Category Archives: States Behaving Badly

Unions: Legalized Racketeering

Unions

I have no issue whatsoever with the McWorker, along side his McFriend, walking into the McBoss’s office and asking for a raise.  And if denied, threatening that the two of them, in hopes they are valuable, will walk off the job and go to work somewhere else.

In this case, the McBoss can call the McBluff and say, “No raise for you!” and hope the McWorkers get back to McWork.  Or, perhaps the McBoss, seeing the value of the McWorkers, will relent and approve the raise and everyone is happy.

In other words, uniting in the pursuit of self interests is fine.  As long as the rules are fair for everyone.  And when it comes to unions, the rules are most certainly not fair:

“The most glaring examples of union favoritism under state laws,” notes a 2012 U.S. Chamber of Commerce report, “tend to occur in criminal statutes and allow individuals who engage in truly objectionable behavior to avoid prosecution solely because they are participating in some form of labor activity.”

Pennsylvania unions now enjoy a loophole that the state’s anti-stalking law “shall not apply to conduct by a party to a labor dispute.” In Illinois, anti-stalking laws exempt “any controversy concerning wages, salaries, hours, working conditions or benefits … the making of collective bargaining agreements.”

These exemptions prove that organizing tactics used by unions can have something in common with those of stalkers – and can perhaps inflict similar emotional distress.

While a number of states have exemptions that have allowed union members to intimidate and harass, California is by far the worst actor. As in other states, it is a crime in California to interfere with a lawful business through physical obstruction or intimidation of workers or customers.

Yet California has exempted unions from this law. The negative effects were clear in 2008, when United Food and Commercial Workers Union members picketed a new Ralph’s grocery store in Fresno. They went beyond traditional picketing, harassing customers and instigating confrontations with employees on store property. When store workers finally called the police, authorities refused to come and put a stop to the union’s disruptive behavior.

The police refused to even dispatch to the site.

But it gets even worse:

California also has a host of exemptions that allow union members to violate the property rights of private citizens. The 2008 Researcher Protection Act makes entering the residences of academic researchers to interfere with their work a crime. Sounds reasonable. Yet this doesn’t apply to union members. They can invade a professor’s home in California and it’s not a crime – so long as the invader is “engaged in labor union activities.”

And even worser:

Labor bosses have even deemed it necessary to get legislators to grant unions exemptions from laws against sabotage. Wisconsin’s state law against sabotage exempts unions, so as to not curtail their organizing activities. The fact that anti-sabotage laws might be construed as an impediment to union organizing says more about union organizing efforts than anything else.

Yet, in 2011, union members were alleged to have sabotaged equipment belonging to supporters of Governor Scott Walker’s labor reforms. In New York and New Jersey, during a labor dispute between Verizon and the Communications Workers of America, the telephone company contacted the FBI to investigate allegations of sabotage. The company reported equipment being stolen, fiber-optic lines cut and an office heating system tampered with.

During a union organizing effort in Ohio, the owner of one non-union electrical services company had his tires slashed and rocks thrown at his windows. One of his employees was assaulted. The owner was himself shot in the arm while confronting a person who was vandalizing his car on his property. Other owners of non-union shops experienced similar harassment and intimidation. When the Associated Builders and Contractors called on unions to halt such odious behavior, the unions responded that their actions were perfectly legal.

We all should have the right to bargain for our services and our compensation.  We should be able to grieve our differences when they occur.  But we should all be safe from threats, violence, theft and assault.

We’re Gonna Ration

The allocation of scare resources: Rationing.

There are a lot of ways of doing it; time, money, connections even luck.

Some of us think that rationing by money optimizes quality and supply.  Others think that rationing by time does the same thing.  I disagree:

SACRAMENTO — As the state moves to expand healthcare coverage to millions of Californians under President Obama’s healthcare law, it faces a major obstacle: There aren’t enough doctors to treat a crush of newly insured patients.

So, California is going to ration on time.  And one of the metrics that time based rationing optimizes is – low quality:

Some lawmakers want to fill the gap by redefining who can provide healthcare.

