bank bailouts. I would have gladly let the banks go under. I am not an apologist for the banking industry and have dozens of posts to prove it. However, had the banks gone under, or executive salaries to zero, it would not have done a damn thing to fix problems with public unions.
Proff77 failed to include pensions in his analysis. Public union pension at the state level are $3 trillion underfunded. That does not count cities and counties. It is safe to assume the overall problem is two or three times the problem at the state level alone. $6-9 trillion is a hell of a lot of money.
Escalating executive pay is partly a function of boom-bust cycles caused by the Fed. I would abolish the Fed. Again this has nothing to do with public unions.
Even if one taxed executives at some high rate, it is beyond absurd to suggest that public unions are entitled to a penny of it.
Regardless of how one feels about executive salaries, it is idiotic to defend the coercion, extortion, bribery, political pandering, and fear-mongering tactics of public unions.
Government should attempt to provide the most services for the least cost. The goal of unions is to do the least work at the most cost. Once again that is a simple undisputed statement of fact.
Public union members are supposed to be public servants. However, the teachers' unions do not put kids first, nor do police or fire unions put public safety first. If unions did things "for the kids" teachers would take small pay cuts rather than let teachers go increasing class size. The same applies to police and firefighters.
Forced collective bargaining is extortion.
Executive Pay Distributed
Prof77 goes through a hypothetical example that takes $150 billion in bonus money of executives and gives $500 to every man woman and child in the country. Excuse me for asking such simple questions but ...
Exactly how would that fix the problem of union extortion, bribery, coercion?
Exactly how would giving everyone in the country $500 fix the a $6 trillion (or whatever) pension hole?
Preposterous Math
Taxprof77 also cites preposterous math that says TARP recipients got $12 trillion. He failed to point out those were loans not gifts. To be sure, taxpayers are on the hook for AIG, Fannie and Freddie, GM and numerous other things but it is absurd to present this as if was a gift of $12 trillion.
Even if it was, how would it excuse bribery, coercion, fearmongering, ect, by public unions. Since when do two wrongs make a right?
Comparing Private and Public Sector Compensation
Prof77 goes through more misguided analysis that attempts to defend public union salaries on the basis of education levels. For starters I highly doubt public union workers are better educated.
Look at all the prison guards, transit workers, police, janitorial services, etc most with nothing more than a high school education plus a little training. Many of those groups have 6 figure pensions.
Nonetheless, let's pretend for a moment public sector workers are better educated. Certainly teachers in general are likely to be better educated than the average person in general. I will grant you that.
However, what are most of those degrees worth in the private sector? What is an English degree worth? Art? Poetry? Teaching? PE?
Let's now consider hundreds of presumably highly educated persons working for the BLS figuring out the unemployment rate. What are they really worth given a Gallup survey produces comparable results (if not better) for far cheaper?
Personally, I would scrap the entire department of labor, the entire department of energy save perhaps something like the strategic oil reserve, HUD and dozens of other agencies. All of the people in those bureaucracies may very well be highly educated, but how many of them do anything useful that the private sector would not do better, faster, and cheaper?
I am quite sure that there is a small percentage who would make far more in the private sector. However, many of them, if not most of them would struggle to find a job.
Let's return to some of the initial points I made.
Coercion, Bribery, Fearmongering
1. Public unions have bankrupted cities and states and receive unjust pay and benefits by tactics that include coercion, extortion, bribery, political pandering, and fear-mongering. That is a simple statement of fact and I have numerous videos to prove it. Here is a sample. I can easily find 1000 more.
Give Up the Bucks
SEIU Spokesperson Threatening California Lawmakers with Union Retaliation
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie explains how public sector unions control politicians
Governor Christie Explains Who Is To Blame For Teacher Layoffs
California Treasurer Bill Lockyer on Public Sector Union Influence
Armand Thieblot on Public Sector Unions (part 1)
Armand Thieblot on Public Sector Unions (part 2)
Even FDR Understood the Problem
2. Public unions get into bed with management and politicians and work out sweet deals for themselves at taxpayer expense. No one looks out for the taxpayer. Even FDR understood the problem.
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.
Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.
A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.
Bank Bailouts Separate Issue and I was Against Them
5. No one protested more than I did the bank bailouts. I would have gladly let the banks go under. I am not an apologist for the banking industry and have dozens of posts to prove it. However, had the banks gone under, or executive salaries to zero, it would not have done a damn thing to fix problems with public unions.
If all those people were behind bars, pray tell what would it do to fix pension $6-9 trillion in the hole?
Pensions
6. Proff77 failed to include pensions in his analysis. Public union pension at the state level are $3 trillion underfunded. That does not count cities and counties. It is safe to assume the overall problem is two or three times the problem at the state level alone. $6-9 trillion is a hell of a lot of money. Interactive Map of Public Pension Plans; How Badly Underfunded are the Plans in Your State?
According to a report by the American Enterprise Institute, public pensions are underfunded by more than $3 trillion. ...
It is likely some of that is recovered in the latest rally. However, pension plan assumptions of 8% are absurd, and in a couple years the problem is highly likely to be far worse.
Amazing Sense of Entitlement
8. Even if one taxed executives at some high rate, it is beyond absurd to suggest that public unions are entitled to a penny of it.
Indeed, Prof77 was gracious enough to prove that point himself. He cites a hypothetical example that takes $150 billion in bonus money of executives and gives $500 to every man woman and child in the country.
Exactly how would that fix the problem of union extortion, bribery, coercion?
Exactly how would giving everyone in the country $500 fix the a $6 trillion (or whatever) pension hole?
12. Forced collective bargaining is extortion.
Collective bargaining is not what its name indicates. In fact, it means exactly the opposite of what you'd guess. Collective bargaining refers to the obligation of an employer to recognize the elected representatives of a group of workers and his further obligation to negotiate with those representatives. This last part is what makes 'collective bargaining' extortion.
Under collective bargaining laws, employers have to recognize an elected union and have to negotiate with them.
Imagine if the tables were turned and employers had the right to 'employer bargaining', under which the employer could demand whatever pay reductions or workday increases he wanted, the employees had to negotiate with the employer, and employees couldn't quit!
Such an arrangement could only be classified as slavery.
The right to terminate the employer-employee relationship is a fundamental right of both employer and employee. Employment should be mutually beneficial to employer and employee and open to termination by either when it becomes non-beneficial (limited of course by any voluntary contractual agreements).
Freedom of Choice
No person should be forced to join a union to get a job, nor should union dues be used to extort money from taxpayers.
That last sentence says all you need to know. Unions rob people of their right to choice. Unions then go on to threaten others to do the same. Eventually they extort, bribe and coerce their way to salaries and wages that the private sector does not get.
The solution is to end collective bargaining of public unions, repeal Davis Bacon and all prevailing wages laws, and make every state in the union a right-to-work state.
"Mom, Susie Did It Too"
There are so many holes in Prof77's post that it is time consuming and tedious rebutting them all. He did not address any serious issues with public unions. Instead he used two child's ploys.
1. Changing the subject 2. Using "Susie"as a scapegoat.
Mom to Joey: Did you go down to the beach when I told you not to? Joey to Mom: Well Susie hit Tommie yesterday.
Hopefully you see the irony in this. The person scapegoating is none other than Prof77. Instead of addressing very real and very serious issues with unions, he changed the subject pointing a finger at banks just as Joey pointed a finger at Susie in my example above.
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