-By Warner Todd Huston
Mark Tapscot echoes our current theme here on the blog by reporting that California is once again in a disastrous budget shortfall and one of the biggest reason that this is so is the undue power of the recalcitrant public employees unions. Tapscot says that California cannot get out of its mess because, “the unions refuse to consider relaxing their death grip on California’s rapidly shrinking legion of tax payers.”
Tapscot thinks that California is coming to realize that the unions are going to have to be confronted in order to solve the spiraling budget woes, but I am doubtful. Looking at the mess from the outside would certainly cause one to draw such a conclusion, but inside the legislature at Sacramento one sees no hint that the unions are becoming the bad guys as they should be.
Still, I hope that Tapscot is right and the California can finally lead the country in a good thing by breaking the public employees unions and, hope of hopes, eliminating them.
And why are these unions so dangerous? Tapscot’s conclusion is a refrain we’ve been touting for years.
It’s not only that public sector unions are driving many state and local governments into fiscal insolvency by forcing them to accept contracts providing compensation benefits that far exceed those in the private sector for comparable work and that cannot be paid for without crippling tax increases.
We agree, of course.
Add this report to the mounting number of individuals coming to the same conclusion we came to here on the blog.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, and the New Media Journal, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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