To compel a man to
furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he
disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical – Thomas Jefferson
California, of all places, is making a stab – too little,
too late -- at reigning in its Gargantuan pension liabilities. Pension
reformers in California recognize frankly that certain kinds of state workers
should not be invested with benefits and pensions in excess of those available
to all other workers in the private market place.
California’s unaffordable pension and salary burden can be
ameliorated, reformers say, by dividing government employee benefits into three
types: 1) benefits already earned for completed work, 2) those under pending
contracts that relate to future work, and 3) those performing work not yet
performed and not covered by contracts written in stone. Under a reform regime,
different levels of protection will be afforded to the different groups. Level
1 workers will be afforded full protection; pension and salary arrangements for
level 2 workers will be open to revision by the state; and level 3 workers will
be afforded protections similar to those in the private market place.
The California reform effort recognizes that massive state
worker salaries and pension debt, whatever its poison roots, is at bottom a
spending rather than a revenue problem. Even if California’s massive state
worker salaries and pension debt were to be liquidated tomorrow, future debt
would reestablish itself in due course – because pension debt is a function of pension
financing. If you curb spending, you reduce debt.
Connecticut is laboring (pun intended) under a California-like superstructure, and the weight of it may be reduced ONLY through reduction in spending
-- NOT through further increases in state revenue.
Governor-in-waiting Ned Lamont cannot effectively solve
Connecticut’s massive pension and liability debt by increasing taxes and
diverting the superflux to pay off state union worker salary and pension debt
without attacking the efficient cause of the debt, which is this: The cost of
state employee union labor in Connecticut is too expensive. And unless that
problem is attacked vigorously, it will recur. Attempting to fix the problem of
a hole in the roof by putting a pot beneath it during rainy weather, without
patching the hole, almost certainly will necessitate bigger pots in the future
to accommodate the growing hole in the roof. The larger increased revenue pots
simply relieve the householder of the necessity of fixing the hole.
There is a frenetic bustle surrounding Lamont’s accession to
the governorship. Confabulations are arranged; studies are requested; gaggles
of people are assembled to address Connecticut’s multifarious problems;
business people are called upon to contribute their widows' mites to the discussion, redundant additions to
a library shelf full of past unread studies, while the new Democrat progressive
caucus froths “Let’s boil the rich and eat’em”; petitioners crown the doors of
the Democrat controlled General Assembly begging for more liberal pieces of the
usual governmental largess. All of this is very flattering to the getting and
spending crown of politicians in Connecticut, generously applauded by
Connecticut’s left of center media, who have, over the course of many years – “It’s
our predecessors' fault!” – driven the state to the very edge of penury.
But there is only ONE problem – STOP SPENDING MONEY. FIX THE
SPENDING HOLE IN THE ROOF. PATCH THE SPENDING HOLE IN THE BUCKET. CAULK THE
OUTSIZED UNION-INFLUENCE HOLE IN THE SINKING SHIP.
Connecticut is not suffering a revenue or leadership
shortage. It is suffering from a lack of will and courage among its present and
past leaders.
Do not doubt that the stream is cold, running strong beneath
treacherous layers of paper-thin ice. Just recently Connecticut unions, the
state’s fourth branch of government devised a means of subverting a Supreme
Court decision that, had its strictures been applied to state government,
would have protected state workers who do not wish to join unions from paying
union dues. Unions have grown fat on those dues for years, some of which is
used as get-out-the-vote walk-around money to elect to office grateful
politicians who have sold their souls to unions for a mess of political
pottage.
Imagine the surprise of union members when, requesting
retirement from their unions, they will be told that, according to a union card they signed in
2017, they could only resign when a contract expires between the union and the
employer, or within 30 days of the member’s yearly anniversary. The
Yankee Institute tells the sorry story: “’Per the membership card you
are outside of the window period to cease your membership at this time,’ wrote
AFSCME Director of Collective Bargaining Kevin Murphy to union members” longing
to assert their Jeffersonian independence from their union’s process tyranny.
That window is exceedingly small, and the
union’s outrageous process denial violates the efficacious and ameliorative spirit of the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME. Of course neither the reigning nor the presumptive Attorney General – George Jepsen,
once the Chairmen of the state Democrat Party, or William Tong, Connecticut’s
Attorney General elect – nor leaders in the Democrat dominated General Assembly, have enough non-partisan good will to render a formal decision on the constitutionality
of AFSCME’s Supreme Court subversion. And Lamont, like his predecessor, will continue,
many rightly suspect, to make Connecticut a sanctuary state from U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
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