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.

As is the case across the nation, public employee compensation in Illinois is long overdue for a “right sizing.” The average barber on the state payroll made $65,967 in 2008, more than double the average pay of barbers statewide. Unionized employees are scheduled to receive “cost of living” pay raises worth 8.25 percent between January 2011 and January 2012—never mind that inflation is minimal.

According to an upcoming study from the Illinois Policy Institute, Illinois state employees enjoy significant monetary advantages over private employees, both in wages and benefits, and work less time in return. Perhaps most striking is the fact that there is no generally available reporting of state employee compensation, which is by far the largest expenditure. This would be inconceivable in a private enterprise.

The “no lay off” deal goes beyond jobs; another big giveaway is managing rising health insurance costs. According to AFSCME talking points, another agreement exchanges $70 million in “greater efficiencies in the group health insurance program” for the nullification of a provision allowing the state to open the contract this year to renegotiate health insurance costs. At exactly the time when the state should be pursuing creative market-based reforms—like the Health Savings Accounts that were successfully implemented for public employees by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels—Quinn is slamming the door shut.

Quinn’s decision to roll over on union demands doesn’t mesh well with his persistent calls for hiking the state income tax. A June poll commissioned by the Illinois Policy Institute found 62 percent of likely Illinois voters thought the state spends too much money. When asked how to solve this problem, 49 percent said cut important programs while just 34 percent wanted their taxes raised. Fifty-two percent of independents said they’d be more likely to support a candidate who lowered state employee pay to private sector levels during the budget crisis, compared to 25 percent who said it’d make them less likely.

A moribund economy with poor job conditions is leading families and businesses to more closely watch their bottom lines. Heading into November, they don’t have to look very far to see major de-stabilizers ahead in the form of pending federal, state, and local tax hikes.

Voter frustration, fiscal mismanagement, and union bailouts are a potent political mix. Will this translate into major change on election day? One thing is sure: Illinois will need a strong dose of The Christie Way if the state wants any chance of shedding its reputation as a fiscal nuthouse.

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.

“The unions are not on the side of the kids,” says DeLorenzo who believes unions are more interested in expanding their ranks than protecting epileptic children.

“It’s exactly the opposite,” says Gayle McClean, southern section president of the California School Nurses Organization and a member of the California Teachers Association. ”We care deeply for children and we want them to receive the most appropriate care and that means they need a licensed medical person caring for them.”

Sacramento lawmakers sided with unions and have refused to bring the bill up for a vote. The bill will officially expire on August 31.

“Union Jobs vs. Children’s Lives” is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Field Producers: Paul Detrick and Zach Weissmueller; Additional Camera: Austin Bragg, Production Associate: Sam Corcos.

Approximately 7.30 minutes.

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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.

Just because I raise the price of a Yugo doesn’t mean it suddenly starts driving like a BMW.  It’s still a piece of crap – you’re just paying more for it.  Sweet deal if you can be on the good end of it.  But for the rest of us left holding the bill, it’s a sour deal – dare I say, a lemon?

Organized labor, specifically the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, don’t even try to hide their agenda behind better student outcomes.  When Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Dave Obey introduced legislation to create a $23 billion $10 billion “Emergency Education Jobs Fund,” it had nothing to do with whether or not the money being spent was going to make us more competitive in the world, it had everything to do with the latest Obama public works project for the friends who happened to have spent tens of millions of dollars electing them.

The NEA posted a video on YouTube – which it has since, remarkably, taken down – with the headline, “The issue is JOBS.”  Naturally.  The most dangerous place to stand in the world is not on the streets of Baghdad or Kabul – it’s between teachers unions and the public trough.

And speaking of that, because Democrats know the spending is so unpopular, they inserted it into a war spending bill so if you vote against more education spending, clearly, you hate the troops!

It would serve the Tea Party movement well to get engaged with how the biggest portion of each state’s budget is spent because clearly as more and more is spent each year, we’re not seeing that return on the “investment” the unions are twisting arms for.  You want to hold Big Government candidates accountable?  Pin them down on education spending.  Do they favor reforming spending, potentially stepping on the toes of monied special interests to maximize the tax dollars currently available, or do they want to continue pouring money down the rat hole to ease some feeling of guilt or to butter up a powerful campaign financier?

