[kitchencabinetforum] WHIGS SURRENDER TO LABOR MAFIOSI

As the cochairman of Tories, I congratulate Ed Miliband on his election as Leader of Whigs. Miliband will have many challenges ahead in these next few days, but if he wants to be taken seriously, the first thing he's got to do is own up to his role in creating the mess that Britain is in and tell us what he'd do to fix it.

From advising Gordon Brown in the Treasury in the 90s, to serving in his Cabinet in the 2000s, he must recognise his central role in creating the financial mess we're all paying for. For the past five months, all we've heard from Whigs is knee jerk opposition to our plans to tackle the deficit. Now is the time for Mr Miliband to tell us what he'd do instead. He promised us a Labour spending plan before the spending review, now we'd all like to see it.

The new Whig leader now has a clear choice. He can either serve the national interest by joining with us and the Liberal Democrats and set out how he would cut the deficit, or he can stand on the sidelines and refuse to engage with the biggest challenge facing Britain in decades. The fact that Ed Miliband owes his position to the votes of the unions does not bode well. At the moment this looks like a great leap backwards for the Labour Party.

Basil Venitis, twitter.com/Venitis, points out that most labor leaders are in cahoots with mafiosi and kleptocrats. In Greece, the most corrupt country on Earth, labor leaders kept their mouths shut about Graecokleptocrats churning eighty billion euros of the pension funds of poor Greek workers, in exchange for seats in the Greek Parliament, aka the Grand Brothel on Syntagma Square! Greece has more than five times as many civil servants per capital than the United Kingdom. The country's inflated government apparatus consumes tens of billions of euros a year.

Fourthreichian Premier Durao Barroso points out the majority of union members now works for government. Three times as many union members work for the Post Office as in the auto industry. The union movement's priorities have shifted with their membership. Now unions focus on making government employment even more comfortable.

Fourthreichian Diplomacy Czar Catherine Ashton points out much of the generous compensation of public employees comes in benefits. The average government employee earns triple the retirement contributions of the average private-sector worker and can retire far earlier. Government employees get generous health benefits too. Almost one out of every four government employees pay nothing out of pocket for health care. Government workers have also been insulated from the pain of the recession. The government has been hiring even as the private sector lost many million jobs over the last two years. No wonder government employees are more likely than anyone else to tell pollsters that their personal finances are doing well.

Fourthreichian President Haiku Herman points out most public employees have been pampered, rarely getting fired, with wage and benefit packages steadily rising, so now many are paid far more than their private sector equivalents. A recent study, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed that average U.S. federal salaries exceed average private-sector pay in 83 percent of comparable occupations.

Venitis muses the overstaffing and sloppy work performance in the public sector is the subject of countless jokes, which would not be funny if they did not contain a strong element of truth. Even civil servants joke about the 80-20 rule, where 20 percent of the employees do 80 percent of the work and vice versa. The late-night comedians can always get a laugh when describing the indifferent attitude of department of motor vehicle employees. Professors in many public colleges now only teach one class per semester. Professors in private colleges teach three or four courses, which is not particularly taxing. No wonder college tuitions have been rising far faster than inflation. The private-sector has been surging in productivity growth while much of the public sector has negative productivity growth.

Understandably, government employee unions like these arrangements. But the money that makes it all possible comes from your taxes, and that explains why the union movement has become an aggressive lobby for higher taxes. Instead of voters telling the government how to spend their money, government unions now tell voters the taxes they want them to pay. They always have a one-word answer: more. As taxpayers have discovered, the new labor movement wants you to pay your pseudofair share to them.

Venitis asserts that public sector unions are bankrupting countries. There is a rising concern about the growing political power of public sector unions. With large budget deficits and huge funding gaps in pension plans, policymakers in many countries are trying to constrain spending and improve government efficiency. But unions stand in the way of needed fiscal reforms.

California's public sector workers have the highest average compensation of public sector workers in any State, and they also have one of the highest rates of unionization. It's not a coincidence that California is having severe budget problems and that it finds spending restraint very difficult to achieve.

Public sector workers can often retire at age 50 or 55 and draw very large pensions. In California, for example, there are more than 9,000 retired public sector workers with annual pensions of more than $100,000 a year. Oftentimes, these high pensions result from government workers abusing the system; for example, the last year of an employee's salary may be artificially inflated to garner a larger annual pension, a technique known as pension spiking.

Jerzy Buzek, prostitute-in-chief of Eldorado of Prostitutes, aka European Parliament, points out journalists often do not ask tough questions of groups such as firefighters and police because of the valuable contributions of those groups to local governments. Yes, fire and police jobs can be dangerous, but numerous private sector jobs are even more dangerous, and they don't get the sweetheart deals on pensions and other benefits that public sector workers do.

The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are powerful players in every aspect of education policy, and they rake in about $2 billion of union dues and fees a year. These unions shamelessly oppose reforms such as school choice, they protect failing teachers from termination, and they impose layers of costly bureaucracy on local governments. Unions also create barriers to entry into the teaching profession by opposing alternative teacher certification programs that would allow more mid-career professionals and those without traditional teaching degrees into the classroom. Many of the problems plaguing education today can be attributed directly to union power, which can be curtailed through common-sense reforms. Breaking the stranglehold from these unions is the first step toward making long-term meaningful education reform.

The level of public sector unionization varies dramatically from state to state. While New York's public sector workforce is 73 percent unionized, North Carolina's is only 8 percent. These large differences are due to varying state-level rules on collective bargaining and union shop provisions.

The public's servants have become the public's masters. It does seem that government workers have tightened the screws on citizens and governments in many countries. As the baby boomers in government workforces retire and draw their generous pension and retiree health benefits, there will be pressure to raise property, income, and VAT.

Public sector unions should be outlawed. Governments should pass legislation to ban collective bargaining in the public sector, which is the successful path followed by Virginia and North Carolina. Government workers should be able to join voluntary organizations and have a voice in public policy debates, as people in any other voluntary organization can do. But collective bargaining infringes the rights of workers to freedom of association, and it creates monopoly unions with a privileged position in our democratic process. A huge fiscal battle between taxpayers and public sector unions is getting under way in many States.