Free Republic

After years of declining tax revenues, cities and towns across the country are now running out of ways to deal with their ballooning budget deficits. ... Public employee costs account for a large share of municipal budget woes.

the times Daniels OKs bonuses up to $1,000 for each state employee By Dan Carden dan.carden@nwi.com, (317) 637-9078 | Posted: Friday, July 15, 2011 10:45 am INDIANAPOLIS | State employees will be paid a bonus of up to $1,000 each for their efforts in helping Indiana amass a $1.2 billion budget surplus. Gov. Mitch Daniels authorized the one-time payment on Friday to recognize employees he said have spent years doing more with less. "There's not a state in the nation where state employees are more committed to efficiency and care with tax dollars than Indiana," Daniels said. The "efficiency dividend...

Seriously……Google “Stocks Fall 279 Points” or “Stock Market Falls 279 Points”, and you will find very little headlines from the major liberal media outlets. Every search of the major papers and network online sites have already buried this plunge in the Markets as if it just never happened, or they’ve been relegated to their blog sites. We can all imagine how a major stock market plunge would have greeted George W. Bush by our liberal media friends. But, let’s give credit where credit’s due. Patrick Allen posted this story at CNBC dot com with a title that just has to...

"More than 77,000 federal government employees throughout the country — including computer operators, more than 5,000 air traffic controllers, 22 librarians and one interior designer — earned more than the governors of the states in which they work. The findings, from a Congressional Research Service report requested by Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, were released at a time when public workers’ salaries and benefits are under scrutiny across the country as governments try to streamline...."

Homeowner, who owns the land you live on? You might think you do, in America, but you'd be forgetting a few things. One) eminent domain: you could at any time lose you house if, say, your city or state wants to put in a freeway there. Two) County building codes: You can lose your house if it gets too weird, ugly, unsafe, or enough of an annoyance to neighbors. Yes. In the end, this is not as free a country as you think when it comes to home design. Ask former telephone tech Alan Kimble Fahey of Acton, CA, who...

While Western media continue to rhapsodize about the "Arab Spring democratic revolutions" in the Middle East, it may be that the real democratic revolution is beginning to occur in the European Union and the United States. And if the timing is right, the crisis in the European Union may play a decisive part in tipping the American electorate against President Obama and the Democrats in our 2012 elections.Both by their votes and their demonstrations, the semi-enfranchised citizens of nations under the rule of the European Union are beginning to fight back against both the social welfare/debt and immigration/border policies that...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- A triple dose of bad news sent stocks sharply lower Wednesday afternoon, with all three indexes set to have their worst day in months. The day started with two disappointing U.S. economic reports that exacerbated fears about a slowdown in the recovery. And late in the trading session, Greece's debt got slapped with yet another downgrade. The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) fell 245 points, or 2%, with all but one of the blue chip index's 30 components lagging. Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Caterpillar (CAT, Fortune 500) and Alcoa (AA, Fortune 500) were the...

More than 100 employees of the Internal Revenue Service cheated the government by fraudulently claiming a first-time homebuyer tax credit included in the 2008 and 2009 economic stimulus packages, according to federal investigators. The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, in several reports over the past few years, has identified a total of 128 IRS employees who claimed the credit but who also made other claims that showed they either weren’t first-time buyers or bought their homes outside the eligibility period for the credit, which was worth up to $8,000. Meanwhile, one other IRS employee has been charged with...

About 550,000 full-time career federal government and U.S. Postal Service could hang it up and move on at anytime because they are eligible to retire, according to government statistics. The eligible workers represent about a quarter of the 2.4 million permanent full-time employees collecting government or postal paychecks.

Equity among workers is one of Republican Gov. John Kasich’s most consistent arguments in favor of Ohio’s new collective bargaining law. The law, Senate Bill 5, will bring Ohio’s public workers closer in line with private sector workers, who, on average, pay more for health care benefits and have weaker pensions, Kasich repeatedly has said. Now the governor is weaving collective bargaining for federal workers – or lack thereof – into his support for the law. Even though SB 5 restricts collective bargaining for the state’s 360,000 public workers, they would still be better off than federal workers, Kasich recently...

