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Not as a libertarians, but as a good government fiscal conservatives, who value government and government programs, how might we respond to charges of right wing radicalism? How might we respond to charges that we are biased against working people, or want to destroy the middle class, or are a tool of the super-rich? If you want to keep good government programs, but want to make government more financially efficient, how to respond to charges of resenting government workers, or wanting to change the deal on government workers, or not appreciating government workers? Focusing on the state and local government entities here in sunny California, here are some thoughts:
(1) Public employees used to take jobs that paid less than private sector jobs. Up until about 20 years ago, the trade-off was clear: Government workers exchanged a lower salary for better benefits, a pension that was better than social security, and job security. This was a fair exchange, and the system worked just fine.
(2) Over the past 20 years, during the economically unsustainable internet bubble followed by the real-estate bubble, public sector unions stirred up envy among public sector employees, prodding them into demanding unsustainable increases to their compensation to match the private sector. Since these bubbles have burst, these unions use their nearly absolute power over California’s state and local politicians to maintain unsustainable levels of public sector employee compensation.
(3) We now have a situation where public employees have, in most cases, better base salaries than [...] Read More
A CIV FI post back in January 2010 entitled “Axis of Wall Street & Public Sector Unions” identified an irony still lost on the occupy movement’s rank and file – Wall Street is financed by the pension funds of unionized government workers. Every year, taxpayer funded government agencies pour hundreds of billions of dollars into Wall Street investment funds.
Occupy Wall Street? Why not “occupy” Wall Street’s union paymasters, the government employee pension funds?
Here’s a summary of the dynamics between Wall Street, unionized government workers, and the taxpayer:
(1) The government workers provide services vital to the taxpayer, and charge the taxpayer, on average, about 40% of their income (middle class worker, all taxes – state, federal, social security, medicare, property, sales) to receive these services.
(2) The government workers receive, in addition to their normal pay, funded by these taxes, pensions that are, on average, five times better than what taxpayers get from social security (the average government pension is $60K per year with an average retirement age of 55, the average social security benefit is $15K per year with an average retirement age of 65).
(3) The government workers tell the taxpayers – don’t worry – you don’t have to pay additional taxes for us to get these generous pensions, because we’ll invest the money on Wall Street, and Wall Street will earn 7.75% per year on these investments.
(4) Wall Street invests the taxpayer’s money, funneled [...] Read More
It is impossible to easily summarize all of the efforts government worker unions have mounted in California to consolidate their power. But the efforts by these unions to disrupt reform initiative efforts, as well as undermine the initiative process itself, is worthy of special mention, and is the focus of this post.
As Californians realize that unions stand firmly opposed to reducing government worker pay and benefits as one way to reduce government deficits, and further realize that their elected officials are controlled by these unions and unable to enact reforms, the citizens initiative has become their tool of last resort. Across the state, grassroots organizations have mounted initiatives designed to reduce government expenditures – through banning Project Labor Agreements, or right-sizing government worker pensions, or through campaign finance reforms that target unions alongside large corporations. These measures constitute a profound threat to government union power.
Here are some of the ways government worker unions have spent millions of dollars over the past six months to fight reform through the initiative process:
MISINFORMATION TO THEIR OWN MEMBERSHIP: In mid-July the SEIU created a “think before you ink” flyer filled with misinformation and distortions regarding a major threat to their power, the “Stop Special Interests” initiative that would ban corporations or unions from withholding money from paychecks to finance political activity. The flyer claims, for example, that “business donates more to politics than unions by a ratio of 15-1.” Actually in California the unions spend more than business [...] Read More
It is surprisingly difficult to gather data on just how many public safety employees claim disability in their retirements, but this should not prevent us from estimating what the benefits bestowed on disability claimants cost taxpayers.
A common program to compensate public safety workers for job-related disabilities is to grant them a tax exemption, whereby 50% of their retirement pension is exempt from state and federal taxes. While it is virtually impossible to collect data from pension fund administrators on exactly how many retired public safety workers have retired with this benefit, a 2004 investigative report by the Sacramento Bee found that among retired members of the California Highway Patrol, 66% of the rank and file officers, and 82% of the chiefs retired with service disabilities. Similarly, a 2006 investigative report by the San Jose Mercury found that two-thirds of San Jose Firefighters retired with service disabilities. Neither of these reports remain available online, although a Google search on the term “Chief’s Disease” (a term coined by the Sacramento Bee) will find dozens of secondary references to these studies; you can start here, and here.
The point of this analysis, other than to point out the shocking lack of comprehensive data on this issue, is to perform a what-if, based on assumptions that might be reasonably extrapolated from the available data.
The first section of the table below, “Impact per Worker,” shows what a person receiving a service disability tax exemption is really making annually, [...] Read More
The agenda of California’s union-controlled state politicians is to do whatever they can to increase the amount of tax revenue flowing into the government, and increase the amount of dues revenue flowing into the coffers of government worker unions. This isn’t news, and any law they pass can be appropriately viewed in this context. But beyond grasping for tax revenue ala AB 155, which imposes sales tax on internet purchases, or grasping for union dues revenue ala SB 104, which (vetoed this time) would have imposed unionization via “card check” on agricultural workers, California’s union-controlled legislature is enacting laws that will change the ground rules of politics and governance.
The purpose of these laws, too numerous to compile, is to consolidate the power of public sector unions and ensure that government of the government workers, by the government workers, and for the government workers, will be the perpetual fate of California. As citizens awaken to the fact that government workers in California, on average, make twice as much money and work half as many hours in their careers as the taxpayers who support them, a seismic wave of reform sentiment gathers. To prepare for this tsunami, California’s government worker unions are building a seawall of regulations, many of them buried within budgets and unrelated new statutes. Here are just a few:
AB 114 – Dramatically reduces local financial control of school districts; prohibits layoffs; removes requirement for [...] Read More
To declare that union reform, public sector union reform in particular, is a nonpartisan cause, is certain to attract vociferous challenges from defenders of unions, but events continue to trump ideology.
