I’ve been avoiding this one, just because there is so much coverage of it that my .02 probably wouldn’t add much, if anything to it.
I am against all public sector unions. Private company unions aren’t my problem. If a company wants to put up with that shit, that’s their problem. I can always take my business elsewhere if they are priced too high. Public sector unions on the other hand, give me little to no choice in dealing with them. There are no alternatives to dealing with the government, whether it is state, of federal. I don’t think that I should have to pay ridiculous sums of money for public sector employee’s health and retirement benefits, when they contribute next to nothing, if anything at all.
At any rate, the battle ground for the people vs. the unions has been set. If Gov. Walker holds out and smacks the union in the mouth, then it will be like dominoes in the rest of the country.
Here’s a few people that are covering this:
This happened in New Jersey, under Christie. The teachers were told they could either pay for health insurance and pensions but keep their current workers in their jobs, or stay at their current overpaid rates but face a lot of layoffs.
1,200 jobs eliminated, funding to public schools reduced, collective bargaining on benefits for public-employee unions nuked, and total spending slashed by 6.7 percent. Is there any governor in America, Daniels and Christie included, more willing than this guy to risk political death in the interests of solvency?
It’s all about the deficit to [David] Brooks. But the damage done by public sector unionism isn’t mainly the producing of deficits. It’s the crippling of government, so that bad teachers can’t be fired and productivity stagnates and virtually everything the government does it does crappier than private industry does it. That’s a big, ongoing problem for Democrats, which is why maybe it doesn’t trouble Brooks. But it should trouble even non-neo liberals. Democrats are the party that needs the government to be good at something other than mailing out checks.
Those who thought Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s agenda would be tempered by two weeks of nonstop protests outside his Captiol office couldn’t have been more wrong.
State spending would be reduced, taxes would not increase and the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus would be granted independence from the UW System under the biennial budget introduced by Gov. Walker on Tuesday.
MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker unveiled Tuesday the rest of his two-year spending plan that has already gripped the nation’s attention with its explosive proposal to take nearly all collective bargaining rights away from most public workers.
With the union rights proposal stuck in a legislative stalemate thanks to the state Senate’s runaway Democrats, the Republican governor forged ahead with the release of his spending plan that includes major cuts to schools and local governments to help close a projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall.
You have to see it to believe it. The clip is long and the key moment doesn’t come until 2:50 in, but you won’t be able to look away. The savior here, in the orange union t-shirt and sportsjacket, is Democratic Rep. Brett Hulsey; behind him, with white hair and glasses, is Republican Sen. Glenn Grothman. Watch and try to imagine what might have happened had Hulsey not been there. Even some of the protesters are sufficiently alarmed to start a chant of “peace-ful” to calm the more unruly ones down.
There’s plenty more out there.
Unions suck!
Truth, Lies and In Between 