$5 Million Was Taxpayer Money

A senior White House official told Politico: "Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet."   The $10 million is how much the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and AFSCME spent trying to pull out the win for Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter in the Arkansas Democratic Senate primary runoff election.  Senator Blanche Lincoln won the primary.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed that for the first time in the history of the United States, a majority of union members work for the government, not the private sector. To be exact, 52% of all union members work for the federal or state and local governments. That means more than half of the $10 million that unions wasted just in Arkansas first came from your tax dollars. And the waste goes well beyond Arkansas.

The battle between government unions and the people who pay their salaries is playing out across the country. In Maine, the Maine Municipal Association, the SEIU, the Teamsters, and the Maine Education Association collectively spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to campaign against a ballot initiative that would have prevented government spending from growing faster than the combined rate of inflation and population growth.

 In Illinois, AFSCME Council 31 ran television and radio ads pushing for tax increases in their "Fair Budget Illinois" campaign. In Oregon, government unions provided 90 percent of the $4 million spent advocating two ballot initiatives to raise personal income and business taxes by $733 million.

When a private sector company agrees to an unwise labor contract, it renegotiates or it goes out of business (unless it gets bailed out by the government).  Not so with the government.  The government never goes out of business, and in fact, always grows. In 2009 private-sector unions lost 834,000 members while public-sector unions actually gained 64,000 members. This is untenable. Something must change before government unions bankrupt this country.

These government unions are using our tax dollars trying to prevent legislation we the taxpayers who pay their wages want.  While being a firm believer in the First Amendment I disagree with using my money to oppose me.

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