by Kerry Thomas
January 14, 2012
Let’s be honest about the recall efforts against Wisconsin Governor
Scott Walker by the Democrats.
It’s a case of sour grapes.
Scott Walker and the Republicans won the 2010 elections. They ran promising to get Wisconsin’s
spending under control. Wisconsin
voters preferred this message to the Democrat alternative of more of the same
old tax and spend policies.
Once they took office, Governor Walker and the Republicans
in the Legislature implemented the policies they promised.
Wisconsin’s public sector employees no longer have their
union dues automatically taken from their paychecks. Wisconsin’s public employees now contribute 5.8% of their
salaries toward their own pensions and now pay 12.6% of their own health
insurance premiums.
(By comparison, a Kaiser Family Foundation study concluded
that employees nationally -- public and private -- pay an average of 29% of the
cost of their health insurance premiums. Among just government employees
nationwide, the average was 25% for family coverage. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010
health care benefits survey
reported the employee share of health insurance premiums at 32% for family
coverage, and 21% for single coverage. A
study
by The Segal Co., a private benefits firm, looked just at state government employees
and found that a majority of them pay between 20% and 60% of their health
insurance premiums for family coverage.
And the Employee Benefits Research Institute calculates the average
employee contribution to their own retirement is 7.9% of their take-home pay.)
Wisconsin’s liberal Democrats cried foul.
These same liberals who demand that “the rich” pay “their
fair share” are upset that public employees, whose generous compensation
packages exceed most of those in the private sector, are now contributing a
small portion of their salaries to their own benefit packages.
(The median wage for Wisconsin’s public sector employees is
$45,691, which is 22% higher than the average Wisconsin private-sector
employee. These figures do not include
fringe benefits.)
But what really upset the Democrats is that their well-oiled
money-laundering machine, automatically lubricated with taxpayer dollars, was
derailed.
It worked like this.
Democrats used taxpayer money to give overly generous compensation
packages to their unionized public employees.
Union membership was mandatory for these public sector employees. Union dues were automatically taken from
these public employees’ paychecks. A
portion of these union dues were then used to elect Democrats, and the cycle
repeated itself.
But now that union dues are no longer being automatically taken
from public employees’ paychecks, many of these employees are no longer paying
union dues.
Democrat leaders are scared. They know that if Governor Walker’s reforms are allowed to stand,
one of their best sources of funding will dry up.
According to George
Will, in 2001, after Colorado required public employees unions to have
annual votes reauthorizing collection of dues, membership in the Colorado
Association of Public Employees declined 70%. In 2005, Indiana stopped collecting dues from unionized public
employees; in 2011, there were 90% fewer dues-paying members. In Utah, the end of automatic dues deductions
for political activities in 2001 caused teachers’ payments of union dues to
fall 90%. After a similar law passed in
1992 in Washington state, the percentage of teachers paying such union dues dropped
from 82% to 11%.
In Wisconsin, the Democrat gravy train has come off it’s
tracks.
The Democrat laundry business is facing hard times, and,
without a successful recall, may go out of business all together.