{"id":3304,"date":"2010-01-21T11:20:05","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T16:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=3304"},"modified":"2010-01-21T11:20:05","modified_gmt":"2010-01-21T16:20:05","slug":"jfk-public-employee-unions-and-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/3304\/jfk-public-employee-unions-and-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"JFK, Public Employee Unions, and Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s Wall Street Journal<\/em> features an op-ed by Daniel Henninger that traces the rising stranglehold of public employee unions on the Democratic Party<\/a>. Prior to 1962, federal workers were not unionized. That changed with a JFK executive order. Many states soon followed suit.<\/p>\n

Looking back, the change in policy continued the Democrats\u2019 long association with unions, but for the first time there were substantial numbers of union members that worked in jobs uncoupled from business realities like profit and loss. Instead, their budgets were the product of taxing and spending.<\/p>\n

The results, as we all know, have been catastrophic for government budget writers at all levels. Public sector unions claim members from the ranks of teachers, cops, fire fighters, DMV personnel, and a myriad of other support workers. As membership increases, so do demands for higher wages, bigger pensions, and greater emphasis on seniority rather than performance. Since governments themselves aren\u2019t measured on the taxpayers\u2019 return on investment, it\u2019s been easy for Democrats to champion public employee unions, trading money for votes, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

That may be coming to an end. Henninger notes that Republicans have a unique \u2013 and short \u2013 window to align themselves as the party of spending restraint by vowing to take on the public employee unions and their entitlements. It won\u2019t be easy because taking on these groups can actually be worse than attacking another politician. Organized labor is the Democratic Party\u2019s grassroots, so challenging them is a request to have millions raised in opposition while thousands of government employees work phone banks, neighborhoods, and break rooms lobbying for support. As California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger learned in 2005, all it takes to create a union\u2019s war chest is a few dollars increase in each member\u2019s dues.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s worth it, especially in a campaign year when most of the people out of work are from the private sector. Because of the stimulus money, most state and local governments were able to \u201ccreate or save\u201d jobs. Of course, the federal government has been on a hiring spree to keep pace with President Obama\u2019s rapid expansion of the public sector. If this is truly the year when fiscal conservatives taste victory in coastal bastions of liberalism, it will be because GOP nominees take the time to educate and persuade voters that public employee unions are some of the greatest threats to our economic recovery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s Wall Street Journal features an op-ed by Daniel Henninger that traces the rising stranglehold of public employee unions on the Democratic Party. Prior to 1962, federal workers were not unionized. That changed with a JFK executive order. Many states soon followed suit. Looking back, the change in policy continued the Democrats\u2019 long association with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[760,24,761],"class_list":["post-3304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-jfk","tag-obama","tag-public-employee-unions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3304"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3307,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3304\/revisions\/3307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}