TRENTONIAN EDITORIAL: Unions v. reality — all-out war looms
The Trentonian
December 02, 2010
From New York to Trenton to Washington and beyond, employees on tax-funded payrolls have gotten the notion they are the public masters, not public servants. And why wouldn’t they?
Year after year, craven politicians especially although not exclusively Democrats have surrendered to the unions’ unsustainable contract demands without so much as even a pitiful whimper.
As unions have sunk deeper and deeper roots in the public sector to compensate for their wide rejection in the private sector, an insidious symbiosis has developed between them and the politicians especially although not exclusively Democrats.
The politicians have given the nod to sweetheart contracts that keep the unions’ tills brimming with dues dollars. In return, grateful unions have kicked back, er, contributed generous sums to the campaigns of sympathetic or pliable politicians.
On and on the mutually cozy arrangement has gone — until now.Now, with New Jersey, New York, California and Illinois pushed to the very brink of insolvency and other states right behind them, the game is over — unless, that is, the unions and politicians can figure a way to keep playing it with Monopoly game board money. The taxpayers are tapped out and have served notice they’ve had it.
But “tapped out” and “had it” are concepts as foreign to the public employee unions as Sanskrit grammar. The intransigent teachers’ unions, police unions, state employee unions and federal employee unions continue to man the ramparts of the status quo as if they haven’t heard the news yet of the hardest economic times since the Great Depression. Apparently the public sector unions believe private-sector taxpayers have all hit the lottery jackpot — or should go out and proceed to do so if they haven’t.
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