Free Republic

Just when you thought yesterday’s dismal jobs numbers couldn’t get any worse -- they did. According to CNSNews.com, nearly seventy-five percent of all civilian jobs created since the beginning of last summer are in the public sector: Seventy-three percent of the new civilian jobs created in the United States over the last five months are in government, according to official data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In June, a total of 142,415,000 people were employed in the U.S, according to the BLS, including 19,938,000 who were employed by federal, state and local governments. By November, according to data...

The average public sector worker is paid £4,500 ($7175.70) a year more than their private sector counterpart—and the gap is getting wider. A full-time state employee typically earns £565 ($900.95) a week, compared to £479 ($763.81) in the private sector, according to figures released yesterday. That leaves public sector workers an astonishing £86 ($137.14) per week better off—the equivalent of a luxury family holiday every year, and up from £84 ($133.95) a week last year. Over the past year, it found that the average weekly pay of a full-time public sector worker has risen by 1.6 percent, compared to 1.5...

"The unbridled growth of crony unionism and government corruption will destroy the United States as we know it." This statement may strike many as sheer hyperbole. But its author, Mallory Factor, a political scientist at The Citadel, knows whereof he writes. His new book, "Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind" (New York: Center Street), makes a credible case, and a well-sourced one, that our country may be in the early stages of a ruinous dystopia, courtesy of public-sector unions. In pursuing their interests, argues the author, these labor organizations hold taxpaying citizens hostage to unsustainable wage/salary, pension,...

Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday downplayed a Los Angeles television station's report of Caltrans employees using state rental trucks for personal purposes, saying "only God" can watch over every one of the state's hundreds of thousands of public employees. "Caltrans has been looking at it. I would be glad to look into it," the Democratic governor said after a speech to the California state conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "If somebody took some time off to do something, we'll find it, but, you know, to blow it up like it's some major thing –...

To most Americans, a job is a job is a job --- but, in the quest to generate employment for the more than 12 million Americans currently out of work, statists betray a prejudice in favor of public-sector jobs, while free-marketeers betray a prejudice in favor of private-sector jobs. That is, a private-sector job seems barely a job to the statist, while a public-sector job seems barely a job to the free-marketeer.To big-government advocates, growth in the public sector is essential to lowering the unemployment rate --- and it apparently need not come at the expense of the private sector....

Leadership: On a day when unemployment topped 8% for the 41st month in a row, it's worth noting Vice President Joe Biden told Ohioans Tuesday that "so-called job creators" don't build the economy. It explains a lot. Campaigning in hotly contested Ohio, Biden told a National Education Association conference that big government spending strengthens the economy, not the private sector, the Washington Examiner reported. "We believe that the way to build this country is the way we always have, from the middle out .. .(to) invest in things that have always made our economy grow: innovation, research, development, infrastructure and...

Marxists like Obama and Harry Reid can't connect dots that the overwhelming majority of the bureaucratic tyranny they call government is a cancer on the economy. They are an impediment to prosperity and until we figure this out, we will never (and I do mean never) restore the kind of prosperity that only free market capitalism can produce. Government, for the most part, produces nothing and every dollar transferred to them from the productive sector is a dollar that is tragically wasted, unable to be invested, saved, spent, or used to hire people to grow their businesses...

Last week, President Obama said "the private sector is doing fine." This was not reassuring to those of us who suspect the Democrats haven't the first idea what "private sector" means. He did not help matters by becoming lachrymose over the suffering of public sector employees: "Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. ... And so, if Republicans want to be helpful, if they really want to move forward and put people back to work, what they should be thinking about is, how do we help state and local governments ..." When...

The organized labor coalition fighting a November ballot measure that would end payroll-deducted money for political spending -- the channel through which unions raise funds to play in politics -- has launched a new video blasting the proposal. The unions' message attacks the measure as an unfair idea that would put new limits on the influence of organizations that speak up for working people while exempting self-interested elites. As we mentioned in our Sunday story on the battle ahead over the proposition, look for labor to continue connecting the words like "exempt" and "Wall Street" to tar the measure.

It has been a Junius Horribilis for President Obama. Job growth has stalled, the Democrats have been humiliated in Wisconsin, the attorney general is facing a contempt-of-Congress citation, talks with Pakistan have broken down, Bill Clinton is contradicting Obama, Mitt Romney is outraising him, Democrats and Republicans alike are complaining about a “cascade” of national-security leaks from his administration, and he is now on record as saying that the “private sector is doing fine.” Could it get any worse? Early Monday morning, Obama learned that it could. His aides delivered the news to him that his commerce secretary had been...

