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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 who [...] 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 20 [...] 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 that [...] Read More
A great irony of American politics is that the agenda of the left, especially big labor, causes more economic harm than good to the average American worker. Explaining this irony is not easy, but a contributor to the Washington Times, Doug Ross, did a pretty good job yesterday in his guest column entitled “Union members should know their leaders are betraying them.”
Ross gets to the heart of the matter as he connects the money from union dues to support for big government bureaucracies whose current agenda is to curb economic growth while flooding the nation with cheap labor:
“When you get your next paycheck, take a minute to calculate how much money is going to union dues (say, for example, $90). Multiply that by the number of pay periods per year (say, 26). The total (in this example, nearly $2,500) is going to line the pockets of the union bosses who will give your money exclusively to one political party, Democrats.
Your money — the product of your labor, of your finite time on Earth spent working — is being stolen and funneled to the same political party bent on destroying you. The EPA is destroying jobs. The Department of the Interior is destroying jobs. The Department of Labor’s open borders advocacy is destroying jobs.
All of these immense bureaucracies, which you pay for with your taxes (more money stolen from you) are targeting union workers, America’s backbone. [...] Read More
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But when the imitator inverts the meaning of the phrase they’re imitating, clarification is called for. Such is the case with the esteemed Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, who has penned an essay in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Scott Walker’s False Choice.”
According to Trumka, Wisconsin’s embattled governor Scott Walker has presented the following false choice to the unionized public employees in that state, “if you want to keep your job, give up your rights, if you want to keep your rights, you’re going to get laid off.” But what if it isn’t Governor Walker, but Richard Trumka, who is presenting a false choice to America?
Back in 2009, a courageous reformer in San Diego, California, councilmember Carl DeMaio, was already talking about the false choice that powerful labor unions in that city were presenting to voters. In an April 2009 press release from DeMaio’s office entitled “City Makes Progress with Labor Contracts,” DeMaio had this to say about the choices facing voters:
“City taxpayers have long been presented with the false choice that we must either raise taxes or suffer severe cuts in citizen services. Today’s action reflects my long-held belief that the better path to solving the city’s financial problems is to make our city government more efficient by reducing labor costs to sustainable levels in line with our local labor market.”
By extension, [...] Read More
While attention focuses on the battle in Wisconsin between a Republican Governor and public employee unions who overwhelmingly support Democrats, it is in California where the future role of public sector unions in politics is being most severely tested. Because in California, Democrats exercise nearly absolute control over the state’s political agenda, and as a result, Democrats are forced to confront the unsustainable and counterproductive public sector union agenda all by themselves.
An interesting article in the March 2011 issue of Reason Magazine by Tim Cavanaugh, entitled “Farewell, My Lovely – How public pensions killed progressive California,” opens with a statement that clearly expresses the political reality in California today, “In November, bucking the national trend, Democrats in California won not just the governorship but 51 Assembly seats to Republicans’ 29, 24 state Senate seats to Republicans’ 14, and every statewide office. With the passage of a referendum lowering the number of legislative votes required to approve a state budget (from a two-thirds majority to a simple majority), California is that rarest of land masses for the 2011 Democratic Party: conquered territory.”
Cavanaugh goes on to describe the slow realization by California’s Democratic lawmakers that their visions for California’s future “are being derailed by a labor movement nobody can harness.” Referring to California’s unsustainable pension benefits package granted unionized state and local government employees, Cavanaugh observes “…the most aggressive lobbying for pension reform is coming not from [...] Read More
On February 9th, 2011, the Detroit News, as part of its “Labor Voices” series, published a guest editorial by the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, James Hoffa, entitled “American ills not caused by unions.” In this editorial Hoffa made many statements that require a rebuttal, starting with this: “Across the country, new governors and new legislatures are demanding cuts to jobs, pensions and concessions from public employee unions. Their demands are nothing more than payback for the billions of dollars that the ultra-rich have poured into political campaigns.”
