Archive for category Unions
Organizing For America
Posted by Tom in Employment, Politics, Presidency, Unions on February 20, 2011
Well, if you didn’t know by now, you now know what the job of a community organizer is. After all we have had one in the White House running the country for the past two years. The job of a community organizer is to promote dissension among various groups and thus gain political advantage, not for the groups mind you but for the “community organizer!”
John Fund covers President Obama’s current community organizing antics in his WSJ article, What’s at Stake in Wisconsin’s Budget Battle. “The real assault this week was led by Organizing for America, the successor to President’s Obama’s 2008 campaign organization. It helped fill buses of protesters who flooded the state capital of Madison and ran 15 phone banks urging people to call state legislators.”
“Myron Lieberman, a former Minnesota public school teacher who became a contract negotiator for the American Federation of Teachers, says that since the 1960s collective bargaining has so “greatly increased the political influence of unions” that they block the sorts of necessary change that other elements of society have had to accept.”
That’s right, a labor guy admits that the public employee unions control society. Even the most progressive of Democrats, FDR warned against this: ”The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. Yes, public workers may demand fair treatment, wrote Roosevelt. But, he wrote, “I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place” in the public sector. “A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government.”
So the public unions control the leftist politicians, they have the votes, they own the elected! Not only that, but they have a monopoly. They don’t need to worry about competition as do the private sector unions. They are living fat, fatter than the private sector while the rest of us put up with their mouth pieces and pay their unsustainable wages, benefits and pensions.
Bravo to Governor Scott Walker, the Wisconsin Republicans and this mild proposal to level the playing field!
Public Schools Exist For Teachers Unions, Not Students
Posted by Tom in Education Facts & Policies, Statism, Unions on February 17, 2011
David Harsanyi of the Denver Post tells the sad story of 40% of the unionized teachers in Madison Wisconsin calling in sick, forcing the superintendent of schools to shut down the entire school operation. Harsanyi appropriately calls it An Assault on Taxpayers in his RCP February 18th post. Seems that in Wisconsin lawmakers are attempting to restrict public employee collective bargaining to wages instead of unsustainable pension benefits. Well, the teachers are pissed, and they’ll show those nasty lawmakers by calling in sick!
Harsanyi argues that sure unions are to blame but the bigger problem is state monopoly with education as the prime example.”Whatever you may think of the politics of private-sector unions — now less than 7 percent of the work force — they function in a competitive environment. Public sectors, on the other hand, have artificial leverage that no other workers in the nation enjoy.”
“The counterargument is familiar. These folks are sacrificing healthy salaries by choosing to teach your children rather than greedily chasing riches that they would almost certainly realize if they took their talents to the private sector. (Funny, isn’t it then, that when we try to inject competition into education, it’s met with anger and scorn by the people who sacrifice without it.)” He points that immunity from economic downturns and market fluctuations is rare. But it’s worse when the public sector union demands are often the cause of the financial pain.
Of course we can look to our President for proper guidance, right? NOT! “Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin, where they’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions,” explained President Barack Obama, who, unlike governors, can (and does) borrow trillions. The numbers, though, tell us that public-sector unions are the ones assaulting taxpayers and brittle state economies. And the more we grow the state monopoly the worse it will get.”
It all gets down to the proper role of government. Education, health care, charity don’t come to mind when you start to list the primary functions of government! When government enters these roles, it screws them up. There is little government does well and creating monopolies outside its proper scope only magnifies society’s troubles.
David Harsanyi is an excellent commentator; I recommend following him. tjm
Taxpayer Super Bowl Ads
Posted by Tom in Bankruptcy, Democrats, Statism, Stimulus/Bailout, Unions on February 7, 2011
Did you happen to see the Chrysler ad during yesterday’s superbowl telecast? It was pretty long, in fact, the longest of the program, running a bit over two minutes. The ad must have been expensive to produce at government inflated costs, and at $3 Million per 30 second slot, one run of this would have been $12 Million. In reality, the spin was just as much about Detroit as Chrysler.
