Tag Archives: spending

Democrats and Unions

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Illinois’ Democrat-controlled legislature—both houses—passed a budget earlier this year that spent $4 billion more than it intended to collect in revenue: a $36 billion spending bill against a $32 billion revenue bill. Never mind the rank dishonesty of this—bankrupt Illinois has no hope of raising those $4 billion except by borrowing, and these Democrat legislaturists know that. They have no intention, then, of repaying the borrowing, and that’s the dishonesty.

But leave that aside for a moment, and consider the following.

Governor Bruce Rauner (R) vetoed the bill because of that deficit, so the State is operating without a budget. Nevertheless, Rauner said the State would keep paying its government employees; as AFSCME said in support of Rauner’s decision,

public service workers in state government are on the job despite the lack of a state budget…and they should be paid for their work on time and in full.

Well, not so fast. Illinois’ Democrat Attorney General Lisa Madigan (just by happenstance, she’s also the daughter of the State’s Democrat Speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, whose own father was a New Deal pusher), with the full backing of her Democrat legislaturists, went into Illinois’ courts to block payment for those same “public service workers.”

Strictly to make a political point for their own benefit, these legislaturist Democrats are trying to prevent their employees from being paid, and they’re using their (erstwhile?) union allies as speed cushions for their bus. The Democratic Party of Illinois is typical of the national Democratic Party.

Some Economics Numbers

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…from the Tax Foundation, via AEIdeas. First this graph (right-click on it to get a bigger, more readable version):TaxMap_100-Map

The figures are regional price parities of $100 for each of the 50 states, where the national average price is taken as 100. In other words, whereas on average across the whole country, $100 would buy $100 worth of goods, in California those $100 would buy only $89 and change, in Arkansas those $100 would buy a bit over $114 worth of the same goods. The bulk of the differences across the US was driven by relative housing costs: California’s housing, for instance, costs one-third more than the national average while Arkansas’ housing is one-third cheaper.

Mark Perry expanded on these data in his article at the AEIdeas link above, and adjusted per-capita personal income for differences in personal taxes and those price levels. California, based solely on income, ranked 12th in the nation at $48.5k per person. After adjusting for California’s tax bite and pricing, though, the value of a California’s average citizen fell to just $34.8k, dropping California to 37th in the nation the value of that nominal income.

Arkansas, on the other hand, started out 43rd in unadjusted income, with a citizen getting $36.7k. After tax and price level adjustment, though, the state rose to 31st, with that income becoming $35.5k.

There’s something to be said for cost of living and taxes in determining where actual prosperity resides.

Another Government Has Shut Down

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…at least partially, and again over Democrats’ intransigence with fiscal responsibility. Tom Corfman, of Crain’s Chicago Business:

The financial situation in Illinois has been dire for a number of year. What brings it to a head is the election of Governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican with a strong agenda to change the state. At the same time, he faces opposition from the Democratic legislature and their constituents.

Indeed. Rauner won’t agree to any tax increases unless the Democrats agree to making the state more friendly to business: which means reducing Illinois’ regulatory environment, reducing spending (including on the Teachers Union’s schools), and reducing taxes generally, especially on businesses.

But those Democrats have to have their spending. Never mind that the state has the nation’s lowest credit rating, the nation’s most underfunded state pension system, and the nation’s largest deficit at the state level.

It’s only money.

A Reason

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…to decertify public “service” unions. And to terminate for cause the government’s “negotiators” for agreeing to such a thing.

Under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, “official time” was named, and it allows public service union members to use company time—that is, time they’re formally working for the government in a government job as a government employee—to do union administrative things. Doing union-specific work on the government’s clock also means they’re being paid by the government—by us taxpayers—to do union, and not government, work.

The thinking behind this little fillip was the premise that the union bargains in the name of all government employees, whether they’re union members or not, and this was a way to compensate the union for those alleged extra costs.

Like all sweetheart deals, this one has gotten out of hand.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, in 2012 (the most recent year there are statistics for) federal workers spent 3.4 million man-hours on union issues and not the work they were hired for. OPM estimates the cost to taxpayers was more than $157 million.

What’s more, at two government agencies that would seem least able to afford a loss of manpower—the Veterans Affairs Department and IRS—hundreds of workers spent 100% of their time doing union work. At the VA, 259 employees worked solely on union issues. At the IRS—which only disclosed their statistics when the National Review sent them a Freedom of Information Act request—the number was 201.

But wait—there’s more:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 939,000 federal workers belonged to a union in 2014. Another 139,000 were covered by collective bargaining agreements, but weren’t in a union. That brings the total number of employees covered by the unions to 31.6% of the total federal workforce.

However, there’s no requirement for any union to bargain for non-union employees, nor is there any requirement for any employer—even the government—to apply union contract terms to non-union members. Indeed, there’s no requirement for non-union employees to accept union contract terms as their own employment terms.

And so there are no costs for bargaining for the benefit of non-union employees. There never has been, requirement or cost; those are just fictions peddled by self-serving union leadership in order to get more money for union coffers.

Hence my call for decertification and termination.

Typical

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In an ambitious first budget plan, Governor Tom Wolf on Tuesday proposed more than $4 billion in higher taxes on income, sales and natural gas drilling to support new spending on schools and to cut property taxes as part of an effort to overhaul the way public education is funded.

Wolf, a Democrat, is also asking the Republican-controlled Legislature to cut corporate taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars, borrow more than $4 billion to refinance pension debt and inject new money into business loans, clean energy subsidies and water and sewer system projects.

Pennsylvania already is in the hole by some $2 billion, and it’s getting an increase in allegedly mandatory spending, for the upcoming fiscal year, of $1.6 billion.

So he wants to raise taxes overall and to borrow more. Because money grows on trees in the Democratic Orchard.

Wolf’s spending plan would increase overall state spending through the state’s main bank account by about 3% to $29.9 billion from the current year’s approved budget. Counting $1.75 billion in pension obligation payments to the Public School Employees Retirement System and $2.1 billion in school property tax relief receipts, the increase is about 16%….

“Pay” for tax cuts here by raising taxes there. Borrow to cover increased spending. But raise taxes overall, and increase spending. Mandatory spending? No. There is no such thing. Some spending is harder to cut, whether fiscally or morally, than other spending, but none of it is mandatory beyond the bare minimum needed to fund what the state’s constitution—the people’s instructions—mandates is the government’s purpose.

Covering the budget shortfall by cutting spending is anathema. Covering the budget shortfall by also cutting taxes and watching the economy grow from that increase in private sector money, yielding a net increase in revenue to the government, is utterly inconceivable.

How Democratic.