Over the last few years much has been made about the pay and benefit discrepancies separating public and private employees. An endless number of articles and dueling press releases have compared salaries, benefits and vacation days across sectors. But in the flurry of all this analysis, one very simple comparison has been missed. Think about this: The Public Employee Retirement System is making more millionaires than the Oregon state lottery.

Republican leaders in Congress think so, and they are calling for an overhaul of the entire federal pay system to help slash government spending. Democrats and other defenders of the government work force say federal workers are actually underpaid compared with their private counterparts. A closer look at the data shows that both sides have a point but that supporters of federal workers are a bit closer to reality.... That argument is backed up by a 2002 study of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It found that federal salaries for most professional and administrative jobs lagged well behind compensation offered...

As the possibility of a federal government shutdown loomed over thousands of Americans, the article in CNN, April 2, 2011: “Americans Flunk Budget IQ Test”, was quite intriguing. According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, most Americans think that the government spends a lot more money than it actually does on Government pensions and benefits. On average, Americans think the federal government spent 10 percent of its 2010 budget on pensions and retiree benefits; the OMB figures indicate the real number is about 3.5 percent. Another area that is not often talked about is the big difference for federal workers...

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- If Congress shuts down the federal government, Washington will still end up paying hundreds of thousands of employees who are sent home. Idled federal workers can apply for unemployment compensation from the states in which they work, and the federal government will pick up the tab. Whether they get their full back pay once a shutdown is resolved is less clear. After the 1995 and 1996 federal government shutdowns, Congress approved back pay for furloughed employees. Federal employee unions say they will fight for a similar measure again. The Department of Labor has told state unemployment agencies...

As we draw closer to a government shutdown, I have been reading with great interest. You see, I am a federal employee employed at Fort Drum as a civilian mail clerk. I am looking at the possibility of a furlough for as long as it takes for Congress to reach an agreement. It could be days or it could be weeks, but regardless of how long, I am more concerned at how much. How much will this affect my family? How much will it hurt us financially? The uncertainty is maddening as I, and my fellow federal workers, watch the...

With just five days left before a government shutdown, federal workers are pressing lawmakers to cut a deal that will keep the government open for business. The stakes are high. If lawmakers fail to pass some kind of spending bill by the end of Friday, hundreds of thousands of government employees are likely to be furloughed, and their paychecks stopped. The National Treasury Employees Union and the National Federation of Federal Employees, which represent a combined 260,000 workers, announced Monday they have asked their members to call lawmakers and encourage them to strike a deal.

Here's your eye-popping statistic of the day, courtesy Stephen Losey at Federal Times: Does job performance play a factor in employee raises and step increases? Unions defending the General Schedule say yes. But the latest numbers say clearly no. Only 737 out of more than 1.2 million GS employees — or one in every 1,698 — were denied a regularly scheduled step increase and accompanying raise in 2009 because of poor performance, according to data provided by the Office of Personnel Management at Federal Times' request. That equates to a 0.06 percent denial rate, which is far lower than any...

COLUMBUS, N.M. (KRQE) - Federal documents state a gun smuggling operation allegedly run by three public officials from a tiny New Mexico border town had ties to Mexican drug cartels and some of the weapons were used in several murders. Last week, federal agents raided Columbus in Luna County arresting Mayor Eddie Espinoza, Village Trustee Blas Gutierrez and Chief of Police Angelo Vega, along with several others. In total, 11 people are accused of smuggling guns into the Mexican cities of Cíudad Juarez and Palomas. Palomas sits just across the border from Columbus. For the first time the federal arresting...

When Erin McFarlane looks at public workers, she sees lucrative pension benefits she doesn't ever expect to get. And it makes her mad. "I don't think that a federal employee or government employee is worth any more than anybody else who does their job and does it well," said the Slinger, Wis., woman. She's been working a couple of bartending jobs since January, when she was laid off from her job at a Harley Davidson plant after almost a decade. She's not alone in seeing public servants as public enemies in some ways. It's a case of pension envy.

Global Economy? 23 Facts Which Prove That Globalism Is Pushing The Standard Of Living Of The Middle Class Down To Third World Levels From now on, whenever you hear the term "the global economy" you should immediately equate it with the destruction of the U.S. middle class. Over the past several decades, the American economy has been slowly but surely merged into the emerging one world economic system. Unfortunately for the middle class, much of the rest of the world does not have the same minimum wage laws and worker protections that we do. Therefore, the massive global corporations that...