Government Unions

Elizabeth MacDonald had some thoughts in a three-parter for Fox Business.

Wouldn’t you like to have a job where you get paid to slack off, and no matter what, have a powerful authority to back you up, winning battles to preserve your salary, benefits, and your every demand if your boss tries to fire you?

It’s a fact of life for many government workers.

Here are some of the horror stories she’s discovered.

[F]ederal labor unions are winning fights against federal agencies who try to fire their union workers for letting mentally ill military veterans walk out the door of psychiatric units in Veterans Affairs hospitals, or for not catching things like a major rat infestation in a food factory. Instead, union lawyers are getting their members’ jobs, back-pay, and benefits reinstated, all at taxpayer expense.

Plainly, it’s not only the VA that doesn’t give a hoot about our veterans.

[D]espite the fact that cyber attacks on the government are on the rise, a federal union recently won a case that stopped Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from immediately blocking workers’ personal email accounts on government computers, like Hotmail or Gmail. Such accounts are often loaded with computer viruses or malware.

Instead, the union is forcing these security agencies to first enter into protracted collective bargaining over the use of personal webmail accounts, putting the government at risk of cyber-attacks at a time when security experts note cyber criminals, terrorists and nation states like China are increasingly trying to break in.

Just last week Russian cyber thieves were blamed for the hack into the IRS, where tax return data for 104,000 individuals was stolen in order to get fraudulent tax refunds, now estimated at $50 million. Hackers broke into the IRS’s Internet service that lets taxpayers access their past tax returns.

On top of that, the People’s Republic of China, it’s only just been discovered, has hacked into OPM to steal the personal data of 4 million Federal employees.

Then there’s this naked threat from a Federal union.

“We are a force to be reckoned with and we are a force that will open up the biggest can of whoop ass on anyone” who votes against the interests of federal unions, J David Cox Sr, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), recently said, adding, “every time the ‘fools’ in Congress try to hurt the federal workforce we get bigger. We get stronger, and we fight harder.”

RTWT. All three parts.

These are completely sufficient reasons to do two things. One is to generally shrink the physical and employee size of the Federal government along with its scope so as to make it far easier for We the People to monitor and control it. The other thing is to eliminate government unions. Their usefulness is long past, and they have become actively destructive of good government.

Energy Subsidies

Mr [Congressman Dave, R, WA] Reichert is co-sponsoring legislation to extend the PTC [Production Tax Credit] because the subsidies “reduce electricity costs and create jobs.”

But what jobs? Lower costs for whom? Who do you think pays that subsidy? Three years later, there still aren’t any in significant number. Electricity costs aren’t lower for the producers, and Reichert still hasn’t explained who’s paying for those subsidies (answer: we taxpayers are).

Mr [Congressman Steve, R, IA] King, who likes to advertise himself as a principled conservative, his line is that “Iowa is a wind energy success story” that only needs the federal government to “provide stable, low tax rates.”

Three years later, again left unanswered: if it’s so successful, why does it need federal subsidies? Why does it need subsidies at all? Why does it need continuation of subsidies as old as 1992—now 23 years on?

Oh, wait:

One need not literally seize the assets of businesses and install gov’t bureaucrats into management position to effectively nationalize those businesses. All it takes is to make them dependent on gov’t and/or direct their activities through regulatory constraints.

Or government subsidies.

Featherbedding?

To paraphrase a Democrat’s remark, never let a tragedy go to waste.

The union for Amtrak’s locomotive engineers urged the railroad on Tuesday to put a second crew member at the controls of trains on the busy Northeast Corridor, where a derailment killed eight people and injured more than 200 others.

Of course. Never mind that an existing technology, cheaper than adding an unneeded employee, should have been in place, and will be in place after this accident.

The featherbedding contained in this union urging is made manifest in the union’s own statement:

Amtrak hasn’t had a second crew member in the locomotive of its Northeast Corridor trains since Congress ended the requirement in the early 1980s, the union said.

How many accidents caused by the lack of a second crew member has Amtrak had over those 30 or so years?

Those Are Some Bills, Bill

“I gotta pay our bills,” says Bill Clinton about his $500k per speech fees. That’s nice work, and I don’t begrudge him a penny of it or the easiness of his earning it.

But is it really just to pay some bills?

Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton earned more than $25 million combined in speaking fees since January 2014, Fox News confirmed Friday.

Hillary, by the way, gets upwards of 200 large for her gigs.

Those are some bills.

The Ex-Im Bank

The Export-Import Bank’s charter is up for renewal in our Congress this spring. The bank is alleged to help American companies by lending money to foreign buyers of and American company’s products so that buyer can afford the purchase, which in turns helps the US company, and its employees.

That’s a pretty good deal, right?

Maybe not so much. It’s American taxpayers who are on the hook—not just the one American company and its employees—if the foreign buyer defaults on the loan. But that’s not all. American companies trying to compete with that foreign buyer also are harmed, whether or not that foreign buyer defaults. See the graph below, from AEIdeas:ExImBank

Don’t renew the bank’s charter.