Matt Welch – who I do not always agree with (to be fair, I rather doubt he would agree with me all the time, either) - points out the likely real reason for the utter fiscal mess in California right now:
During the last two decades, the Golden State has been transformed from what was once known as the nation’s most anti-labor outpost to a state essentially run by public-sector unions. Nearly three in five publicsector workers are unionized, compared to less than two in five public employees in other states. The Democratic Party, which is fully in hock to unions, has controlled the legislature and most statewide posts, with the notable exception of the governor’s mansion, for more than a decade. That means more government workers, higher salaries, and drastically higher pension costs.
According to Adam Summers-a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine-the state’s annual pension fund contribution vaulted from $321 million in 2000-01 to $7.3 billion last year. According to public databases, more than 5,000 people are drawing pensions in excess of $100,000 from the state of California each year.
So pervasive is the union influence that big labor doesn’t even try to defend its deleterious effects on California’s finances. Just before the special election, a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked Service Employees International Union chief Andy Stern to respond to charges that unions are the 21st-century equivalent of the railroads that were once all-powerful in California. Stern verbally shrugged: “I think democracy is an ugly thing at times.”
That ugliness has made the California budget, like those in most of the other 49 states, less efficient and more bloated. Government spending, unlike spending in the private economy, is a zero-sum game-especially on the state level, since governors can’t print money. Every dollar spent gilding a pension is a dollar not spent funding an orphanage. Naturally, the same elite outlets that were busy blaming voters after the election spent even more time detailing the horrors of the “annihilating cuts,” as the Los Angeles Times called them in a news article, that were coming down the pike. (In early June, the paper invited readers to be shocked that a high school with 3,200 students would have to make do with just three guidance counselors.) Bloated pension costs and the increasingly inefficient provision of state services received a fraction of the coverage.
The federal government is now run by a president and Congress more responsive to union concerns than any in at least two decades. The same bloat currently bogging down statehouses and city halls is being duplicated in boomtown Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama even brought Andy Stern in to help warn Schwarzenegger that federal stimulus money would not be disbursed to California unless the governor rescinded some proposed state job cuts. Though that threat was later withdrawn, Schwarzenegger at press time was pushing for a measly work force reduction of 2 percent.
Welch makes a lot of points in this post that really are must reads. The political and media “elite” have been urinating on the voters who turned down the elite’s comic opera “solutions” to the budget disaster. Welch eviscerates them.
Welch also sees something in California: Hope. That would be a real hope that the voters are sick and tired of the “elite” and their “solutions” to the real problems our states and nation face.
There is some hope and change you can actually get behind.
Not everyone wants to be a govt. union employee in CA. My husband, a public high school teacher must pay $88.40 a month to the CA Teacher’s Assoc. Why? Because everyone must be a union member or an agency fee payer. Even as an agency fee payer, he must opt out each year and request that none of the money he is forced to provide go to political agenda items. Somehow, the amount they say is going to politics, is quite small. The union fees aren’t much higher than the agency fee payer amounts, but, the union people get liability insurance, scholarship money and a number of other benefits. With little difference in the amounts extracted, how on earth are those benefits funded? Also, those of us ‘east of I%’ tend to be quite conservative, just check how various districts voted. The coastal population, especially the Bay area and LA, but also Sacramento are the blue areas, the rest are a pretty solid red. Most inlanders do NOT like the political agendas that the union take their money for, but not that many know that they can opt out of that part, even if a union member.