Now we know President Johnson once called Detroit the model city of the Great Society. And we know that our current government bailed out the UAW of GM and Chrysler by subordinating the bondholders to the unions and transferring the bulk of the ownership in each firm to the U.S. taxpayers. So here’s the ad:
In reality, Detroit is the prime example of the progressive agenda. It is barren, deserted and bankrupt. In every important respect it is dependent on the federal government, the U.S. taxpayer.
Knowing that, how do you like your ad? Are you happy about the way your hard earned tax dollars are spent?
Only People Not Represented Are The Taxpayers!
Posted by Tom in Humor, State Finances, Taxation, Unions on January 22, 2011
It’s a story out of the Twilight Zone, the article in today’s WSJ, New Faces Appear at Bargaining Table, in cash-strapped states, government managers form unions! That’s right, managers and professionals are organizing to protect their very generous share of the pie. So, we will now have unions negotiating with unions! Unbelievable!
For example, “In Seattle, prosecutors and supervisors at the city’s electric utility both have formed collective bargaining units in the past year, while in central Minnesota, managers at a regional library system have created its first union of any kind. In Sacramento County, Calif., a group that includes management engineers and lawyers nine months ago voted to become a collective bargaining unit for the first time.”
Let’s see if we can imagine how the bargaining will take place with union member negotiating with union member. Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” comes to mind:
The only redeeming news is that union membership has dropped both in the private and public sectors. As you would expect, though, while the private sector membership in the last decade has dropped by 2% the public sector has dropped by only 1/2%. “The 7.6 million government workers in unions made up more than half of the 14.7 million workers in the U.S. who belonged to a union last year, with the state and local government sectors among the most heavily unionized in the economy.”
Do you think it’s time for the taxpayers to form a union and call a strike!
Let’s Hire More Government Workers
Posted by Tom in Academics, Deficit, Economics, Education Facts & Policies, Fiscal Policy, Nevada, Taxation, Unions on January 12, 2011
It’s wrong to pick on public workers, so I hesitate to write this post; but when the public workers profess to teach students at college and post graduate levels, pick on ‘em we should, and hard!
I speak of an op-ed in today’s edition of that bastion of elite journalism, the Reno Gazette Journal, by Tom Harris and Elliott Parker. Harris is a professor of “resource economics” and more frighteningly “director of the University Center for Economic Development.” Parker is a professor and chairman of economics at UNR’s College of Business.
The article, What is the effect of taxes on state economies? compares Nevada’s GDP growth to the “share” of GDP “provided by state and local governments” during the past 45 years and concludes that Nevada’s small government did not cause it to be the fastest growing state! No correlation here. Yeah, how about that?
Being economists, however, they struggle and find a strong correlation between real GDP growth and and “lagged growth rate of its state and local government!” Whew! I was worried about that.
Perhaps our good professors don’t realize that Nevada’s state and local government spending has grown more than the population growth plus inflation with little to show for it save deficits and unfunded liabilities. Or perhaps they aren’t aware of the slight deficit problem here caused to a great extent by public employee unions at the local level. Or perhaps they don’t read the Wall Street Journal which published the following chart in discussing spendthrift Illinois and the great migrations away from the tax, borrow and spend fools in state governments.
Anyway, back to the article, our authors continue searching for a reason for the non correlation in one case and strong correlation in the other. “One way to look at it is that state and local governments provide essential public goods that cannot be adequately provided by the private sector, such as roads and education. While higher taxes might create some disincentives for private investment and growth, many of these public goods are necessary investments for the private sector to function.”
I love that “essential public goods that cannot be adequately provided by the private sector.” And they use education as an example, later stating that “without good public education, the private sector lacks the educated work force it needs.” Nevada public education is at the bottom of the barrel and the more money we throw at it the worse it gets. Oh, but our professors are in the education business, a business whose prices dramatically outpace inflation and in truth outpace value delivered.
But what’s the point of the article, well it’s an exposition of the Keynesian multiplier. You know the one Obama rolled out for his stimulus billions. Government spends a dollar which creates $1.50 in GDP. It’s as if that dollar comes out of thin air. In truth that dollar is taxed currently or borrowed and repaid with later taxes (grandchildren look out!). In either case there has been a misallocation of what could have been productive capital.
