Fixing the union problem

David Brooks had a good column yesterday about why New Jersey can’t afford to
invest in a new tunnel connecting his state with New Jersey.
Chris Christie, the unlikely rock-star governor, says that the Garden State
just can’t afford it, and if you take one look at its balance sheet, you know
he is right.

New Jersey, like Illinois, California, New York and many other states that are
dominated by the Democratic Party, can’t afford to pay for big projects because
they are spending all of their money on their employees, many of whom no longer
work for the state.

Because state employees are represented by unions, and because unions play big
in local and state races, these states are going broke. State employee unions
have a vested interest in keeping their members happy. And how do you keep
union members happy? You fight for full benefits (better benefits than you can
get in the private sector), you fight to keep retiree healthcare benefits
(better benefits than you can get in the private sector), you to fight to keep
defined benefit pensions (much better than the private sector) and you fight to
allow all of these benefits to start kicking in not at a certain age, but at a
certain period of service.

When you do that, you have hundreds of thousands of retirees who start a second
career in their 50s, as they collect hundred of millions of dollars in
benefits.

Sounds like a good deal, up until a state goes broke.

But still, because state employee unions tend to have very large political
action committees, they fund only those candidates who pledge to continue to
protect all of those benefits, no matter what happens to the state.

This breeds resentment at the local and state level, and that resentment has
spilled out into Washington. Federal taxes, for about half the country, are
really no big deal. In fact, that lucky half of the populace pays nothing in
federal taxes. But they do pay, big time, at the local and state level. And as
those taxes go up, and they go up on just about every product imaginable — from
tobacco to soft drinks to cell phone to hotels to cable to airplane tickets to
food to property taxes to environmental fees to anything else a politician can
dream up — the taxpayers are getting a lot less for their money.

Taxes goes up, yet the states are still going bankrupt. And that is because
entitlement spending on retiree benefits for state workers continues to rise. And
the state employee unions continue to fund candidates who will continue to
support the welfare state for state and local employees.

If you ask any Tea Party member what really angers them, they will probably say
that they are sick and tired of getting ripped off by the politicians. But it
isn’t just the politicians who are to blame. It is also the state employee
unions. They are ripping off the taxpayers, and we simply can’t afford to be
ripped off any more.

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