Public Union Issues Hit Prime Time
The debate over public union pensions, benefits, and influence is gaining more and more attention with the mainstream media and the public at large. This couldn’t be more evident than the release of a new documentary skewering teachers unions and a skit making fun of the public unions on this past weekend’s Saturday Night Live.
In the SNL satirical skit, Kenan Thompson played the host of the "2010 Public Employee of the Year Awards." As he tells his audience at the mock award show, "people with government jobs are like workers everywhere except for lifetime job security, guaranteed annual raises, early retirement on generous pensions and full medical coverage with no deductibles and office visit fees or co-payments."
Have a laugh when you take a look at the skit for yourselves here.
A new documentary on teachers’ unions called "The Cartel" was produced and reported by former Bloomberg television reporter, Bob Bowden. He argues in his 90-minute documentary that the state of the public schools are the greatest threat to the nation and that powerful teachers unions are the cause of failed public education.
Main Street Menace of the Week: SB 933 (Oropeza) – Putting Small Business Between the Rock and the Hard Place
While the legislature is in session, the National Federation of Independent Business/California will be profiling anti-small business bills and the adverse effect they would have on California’s job creators. This is the second column of the 2010 series.
That spot between the rock and the hard place is a bad place to be.
In fact, it’s a very tight fit.
And the California Legislature is about to make it a bit tighter.
THE ROCK
When you visit your local bookstore, restaurant or dry cleaner, you may have noticed the kindly-worded sign letting you know that the business charges a small fee for you to use a debit card. Well, the debit card surcharge imposed by the mom-and-pop store is not there to squeeze you for a little more profit; a small business charges this fee to cover the ever-increasing cost imposed by the big electronic payment networks such as VISA, Mastercard and Interlink, and those mandatory fees may be 2.5 percent of the purchase price or higher.
For Want of A Nail
For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
for want of a shoe the horse was lost;
and for want of a horse the rider was lost;
being overtaken and slain by the enemy,
all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.
-Benjamin Franklin
The Way to Wealth (1758)
A volcano in Iceland with an absolutely unpronounceable name erupts and air travel in, about, and through Northern Europe is thrown into total, unmitigated chaos. The ash and smoke from the erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano could, if sucked into modern commercial jet engines, shut them all down, leaving winged, painted steel and aluminum tubes and hundreds huddled inside in cramped seats at the cruel mercy of gravity. In London, more than a thousand miles away, thousands of flights were grounded with perhaps hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded for days that must have seemed endless for one trying to just get home. Strangely, it was all about the direction the wind blew.
Blowing Up Boxes With a Purpose: the New Green Economy
When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger first sought the Horseshoe in 2003, he famously announced his intention "blow up the boxes" in Sacramento. That goal appealed to a voting public tired of unbalanced budgets, confusing mazes of bureaucracy in Sacramento, and a seemingly endless number of state agencies with unintelligible acronyms for names and equally confusing mandates and authorities. Yet when it came time to actually trigger the explosions, the fuses apparently wouldn’t light.
The Governor called his state reorganization plan the "California Performance Review." Its stated mission was to "…restructure, reorganize and reform state government to make it more responsive to the needs of its citizens and business community." However, in the five years since its launch, any performance review of the California Performance Review would not be favorable.
Of the 88 Boards and Commissions targeted for elimination, most remain today. Of the Boards and Commissions that were eliminated, the bureaucracies that supported them were left behind to do their work with less public scrutiny.