New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is traveling to Springfield, Illinois today to do a fundraiser for Bill Brady, the Republican gubernatorial candidate. While he’s in town, Christie should drop by the capitol and give Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat, a lesson on how to trim state labor costs.

While Governor Christie has sensibly challenged the public employee union status quo in the name of fighting deficits, Governor Quinn is cementing union perks in place even as the state’s fiscal condition deteriorates.

The recent announcement of a deal between Quinn and AFSCME to stop any public employee union member layoffs and facility closings through June 2012 is causing a minor uproar in the Prairie State. Illinois is facing a record $4.7 billion backlog in unpaid bills, and the union’s agreement to accept a measly $50 million in savings in return for the concessions doesn’t pass the smell test.

The fact that AFSCME endorsed Quinn just days earlier brings up unpleasant reminders of Illinois’s history of a “pay to play” state. According to reports, Quinn’s budget director David Vaught attended a union endorsement session, albeit on his personal time.

Labor costs make up one in four dollars spent from Illinois’s general funds, and walling off a major chunk of the state budget from any spending reforms makes balancing the books infinitely more difficult. Under the Quinn deal, changes to the collective bargaining agreement would be forbidden until one-third of the way through the next gubernatorial term. By then, Illinois could be bankrupt. The state needs more flexibility to deal with public sector unions, not less.

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Congress has passed a $26 billion aid package that is intended to save the jobs of thousands of teachers, nurses, and other public-sector employees. To critics who call the measure a “special interest” bill, President Barack Obama says , “I suppose if America’s children and the safety of our communities are your special interest, then it is a special interest bill.”

In politics everyone claims to be on the side of the children, but who really is? Pat DeLorenzo is a parent whose daughter suffers from epilepsy. Like roughly 10,000 other epileptic schoolchildren in California, eight-year-old Gianna suffers from the type of prolonged seizures that, without immediate attention, can result in brain damage or death. After witnessing the response of teachers and school nurses to one of his daughter’s life-threatening seizures, Pat DeLorenzo now believes that teachers and nurses care more about protecting union jobs than saving epileptic children.

DeLorenzo feared the worst when he receive a call from his daughter’s school, informing him that she had suffered a seizure. Gianna survived that day, but DeLorenzo was outraged that school administrators had not given his daughter Diastat, a drug that stops seizures before they do permanent harm and is FDA-approved for use by laypeople. Today many schoolchildren must wait until an ambulance brings them to a hospital before they receive Diastat. That’s much too long, says DeLorenzo who supports, SB 1051, a California bill that would allow trained non-medical volunteers to administer Diastat at schools.

Epilepsy advocates like the Epilepsy Foundation and physicians groups like the California Medical Association have lined up to support the bill. Unions representing teachers, nurses, and other public employees have lined up in opposition, claiming the bill would put children in danger. Their solution: hire more school nurses.

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The American public education system is going the way of the auto companies and just like the $17.4 billion American taxpayers forked over to bail out outrageous employee contracts and spineless spending decisions of management, labor unions are hoping their allies in Congress will throw them a lifeline.

The difference, of course, is that prior to the bailout, those private sector companies could actually go bankrupt – no one was “too big to fail.”  There was an invisible mechanism that prevented labor from pushing too far because while it’s greedy, even the UAW knew that there would be a limit to the pay and bennies it could extract from the auto manufacturers.  In that instance, the parasite knew when to stop sucking.

Public schools, largely a monopolistic system not held accountable by competition, don’t have that same invisible force keeping labor in check.  Therefore, if the outrageous demands of labor and current spending practices of school districts outpace the money coming into the coffers, they’ll go out and wring their hands, tell sob stories about Johnny having to sit on Georgie’s lap in class because of a lack of desks and demand more “revenue.”  From you, the taxpayer.

This should be a huge issue for the Tea Party movement.  This has been a problem for far too long and we’ve allowed the tax eaters, that is, teachers unions, to fleece the American public into thinking that more spending, which ultimately ends up in their members’ pockets, somehow equates to better outcomes.

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Before Tuesday’s elections, I wrote about a nasty union battle in the heart of conservative Orange County, Calif.

The good news: The unions might have a nearly endless source of cash in the form of employee dues, but they don’t win every battle. On Tuesday, in an election that holds nationwide lessons, a pension-reforming candidate for OC supervisor withstood a million-dollar-plus union onslaught and lived to tell about it. A county Republican Party chairman, put to the test over his “manifesto” to fellow GOP officials, is now taking his lessons to other counties.