They are working on proposals that would allow physician assistants to treat more patients and nurse practitioners to set up independent practices. Pharmacists and optometrists could act as primary care providers, diagnosing and managing some chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and high-blood pressure.

Now, to be sure, allowing non-doctor health care providers could very well be positive; after all – why do we need an MD to refill a prescription for blood pressure medication?  However, I’m sure that California isn’t embracing this is an open-market mindset.  Rather, docs are just fleeing the medicaid business.  In fact, in California, only 57% of doctors are accepting new medicaid patients.

 

Lefty Has A Friend

More on California taxes.

I posted on Monday that Phil Mickelson has had enough of the confiscatory powers of the state:

 And now California is about to.  When you tax the living snot out of people they are going to react.  They’ll either move or quit.

And that results in $0.00 tax revenue.

It’s really not rocket surgery.

Perhaps the only thing more frustrating than a government that confiscates so much wealth is the fact that it is so predictable:

…but when pressed during his interview Tuesday, here’s how Woods responded:

“I moved out of here back in ’96 for that reason. I enjoy Florida but it was also…I understand what he was I think trying to say. I think he’ll probably explain it better in a little bit more detail.”

When California takes 13.3% and Florida takes zilch the calculus is pretty simple.

Laffer Curve: PGA Style

Imagine a curve.  On the left hand side the value is zero.  Then, as you move from left to right, the slope goes up peaking somewhere then slides down back to zero.  That’s the Laffer Curve.

If you tax income at 0%, you realize $0.00 of tax revenue.  If you tax income at 100% you will also realize $0.00 of tax revenue; no one works for free.  In between is the sweet spot.

And it appears that, for Lefty, a 63% take is just too much:

LA QUINTA, Calf. — Phil Mickelson started his 2013 PGA Tour season at the Humana Challenge in partnership with the Clinton Foundation with a tie for 37th place. But after a final-round 66, Mickelson did more than hint that the 2014 season may see some big changes for the World Golf Hall of Famer.

“Well, it’s been an interesting offseason. And I’m going to have to make some drastic changes,” Mickelson said at the Palmer Course at PGA West in La Quinta. “I’m not going to jump the gun and do it right away, but I will be making some drastic changes.”

And what changes might he be making?

PHIL MICKELSON: Well, it’s been an interesting offseason. And I’m going to have to make some drastic changes. I’m not going to jump the gun and do it right away, but I will be making some drastic changes.

Q. Meaning leaving from California?

PHIL MICKELSON: I’m not sure.

Q. Moving to Canada?

PHIL MICKELSON: I’m not sure what exactly, you know, I’m going to do yet. I’ll probably talk about it more in depth next week. I’m not going to jump the gun, but there are going to be some. There are going to be some drastic changes for me because I happen to be in that zone that has been targeted both federally and by the state and, you know, it doesn’t work for me right now. So I’m going to have to make some changes.

And why does he think he needs to make these changes?

PHIL MICKELSON: Yeah. I’ll probably go into it more next year or next week. But if you add up, if you add up all the federal and you look at the disability and the unemployment and the Social Security and the state, my tax rate’s 62, 63 percent. So I’ve got to make some decisions on what I’m going to do.

France learned it.  And now California is about to.  When you tax the living snot out of people they are going to react.  They’ll either move or quit.

And that results in $0.00 tax revenue.

Abuse of the System

I’m late on this one; been sitting in my stack for awhile now.

I’m not so naive as to think that any program is going to be 100% free of abuse; there will always be those that game the system.  So I’m not really moved by this:

The food-stamp program prohibits the purchase of booze, tobacco and lottery tickets with an EBT card. But with the cash-assistance program, users can blow money on strippers or a six-pack and to tap welfare dollars from liquor stores, casinos and adult-oriented establishments.

The Post found dozens of pubs, nightclubs and tobacco shops where welfare dough was dispensed — and presumably spent.

The Boiler Room, a gay dive bar in the East Village, had $120 and $60 transactions a minute apart on Jan. 17, 2011. The bar is around the corner from a Bank of America that takes EBT cards.