Ah, but our good professors use the Keynes multiplier in reverse, a dollar reduced in state or local government spending will diminish GDP by $1.62! “Firing a school teacher means less money is spent by that teacher on rent, food and other goods!” They fail to mention that the teacher might be deadwood kept on in tenure by the infamous teachers union which accounts for a significant portion of the current deficit and unfunded liabilities. But the real sin is that the dollar saved by firing that non productive teacher might have been invested and produced $10 dollars in GDP.
Finally they elevate the sin to the level of a crime in discussing the multiplier effect. “Economists teach this to every first-year student in macroeconomics, and estimates from real data consistently find it to be true.” This of course is not true, not even a half truth as Obama has demonstrated.
Besides, if this were true we should all go to work for the government, since there is no “essential public good” it doesn’t seem to have its hand in.
Democratic Governors Face Their Own Mess
Posted by Tom in California, Entitlements, Liberalism, State Finances, Unions, Welfare on January 5, 2011
And it’s not pretty. Yesterday’s WSJ editorializes on “The Blue Men Group,” a wonderful pun treating California, Illinois, and New York, all essentially bankrupt. One chart is worth a thousand words, this one ranks the three spendthrifts in terms of tax climate for businesses, all are pretty near the bottom:
But focus on CA for the moment, NV’s neighbor upon whom so much depends. Jerry Brown will reprise the position he had in 1976, then sworn in with his girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt at his side. Jerry is responsible for public employee unions in the state. Now he must face the mess he created with a $28 Billion deficit and multiples of that in unfunded pension liabilities.
One other issue he may want to look at is the welfare system. It seems that CA’s welfare credit cards are good worldwide!
Good luck!
Obama’s Leftist NLRB Run Amuck
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy, Congress, Statism, Unions on December 23, 2010
As we all know the unions own a big piece of Obama and he acknowledged this with his sponsorship of the Employee Free Choice Act permitting “card-check” unionization which eliminated those messy secret ballot elections. This passed in Pelosi’s House but failed to pass the Senate arguable because of the high unemployment rate of almost 10%. If this indeed was a reason for the failure, it’s a rare and happy sense of economics out of this august body. Unionization causes unemployment just as the minimum wage causes unemployment.
When legislation fails Obama shifts to the regulatory arena which he did at the NLRB by appointing Lafe Solomon, a career board lawyer, as “acting general counsel.” Now, the NLRB General Counsel is a position that requires Senate confirmation, but Obama has nominated no one as general counsel!
Why, you ask? Because Solomon is a radical leftist labor organizer. Without nomination or confirmation this wild man has started a rule making process which inter alia would require open shop employers to give the unions the names and addresses of the workers to promote unionization.
Is it fair to conclude that Obama favors economic barriers to full employment? This regulatory subterfuge would support that conclusion. Favor unions over the economy. The GM government takeover is another example of this.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, posted an excellent RCP article today, Where Unions Are, Americans Aren’t. In it she demonstrates how right-to-work states have gained congressional representation while forced unionization states have lost it. Winners like Texas and Florida are in the south and west, losers like New York and Illinois are in the northeast and midwest. In fact this has been the case for the last 25 years with right-to-work states growth more than double the growth of the forced unionization states. The recent Republican surge in the House, Senate and state governments confirms the voters attitude toward Obama’s more radical statist agenda.
Obama from the get-go has embarked on a statist, economy killing, job killing agenda. Whether it was Obamacare, cap and trade, or financial regulation, everything he and his minions along with Pelosi and Reid have created drag and uncertainties in the economy.
Despite his press conference Wednesday where he stated that “we now have to pivot and focus on jobs and growth,” he still tolerates radicals like Solomon in critical positions. Methinks that paleface speaks with forked tongue.
Everything government does beyond its legitimate scope, increases uncertainty and decreases growth and employment. Unionization and minimum wages are prime examples! That he ignores the law to pay back the unions he owes, is all the more damnable!
Common Good? What Common Good?