Leadership: An incoherent press conference and contradictory explanation show that if the president thinks the answer to job-killing federal policies is boosting state and local governments with borrowed money, we're really in trouble. 'Tone deaf" fails to describe President Obama's statement at Friday's press conference that "the private sector is doing fine," when median income is down 10% in three years, family net worth has plunged 39%, 23 million Americans are out of work and the official unemployment rate tops 8% for the 40th month in a row, the longest sustained period at that level since the Great Depression. Mitt...

Labor unions and business interests have been quietly raising millions of dollars and testing campaign messages for months, girding for a brawl over a November ballot measure that could fundamentally shift political power in Sacramento. Now, on the heels of an election that saw unions handed a major defeat last week in Wisconsin, the opposing camps in California soon will launch a campaign battle likely to consume $50 million or more in political spending. "Unions have just two channels of influence," said Daniel J.B. Mitchell of the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, "collective bargaining and the political side,...

www.FinancialSurvivalNetwork.com presents: Thom Reilly was manager of Clark County Nevada from 2001 to 2006; he got out just before the crash. When it comes to understanding our insane economic world or municipal labor contracts and benefits, he has an insider's understanding. He's written a book Rethinking Public Sector Compensation--Whatever Happened to the Public Interest?, and it will be released later this week. In his new book, Thom chronicles the true cost of bloated pensions, lifetime health care, and why things are headed for a possible disaster, if our leadership does not start addressing the issue soon. Little things like merit,...

Gov. Jerry Brown says he's serious about reforming California's "unsustainable" public employee pension system, and has warned state legislators that if they don't do it, they could doom voter approval of new taxes this year. "Examine it. Improve it," Brown said in his State of the State address. "But please take up the issue and do something real." Critics of Brown's 12-point plan – a union-backed coalition, primarily – were not moved. They've made it clear that they don't want any fundamental changes in California's relatively generous state and local government pensions and are urging the Legislature to just make...

The biggest news in last week's elections appeared to be the success that public sector union forces had in overturning Ohio's new law that would have required more contributions from government workers toward their benefits and would have suspended some collective bargaining rights. In the wake of the referendum revoking the legislation that he had proposed to gain control of state and local spending, Ohio Gov. John Kasich told towns, cities and school districts that they would have to go back to the negotiating table and extract concessions from public workers to fix their budget problems because there was no...

On Tuesday, November 8 — actually, during the weeks leading up to November 8, thanks to the travesty known as “early voting” – Ohioans have been and will be voting on two crucial ballot issues. One of the results will largely determine whether the Buckeye State continues to be governed like a heading-towards-broke blue state — as it was for over 15 years before current Governor John Kasich took office — or a recovering red one. Both could heavily influence the red or blue direction of the entire nation. Ballot Issue 2 is about whether to keep Senate Bill 5...

‘It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid claimed last week. Senator Reid is simply wrong: The private sector has suffered from much deeper job cuts than public-sector workers have faced. Obviously, Americans are hurting, with some 7 million losing their jobs since the start of the recession. And that doesn’t include the 7.2 million people who should have entered the work force over the same time period. But the pain hasn’t been in...

When Beverly Hills residents found out that many of their city’s 950 municipal and public safety employees were earning stunning salaries, 13 weeks of paid vacation, unlimited overtime and other tax-free retirement benefits, taxpayers were outraged and city officials rushed into closed-door sessions to figure out what to do. These revelations, exposed through the efforts of the city’s hometown newspaper, The Beverly Hills Courier, unmasked an even deeper problem: many California cities, and likely other municipalities across the U.S., are being strangled by the cost of ballooning pension benefits they can no longer afford. “What we have now is a...

Should public sector unions be curbed? Is it time to end the ability of governmental employees to form unions? Raymond La Jeunesse, Jr., vice president and legal director of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, believes so. La Jeunesse, who has more than 40 years experience helping employees litigate against compulsory unionism - including arguing four cases

So I was driving the NY Thruway up to Saratoga this past weekend and I saw a few old Obama 2008 bumper stickers. As I saw each one I thought to myself, "How stupid must that person be not to have removed it yet." But then I passed a car with one of those old stickers with a new one that had another with nothing more than "2012" on it pasted next to the old one. A white, 40 something woman was driving. And it hit me. She is a government employee. She is quite happy about what is going...