West Village tobacco shop Shisha International had EBT transactions ranging from $40 to $180 in 2011. The store is near at least two EBT-friendly ATMs.

That’s precious little data to suggest that there is a problem.  But what DOES drive me crazy is this:

State Sen. Tom Libous (R-Binghamton) passed a bill in his chamber in June that would outlaw welfare withdrawals at gambling dens, strip clubs and other venues of vice, but the measure is gathering dust in the Democratic-controlled Assembly.

Libous is looking for a new Assembly sponsor to carry the bill in that house in the upcoming legislative session, after past sponsor George Latimer (D-Rye) was elected to the state Senate.

With only one of the city’s Assembly members, Nicole Malliotakis (R-B’klyn./SI), as a co-sponsor, the bill faces an uphill battle.

The Assembly typically doesn’t support welfare reform, because its more liberal members think the measures “hurt the poor,” Libous said. If the bill remains stalled, the state stands to lose $120 million in federal welfare funding.

The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act, signed by President Obama last February, requires states to prohibit sinful welfare spending by 2014. If they don’t, they’ll forfeit federal cash.

“The people who are stealing from the program are the ones I want to go after,” Libous said. “Not someone who lost his job or a single mom who has to feed her kids. That’s what this program is supposed to be for.”

This isn’t, or doesn’t seem to be, an ideological attack on the program at all.  Rather, it seems to be a attempt to tighten regulations to make sure that the money is being used for food.  For the required basics.

 

Public Transportation – Going Private

There’s often talk of public transportation.  And I get the idea; the more accessible work, shopping and other services are to folks who might be struggling, the better off those folks might be.  A second argument surrounds the environment.  The more people use mass transit, the better off we are in terms of gas use, pollution and, recently, CO2 emissions.

Not to mention the fact that traffic just sucks and anything that we can do to minimize it is a plus.

All arguments aside, suppose, for the same of this discussion, that I cede all points.  That mass transit is the way to go, my question is this:

Does it matter what agency provides that transit?

The answer is:

Apparently so.

By now you’ve heard about the perks that come with working in Silicon Valley. Free lunch, 20 percent time — that’s the work time you can use to pursue independent projects.

Well, another perk? A private bus that picks you up in your neighborhood in San Francisco and shuttles you down to your corporate campus about an hour south in the suburbs of Silicon Valley.

During rush hour in San Francisco, you see them everywhere, said Eric Rodenbeck, the creative director of Stamen Design in the Mission District of San Francisco.

“They’re just so big,” Rodenbeck says. “These buses are two stories high and they’re barrelling down residential streets, and no one knows where they’re going except the people who are on them.”

So now the complaint against “Big Business” is that they bus people to work.  It’s almost like if the government isn’t providing it for you, it’s just this great big secret conspiracy or something:

“You know it’s almost like this masonic ritual,” Rodenbeck says.  “If you’ve got the key, this whole other city layer unlocks itself to you. And that’s the kind of urban puzzle we like to solve.”

I mean, serious.

So what we have are private companies shelling out their own money to transport people from where they live to where they work.  All this to reduce traffic, reduce emissions, pollution and dependence on oil and other fossil fuels and it STILL isn’t good enough:

Rodenbeck says he thinks the locations are secret because the companies are “sensitive to this idea that they are funding a change in the infrastructure in San Francisco without it being regulated.”

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is in the midst of studying what’s essentially emerging as a private mass-transportation system, says Jerry Robbins, a transportation planner for the agency.

“The increase in employer buses has sparked some reaction from residents,” Robbins says.

He says that since tech companies contract out the work to private bus companies, which are regulated by the state, the city has little say in what they do.

But Robbins says the agency has fielded complaints that the the private shuttle buses, which often stop at public bus stops, are causing delays and traffic.

Again, private companies are providing transportation, almost exactly like that being provided by the government, but residents don’t like it because it’s not regulated.

But how many folks does this private system haul everyday?

