Why is the Angry Public so Angry?Read the rest here.
I think we all know why the Tea Party movement arose — and why even the polls do not quite reflect the growing generic anger at incumbents in general, and our elites in particular.
Anger at Everything?
There is a growing sense that government is what I would call a new sort of Versailles — a vast cadre of royal state and federal workers that apparently assumes immunity from the laws of economics that affect everyone else.
In the olden days, we the public sort of expected that the L.A. Unified School District paid the best and got the worst results. We knew that you didn’t show up at the DMV if you could help it. A trip to the emergency room was to descend into Dante’s Inferno. We accepted all that in other words, and went on with our business.
But at some point — perhaps triggered by the radical increase in the public sector under Obama, the militancy of the SEIU, or the staggering debts — the public snapped and has had it with whining union officials and their political enablers who always threaten to cut off police and fire protection if we object that there are too many unproductive, unnecessary, but too highly paid employees at the Social Service office. In short, sometime in the last ten years public employees were directly identified with most of what is now unsustainable in the U.S. The old idea that a public servant gave up a competitive salary for job security was redefined as hitting the jackpot.
The Tea Party is not over
There is another Tea Party theme that those who play by the rules are being had, from both the top and bottom. The Wall Street bailouts and financial help to the big banks smelled of cronyism, made worse by the notion that liberal “reformers” like Obama got more from Big Money than did the usual insider Republican aristocrats. (The continual left-wing trend of wealthy elites is an untold story, but it suggests a sort of noble disdain: “We make so much that we are immune from the hurt of higher taxes, but like expanded entitlements as a sort of penance for our privilege.”)
Emblematic of the anger at both top and bottom was the 2008 meltdown: those who had not played by the rules still got their mortgages, then defaulted, and left the taxpayer with their bills; those who made the loans and profited without risk took the bailout money, and left us with the cleanup. Those in between with underwater mortgages and higher taxes pay the tab.
We are not 19th-century poor
Somehow we forget that we are in the 21st century with our multitude of cell-phones, laptops, no-down-payment new car leases, big-screen TVs, cheap food, and accessible rent that have permeated all society and given the proverbial underclass appurtenances that only the very rich of the 1960s could have dreamed of. Yet the Dickensian rhetoric has only intensified. There is rarely any acknowledgment of the public’s investment in anti-poverty programs or of its efforts to promote social equality. Instead, an overtaxed electorate is constantly reminded of its unfairness and its moral shortcomings. (I just left a multimillion dollar ICU unit in Fresno, where I was visiting a relative. Over a third of the visitors there did not seem to speak English, and so I was impressed by the public generosity that extends such sophisticated care to those who that day seemed largely to have arrived here recently from Mexico. The notion that a visitor to Mexico could walk into such a unit in Mexico City and get instant, free — and quality — care is, well, inconceivable. Yet politicians talk of our heartlessness, not our generosity.) ...
For most Americans, the Great Recession has been an occasion to hold on for dear life. For public employees, it's been an occasion to let the good times roll.
The percentage of federal civil servants making more than $100,000 a year jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent during the first year and a half of the recession, according to USA Today. At the beginning of the downturn, the Transportation Department had one person making $170,000 or more a year; now it has 1,690 making more than that. [emphasis added]
The New York Times reports that state and local governments have added a net 110,000 jobs since the start of the recession, while the private sector's lost 6.9 million. The gap between total compensation of public and private workers has only widened during the downturn, according to USA Today. In 2008, benefits for public employees grew at a rate three times that of private employees.
Public employees have developed an inverse relationship to the rest of the economy -- as it shrinks, shedding jobs and cutting salaries, they draw on a never-ending taxpayer bounty. It used to be said that the Great Depression wasn't so bad, if you had a job. The Great Recession has practically been a boom, if you have a government job.
Public employees can thank the union label. In 2009, for the first time ever, a majority of union members worked in the public sector. Unionism has been in a long, secular decline in the private sector (down to 7.2 percent of all workers), but increasing in government (up to 37.4 percent of all workers). ...
I still lived in Ukraine when the union of coal miners in the Donbass region launched a strike demanding higher wages at a time of rapid inflation. This was in the early 1990s, the first years of Ukrainian independence. The timing couldn't be worse for the barely surviving industries that depended on coal-generated power, as the rest of the country struggled to stay warm in the winter. The miners did get their pay hike. It affected the cost of heating, power, metals, and just about everything else in the country. As the prices went up, the overall gain for the miners was zero but everyone else's lives became even more miserable.
The Donbass miners felt they were cheated and went on another strike. Well-positioned to hold the country by the throat, their union demanded one wage hike after another. The cycle repeated over and over, still leaving the miners with no gain but driving all others, especially the pensioners, into abject privation.
Before long, other unions demanded higher wages, supported by angry workers envious of the "privileged" status of the Donbass coal miners. In an overstretched economy, new pay hikes ended up driving consumer prices through the roof. The wage race was as irrational as cutting a hole in the back of a shirt to patch a tear in the front, but such is the nature of collectivist pressure groups that can't help but fulfill their purpose of extracting privileges for themselves at the expense of everyone else - even in the face of an imminent economic catastrophe.
They got their wish. Soon everyone became a millionaire, walking around with bags full of money because their pockets could no longer fit the huge wads of cash required to buy a loaf of bread, whose cost was now in the thousands. And even that money they had to spend fast; by the end of the week it was worthless. My friend invested part of his rapidly dwindling savings into a pearl necklace for his wife, half-joking that someday they might be lucky to trade it for a warm meal.
