You have to love the creativity of the public employee unions that have lorded over the massive growth in state government spending — they have come up with a "pretty name" for their efforts to politically attack Republican legislators who have drawn a line in the sand against punishing Californians with higher taxes — "The Fair Budget Coalition" — hey, who would be opposed to a fair budget?  No one, right?  Well, I guess what you have to ask yourself is, "Fair to whom?"

You’ve heard this here before, and you will hear it a lot — public employee unions have two and only two core purposes.  The first is to increase the wages and benefits for their respective members.  The second is to increase their number of members.  EVERYTHING else is window dressing.

The public employee unions that make up the "Fair Budget Coalition" — the California School Employees Association, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, California Teachers Association, California Federation of Teachers, United Public Employees PAC, State Building and Construction Trades, Professional Engineers in California Government, SEIU California State Council and Public Employees Union Local One — are not primarily interested, as their press release indicates, in "protecting vital programs for our kids, grandparents, and the vulnerable." — their interest is in protecting their public jobs.

If tomorrow it were determined that funding would be maintained, but that all of these vital programs would be contracted out to the private sector, these same public employee unions would be just as vehemently opposed to that as well.

I find it particularly interesting that these public employee unions have spent so much time looking to see which Republicans had the closest elections last year in targeting their attacks — apparently paying little or no attention to the actually legislators they are attacking.

Freshman Assemblyman Steve Knight is not a man without compassion, but he is someone who understands that Californians are overtaxed, and that the tragedy of the situation in which we find ourselves today is that due to chronic overspending during "times of plenty" — public employee unions have gotten used to a paradigm where automatic pay raises, ever-increasing pension benefits, and constant and significant growth in the number of state employees is the "status quo" and to be expected.

Of course, the larger the union, the higher the wages and benefits paid to its members — the more resources are sucked into the various union PACs so that they can use it to elect their minions to office, and to attack those legislators, like Knight, who actually represent the interests of their constituents and the taxpayers.

Frankly, the only way that these unions are going to get Steve Knight to push the green "yes" button for a tax increase would be to physically tie him up, and try to vote for him.  But remember that until his election to the legislature last November, Knight was an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department.  I don’t think anyone is going to force him to do anything.

Hey, I don’t blame the unions for doing what they do, given that they exist only to fulfill their two-part mission outlined above.  But shame on Sacramento Democrats for not putting these unions in their place.  But then again, without the financial support of these unions, they might not be the majority party in the legislature today…  Perhaps this explains why, after the voters handily rejected tax increases in May, Democrats (in a rather tone-deaf move) are proposing even more taxes…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.