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Critics have suggested that leaders of the labor movement suffer from economic illiteracy that has made them the architects of their own demise. The unwillingness of unions to make concessions in the face of global competition starting in the 1960’s was a major factor in Americans losing millions of union jobs. In the present day, unions push for minimum wage hikes well beyond what inflation might justify (about $9.00 to $10.00 per hour), with “fight for fifteen” campaigns which, if successful, will carry the unintended consequences of higher unemployment and accelerated small-business failures. Today only about 7% of America’s private sector workers belong to unions.
One can also make the case that unions are becoming irrelevant because much of what they fought for is now enshrined in law. Labor laws protect workers from wrongful termination. OSHA standards ensure workplace safety. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other social welfare programs all provide a safety net for the aged, disabled and unemployed. The Affordable Care Act, fraught with flaws that will hopefully either get repealed or replaced, at least guarantees anyone can purchase health insurance. Has the justification for unions in America largely withered away because of their successes?
What role, if any, should unions play in 21st century America?
The most difficult challenge to finding a consensus model for unions in 21st century America is the polarizing rhetoric that passes for discourse. Among pundits who are rewarded by the size of the audiences they can attract, or analysts [...] Read More
California has one of the highest costs of living in the United States. California also is one of the most inhospitable places to run a business in the United States. And despite being blessed with abundant energy and an innovative tradition that ought to render the supply of all basic resources abundant and cheap, California has artificially created shortages of energy, land and water, and a crumbling, inadequate transportation and public utility infrastructure.
The reason for these policy failures is because the people who run California are the public sector unions who control the machinery of government, the career aspirations of government bureaucrats, the electoral fate of politicians, and the regulatory environment of the business community. To make it work, these unions have exempted government workers, along with compliant corporations and those who are wealthy enough to be indifferent, from the hardships their policies have created for everyone else.
Here’s just a taste of what California’s middle class, too rich to qualify for government handouts and too poor to be indifferent, has to endure compared to the rest of the United States:
CALIFORNIA’S PREMIUM, 2014 – HIGH PRICES FOR THE BASICS
It’s not hard to estimate how these premiums, 13% for gasoline, 42% for electricity, and 72% for homes, translate into the necessity to work and earn tens of thousands of dollars more each year in order to live in California instead of almost anywhere else in America. As for the tax and regulatory environment, [...] Read More
One of the core barriers to economic prosperity in California is the price of housing. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Policies designed to stifle the ability to develop land are based on flawed premises. These policies prevail because they are backed by environmentalists, and, most importantly, because they have played into the agenda of crony capitalists, Wall Street financiers, and public sector unions. But while the elites have benefit, ordinary working families have been condemned to pay extreme prices in mortgages, property taxes, or rents, to live in confined, unhealthy, ultra high-density neighborhoods. It is reminiscent of apartheid South Africa, but instead of racial superiority as the supposed moral justification, environmentalism is the religion of the day. The result is identical.
Earlier this month an economist writing for the American Enterprise Institute, Mark J. Perry, published a chart proving that over the past four years, more new homes were built in one city, Houston Texas, than in the entire state of California. We republished Perry’s article earlier this week, “California vs. Texas in one chart.” The population of greater Houston is 6.3 million people. The population of California is 38.4 million people. California, with six times as many people as Houston, built fewer homes.
And when there’s a shortage, prices rise. The median home price in Houston is $184,000. The median price of a home in Los Angeles is $530,000, nearly three times as much as a home in Houston. The Read More
Taken at surface value, there ought to be minimal identity of interests between these three special interests. But if you follow the money and power instead of the rhetoric and stereotypes, you will find this unhealthy alliance is alive and thriving. For example, unions use “greenmail,” the threat of a lawsuit on environmentalist grounds, to block developments until the businesses involved concede to union demands. Once they back down, the environmental problem magically disappears.
California’s much vaunted high-speed rail and delta tunnel proposals are also examples of the unhealthy rapprochement between unions (public and private) and environmentalists. Because the construction unions, God bless ’em, want thousands of good new construction jobs, and the only big projects that are environmentally correct are these monstrosities. The unions have a choice – fight the environmentalists in order to lobby for public works that actually yield economic benefits to society, or enjoy their considerable support for a couple of misguided mega-projects.
Beyond obvious examples, how unions, environmentalists, and America’s overbuilt financial sector collude – often unwittingly, does not lend itself to emotionally resonant, simple narrative. It can’t be expressed in a few declarative sentences. But because this web of collusion is stunting the economic growth of America and systematically destroying its middle class, it is a story that must be told. Here are some points that all exemplify the chain of cause and effect, linking the interests of public sector unions, environmentalists, and Wall Street.
Public sector unions demand, and get, over-market compensation and [...] Read More
The title of this post expresses what is probably the greatest example of a monstrous hypocrisy – that public employee unions, and the pension funds they control, are supposedly helping the American economy, and protecting the American people from “the bankers.” Overpriced “bubble” assets caused by banks offering low interest rates hurt ordinary working people in two ways – they cannot afford to buy homes, and they are denied any sort of viable low risk investment opportunity. But without an endlessly appreciating asset bubble, every public employee pension fund in the United States would go broke.
