AFSCME: When the American Dream Doesn’t Quite Cut It
November 21st, 2007 - Written by Joey
Below, you’ll find an excerpt of an article in one of the recent AFSCME “Works” magazines, entitled “AFSCME’s Agenda to Rebuild the Middle Class”, in which they say:
“It’s time to “renew the promise of America – that if you work hard and play by the rules you can get ahead and give your children the opportunity to live a better life.”
How would I, an anti-government-union conservative, receive such a thing, you might ask? Well, let’s just say that not everyone in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees AFL-CIO agrees with their platforms, and some of them just happen to be people I know.
The story below is a sad one, so grab your tissues…
These are government employees, folks, and they are using the union to lobby politicians (Liberal Democrats) to raise your taxes to pay for their new car, their daughter’s college education, their medical benefits, their house, their pensions, and of course, a raise on their $82,000 combined annual salary…and they aren’t one bit ashamed of it, as you can see.
What’s that? You still feel a little twinge of sympathy for these “down-and-out” government employees? Well, I’d like you meet a woman I’ll call “Beth”:
My first question to the “AFSCME Works” editors would be, “Is this the best you could do? You couldn’t find anyone that fit your vision of the ‘poor’ middle-class better than these people?”
If you want to be a bicycle mechanic or a day care provider at the age of 40, you’d better expect to be in the lower-income bracket of the income earners in this great and free nation. If you’d like a little bit more out of life, then aspire for more. Don’t come whining to the taxpayer, hand outstretched like a child who just blew all of his money on a video game (or sailboat, same thing), while you still have $240 to your name and a boat in a marina on the Columbia River.
A lot of us have lived on much less, including yours truly, and decided that we didn’t want to make $32K a year for the remainder of our lives, so we changed our circumstances by working toward our dreams. That’s the beauty of America and the pursuit of happiness that we are all promised. (Pursuit being the key word.) If your dream is to fix bicycles and babysit kids, then be content with where you are in life. Don’t expect others (taxpayers) to pay for something that you should be pursing yourself.
This, my friends is exactly why it should be against the law for government employees to unionize.
November 24th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Wow, expecting people to actually take responsibility for their own lives. What a concept! Love it!.
November 25th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I see the problem! The union has stolen their faces! How can they possibly manage to make it without faces?
Seriously though, I was wondering when you were going to post these. Aren’t they great?
It continues to amaze me how they portray people as being victims of their circumstances instead of telling the truth; that being that people make their own choices and have to deal with the consequences as such. When people choose their professions, they have to be willing to deal with their choices. Claiming that you are a victim of your choices and then claiming that others should be doing more to take care of you is absurd.