The Coming Battle Over Public Sector Unions ... A Case of 'Tax Payers Vs. Tax Eaters'

People in the private sector are just beginning to understand how much of a banquet public-sector unions have been having at eve
Unions across Europe have promised strikes in 2011 on a scale not seen since the 1980s. This week, The Economist has an issue devoted to the subject of the (worldwide) need to confront public-sector Unions (thereby unwittingly giving ammunition to those, in America and elsewhere, who support the rise of the Tea Party). • (Government) workers of the world unite! The London Weekly's main article is entitled (Government) workers of the world unite! (Public-sector Unions have had a good few ...

While some states push back against public-sector unions, Illinois lags
 In today's Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby writes about the pushback against public-sector Unions in states such as New Jersey, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio. But in spending-happy Illinois, a few days after one of those unions, AFSCME, endorsed Democrat Pat Quinn, the Governor approved a contract with AFSCME that protects its state workers from Layoffs until June 2012. Shortly before Election Day, AFSCME contributed $450,000 to Quinn's campaign. Pay to play. Now Quinn and the Democrats in ...

Jeff Jacoby: The widening fight against public-sector unions
If you enjoy this web site, please consider making a donation by clicking here. 1) A login is now required to comment. Several forms of login are accepted. If you experience any trouble, please let me know. (See contact page for email.) 2) HTML is on, so basic html should work. Raw links will be made auto-clickable, too, so even if you don't know html you can just paste in the link and it should work fine. Keep the "https://" in it. 3) Comments are generally unmoderated, which means I don't nece...

Understanding The Attacks On Public Employees
You can barely open a newspaper or turn on a radio without hearing about states and local governments bankrupted by high-paid Public Employees, their pensions and their Unions. How much of what you are hearing is really true, and how much is just one more Wall Street-funded campaign to turn people against each other and our government? What do we see if we look around at the state of The Economy? Stocks are soaring, corporate profits are way up, Wall Street gets Trillions in Bailouts and pays...

Robert Creamer: Time to Stand Up for the Public Sector
For over forty years, the Right Wing has mounted an irrepressible campaign to discredit the very concept of government in the United States. It continued its campaign to demonize government even as we watched First Responders--government employees -- run into the collapsing twin towers to rescue their fellow citizens on September 11, 2001. They continued to defame the concept of government in the face of daily reports of the Bravery and sacrifice of our Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan - all ...

Pension crisis introduces unions to new realities
By Robert Holland and Don Soifer Brother, can you spare $3.6 Trillion? Currently in the United States, state and Local Government employees' Pension and Retiree health-benefit plans are under water to the tune of some $3.6 trillion, according to researchers at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. With government workers now comprising more than half of labor union membership in the United States, the priorities of current union leadership may be more at odds with those of aver...

UKs unlikely coalition faces first electoral test
LONDON (AP) — It’s the first Ballot Box test of Britain’s unlikely Coalition Government — a Special Election that pits Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party against his Liberal Democrat partners and gives voters a chance to vent over plans to dramatically slash public spending. Thursday’s vote in the northern England district of Oldham East and Saddleworth follows a bitter local battle during Britain’s election in May that resulted in the fir...

UK's coalition govt faces first ballot test
LONDON - It's the first Ballot Box test of Britain's unlikely Coalition Government — a Special Election that pits Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party against his Liberal Democrat partners and gives voters a chance to vent over plans to dramatically slash public spending. Thursday's vote in the northern England district of Oldham East and Saddleworth follows a bitter local battle during Britain's election in May that resulted in the first Legal Challenge since 1911 to a ...

UK's unlikely coalition faces first electoral test
It's the first Ballot Box test of Britain's unlikely Coalition Government — a Special Election that pits Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party against his Liberal Democrat partners and gives voters a chance to vent over plans to dramatically slash public spending. Thursday's vote in the northern England district of Oldham East and Saddleworth follows a bitter local battle during Britain's election in May that resulted in the first Legal Challenge since 1911 to a vote due to ill...

Wilmette Teachers Reject Salary Freeze
In the face of a $5.1 million District 39 Deficit. As many in Illinois wake up to a proposed 75% income Tax Increase, a tax on Internet sales, and a Corporate Tax from 4.8% to 8.4%, the highest of all the states, we get more in your face behavior from our PUBLIC SERVANTS. Oh no, they think they're not as well paid as their neighboring teachers--well, you know somebody has to be below average. Do your bleepin math. Could it be Wilmette teachers are less experienced? Younger? That's probably a go...

New Michigan Governor Rick Snyder Vows to Curb Public Spending
Michigan is a broken machine. There is so much wrong with the way with the state is run that an entire series of books could be written to detail its plight. It is the only state to have lost population in the past decade and due to the collapse of the automotive industry, 20% of its jobs left the state during that time. On top of that, its public Debt is now over 20% of its GDP. What's even worse is that almost one fifth of the state's population in on food stamps, showing serious weakness in i...

Megyn Kelly Fear Mongers About Public Employees Causing Deaths Across The Country
As we’ve previously reported, there’s a concerted effort to attack Public Employees, especially public employee Unions, afoot among the Right Wing - with Fox News right alongside in the trenches. Yesterday (1/5/11), America Live’s Megyn Kelly did her part for the effort with a segment designed to demonize New York City sanitation workers in which Kelly “asked,” “So now you’ve got CRIMINAL (her emphasis) potential Probes going on here into whether t...

