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"Big Labor's Payoff"

IBD:

Unions: Those who give to politicians expect a lot in return. That’s clear from the budget-busting payoffs directed largely at organized labor by Democrats in Congress and the White House.

A bill making its way through the Senate would bail out union pension funds to the tune of $165 billion. The bill’s author, Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, wants the public to pay for the gold-plated union retirement benefits that the funds have mismanaged into oblivion.

This has to be galling to average working saps who watch as their 401(k)s and IRAs plummet, only to be asked to pony up billions of dollars in subsidies for unionized workers — many of whom get to retire into the lap of unlabored luxury while still in their 50s.

Casey’s bill isn’t the only gift that the White House and Congress have for the unions. Last year, economist and columnist Ben Stein estimated that as much as half of the $862 billion stimulus would go to unions, directly or indirectly. Even that might underestimate organized labor’s take.

And just last week, the White House proposed $23 billion in aid to states for education. For education? Well, in point of fact, increased federal involvement in education has had zero positive effect on test scores.

So this money has nothing to do with “the children” or schooling. It has everything to do with teacher unions, which will see billions in payouts from money ostensibly intended for school kids.

In short: bailouts for the unions; higher taxes and penury for you.

So beholden to the unions have the Democrats become, it’s fair to say they are a de facto Organized Labor Party — a far more accurate name than “Democrats.”

Don’t agree? According to OpenSecrets.org, 12 of the 20 biggest spenders on public elections since 1989 have been unions. In just the 2008 election alone, unions spent $400 million dollars. Virtually all of it went to Democrats.

This shocks even those on the left. “Four hundred million dollars on one election cycle,” wrote David Macaray of the lefty CounterPunch, a Web magazine. “What on God’s earth were they thinking?”

Well, now they’re getting their payback — kickbacks, if you will — in the form of massive, billion-dollar public projects that come straight from the pockets of nonunion taxpayers and add further to the fiscal ruin of our nation, now $13 trillion — and rising — in debt.

But that’s okay. Because demographically speaking, more of people’s money is coming from the government these days, anyway — and once the electorate realizes that it’s in their “economic self-interest” to vote themselves other people’s money as laundered and kicked back to them through the government (who takes, and then squanders, its own cut) — that’s exactly what they’ll do, as Hobbes would have well understood.

That such a scheme is unsustainable is of no import, both to the those voting their “self interest” and those pandering to the that crowd with promises of legalized wealth redistribution and other government-sanctioned theft, crony capitalism, and client statism. After all, those who govern this way reason that they’ll be long gone once the bill comes due; and those who take the money reason that, if and when the bill comes due, their children and grandchildren can just do as they themselves have done: get a government job, and then wait for the government to print more money just for them!

In the land of unicorns, you can close your eyes and pretend that a horn up the ass isn’t a violation. It’s the big strapping government making sweet sweet love to you. May as well get on your elbows and enjoy it…

0 Replies to “"Big Labor's Payoff"”

  1. Carin says:

    See, this is the reality of the progressive’s socialist dream. What they imagine (and hope) is nothing but bullshit.

  2. Bob Reed says:

    Gee Jeff,
    In the second-to-last paragraph you allude to a lot of “reasoning” and “thinking” that there isn’t any real empirical evidence to prove that it exist.

    A whole lot of evidence of connivance and greed though!

    This really galls me because after raiding their pension funds to finance the Socialist’s Democrat’s campaign over the years, nobody is going to go to jail for that malfeasance; and we’ll all pay for bailing them out, instead of letting the union membership collapse and the union itself suffer as they should; and I mean the hierarchy and not the rank and file union members who by amd large put their trust in a corrupt system.

    Talk about too big to fail!

  3. Mr. W says:

    You have to stop saying that the unions pensions are underfunded. It is much more exact to say that the regular union worker pensions are underfunded, but the union management pensions are full to the brim.

    There is something perfect about the management class of the unions morphing into exactly the same thing as the management class of the manufacturers that the unions were originally created as a bulwark against.

    I was some guy in the framers union, I might like to know why my pension funds were consistently given to a guy with a track record of making extremely dubious investments. Let’s just say that he kept on giving pension funds to a bunch of guys named ‘Tony’ and ‘Guido’, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

    Then again, now that I think about it, maybe the member of that framers union better not ask where his money went. Maybe he better just shut his mouth, take a pre-printed sign, and head down to some bank president’s house for a little union sponsored ultraviolence.

  4. Squid says:

    That such a scheme is unsustainable is of no import…

    If I were of a more ruthless bent, I might advocate that one should do one’s best to wring every last cent out of the current government, using said gains to prepare for when the bottom drops out. Because there’s something poetic about using government money as capital for setting up one’s post-government enterprises.

  5. Spiny Norman says:

    Democrat payoffs to Big Labor have been around since, well, Big Labor. Just not this big and not this blatant.