As documented in an earlier post “The Democratic Party War,” even in California, a state where public sector unions wield nearly absolute control, there are increasing numbers of prominent democrats who are standing up to the unions. They include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former State Senator Gloria Romero, President of the California NAACP Alice Huffman, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, and Matt Gonzalez, former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. From education reform to pension rollbacks, Democrats are lining up to make hard choices in California, staring down union power in the process.
A series of similar reality checks are happening all over the United States, as Democrats realize the agenda of public sector unions is often in direct conflict with their ability to fund government programs and infrastructure projects. As reported in the New York Times earlier this week in an article entitled “Cuomo Secures Big Givebacks in Union Deal,” a democratic governor in a union stronghold is making tough decisions in an attempt to restore budget solvency. As reported on June 21st on the website “Intercepts,” in a post entitled “Rage Against the Machine,” Democratic lawmakers [...] Read More
California’s legislature is moving a bill forward that will throttle back the ability to place citizen initiatives on the statewide ballot. As noted in Ballot Access News on May 10th in a post entitled “California Democratic Legislators Advance Bills Injuring Ballot Access for New Parties, Initiatives,” the bill is nearing passage by both houses of California’s legislature:
“On May 9, the California Senate passed SB 168, which makes it illegal to pay circulators on a per-signature basis, if they are working on initiative, referendum, or recall petitions. On the same day, the Senate passed SB 448, which forces circulators of those kind of petitions to wear a button that tells whether they are paid or volunteer. These bills also passed on party line votes, with all Democrats voting “yes” and all Republicans voting ‘no.’”
The impact of this legislation, which is expected to pass the Assembly and get signed by California Governor Brown, will be to double (or even triple) the price of successfully placing a citizen initiative onto California’s state ballot. Anyone who has tried to raise money to qualify a state ballot initiative knows what an advantage the powerful special interests have in this high-stakes political niche, whether they are public employee unions or large corporate interests. Only grassroots organizations with limited access to funding, from taxpayer groups to progressive organizations, are negatively impacted by this legislation.
From Citizens In Charge, a website [...] Read More
At a recent political event I encountered a libertarian group who were passing out a test designed to determine one’s political ideology. Their model had two continua represented as sides of a checkered board with 100 squares. This square board was rotated 45 degrees, with one continuum (2 opposite sides) containing the degrees between the extremes of statist (big government) vs. libertarian. The 2nd continuum on the board contained the degrees between the extremes of social liberal and social conservative. They were measuring the political opinions of attendees with a 20 question test, 10 questions designed to measure one’s statist vs. libertarian leanings, and 10 questions designed to measure one’s social liberal vs. social conservative leanings.
As an attempt to quantify voter psychographics into terms of political ideologies, this model is helpful and probably has a great deal of practical value to politicians and their campaign organizations. The choice of two ideological continuums, a moral value system, and a fiscal value system, is an astute recognition that common political labels, left and right, liberal and conservative, are multidimensional. But for political paradigms that model and map the collective political psychology of voters to properly reflect political reality – the structure of government and governance – another dimension is required.
This third continuum would measure the degrees between the extremes where vested interests collectively command and control the economy and society, and an extreme where there is a continuous and nurtured upwelling of aspiring, emergent interests. Put another way, those [...] Read More
A commenter to the previous post, “Is Union Reform Partisan,” took issue with the observation therein that corporate political spending is less partisan than union political spending. The commenter requested evidence to back up that claim, and suggested that not only is corporate spending equally skewed in favor of Republicans, but that corporate political spending far outweighs political spending by unions. These are fair questions, and the data that follows draws from the same source used in that post, which documented that 95% of union spending goes to Democrats.
Parsing data from OpenSecrets.org, again, “a nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit research group tracking money in U.S. politics,” this time I will present information on all of the top 100 political spenders during the eleven election cycles between 1990 through 2010. These top 100 are divided into four categories; corporate, financial, union, and grassroots. The results were quite surprising, as summarized on the chart below:
The data used to generate these numbers comes from OpenSecrets.org’s “Top All-Time Donors, 1990-2010” table, which I downloaded onto spreadsheets and sorted into the four categories noted, while retaining in the far left column the rank of each contributor within the top 100. So the reader may view my assumptions, all four of these tables constitute the remainder of this post.
Readers are invited to mull the implications of these findings regarding the top 100 political spenders of the last [...] Read More
Advocates of public sector union reform have long been accused of playing partisan politics, but the data suggests it is the unions, not the reformers, who are political partisans. According to OpenSecrets.org, a nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit research group tracking money in U.S. politics, just the top 20 labor unions over the past 20 years have spent over $500 million on federal election campaigns, and 95% of that spending went to Democrats.
This data is compiled by OpenSecrets.org on their webpage “Labor: Long-Term Contribution Trends.” On the chart below the blue bars represent labor union contributions to Democrats, and the red bars represent labor union contributions to Republicans. They show the total reported political contributions for the last eleven two-year election cycles through 2010. The red bars are scarcely visible.
The next table, which extracts data from the OpenSecrets webpage “Heavy Hitters: Top All Time Donors” (below) shows the top 20 labor union’s political contributions to each party for the same 22 year period. Among most of the major labor unions, the contributions are nearly 100% to Democrats. Overall, 95% of political contributions by labor unions have gone to Democrats, and only 5% to Republicans.
One can argue as to whether or not the agenda and policies of Democrats and Republicans are the cause or the effect of political contributions. But there can be no doubt [...] Read More
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