When the map was finished, Stamen counted busses from Apple, eBay, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Google and Yahoo, and they found the buses ran through almost every neighborhood in San Francisco. Stamen estimates that about 14,000 people ride the private shuttle buses every day.

Fourteen Thousand.  People.  Everyday.  In government speak that is 28,000 trips. Everyday.  For free.  And how does the private sector seduce such riders?

“It’s pretty sweet,” Birch said. “They let us choose the type of seats and decor inside. And it’s got dim lighting with the Google colors.”

There’s also free Wi-Fi on the shuttles, and Birch said it’s basically another hour of work.

The tech world is driven by young, educated largely urban workers. But companies like Facebook, Google and Apple are located in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, which is about an hour south of the San Francisco.

“I think a lot of young people who work at the tech companies they want the city life they want something that’s fun and entertaining, and you don’t get that in the suburbs,” Birch said.

Yeah.  By offering what people want.

Look, I like buses more than I like cars.  And I like trains more than I like buses.  And I like lite rail more than I like trains.  But more than any of that I like solutions that actually work.  So maybe the public sector should take some clues from the private sector and begin to work to loosen the grip of public transportation and let it move into the private space.

You might just get free WiFi.

 

Laffer Curve – California Dreamin

California is broke.  Way broke. And spending is the problem.  So what did California do?  They enacted new laws calling for new taxes on the rich:

The big state tax news is that California voters said to sock it to the rich–specifically those with income of $250,000 and up. California Proposition 30, which Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget and public education in particular depended on, passed.

Proposition 30 creates three new upper income tax brackets for the next seven years. For example, folks with $250,000 to $300,000 a year in income will pay 10.3%, up from 9.3%. The new top income tax rate–for folks with income of $1 million-plus–will be 13.3%, up from a current top rate of 10.3%. That eclipses New Yorkers’ combined state and local top rate of 12.7% and Hawaii’s top rate of 11%. The income tax hikes are retroactive to Jan. 1, 2012, but the extra bill isn’t due until April 15, 2013.

The expected result?  Well, if past results can predict future ones, I would expect that California sees more people leaving:

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

Meanwhile, taxes are harming the private economy. According to the Tax Foundation, California has the 48th-worst business tax climate. Its income tax is steeply progressive. Millionaires pay a top rate of 10.3%, the third-highest in the country. But middle-class workers—those who earn more than $48,000—pay a top rate of 9.3%, which is higher than what millionaires pay in 47 states.

People aren’t gonna put up with it; they aren’t going to continue to work harder for less, pay more for smaller houses and face ever increasing costs associated with energy and transportation.

The Laffer Curve wins again.

A Characteristic of Unions

I think that it’s important to begin any conversation regarding unions, uniting, negotiating and representing one another with some acknowledgments.

  1. I absolutely support the effort of an individual to negotiate a higher wage, better working conditions more vacation or increased training.
  2. Further, I acknowledge and support that several employees working together to negotiate these benefits are a stronger negotiating team than an individual.
  3. Employers typically look to hire labor at its cheapest price point but they absolutely look at value, not bottom line dollar cost.

So it is that I have no issue with an employee, alone or with fellow like minded employees, walking into the bosses office and negotiating higher benefits or compensation.  What I do NOT support is the legal protections that change that negotiation from one where two people each seeking their own self-interests are negotiating to one where one of the groups is given such legal protection that the negotiation turns into a racket or where extortion is taking place.

And this is where my problem with organized labor falls.  They have legal protections that allow them to negotiate in bad faith and extort the employer.

Wanna use the tactic that if you are not compensated in the way and manner you want that you’ll walk out?  Fine, but then the boss may fire you in response.

With all of that said, I’m sure there is room for debate and disagreement on the issue of union and organized labor.  However, on one point I am continually astounded that the gentle left won’t critique unions.  And that’s on their tactics.

Discussions surrounding unions always brings to mind union thugs.  The guys that go to the homes of employees who might be on the fence during strikes or organization votes.  Threats against homes and families of those members who might not be towing the line.  And even physical violence to the employers themselves whether it be harm to the individual or vandalism to the property.