The Texas FAIL
Paul Krugman’s column on the failure of the state of Texas as an incubator of Republican economic ideas is a good one. Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its Governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that “we have billions in surplus”? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a Deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years. And that reality has implications for t

Government Jobs and the Great Recession
While the national Recession killed private-sector jobs, the government jobs have been "relatively sheltered," says one researcher. Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, says the Private Sector has lost 6 percent of its January 2008 Workforce, or 7.2 million jobs, as of November 2010. Yet, federal jobs increased 3.5 percent by 98,000 jobs during that same time span. And de Rugy says those increases don’t include all the Census worke...

Public Employees Paid Less than Private-Sector Workers
With the barrage of orchestrated Extremist attacks on Public Employees, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reminds us today of a study it commissioned last year that disproves one of the biggest lies by anti-workers-that public employee make excessive pay.  In short, public employees are paid less than private-sector workers, even when factoring in employer-provided benefits.  The paper by Rutgers University Professor Jeffrey Keefe found: Private-sector workers earned avera

The guy who first thought of cash for clunkers tells you its wasteful
Victor Dial writes in today’s WSJ, Ou Est Le ‘Cash for Clunkers’? Not surprisingly, the idea of subsidizing new cars came from France. You probably wonder who’s Victor, and what does he have to do with cash-for-clunkers? Most Americans wouldn’t know it, but the Cash for Clunkers model originated in Europe in the mid-1980s. I was in charge of sales and marketing for Peugeot at the time, and the government-incentive idea was co-developed by my company, Renault and t...

Bank Loan Putbacks & Repurchases
I mentioned this past week that I thought that Bank of America got a steal at the expense of the Taxpayers. They resolved their Freddie Mac putbacks for a mere one cent on The Dollar (1¢ on the  $) versus the total liability. My back of the envelope calculations is that BofA got away with avoiding payments on somewhere between $5 billion and $15 billion dollars. Note, however, that this was not an arms length transaction. The GSEs are now wards of the state, and both the Bush Administration ...

The Shameful Attack on Public Employees
In this cross-post from https://robertreich.org/, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich shames those who attack Public Employees and questions why Republicans never include the Richest people in America when they talk about sacrifice? In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employe...

The Shameful Attack on Public Employees
In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of Public Employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they’ve earned. But now the right is going after public employees. Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate...

Dems make deal for massive tax hikes in Illinois
More bad news from Illinois: Democratic Governor Pat Quinn and the Democrat-controlled General Assembly plan to slug Taxpayers with a 75 percent income Tax Increase, a $1-a-pack Cigarette take hike, and a corporate Income Tax increase from 4.8 percent to 8.4 percent. The Personal Income tax jump, from 3 to 5.25 percent, is said to be temporary. Spending limits will be included in the deal. But not banning public-sector Unions. But this is Illinois. What was it that Quinn's former Running Mate, R...

The Attitude, by Arnold Kling
David Cole writes, We, the Real Americans, in order to form a more God-Fearing Union, establish Justice as we see it, Defeat Health-Care Reform, and Preserve and Protect our Property, our Guns and our Right Not to Pay Taxes, do ordain and establish this Conservative Constitution for the United States of Real America. Read the whole thing, which the Washington Post thought deserved prominent position in its Sunday "Outlook" section. It expresses what I call "The Attitude." With The Attitude, p...

Paul Krugman: The Texas Omen
The "modern conservative theory of budgeting" isn't working in Texas. "If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere": The Texas Omen, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: These are tough times for State Governments. Huge Deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas. Wait — Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its Governor declare, during his

GOP to spendthrift states: The check will never be in the mail
Exactly a month ago, I wrote a piece on a  “secret GOP plan” to nudge fiscally troubled states in Bankruptcy, giving their governors a chance to rewrite existing Public Employee union contracts and take other drastic measure to restore solvency. Step 1: Eliminate the Build American Bond subsidy to make it hard for states to borrow.  [DONE] Step 2: Force states to reveal the true extent of their Pension liabilities. [COMING SOON] Step 3. Rewrite the federal bankruptcy code [COMING ...

The budget breakdown: How will state lawmakers slash the budget when much of it is untouchable?
The state Budget is in more trouble than you may think for one simple reason. Most of it can't be touched. Roughly 60 percent of state spending — mainly money for K-12 education and Medicaid — is largely off-limits to cuts because of federal restrictions and other legal barriers. That means a shortfall in tax collections approaching $5 billion over the next two years must be chopped from a relatively narrow slice of state spending that's unprotected. The consequences are clear. Eve...

From super-predators to ACORN & public employee unions--the evolution of conservative demons today
The conservative panic over super-predators and an out-of-control underclass crime-wavetrunami turned out to be a False Alarm. Instead, it was super-rich criminals on Wall Street who brought America down. But the underlying conservative narrative did not die, which is why the "recovery" is doing more to destroy America than even the horrendous crash did. Just after Christmas, I wrote a diary spinning off from a piece by Mike Konczal, "The Conservative World View and Prison Populations, ...