The following is excerpted from “Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions,” my new WND.COM column:
“For evidence of the power of the teachers unions acting out on the streets of Madison, Wis., look no further than your property taxes. Almost 50 percent of mine are garnished for ‘Local School Support.’ ‘Port, Fire, Hospital, Library’ constitute a miniscule 5 percent of the property-tax bill. Law enforcement is not even itemized. Other states confiscate even higher percentages from their propertied taxpayers in the service of government-employed teachers.
Yes, do use the term ‘government unions,’ won’t you, as ‘public sector’ or ‘public servants’ implies, incorrectly, that these people serve the public. Besides, have you seen these slackers? In his path-breaking book, ‘The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education,’ Peter Brimelow left us with a lasting mental image of our children’s over-sated role models, attending one of the National Education Association’s annual meetings. The same apparition is everywhere apparent in Madison, as teachers ‘wobble and waddle through the teeming crowds of [supporters] … thighs like tree trunks, bellies billowing, jowls jiggling.’
Over and above the property tax – the federal income tax claims from those who pay it more monies for the educational oink sector. Whether the taxpayer has children in the system or doesn’t, whether he chooses to homeschool his offspring or pays for a private school, whether he approves of the job government pedagogues are doing or doesn’t – he has to pay them, even go into hock for them.
To compound it all, America has a most progressive tax code. According to USA Today, the number of Americans who owe no federal income taxes, and do not share in the cost of government, stood at 47 percent in 2009, and is increasing. What has come to pass John C. Calhoun predicted in ‘A Disquisition on Government,’ where he described the devolution of a democracy in which all private property is, eventually, subjected to the vagaries of majority rule. …”
The complete column, “Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions,” is now on WND.COM.
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UPDATE (Feb. 26): Tom DiLorenzo points out the power of the monopoly that is the government union:
The enormous power of government-employee unions effectively transfers the power to tax from voters to the unions. Because government-employee unions can so easily force elected officials to raise taxes to meet their “demands,” it is they, not the voters, who control the rate of taxation within a political jurisdiction. They are the beneficiaries of a particular form of taxation without representation (not that taxation with representation is much better). This is why some states have laws prohibiting strikes by government-employee unions. (The unions often strike anyway.)
Politicians are caught in a political bind by government-employee unions: if they cave in to their wage demands and raise taxes to finance them, then they increase the chances of being kicked out of office themselves in the next election. The “solution” to this dilemma has been to offer government-employee unions moderate wage increases but spectacular pension promises. This allows politicians to pander to the unions but defer the costs to the future, long after the panderers are retired from politics.
As taxpayers in California, Wisconsin, Indiana, and many other states are realizing, the future has arrived. The Wall Street Journal reports that state and local governments in the United States currently have $3.5 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities. They must either raise taxes dramatically to fund these liabilities, as some have already done, or drastically cut back or eliminate government-employee pensions.