We all learned a new word, hyperinflation. It equalized everyone, including the Donbass coal miners.
One by one, factories started to shut down. The ones that stayed open began to pay workers with their own products. A neighbor who worked at the knitting factory brought home boxes of socks and stockings instead of money. A mother of two, she spent weeks trying to barter the socks for food and other things her family needed, which made her apartment a "sock exchange" and her a "sock broker." My other neighbor worked at a fertilizer plant; he wasn't so lucky. His plant simply closed. Barter was now the law of the land; people and businesses mostly traded in goods, often in complicated multi-party combinations. But the preferred currency was, of course, the US dollar, which was a sign of progress, given that only a few years earlier, owning "capitalist currencies" could result in a visit from the KGB. [emphasis added]
The Donbass coal miners also lost their jobs as their customers either had to shut down or pay them with socks. The little good that came out of their strikes amounted to exposing the philosophical link between trade unionism and communism, and showing why communism doesn't work. It also taught me four things everyone needs to know about inflated union wages, especially those extracted by holding a gasping nation by the throat:
1. Inflated union wages are a form of forced redistribution of wealth. They use government protection to suck other people's money in, without giving anything back.
2. Inflated union wages are futile. They lead to inflated prices; the union members do not become richer but everyone else becomes poorer.
3. Inflated union wages produce an economic monster that ravages the country and eventually consumes its own creators. In richer nations it moves slower due to the abundance of nourishment; in poorer nations it quickly destroys economies, causing massive and unwarranted suffering.
4. Inflated union wages are immoral. ...
A dedicated Teamsters union worker was attending a convention in Las Vegas and decided to check out the local brothels. When he got to the first one, he asked the Madam, "Is this a union house?"
"No," she replied, "I’m sorry, it isn’t."
"Well, if I pay you $100, what cut do the girls get?"
"The house gets $80 and the girls get $20," she answered.
Offended at such unfair dealings, the union man stomped off down the street in search of a more equitable, hopefully unionized shop. His search continued until finally he reached a brothel where the Madam responded, "Why yes sir, this is a union house. We observe all union rules."
The man asked, "And if I pay you $100, what cut do the girls get?"
"The girls get $80 and the house gets $20," the Madam replied. "Now, that’s more like it!" the union man said.
He handed the Madam $100, looked around the room, and pointed to a stunningly attractive green-eyed blonde.
"I’d like her," he said.
"I’m sure you would, sir," said the Madam. Then she gestured to a 92-year old woman in the corner, "but Ethel here has 67 years seniority and according to our union work rules, she’s next."
Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The United Auto Workers union is objecting to proposals from General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC to modify a retiree health-care fund as required by the U.S. so the automakers can keep $17.4 billion in aid.
The UAW stopped negotiations with GM last night, a person familiar with the talks said. Chrysler still is talking to the union, though the talks haven’t been substantive, said another person briefed on those discussions. A delay in the talks could risk the automakers missing a Feb. 17 deadline to show progress in a government-ordered plan to cut labor and debt costs. It’s not clear what that would mean.
The GM and Chrysler proposals on the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association “contradict the explicit terms of the Treasury loan agreements, and would severely hurt retirees,” UAW legislative affairs director Alan Reuther said in an e-mail last night. “These proposals are a non-starter as far as the UAW is concerned.”
The terms of the Dec. 19 loan agreements from the U.S. Treasury require GM and Chrysler to convince the UAW to accept half of scheduled payments into a union-run retiree health-care fund next year in equity instead of cash. The automakers are also seeking to eliminate supplement unemployment pay and change plant work rules to trim labor expenses.
...
The automakers are also asking the union to end a 54-year- old benefit that ensures almost full pay during layoffs.
The so-called “supplemental unemployment benefit,” or “SUB” pay, gives laid-off workers most of their take-home wages. Automakers and the UAW are discussing the future of the program, said people familiar with the talks, who asked not to be named because the negotiations are private. The UAW isn’t negotiating cuts in core wages or benefits, the people said. ...
President Barack Obama on Friday issued an executive order backing the use of union labor for large-scale federal construction projects.
The order encourages federal agencies to have construction contractors and subcontractors enter project labor agreements. Those agreements require contractors to negotiate with union officials, recognize union wages and benefits and generally abide by collective-bargaining agreements. ...
"Project labor agreements are a win-win for everyone involved," said James Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. "Contractors get highly trained, skilled labor with fixed costs, and workers are fairly compensated with their rights and safety protected."
"Today's decision to repeal Executive Order 13202 opens the door to waste and discrimination in federal and federally funded construction contracts," said ABC President and CEO Kirk Pickerel. "This action removes the safeguards that prohibited discrimination based upon union affiliation in the awarding of federal contracts.
"Construction contracts subject to union-only PLAs [project labor agreements] are designed to be awarded exclusively to unionized contractors and their all-union workforces," said Pickerel. "Absent the economic benefits of competitive bidding, union-only PLAs are known to increase construction costs between 10 percent and 20 percent and discriminate against minorities, women and qualified construction workers who have traditionally been excluded from union membership.
"Union-only PLAs drive up costs for American taxpayers while unfairly discriminating against 84 percent of U.S. construction workers who choose not to join a labor union," added Pickerel. "All taxpayers should have the opportunity to compete fairly on any project funded by the federal government."
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