We all know teachers unions don’t exist to meet the needs of students – they serve the adults.  We need to stop pretending that they have students’ interests in mind and we should openly laugh when they suggest otherwise.  We need to stand up to labor and demand that the workers come second and the children come first.  And if they aren’t willing to do that, we’ll do what is necessary to see that change occurs.

Until then, we have only ourselves to blame for allowing Big Labor to control the agenda and purse strings, putting America’s future in greater jeopardy in the name of fat pensions and union power.

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.

Baugh knew that his manifesto was on the line. If the unions won, then GOP candidates would know that the GOP’s demands were to be taken less seriously than the union’s threats. The county GOP mailed its own pieces on behalf of Nelson, but they went only to GOP voters and were far fewer than what the unions mustered. Nelson supporters reminded voters that all the ads were sponsored by the county’s self-interested public-sector unions. That might have been the key.

Going into Election Day, the Sidhu forces were confident, but they never came close. Nelson won 29.9 percent to 18.4 percent, with several other candidates in this supposedly nonpartisan race receiving the rest of the vote. Sidhu wasn’t too far ahead of a couple of the other low-spending candidates, which showed how little the union money had bought him. Nelson fills the seat immediately because it is vacant and then Nelson and Sidhu face off in the November election. It seems unlikely the unions will invest that much again given the results from Tuesday. Other candidates will be sure to take note.

The lesson is as clear in California as it is in New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie is fighting against the unions: Candidates can take on labor and. Maybe the tide is turning.

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.

The City is $500 million in the red.  Rather than do what is necessary – cut expenses and show leadership – Villaraigosa and the spineless City Council has taken to terrorizing the city’s residents by slamming them with fees.  This includes sharp increases in fines for parking and directives to the LAPD to “increase traffic enforcement”.

With respect to fees, in a recent controversy involving the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP), Villaraigosa attempted to strong-arm the City Council into approving a 37% rate increase.  He has tripled the city’s trash collection fees, and supports ballot measures to increase other taxes on city residents, including additional property tax surcharges.

In another terrific piece by the L.A. Weekly, reporter Michael Goldstein notes that, despite 13% unemployment, Villaraigosa and his hacks have instituted these regressive taxes with no regard for the citizenry.  Rather than include his staff of 205 in budget cuts, Villaraigosa saw fit to raise parking ticket fines.  The city plans to double the number of red-light cameras by next year – despite mounting evidence that they contribute to accidents rather than prevent them.  This, while he and the City Council drive free cars with free gas, are exempt from parking tickets, and make 4 times the median income of LA residents, according to Mr. Goldstein.

Sources have informed me that the LAPD has been told to increase traffic enforcement.  While never overtly stated, this is obviously intended to help bridge Villaraigosa’s irresponsible budget gap.   Last week, I observed four times as many traffic stops in the San Fernando Valley than I normally do.   I won’t fault LAPD for this.  I support LAPD in their community service.  However, they have been made pawns in this budget nightmare. If they don’t do their part to close the budget gap, guess whose budget gets cut?   There are many purposes to traffic tickets. However, citing my 72-year-old mother, who allegedly slow-rolled a stop sign at an empty intersection, does not seem to serve much purpose.   Deterrence and education can be valuable tools.  Adding a monetary component to some traffic stops is simply unnecessary.

Now, however, the City has moved to illegal means in which to reap additional revenue.  This past week, I observed three separate Parking Enforcement Officers videotaping cars parked in 15-minute or loading zones, around three elementary schools.  This videotaping occurred during school pick-up hours, as kids leave to be reunited with their parents – who will receive tickets by mail in a few days.