    O_O

  6. JD says:

    I think that TheWeekend’s idea is silly, seeing as though this Administration is content to stand on the throat of the economy.

  7. Squid says:

    If private sector unions were to come back into vogue, how quickly do you think they could destroy their industries and have Congress sell their former employers’ assets to them at pennies on the dollar? And how does taking ownership of failed industries help improve the wage situation?

  8. Joe says:

    We get the privilege of saving union benefits. Weee.

  9. dicentra says:

    What they SAY THEY imagine (and hope) is nothing but bullshit.

    FTFY

  10. dicentra says:

    Time to secede.

  11. SDN says:

    TheWeekend, they don’t have unions in India or China. Which is one reason companies are moving there.

  12. JD says:

    Casey”s union pension bailout is especially noxious.

  13. DarthRove says:

    I have a feeling TheWeekend would be all for a $50/hr minimum wage. Poverty disappears overnight!

  14. Frontman says:

    This blog needs to improve the quality of the drive-by trolls. They run through and drop their little pellets and run away. Jesus wept.

  15. JD says:

    Frontman – that is not a drive-by. It is the 15th or so incarnation of meya/RD.

  16. SDN says:

    Weekend, having WAY more people than you can employ is not a good thing. And working for the government ain’t the same. Meet the TrollHammer.

  17. Frontman says:

    “It is the 15th or so incarnation of meya/RD.”

    Again, Jesus wept.

  18. Big D says:

    Suid,

    I’d like to lodge a complaint. I bought a Squid brand cudgel and it broke on only the second SEIU head I used it on. I called your customer service department and received no satisfaction. I don’t want my money back, just a replacement.

    To answer your customer service reps question, my mother did no such thing.

  19. Big D says:

    Oh, and when it broke in my hand, my spelling ability was adversely affected.

  20. Swen says:

    Perhaps you should invest in one of these Big D. Ain’t capitalism grand? You can buy an unbreakable club and it already has a big blade in it so you don’t even have to add nails!

  21. cranky-d says:

    Squid is making cudgels now? I thought he had let ME have that market with the CrankyCudgel™.

    Let me tell you, sir, that a CrankyCudgel™ will not break that easily. They are made of the finest hardwoods and are good for years of service. Many heads can be cracked with nary a crack appearing in one of our excellent cudgels.

  22. newrouter says:

    use only squid brand™ pitch forks this season

  23. Pablo says:

    And among the others is that they have sweatshops and we have free trade.

    Oh, they have free trade too. And we also have sweatshops, if you’re document challenged.

  24. Big D says:

    HMMMMM…Maybe that’s why I was treated so roughly by Squid’s reps. Perhaps I will try these Cranky cudgels. Tell me, though, will your reps question my mother’s fidelity?

  25. Ric Locke says:

    What meya, etc. always fail to comprehend is that that’s how it’s supposed to work. It worked for us.

    That is: You start with a population engaged in backbreaking agriculture, in which literacy is rare (no, memorizing the Koran — or the Bible — doesn’t count as “literacy”) and the average annual income per person is roughly dinner for two at IHOP. Their income is low, and their lifestyle correspondingly primitive, because nothing they have, including their labor, is worth much to anybody else.

    Then somebody establishes a “sweatshop”. Compared to an American or Western European insurance office it’s an annex of Hell; compared to squeezing a subsistence living out of the ground with sharp sticks it’s Club Med, and the people apply in droves for the opportunity to actually be paid for about a quarter the effort they used to exert just to survive. Their wage rate is abysmal because their labor isn’t worth much — they literally don’t know how to do anything, including show up reliably enough for the employer to be able to plan allocation of the facilities, and a lot of what the employer spends to keep them employed goes to “fringe benefits” like teaching them literacy, timekeeping, and similar basics.

    But their wages get invested in a better standard of living, including starting to send the kids to school. The educated kids don’t want to work in the sweatshop, and don’t have to — another employer will come along who needs slightly more qualified labor to do more complex tasks. That job will still look a bit grim to us, but their kids will live in a more prosperous society with better standards, and on up the line.

    By insisting on “eliminating the sweatshops” the Proggs guarantee that those people will remain primitive agriculturalists forever. Nobody is going to hire those folks at UAW wage rates and work rules, because the product of their labor isn’t worth that much to anybody else — including Proggs. The only thing that insisting the ladder must have nothing but the top rungs accomplishes is to keep competitors from taking the necessary first few steps.

    Of course, the Proggs will insist that such simple primitive people are beautiful and have a perfectly valid lifestyle which must be protected — so long as the Proggs themselves aren’t subjected to it; a Jack Vance character remarks, “…tempting to visualize [them] enjoying their Eden, surrounded by admiring cowherds.” The people being thus “protected” have few illusions. A Mexican friend once summarized it as “back in yer ditch, Pay-drow, ah got motor-home payments t’make.”

