State Budget Battle Showdowns
Wisconsin. Ohio. Michigan. New Jersey. New York. Budget-battle face-offs are coming quickly to a statehouse near you.
Thousands of upset school instructors, union members, and their sympathizers have actually descended on capitals to fight against lowering pay and advantages for public workers. The protesters are up against a new crop of governors who are hell-bent on investing cuts to deal with deficits that may increase to combined $125 billion in the next.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) is searching for public staff members to pay $500 million towards benefits they’re currently getting for free.
New Jersey’s Chris Christie is proposing public workers get 30 percent of their health care premiums. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker wants public employees to pay a minimum of 13 percent of their health care premiums. And he wants state employees to begin adding to their retirements for the first time.
This newfound financial discipline follows an essentially uncontrolled binge over the past 10 years during which state expenditures exploded by more than 80 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, including huge bumps in total worker settlement.
The most controversial element of the spending plan fights handles public-sector unions and cumulative bargaining. Wisconsin’sWalker and others argue that the current procedure is naturally stacked against taxpayers since the government isn’t investing its own money like companies in the private sector do. What’s more, taxpayers have no chance of pulling out of any contract that’s reached. In the economic sector, consumers can constantly take their business elsewhere. That’s the fundamental reason that progressives such as Franklin Roosevelt and labor legend George Meany protested unions for government employees.
In a world of super-tight budget plans, it’s a foregone conclusion that public-sector workers are going to have to give back payment. Public school instructors make up the bulk of government employees in every state in the country and they already make 35 percent more in straight income than their private-school counterparts. There’s also a growing space between what they get towards retirement and what private-sector professionals receive.
Teacher union leaders in Wisconsin and elsewhere now say that educators are willing to accept less payment – just as long as nobody cuts the union out of the deal-making. Whatever the fate of public worker unions in this, the winter of our discontent, there’s no question that teachers and other state workers are going to need to get used to earning less.
That’s not an overall repair, much less a transformation, but it counts as real development in a nation where every state government has invested itself to the brink of personal bankruptcy.
“Budget Battle Showdowns” is a joint production of Heritage Foundation and Reason.tv. Composed and produced by Jim Epstein and Nick Gillespie, who also narrates. Video footage and other assistance from Dan Hayes and Clay Broga of FreeThink Media.
source
New Jersey’s Chris Christie is proposing public staff members choose up 30 percent of their health care premiums. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker desires public workers to pay at least 13 percent of their health care premiums. And he desires state employees to begin contributing to their retirements for the first time.
The most controversial aspect of the spending plan battles deals with public-sector unions and collective bargaining. Public school teachers make up the bulk of government staff members in every state in the country and they already make 35 percent more in straight salary than their private-school counterparts.