The inspiration for this post is a guest column published on April 27th in the Huffington Post entitled “The Real Retirement Crisis,” authored by Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. The totality of Weingarten’s column, a depressing plethora of misleading statistics and questionable assertions, compels a response:
Weingarten writes: “America has a retirement crisis, but it’s not what some people want you to believe it is. It’s not the defined benefit pension plans that public employees pay into over a lifetime of work, which provide retirees an average of $23,400 annually…”
Here we go again. This claim is one of the biggest distortions coming out of the public sector union PR machine, and despite repeated clarification even in the mainstream press, they keep using it, faithfully counting on low-information voters to believe them. “An average of $23,400 annually.” Not in California. In the golden state, public employee pensions [...] Read More
One primary reason California has the highest cost-of-living (and cost of doing business) in America, combined with a crumbling infrastructure, is because California’s construction unions have allied themselves with environmental extremists and crony “green” capitalists, instead of fighting for what might actually help their state.
California’s construction unions ought to take a look around the rest of the country, where thousands of jobs are being created in the energy industries – really good jobs – doing something that actually helps ordinary people. Because the natural gas revolution unleashed in North Dakota, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio is creating thousands of jobs in those states at the same time as it lowers the cost of energy for consumers who struggle to make ends meet.
More generally, construction unions should remember that it is not only how much their own members earn that matters, but how much things cost everyone. If things cost less, you can make less yet enjoy the same standard of living. When unions fight for high paying jobs on projects that are useless, they only help themselves. When they fight for projects – such as natural gas development – that lower the cost of energy, they are helping everyone.
The California Public Policy Center released a new study this week entitled “The Benefits and Costs of Oil and Gas Development in California,” written by Dr. Tim Considine, an energy economist with the University of Wyoming. In the study, Considine estimates [...] Read More
“You can’t build a society on artificially inflated asset values, because that accelerates the class division. Immigrants know that even if they work in a low-paying job in a hotel in Houston the chances they can save and buy a house are infinitely better than in California. If you want to have an asset based economy then accept we’re going to have feudalism because the price of entry is just too high.” – Joel Kotkin, CPC Interview, January 4, 2014
What Kotkin is referring to is the result of decades of increasing legislative restrictions on cost-effective land and energy development, combined with Federal Reserve policies designed to minimize the cost of borrowing. In the first case, prices for land and energy, the building blocks of a healthy economy, are artificially inflated through constraints on supply. In the second, the supply of borrowed money is artificially increased via ultra-low interest rates.
This so-called “asset economy” might also be called a “bubble economy,” because it cannot be sustained indefinitely. For a while, inflated values of real estate, privately owned natural resources and business inventories provide collateral for additional borrowing at low interest rates, which puts even more money into circulation, bidding the price of assets up even further. Meanwhile, environmentalist legislation of increasing severity continues to restrict supplies of land and energy, driving prices of marketable land and energy higher still. And the bubble grows.
This is the real reason California is unaffordable for working families. Anywhere within 100 miles [...] Read More
When examining policy options that might help restore a financially sustainable public sector, reformers tend to focus on what may be politely referred to as austerity programs. And no effective package of reforms can ignore austerity measures; cutting government programs, cutting government staff, and cutting government employee compensation. At the same time, an essential element in such an austerity program would be new rules to change the political landscape – in particular, legislation to curb the power of public sector unions whose agenda intrinsically favors bigger government.
Focusing on austerity alone, however, not only condemns many useful government programs and virtually all government workers to an unpalatable fate, but it is insufficient to revitalize overall economic growth. Accompanying any package of austerity measures must be a package of prosperity oriented measures. These include, predictably, creating a more business-friendly regulatory environment. But they also should include public/private infrastructure projects, strict new laws designed to break up monopolies and promote competition among very large corporations, and a relaxed permitting process for land, energy and resource development. All of these prosperity measures must share a common priority – to lower the cost of living. This not only makes austerity measures affordable, but it frees up public capital to reduce debt and make smart infrastructure investments, and it frees up private capital to innovate and invest in entirely new industries.
Here, in more detail, are solutions for California that combine both austerity and prosperity:
(1) Balance State and Local Government Budgets:
(a) Lower the [...] Read More
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Martini 19.75″ x 27.5″, 2005
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Pinwheels 19″ x 24″, 2006
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Mandala 18″ x 18″, 2007
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Octopus 12″ x 12″, 2008
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Backgammon 16″ x 18.5″, 2009
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Yin Yang 18″ x 18″, 2010
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Andromeda 20″ x 34″, 2011
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Chromaticism 10.75″ x 13.5″, 2012
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Among pension reformers there is a spirited ongoing debate regarding what might constitute a financially sustainable yet equitable solution. On one side there is a call to do away with defined benefits entirely, replacing them with defined contribution plans. The argument is compelling; with defined contribution plans, when the participant retires, they survive on the assets they have invested, and the employer has no contingent liability whatsoever. This is an appealing scenario to anyone who fully appreciates just how close our public sector pension funds are to financial collapse. But some of the ways defined benefits are characterized by their detractors are inaccurate.
For example, defined benefit plans are often referred to as “Ponzi schemes,” based on the premise that pension funds depend on new participants making contributions in order to fund the distributions being made to retirees. But the scam used by Ponzi (and Madoff) was to let new investors fund interest payments to existing investors, while all the while making the promise that existing investors had a claim on their original principal investment and could have it back at any time. Defined benefits do not offer a return of principal. If incoming contributions, plus interest earned on assets under management, offer sufficient extra capital to fund distributions, a pension fund is sustainable. A Ponzi scheme by definition is not sustainable.
Slightly more apt, but still inaccurate, is to characterize defined benefit plans as “Pyramid schemes,” based on the same premise – that their solvency depends on new participants [...] Read More
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