This, however, is an illegal method under California law by which parking tickets may be delivered.  The 2010 California Vehicle Code, Division 17, Article 3.5, Sec. 40202(a,b,d) explicitly states: “40202.  (a) If a vehicle is unattended during the time of the violation, the peace officer or person authorized to enforce parking laws and regulations shall securely attach to the vehicle a notice of parking violation setting forth the violation… (b) The notice of parking violation shall be served by attaching it to the vehicle either under the windshield wiper or in another conspicuous place… (d) If…the vehicle is driven away prior to attaching the notice to the vehicle, the issuing officer shall file the notice with the processing agency…and mail a copy of the notice to the registered owner.”

The Code says nothing about videotaping a parked car and serving the notice by mail at a later date.  A retired traffic court judge I spoke to said any ticket issued in this manner should be “dismissed unconditionally…the City should be ashamed of itself”.

Take heed, Angelenos.  If you are a victim of this scam, the law is on your side. Here’s how you can fight it.

At some point, I can only hope that Angelenos wise up and toss the bums out.  They’ve willingly handed their city, and pocketbooks, over to a group of circus freaks who are not acting in their interest.   If you are a voter, and you vote for an idiot, then don’t complain about those fines and fees.

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.”

While there are structural differences between the debt-laden welfare states of Europe and America, there are very frightening similarities between the course we are now pursuing and the course that has brought so much of Europe to such sorry circumstance.  The primary difference, of course, is that Euro-denominated states cannot monetize the burgeoning debt created by their own individual budget deficits.  That is, they do not have the ability to devalue a national currency as we can by printing more of it.  That is because the twenty-seven Euro countries are all yoked to the Euro.   That said, the problem being experienced in Europe is not, at its core, currency driven.  It is caused by excessive overborrowing to support programs that cannot be paid for from current revenue, which results in accumulated debt that cannot be retired through economic growth because the debt service burdens consume the capital which would otherwise be available to create that growth.

Greece, like the other PIGS countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain) as well as Great Britain, France and Iceland got into so much hot water (or red ink) by spending (and committing to spend in the future) far more money than their already high tax rates could fund, so they borrowed with the same abandon that the United States is now funding its commitments.  They, like the United States, have turned time and time again to taxes and debt to stay afloat but never to sustained reductions in spending.  Never, of course, is a very long time and, in Europe, time has finally run out.  The creditor nations (or, we should say, the central banks of the creditor nations) have had enough and severe spending cuts are being imposed on Greece, as they surely will be on the other high spending countries of the EU if defaults on national debt are to be avoided.

One in three Greeks work for the government and they enjoy higher wages and better benefits than their countrymen working in the private sector.  The people who have been manning the barricades and rioting in Greece are not primarily the unemployed or under employed. To the contrary, they are the well and very securely employed and many are eligible to retire after 35 years of service at eighty percent of their highest salary after which they continue to be eligible for government paid health plans and other perks.  The reality is that they are being paid with money their government doesn’t have and can no longer borrow.  That is the real cause of the violent backlash to the bitter medicine the creditor nations are requiring of Greece and soon will be requiring of the other newly debt-burdened nations of Europe.  It is also ironic that it is government employees who are rioting against the government they serve, in opposition to the consequences of the policies they themselves put in place.

Perhaps, we in America shouldn’t be too hasty in our criticism of Greece (or the other PIGS) and its bloated public payroll.  The American taxpayer is funding quite a public sector gravy train too.  Federal, state and municipal payrolls have actually increased during the recession both in numbers employed and wages paid.  To make it worse, President Obama announced last week a program to make it easier to apply for and land a government job.  His objective, he says, is parity with the private sector.  However, recent data shows that the average public employee in America already earns significantly more than his private sector counterpart.  Real wages are significantly higher in the public sector and public sector benefits are exceedingly higher than private sector benefits.

Private sector wages and benefits must ultimately come from the income of private enterprises.  Public sector wages and benefits come primarily from the taxes paid by private sector employees and the companies that employ them.  We certainly don’t begrudge paying anyone an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work whether they work in the public or the private sector.  But we certainly understand the palpable angst in the country engendered by an ever-growing and over-reaching public sector.