What Hoffa ignores is the political fundraising reality in America, which is that corporations are split relatively evenly between those who will back union reformers – usually Republicans, and union protectors – usually Democrats. Corporations hedge their bets. Very few large corporations openly challenge the union agenda, or even have reason to, since unionization drives off emerging competitors.
Similarly, wealthy individuals are split relatively evenly in their political affiliations in America. For every billionaire who backs Republicans, there is a billionaire who backs Democrats – for every Koch, there is a Soros.
At the grassroots, however, something very different occurs. Because labor unions, which still command over 16 million members in the United States (ref. U.S. Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics), nearly always give money to union-friendly Democratic candidates and issues. If you estimate the average annual dues of a union member at [...] Read More
Advocates for free markets and free enterprise will assert that if political preconditions can be established to nurture these freedoms, prosperity and liberty will increase, and population growth rates will voluntarily decrease in favor of education and career aspirations. The so-called developed nations nearly all have embraced the fundamental principals of free markets and free enterprise and now confront new challenges – how to provide for aging populations, what environmental goals to prioritize, what investments to make in emerging technologies, and how to manage their floating currencies, freewheeling commodities markets, and burgeoning debt. It is important for members of the developed world to understand what a luxury it is to have such challenges.
Using Egypt as an example, this post will present data on their population trends and agricultural production, comparing that to how much of their household income is spent on food, global food prices, and their balance of trade. These hard numbers will underscore how daunting the task may be for many developing nations to emerge economically.
While everywhere in the world the rate of population increase is slowing, in nations like Egypt the projected slowdown in population growth lags well behind the rest of the world. Projections that place the global population maximum occurring sometime between 2030 and 2050, at a total of somewhere between 8.0 and 10.0 billion people, generally view large developing nations such as Egypt, Pakistan, India, Indonesia and Nigeria as the wild cards. How quickly they develop economically is considered the key to [...] Read More
A provocative column last week by Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, entitled “The GOP’s Litmus Problem,” makes the point that “GOP dogma” will “shrink the biggest of men.” As Cohen puts it, “they [successful Republicans] have to swear allegiance to a balanced budget, dangerously low taxes, cutting (trivial) waste, fraud and abuse from the budget, the sacredness of even microscopic life, the innocence of mankind in the cooking of the planet, the inviolability of the 18th century Constitution, meeting the challenges of globalism with even more localism, and a furious rejection of the lessons of Keynes – even when those lessons are successfully applied.”
Cohen goes on to say “it is simply impossible for a centrist to capture the Republican presidential nomination – maybe even to be a Republican. I challenge any of the above to wholeheartedly endorse evolution or global warming.” Cohen believes the Republican party “continues on a course that has already driven out the political moderates and pro-choicers that once comprised its intellectual and financial core…to call this a brain drain understates the calamity. It’s a political lobotomy.”
Notwithstanding some inconvenient facts; that John McCain was a centrist who captured the Republican Presidential nomination, or that Republicans, supposedly a dwindling party of ideological lemmings, recently took over the U.S. House of Representatives, captured 29 Governor’s mansions, and control both legislative houses in 26 states; how exactly does Cohen [...] Read More
While much analysis has been forthcoming on the impact of the November 2010 election on the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, it is harder to get compiled information on how that election affected political control of 50 states. An excellent source for this much larger body of data comes from the American Legislative Exchange Council, who just released the report Political Profiles of State Legislatures 2011, which, when compared to their report from last year, Political Profiles of State Legislatures 2010, provides dramatic evidence of the changes wrought by the November election.
A brief summary of what November 2010 did to the political landscape of the 50 state legislatures is this: Before the election the Republicans controlled both houses of 16 state legislatures (counting Nebraska, which only has a Senate), the Democrats controlled both houses of 27 state legislatures, and 7 states had one party controlling each house. After the election the Republicans controlled both houses of 26 legislatures, the Democrats controlled both houses of 15 state legislatures, and 9 states had one party controlling each house. If you simply total up the number of state legislators affiliated with the major parties, in state senates the totals changed from 1,025-897 in favor of Democrats before the election to 1,023-889 in favor of Republicans afterward, and in state houses the totals changed from 3,023-2,354 in favor of [...] Read More
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