Wisconsin's New Aristocracy Is On The Ballot

[Conservative]

Excellent piece in FORBES by Peter Ferrara... Here are a few pieces...

Wisconsin's New Aristocracy Is On The Ballot - Forbes

A recall election for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is scheduled for June 5. But on the ballot that day will effectively be whether we should establish in law after all these years a new aristocracy in America, not subject to the democratic will of the people like everyone else, with special legal privileges, including the right to plunder the taxpayers with virtual impunity. That new aristocracy is state and local government public employee unions.

Nationwide, these public employee unions plunder taxpayers for pay for state and local government workers that is on average 45% more than the taxpayers paying those salaries make in the private sector.

State and local government workers today are not exploited in sweat shop conditions for poverty wages as the workers in union lore of old. Today it is taxpayers who are the ones being exploited.

Walker came into office facing another state budget deficit of $3.6 billion.

The budget reforms also limited collective bargaining to negotiations over salary, but not over benefits or working conditions and rules. This gave counties, cities, and school boards the flexibility to make management changes to reduce costs, without laying off workers and reducing services to the public, and to increase efficiency in serving the public.

The state has also used this flexibility to halt fraudulent sick leave abuses that unions used to inflate overtime expenses. Workers had called in sick for their own shifts, and then worked the next shift on overtime pay. School districts have also been freed to pay teachers based on performance and not just seniority, and to keep better performing teachers over longer term time servers who long ago have given up caring about their job performance.

Walker’s collective bargaining reforms have added up to over $1 billion in documented savings for state and local governments in Wisconsin in the first year alone. That enabled the entire state deficit to be eliminated without yet another tax increase, and without layoffs of teachers and other government workers, except in three school districts that have continued to resist implementing the reforms. The reforms have also resulted in the smallest property tax increase in 15 years, and the first decline in local school tax assessments in 6 years. In short, Walker’s reforms are working.

And THAT... is what pisses the unions and Democrats behind this recall off... that a REPUBLICAN fixed so many problems the DEMOCRATS caused.