This surprise of mine extends to voting methods favored by unions.  An important tactic to form a union is to utilize  public vote, one where the vote of each employee is made in public for all to see.  The idea is that if the vote is private then the employee is able to make a “No” vote without fear of retribution.  Consistently unions and labor supporters work to take away the privacy of the vote not through open and fair compelling arguments but by legislation.  When their ideas lose in the court of public opinion labor uses the law to pass their agenda.

And this feeling that unions must be supported but not the individuals that make them up is shown in the fight against “Right to Work” legislation.  Laws that don’t ban unions but simply take away their power to coerce an employee to belong or not.  No one is saying that a union, in all of its ugliness can’t exist, the law is simply saying that it has to be voluntary.

I simply don’t understand the support of union violence against people and property that is routinely ignored by the left.

And in case the threat is only veiled and simply easy to miss, labor supporters are outright calling for violence:

“We’re going to pass something that will undo 100 years of labor relations and there will be blood, there will be repercussions,  we will re-live the battle of the overpass,” said state Rep. Doug Geiss (D-Taylor).

Blood – Repercussions – Battle

So, what is “The Battle of the Overpass”?

The battle of the overpass was a bloody fracas in 1937 between union organizers and Ford Motor Co. security guards. Walter Reuther was famously thrown down a flight of stairs and another union organizer was left with a broken back.

A literal battle involving organized labor.

This movement is literally violent.  Explicitly violent.  The push to improve the rights of individuals is being conducted by those who are looking to extend and protect rights to the employee who simply doesn’t want to organize, to vote in private and negotiate on his own behalf.

 

Government Response to Sandy

Government is inefficient, but I repeat myself.

Sandy created massive problems, and New York found themselves utterly unprepared:

Sandy flooded both tubes of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, now called the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, which was one of the major and longest transportation disruptions of the storm. It also ravaged the Rockaways in Queens, particularly the waterfront community of Breezy Point, where roughly 100 homes burned to the ground in a massive wind-swept fire.

Among the other crises Cuomo and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg faced on a daily basis during Sandy were the shortage of temporary housing, which continues, the long disruption of electricity and gasoline, generators in health care facilities swamped by floodwaters, restoring power from swamped electrical infrastructure and repairing commuter rail lines.

But it didn’t have to be this way:

More than three decades before Superstorm Sandy, a state law and a series of legislative reports began warning New York politicians to prepare for a storm of historic proportions, spelling out scenarios eerily similar to what actually happened: a towering storm surge; overwhelming flooding; swamped subway lines; widespread power outages. The Rockaway peninsula was deemed among the “most at risk.”

But most of the warnings and a requirement in a 1978 law to create a regularly updated plan for the restoration of “vital services” after a storm went mostly unheeded, either because of tight budgets or the lack of political will to prepare for a hypothetical storm that may never hit.

I’ll withhold my typical scorn of “the government should take care of us.”  After all, this is a state law meant to address problems that the state would face.  However, I will point out the main problem with government solutions:

They don’t work very well.

Had individual citizens taken efforts to protect themselves rather than holding out some fantastical hope of government assistance, the whole region would be better off.

President Obama’s Mandate

Here’s what Coyote thinks of Obama’s mandate:

Barack Obama argues that the last election gave him a mandate to raise taxes on the rich.  Put another way, he is arguing that 52% of the people voted to raise taxes on 2%.

Nice.

I particularly like his illustration:

Let’s take a look at two propositions [in California]:

  • Prop 30, which propose to raise taxes on on the rich to help close the deficit (there was a token 0.25% sales tax increase for cover, but everyone knew it to be a tax on the rich).
  • Prop 39, which was a broad-based income tax increase which raised taxes on most everyone (or at least on the 50% or so who pay income taxes).

So, let’s look at the results:

  • Raise taxes on only the very rich:  PASS
  • Raise taxes on everyone (including me):  FAIL

Wolves and lunch and lambs people.  Wolves, lunch and lambs.