    Regards,
    Ric

  26. cranky-d says:

    Big D, if any of my representatives says anything untoward, let me know and I will apply some correction myself. Not only do I make the CrankyCudgel™, I also use them.

    Ric, I never thought of it that way before. I tend to be knee-jerk against “sweatshops,” as I think many are, because the standards are so low compared to the ones we enjoy. I will think on this more.

  27. Ric Locke says:

    cranky-d, the myth is that sweatshops exist because the labor is cheaper. It is, in fact, a myth.

    You probably know that most Chrysler trucks (“Dodge”) are made in Toluca, a suburb of Mexico City. I once spent an evening drinking with a guy who presented himself as an accountant working on contract for Chrysler; he said, flatly, that Chrysler’s labor costs per vehicle made in Toluca were equal to or higher than those in UAW-organized plants in the US and Canada, despite the workers’ wages being something like a third of that. Having seen a bit of how such things go, I didn’t find it totally unbelievable at all. Third-world sweatshops are a more extreme example of that. Nike’s production costs at a sweatshop in Southeast Asia are not less than what they would be in, say, South Carolina by any significant amount. The difference, frankly, is cheaper politicians a.k.a. “a less restrictive regulatory environment”. Japanese companies do it (or did) as a deliberate and conscious form of missionary evangelism — not taking advantage of cheap labor, rather trying to build a rich enough population to be their children’s customers. If we ever had such a long view, it went away a long time ago.

    Regards,
    Ric

  28. Big D says:

    Ric Locke is gold.

    That is all.

  29. bh says:

    “and the people apply in droves”

    In a nutshell… this.

  30. Scrapiron says:

    I understand that the latest payoff to the union is in the financial reform ? bill. It will require Volunteer firefighters to join one of the government selected unions. I got news for them, Volunteer is just that volunteer, and 95% of the volunteer firefighters will quit the profession. I (15 years as a volunteer firefighter/EMT)will quit and go set on the corner during every structure fire and watch it burn to the ground.

  31. Mike LaRoche says:

    Time to secede.

    Yes, and Jeff’s “horn up the ass” metaphor is appropriate because this Big Labor bailout is effectively the rape of Red America by Blue America.

    Ric Locke is gold.

    Agreed.

  32. Spiny Norman says:

    Ric Locke is gold.

    That is all.

    Indeed. While I have no doubt he’s far better educated than I (or most people I know), he’s as fine an example of the difference between “wise” and merely “educated” as you’ll ever see.

    Thanks for those comments, Ric. They’re antidotes to Lamestream Media pabulum.

    It’s some twisted justice that over-educated, self-serving dolts like Paul Krugman win Nobel Prizes…

  33. Squid says:

    It has come to my attention that counterfeiters have been promoting and selling cudgels under the SquidCo label. As noted above, SquidCo does not and has not at any time produced such weapons of mass persuasion. Our torches and pitchforks are of the highest quality, and have been the preferred tools of angry mobs since 2009. More recently, we’ve expanded into tar and feathers. But at no time have we produced cudgels, billy clubs, truncheons, baseball bats, or shillelaghs. If you have need for such tools, we highly recommend CrankyCo’s fine products.

    Please rest assured that we will diligently pursue the source of these counterfeit tools, and will contract with CrankyCo to provide appropriate punitive measures.

    Thank you for your continuing support.

  34. cranky-d says:

    Now that SquidCo has explained the situation, I wish to announce my support of SquidCo’s crack-down on the counterfeiters. Both CrankyCo and SquidCo provide the highest quality products money can buy. Rest assured that we shall get to the bottom of this, and apply any correction needed to rectify the situation.

    We shall not let this incident divide our respective companies from our common goal of providing angry mobs with the tools they need to perform their tasks.

  35. Yackums says:

    Oh, you two, just get a (board)room and merge already!

  36. Yackums says:

    BECAUSE OF TEH SYNERGY!

    Or something.

  37. SDN says:

    Go ahead and “insist”. It worked so well for the Soviet Union.

    Moron

  38. CapitalFlowsWorkersCrawl says:

    And communist china.

  39. Squid says:

    Collective bargaining is bargaining. As in give-and-take. It’s not just the workers “insisting” and the owners giving in. Only a brain-dead collectivist would assert otherwise.

    If the workers agree to show up on time, to work at certain agreed-upon levels of quality and duration, and to generally assist in the profitable operation of the enterprise, then they are far more likely to see better wages.

    Of course, they’re still only going to get as much as the market will bear, and their bargaining leverage will suffer significantly if there’s a ready supply of cheaper workers coming in from the farmlands or from south of the border.

  40. Slartibartfast says:

    Collective bargaining doesn’t need to happen in PRC. It’s already a worker’s paradise.