Senators load the tax bill with so-called Christmas trees! That’s short for selling their votes. So what was a negotiated deal between Obama and the Republican leadership on a two year continuation of the current income tax rates with an increase in estate tax rates has been loaded up with “extras.” These are the quid pro quo that elected representatives extort for voting on the main bill.
The worst of these is the ethanol tax and tariff subsidies. And the worst of the whores are the Iowa Senators, Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley. Rich Lowry flags it in his NRO post, The Ethanol Idiocy that Will Not Die. And, today’s WSJ editorializes on The Hawkeye Handouts:
“One measure of ethanol’s political clout is that reformers merely hoped to cut the tax credit for blending ethanol into gasoline to 36 cents per gallon from the current 45 cents that was due to expire at the end of the year. Instead, the deal keeps the full subsidy in place for another year, at a cost to taxpayers of $4.9 billion, and it retains the 54-cent per gallon tariff on ethanol imports that was also expiring.”
“Direct subsidies and trade protectionism, plus mandates that force consumers to buy ethanol: This is the trifecta of government support, and all for an industry that is 30 years old and that even Al Gore now admits serves none of its advertised environmental purposes.”
“The ethanol extension is the bipartisan handiwork of Iowa Senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin, who both regularly abandon their professed principles (fiscal conservatism for the Republican and equity for the Democrat) in the service of agribusiness.”
It’s frustrating, infuriating, immoral and damnable that our elected representatives are the whores of special interests. The farm lobby is one example of corporate welfare at its best. Special interests control our government whether they be unions like the UAW and SEIU or corporate giants like ADM and GE. These are rent seekers, gaining from the public coffers, from the taxpayers, what they cannot get in a competitive environment. They and the elected representatives they buy are stealing from the rest of us.
The Christmas trees and earmarks should be banned. There should be up or down votes on single issues. Let ethanol stand or fall on its own. If we do not have the political will to take this simple procedural step in the legislative process we will not balance a budget.
There is no legitimate argument in favor of ethanol. Political whores of special interests know no common good! Nor do they know their Constitutional duty!
Deficit Reduction-Competing Plans
Posted by Tom in Business, Centrally Managed Economy, Congress, Deficit, Democrats, Entitlements, Environment, Financial Policy, Foreign Trade, Government Regulation, National Character, National Debt, National Endowments and GSEs, Social Security, Taxation, Unions on November 17, 2010
Now we have another deficit reduction plan to compare the the Obama Deficit Reduction Commission plan, this the “Bipartisan Policy Center Debt Reduction Task Force” announced by Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici. Here’s the WSJ high level comparison:
We won’t reduce deficits and their concomitant generation burdening debt until we reform congressional spending. Listening to another commission or task-force will not do the trick. Congress must get serious and tell the truth to the America people–there is no free lunch, THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH!
In addition to reducing the deficit, we must promote an environment for growth: certainty of taxation well into the future, certainty of limited regulation of business, and elimination of rent-seeking-giving subsidies and regulations.
All the principles of freedom and growth are anathema to the current state of Obamaism: Instead of reforming Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security Obama’s Democrats added Obamacare as an additional unsustainable entitlement with concomitant business and personal uncertainty. Instead of cleaning up the Fannie-Freddie generated financial mess Obama’s Democrats continued the charade of propping them up to do more future damage. Instead of cutting unnecessary spending, Obama’s Democrats passes such folly as cash for clunkers and bought GM for the UAW. So, bottom line, oppose Obama’s Democrats while they’re in office and turn them out of office ASAP.
A few basic economic growth imperatives;
- Repeal Obamacare while eliminating employer tax benefit subsidies, while eliminating interstate insurance competition barriers and while enacting stringent malpractice tort reform; reform Medicare over time as a high-deductible insurance policy with means testing; and reform Social Security with later retirement, means-testing and private accounts as an option for the means tested high-earners.
- Go for a flat, low-rate income tax both personal and corporate, eliminating extraterritorial corporate taxation, and all personal deductions, including home mortgage deductions.