There was a time when most people understood that public sector jobs that were funded by private sector taxes may not have paid quite as well as private sector jobs, but that the benefits were generally more attractive.   Federal employees earn thirteen days of vacation leave a year for the first three years of service, twenty days a year for the next twelve years and twenty-six days a year after fifteen years of service.  And that is in addition to thirteen days of sick leave each year.  Today, however, those same federal employees are, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on average, also earning significantly more in wages for doing comparable work and the federal payroll has also been expanding throughout the recession while virtually all sectors among private enterprises have been contracting.

The same phenomenon is taking place on the local level as well, where public employee unions have negotiated for early retirement and lifetime pensions and health benefits which have exhausted state and municipal budgets and sent government officials scurrying to enact new taxes and to charge new and increased fees on almost every municipal service.  Park in front of your own home…pay the government; plant a tree…pay the government; need a bag to carry your groceries…pay the government.

Someone once said that nothing and no one is all bad.  And we suppose we can find some good in the debacle unfolding in Greece and elsewhere in Europe.  It is, after all, an incredibly fortuitous wake-up call for America.  As Yogi Berra once said, “when you come to a fork in the road…take it.”  We are at Yogi’s fork in the road.  Our public debt (on-balance sheet debt) does not yet mirror that of Greece (114% of GDP) or the other PIGS of Europe.  Our consolidated obligations, however,  (public debt added to our unfunded liabilities and the public debt and unfunded liabilities of our states and municipalities) are astronomical.  The federal unfunded liabilities alone stand at just under $110 trillion, or many times more than our entire GDP.

With the price of an ounce of gold having now broken through the $1200 threshold and with the EU’s leaders having just announced a $1 trillion rescue package to help steel world financial markets against blow-back from the mess in Greece, we in America must stop and reassess what we are doing and where we are going.  We have to slash every dime of unnecessary spending.  Even our own Secretary of Defense has urged cutting back on the substantial bloat in defense spending. Every other agency should do the same.

Perhaps, most importantly, we need seriously to think anew about which needs in our daily lives are personal responsibilities and which are the roles of government. In other words, we need seriously to reconsider the very essence of America’s social contract.  Expanding government’s role in health care, and mandating expanded Medicaid costs to states, many of which already have busted budgets, attempting to control through regulation, and yet new taxes, the wax and wane of climate change, turning a blind eye toward skyrocketing pork and earmarks, rapidly expanding the federal payroll and spending trillions to stimulate an economy that just needs the federal government to get out of its way does not augur well for the economic health of the country.

We should stop and rethink raising taxes that will retard economic growth and reduce individual initiative and productivity.  We have no chance of avoiding a PIGS type debt crisis without sustained robust economic growth. Capital formation and investment should be encouraged, yet we are about to raise tax rates on capital appreciation. Corporations should be encouraged to distribute dividends from earnings beyond that which is needed to fund growth, yet we are about to triple the tax rate on distributed dividends (even though earnings from which dividends are paid are already fully taxed at corporate tax rates). Everyone should pay a fair tax, yet nearly half of our tax filers pay no taxes at all, and those who pay the most are about to have their taxes raised.  Our unfolding tax policy may be good for those engaged in cultivating class warfare, but it will not be good for the American economy since it will suck finite resources from those people and businesses upon whom we must rely for that very growth.  Ultimately, this boils down to a political decision.  If Americans want everything from government, then the price will be paid in both diminished American growth and economic power.  We simply cannot have it both ways.  Reality has caught up with smoke and mirrors and the proverbial piper is knocking on the door and demanding to be paid.

Greece and the other PIGS of Europe needn’t foreshadow America’s coming attractions. What is currently unfolding across the Atlantic needn’t be a prediction of what is soon going to happen here.  Greece may well be the economic Dunkirk of 21^st century Europe.  We should make sure it is a morning wake-up call for America and not a national nightmare.

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.

Yes, this woman is responsible for educating some number of your children. Her chant goes to the heart of what’s wrong with our public school system…it is designed for the adults in the system, i.e. teachers and not the children.

The task at hand is even bigger than we feared.