In January, Chairman Scott Baugh berated Republicans who side with union benefit-enhancement deals and declared that no GOP candidate for office would receive party support if the candidate did not eschew union support. OC GOP support is a big deal in that still-overwhelmingly Republican county.

The showdown came this week in a contest to replace a supervisor, Chris Norby, who went on to the state Assembly. Fullerton Councilman Shawn Nelson took party chairman Scott Baugh’s pledge to refuse union funds seriously as he sought election to the powerful county board. Nelson was named the county GOP Elected Official of the Year after he blew the whistle on a retroactive pension deal in his city. He displayed the courage Baugh said he is seeking in Republican elected officials.

Nelson’s top opponent, Anaheim Councilman Harry Sidhu comes from the go-along, get-along wing of the party. He signed the “no union support” deal, but then he sat back and said nothing as the county’s major public employee unions dropped upwards of a million dollars on his behalf – including for vile smear ads against Nelson, depicting him as a friend of child molesters because his law firm does criminal defense work. Sidhu also promised that, as supervisor, he would drop a county lawsuit challenging the retroactive portion of a past pension increase.  It was almost unbelievable the number of mailers and TV and radio ads the unions paid for – something bordering on overkill for this type of county race.

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The City of Los Angeles – you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  Slowly, ever since the departure of Mayor Richard Riordan in 2001, the parade of inept mayors and spineless city councils have dragged the city into a morass.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has always been an empty suit, a smirking, glad-handing fool of epic proportions with a history of questionable ethics.  Besides successfully lobbying President Clinton to commute the sentence of a convicted cocaine trafficker, Villaraigosa pulled a John Edwards by allegedly fooling around while his spouse was undergoing cancer treatment.  Add to this the L.A Times report that the Los Angeles Ethics Commission accused him of 31 violations of campaign finance and disclosure laws during his 2003 City Council campaign.  Toss in the report that Villaraigosa was a member of MECha, a Hispanic separatist organization, while at UCLA, and attended an unaccredited law school in Los Angeles that allegedly promoted illegal alien causes (He failed the bar exam four times).

This is the Mayor of Los Angeles, and Angelenos have gotten what they deserve.  They re-elected a man who has shown absolutely no leadership in times of crisis.  His inability to use the bully pulpit has contributed to the dismal record of the Los Angeles Unified School District.  LAUSD is falling apart, unable to manage its budget, unable to fire teachers due to outrageous union rules, and increasing class sizes.  This is not surprising.  A report by the LA Weekly, an alternative newspaper usually known for supporting left-wing causes, did some strong investigative work into Villaraigosa’s schedule.  During one period, the Mayor spent only 11% of his time working on city business.  He has refused to direct LAPD to repeal Special Order 40 – which does not permit officers from asking about someone’s immigration status.

So even in circumstances where an officer sees a KNOWN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT that he himself helped deport following a prior arrest, he cannot report this individual to I.C.E.   This outrageous policy by the Mayor and City Council resulted in the shooting death of a young man named Jamiel Shaw.

However, the most egregious lack of leadership Villaraigosa demonstrates is occurring right now.

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It is not the magnitude of the rapidly collapsing Greek economy that should concern us in America.  It is, rather, that Greece is unquestionably the proverbial canary in the coal mine that should have the American ruling class burning the midnight oil to extract us from the mess they and their predecessors have created for us.  Instead, our government is ignoring the warning.

The left in America, has flirted with the European economic welfare paradigm for years and now we have an Administration that has morphed that flirtation into a full blown love affair.  Greece, which has spent itself into oblivion providing unsustainable benefits (mostly to ever-growing public payrollers) is, we are told, an aberration and the Administration will, no doubt, say the same thing about Portugal and Italy and Ireland too.  But then we have Spain and Great Britain and even France (and let’s not forget Iceland) staggering down the same path toward economic never-never land, all suffering from the same delusional affliction that is now being pursued with gusto by our ruling class…the belief that we can best improve life for all Americans, nearly half of whom pay no taxes, by raising taxes on the declining number of Americans who do.

The left has always believed that prosperity is something that can be bought through government taxation of society’s income, rather than something that is simply a by-product of society’s productivity.  Let us say it again.  Government cannot create sustainable wealth or prosperity.  Only the people, individually and through the commercial and industrial institutions they create, can do that.