- Eliminate all federal agency rule-making. If Congress can’t define it specifically as a law, then it should not govern, period! Now, there will obviously be extremely well defined and narrow exceptions to this like the difference in typeface, boldness or color of signs and warnings!
- Abolish all subsidies and mandates, farm subsidies/mandates, green subsidies/mandates, ethanol subsidies/mandates. If a product or service is not in and of itself economic enough or green enough to make it in the free market, then it should fail. In no case should it be subsidized.
- Eliminate all trade barriers that protect unions or their work rules. The Mexican trucking proscription under NAFTA is an example.
- Negotiate, sign and ratify as many free trade deals as are reasonable. As the world’s largest consumer, we hav the leverage, if we would only use it intelligently.
- Preclude all public service unions. Repeal Taft-Hartley and minimum wage laws.
- Eliminate all unnecessary government spending like, NPR, NEH, Department of Education, etc.
- Eliminate and forego all unfunded mandates to the states. Federalism must be re-energized and government pushed down to lower levels.
We need to get the point across to the American people that we are broke. We can’t afford the free lunches anymore. We need individual responsibility. We are not a socialistic nation.
In short, if we got government out of the way, this country would once again blossom!
November Reno Hayek Dinner
Our thanks go to Chuck Baird for an outstanding presentation last evening on the problems with union law in this country. Now unions are dominant in the public sector thanks to John F. Kennedy’s establishing them in 1961 and weak in the private sector thanks to basic economics. Federal labor law controls the private sector unions and federal public unions and state laws control all state public employee unions.
Basically, the Roosevelt labor law is unfair to individual workers. They are forced to be represented by a union they don’t vote for. In essence, forced into an election that otherwise would not pertain at common law. They give up excellence in exchange for mediocrity, no, less than mediocrity, they give it up for the lowest common denominator. Perhaps they are forced to give it up by peer pressure, in the strongest sense of the term. They are forced to pay dues under the theory that the union is benefiting them, whether or not it is. There is forced mandatory good faith bargaining on whatever the union bosses want. In short, labor wins and the law is biased.
The Government Employee Unions, (GEUs), are in an unholy, incestuous alliance with their employers. They “bargain” and get wage and salary increases and exorbitant benefits in exchange for votes. There is no competition to keep them honest. There is no competition or profit motive to keep the employers honest. It’s a relationship made in hell. In effect, they sit on the same side of the bargaining table and then hire their own bosses.
It’s gotta stop! Voluntary unionism is the answer. See: “Toward a Free-Market Union Law,”www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj30n1/cj30n1-12.pdf
We also had a briefing, last evening, from Randy York on the results of our Nevada state fundraising activities. Of the 11 candidates we supported 8 were elected which helped retain the Republican super minority in both houses of the legislature. This one-third minority is necessary to block the tax part of the tax and spend Democrats! The breakdown: Senate: 11 Democrats and 10 Republicans for a pickup of 1. House: 26 Democrats and 16 Republicans for a pickup of 2. Sadly some good people lost, but we’ll make up for that in 2012.
Randy also briefed on NV4CFE. In view of Reid’s re-election and his opposition to real jobs in Nevada (he likes green subsidized jobs that a free market will not support), we need to get to the public and the congressional representatives of the 34 states that have nuclear waste waiting, behind NV3CFE’s Yucca Business Park proposal. We also need to get to interested industry behing reasonable solutions. It’s full speed ahead on all those efforts.
Finally, we had an exciting presentation from John Killoran and Hawley MacClean on the Reno Tahoe Olympic Bid for the 2022 Winter Games. This was a preview of a more detailed presentation they will give in the spring. They advertised one hell-of-a-lot of benefits in excess of the costs needed to pull this off. The economics, I’m sure, will be tested in the full presentation.
I have had great reports from those who attended last evening and want to again thank our speakers. We are dark dinner-wise for December and January. On February 15th we will have Greg Casey president of BIPAC and a former Sergeant at Arms of the United States Senate as our speaker. Then, on March 15th we will have Ty Cobb who after distinguished military service worked in the Reagan White House reporting to the President as part of the National Security Council.