The Outstater
The Municipally Privileged
“All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
HAS YOUR CITY worked out its new budget with the cuts and adjustments made necessary by property-tax reform? Mine has done so, and in a long, torturous process inscrutable to the common man. But we do know one thing for certain: No city employee was inconvenienced.
We know that thanks to the crypto-Marxist on council who couldn’t resist this boast: “I am happy to say that we were able to not lay off any public servants. We have our employees still getting raises, so we’ve done the right thing in that way.”
Really? My Grok assistant tells me that In a typical mid-sized city as much as 70 percent of the budget is dedicated to public-employee compensation (salaries, wages, insurance, benefits and pensions).
How can those outlays not only remain untouched, bad times and good, but ratchet up year after year? In fact, nationally, wage growth for public-sector employees now outpaces the private sector for the first time outside a recession in a generation. Aren’t they eventually going to, you know, run out of other people’s money?
All of that is said acknowledging that productive, hardworking public employees make the city work. Indeed, they are the only ones who actually knowhow it works and should be rewarded accordingly. Still, there is hardly any human endeavor where at least a number of those involved are not superfluous, overpaid or just plain useless.
Are we never to apply that reality to the public work force — especially when budget cuts are deemed necessary? Not even if it is understood that unions, as all monopolies, create higher costs and diminished efficiencies?
Probably not.
The reason is mandatory public-sector collective bargaining. The public-sector unions would like us to think of them as traditional unions. They are not. Traditional unions operate within a market economy. It would make no sense for them to bankrupt their industry and destitute their membership.
Public-sector unions are under no such constraint. Their bargaining demands, unaccountable to the public good, have been the chief cause of fiscal default in cities throughout the nation. Economics predicts as much. We use this example in our “Indiana Mandate: A Return to Founding Principles”:
Say that the cost per person of giving your city’s firefighters a $1,000 raise is $8 a year or 16 cents a week. Politically, there is little risk for the mayor. Few will notice the extra $8. Those receiving the extra $1,000, however, will be activated — and they will engage in activities to encourage and even increase additional wealth transfers, that is, voting for the mayor and council, lobbying, campaign contributions and so forth.
It’s almost as if it wasn’t a good idea to give government workers the power to hire and fire their bosses.
Budgets as ‘Moral Documents’
(Oct. 30) — The Journal Gazette’s contention this morning that a budget was a “moral document” was the last straw for some of us readers.
A budget is anything but a moral document. The Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto are moral documents. A budget, rather, is an absolute, its etymology tracking to the Old French for “wallet,” that is, how much money we have.
Councilman Russ Jehl and others deserve our respect for their efforts to keep the fiscal discussion within the bounds of the practical.
The Journal Gazette, however, has itself become nothing more than a “moral document,” without curiosity about facts, definitions or the connection between intentions and consequences, its assertions hanging in the air untethered to reality. — tcl
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