Halting State: How state employee unions stole California

[unixronin]

Police officers and firefighters are widely regarded as underpaid.  So how come police captains in Vallejo, California can make $300,000 a year, then retire at 50 on 90% salary, adjusted for inflation, for life and the life of their spouse?

The camera focuses on an official of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), California’s largest public-employee union, sitting in a legislative chamber and speaking into a microphone.  “We helped to get you into office, and we got a good memory,” she says matter-of-factly to the elected officials outside the shot.  “Come November, if you don’t back our program, we’ll get you out of office.’

City Journal's Steve Malanga details the history of how public-sector state employee unions bought California's state government lock, stock and barrel. Their bought-and-paid-for politicians repaid the favors by bankrupting the state, looting the budget to fund ever more lavish salary and pension plans for public sector union employees.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, no, whatever its faults, SEIU did not break California. What broke California was over 30 years of tax cuts without budget cuts, a real estate bubble, and a huge recession, which led to a huge fall in tax revenues. A right-wing faction in the legislature that refuses to write an honest budget is aggravating the problems.

I am struck, too, by how often we are told to hate people who get decent deals for themselves.

BTW, City Journal is published by the right to far-right Manhattan Institute. Sources, sources.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Some of those union contracts are decent deals like a Ferrari F60 is a nice car.

As observed below, yeah, there's no single cause.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Not most of them, though. The claim that most union employees are dishonest, lazy, greedy, and incompetent is a lie. The unions didn't cause the fiscal problems of California, and breaking the state's government employee unions, as the right advocates, won't fix the state's fiscal problems. Breaking the unions, however, would probably comprehensively wreck the state's educational system, from primary all the way through university. It would also enormously reduce the quality of public services in the state. Conservatives claim to support law and order, education, family, and so forth. Let them, then, support them.

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

It's hard to cut the budget, when there are laws with mandated spending amounts for that given project/service. Cutting the budget of such an item would actually be illegal.

From my observation, that's the biggest problem (but I could be wrong).

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The state can afford the mandated spending, but it requires a 2/3s majority of the legislature to fund it, and the party of no--Republicans--has been steadily blocking the necessary spending and there has been no vigorous opposition. California, even now, is a rich state--its citizens can afford to pay for what their majority wants. But a minority of its legislators have created a fiscal disaster.