Showing posts with label public employees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public employees. Show all posts

Stanley Kurtz: California's Dangerous Proposition 31

The revolution will not be publicized.    We are two months away from fundamentally transforming the State of California, and barely anyone knows it. With a five to six point lead in the latest poll, Proposition 31 has a solid shot at passage. The measure is meant to bail out California’s failing cities by creating regional super-governments empowered to raid ... MORE

Chicago Strike Shows Why We Need School Choice

by Star Parker. It says something about today’s public education reality that the two sides in the teachers’ union dispute in Chicago are the union and the mayor. Allegedly the point of schools is to educate children. But which side in this dispute has sole interest in children and their parents? The answer, of course, is neither side.Unions are about   ... MORE

VIDEO: California Taxpayers Soaked By Lifeguards


Exposed: California lifeguards paid $200,000 and retire at age 50.

Amy Payne: 25,000 Chicago Teachers Walk Off The Job

Why support for school choice is at all-time high. This morning, about 350,000 students in Chicago Public Schools will be without teachers. While the 25,000-plus unionized teachers take to the picket lines in a strike over benefits and teacher evaluations, working parents are scrambling to figure out what to do. “We know a strike is really going to be      ... MORE

Steven Greenhut: California Goes Bankrupt

One city after another becomes insolvent. First Vallejo, then Stockton, then Mammoth Lakes, and now San Bernardino and soon possibly Compton. As Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach told Bloomberg News, the bankruptcy dominoes are starting to fall. One California city after another—following a decade-long spree of ramping up public-   ... MORE

Shikha Dalmia: Detroit's Run Out Of Other People's Money

Motown is overtaxed and broke as a joke. A sigh of relief swept through Detroit recently after a judge threw out a legal challenge to the “consent agreement” the city just signed with the state to clean its books and avoid bankruptcy. The lawsuit, filed by the city’s megalomaniacal legal counsel, represented a level of overreach ridiculous even by ... MORE

John Fund: Twilight Of The Unions

Hard times at the AFSCME convention. Since 2008, we’ve seen the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Unlike 75 years ago, however, unions and the Left have this time largely failed to build a rigorous movement of economic populism to further their goals: Witness the now largely disbanded Occupy movement. Indeed, as members ... MORE

Should We Hire Even More Teachers, Cops And Fireman?

by Nick Gillespie. Though it feels like it was about a thousand years ago, it was only a couple of weeks back that President Barack Obama announced that the private sector was "doing fine" and that it was the public sector that really needed a helping hand getting through this furshlugginer economy. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney bravely critiqued his    ... MORE

Washington Times: The War On Teachers Unions

Romney seizes high ground on school choice. Parents would like to choose where their kids go to school, if they could. In a speech to the Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit in Washington D.C., Mitt Romney laid out his case for choice-based education reform. “Here we are in the most prosperous nation, but millions of kids are getting a Third  ... MORE

Kyle Olson: Are We Slaves To The Government Class?

Public servants or public masters?    Over the past year, a lot of people have been talking about “the 1%” versus “the 99%.” But if you’re concerned about one class exploiting another for economic gain, that’s the wrong way to look at the problem. The protesters are right about one thing: there are gross class inequities in America. There is one class that  ... MORE

Steven Greenhut: How Government Makes Life Worse

Another day means more waste, fraud or abuse.   Occupy Wall Street protesters are reminiscent of writer R. Emmett Tyrrell’s criticism of radical feminists: They don’t know what they want, but they want it very badly. On May Day, the protesters tied up the streets of Oakland, San Francisco, and elsewhere. They are mad as hell and they are not  ... MORE

Patrick Brennan: Public-Employee Unions Gone Wild

The expectation of retirement at 47. Terry List, a teacher in Saginaw Township, Mich., has a depressing lesson for her students: “I would not recommend to my pupils to become a teacher in Michigan.” What’s discouraging her? A proposed pension-reform bill in Michigan would derail her plans to retire — at age 47. After these rapacious reforms, List  ... MORE

F. Vincent Vernuccio: Compulsory 'Free' Speech

How unions turn the meaning of words upside down.   What is free speech? Is it the right to speak out and give money to causes, politicians and push ideas? Is it the ability to keep silent and not support that with which a person disagrees? Or is it the power of a group to force its individual members to fund political causes and candidates they do ... MORE

Gary North: Tax Burden Of 40 Million Government Workers

A crushing burden for taxpayers.  How many people work for governments in the United States. Let's look at the numbers. The usual estimate of the number of employees of the U.S. government is 2.8 million. The estimate is fake. This does not count military personnel. But most important, it does not count contract workers paid by the federal ... MORE