Healthy societies are growing societies that earn the means (the capital) for reinvestment in continued health and growth.  In this process of market-driven growth everyone who participates eventually prospers. Healthy societies are not those such as we are witnessing in Europe, whose earnings are sucked dry by government for redistribution to accomplish objectives as dictated by government planners.   Yet it is this withering European model that our current Administration and its congressional majority have embraced, notwithstanding the warnings screaming at us from across the Atlantic and throughout nearly every precinct in America.  President Obama has stated, unambiguously, that he personally believes that at some level of income no one needs to earn any more, presumably the point at which government should take the balance for redistribution. He acknowledged, however, that this view was, “not the American way.”

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This is what the welfare state looks like. The formerly great state of Illinois, having thoroughly run its budget into the ground, is considering digging an even deeper hole by raising taxes. Exactly the shot in the arm the economy needs!

Of course, public sector unions are in full-throttle support of the tax grab. (No recession for those that live off taxpayers.) On Wednesday, a phalanx of public sector employees, including SEIU, Illinois Education Association, Illinois Federation of Teachers, AFSCME, and AFL-CIO, rallied in support of the tax hike in the capital, Springfield.

This public school teacher, who was likely given the day off to attend the rally, left no doubt about her reasons for supporting the tax hike.

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Based on this data , I am thinking that the good life starts the day one gets a job as an employee of your local Labor Union and in fact those overpaid financial sector people might want to change jobs!

This table, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows  the changes in the wages in three sectors: the private sector, the Labor Union industry and the financial industry. According to the BLS, the Labor Union industry “comprises establishments primarily engaged in promoting the interests of organized labor and union employees.” That’s basically all the guys who work in a Union.  The financial industry is “The Finance and Insurance sector comprises establishments primarily engaged in financial transactions (transactions involving the creation, liquidation, or change in ownership of financial assets) and/or in facilitating financial transactions.” So the Goldman Sacks, AIG and others.

As one can see clearly here since the beginning of the recession, private sector employees have seen their wages grown by 3.3 percent (roughly the rate of inflation.) The financial sector employees have been slightly better off with wages growing at a 4.1 percent rate.

Meanwhile, wages in the labor unions have continued to increase. And not by 5 percent or 7 percent but by over 24.9 percent!!!

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I’m sure Ms. Monica Potts, is a delightful person and in polite company never wets on the carpet as some of us are want to do.   And history teaches when a lady speaks ill of me, I surely have earned it.

So I find myself  a bit out of sorts after pouring over her latest screed, at the American Prospect, because no matter how I turn this around in my little mind I reach the conclusion: Monica owes me (gasp) an apology.

Here are a few minor gaffes Monica makes:

• I called for 20% cuts in federal, state, and local employees salaries.  She misread and uses only federal numbers to impugn either my math skills or Google’s Calculator.

• I said we should cut public employee compensation by 20% and future increases should be tied to private wage growth.  Again, Monica appears to have misread.  I didn’t say each worker should receive 20% less, precisely because there is so much obvious inequity in the salary, pension, and overtime public employees receive.  She makes my point by explaining a government cashier earns sixteen thousand dollars more per year than a cashier in the private sector.  NJ’s governor just pointed to a 49 year old pensioner who is to receive $3.3 Milion on a $124,000 contribution.  Please know this Monica:  I don’t want to use a hatchet, I want to use a scalpel to remove 20% from public employee compensation. This doesn’t mean job reductions (that’s for another post), but if for instance a cashier quits in a huff, his eager replacement will still earn less.   And this doesn’t mean furloughs, workers will be expected to earn less and (horrors!) show up for work.

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Slate’s Jacob Weisberg came unhinged on Friday and gave the country the finger.

“Down with the People!” he screams from Bill Gates lap.  As Jacob sees it, we the people are demanding two mutually exclusive things: premium government services and tax cuts, and when we can’t have what we want, we become unruly children.

There is of course a third option, and I think it is the voting issue for the 2010 elections.  It frankly amazes me that TPM-style Democrats going after Paul Ryan’s Roadmap, don’t see it coming…

You can thank me later, but I just saved the United State of America at least  $278,309,600,000.00 PER YEAR. You read that right.  $278 BILLION per year.  That’s almost entirely what Medicaid will spend this year for children and the disabled.  That’s what our normal deficit looks like without TARP and stimulus.

The crazy thing is how easy it was to do.   It took me like three minutes.  And since I’m a big open source, creative commons guy I’m even posting my magical formula shown here using 2008’s budget:

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