Thanks to this bill — which doesn’t touch any of the civil service protections afforded public workers, nor any private-sector unions — public sector workers will have a choice over whether to join a union. Thanks to this bill, public workers who elect not to join a union won’t be forced to pay dues anyway. Thanks to this bill, elected officials won’t be negotiating away taxpayer dollars with the people who finance their campaigns. So, naturally, the Democrats call it the the undoing of fifty years of “civil rights.”
You may think the Ryan Roadmap looks harsh and disruptive. But we simply must start dealing with these things right now, while we have some resources, some options, and some time. It will be much more harsh and disruptive to try to deal with these things after the fiscal crisis is upon us, when inflation is skyrocketing, unemployment is through the roof, and the markets start demanding a very high premium to finance the debt of Washington, the states, and the cities, if indeed investors are willing to do so at all.
We are in an extraordinarily dangerous period, one that calls for real leadership in Washington, where the geniuses in charge are currently locked in a death struggle over whether to cut nothing or next to nothing.
NPR? Foreign aid? Food stamps? That isn’t going to do it. The fact that we’re even having a discussion about whether we have to federally subsidize experimental opera companies in Topeka suggests that the message has not quite hit home. Maybe when the Social Security checks stop coming, Americans will notice. Which is to say, when it’s too late.
Even in California? It’s certainly insane to think the state can afford it, but then, this is the state that has voted to destroy its economy with crazy emissions rules, and then doubled down on it. So, we’ll see.
The cuts represent less than 2 percent of the total budget, less than 4 percent of the deficit, and less than 5 percent of discretionary spending, which rose in real terms by 75 percent from 2000 to 2010 and by about 9 percent in each of the last two fiscal years. If the House-approved reductions would be “the largest one-year cuts in history,” as the folks at Every Child Matters say, that is a sad commentary not on Republican cold-heartedness but on the fiscal incontinence of both parties.
Administration officials declined to explain why they have not reached out to groups of liberal-minded Muslims. “Federal Departments and Agencies engage with a wide variety of Muslim organizations and groups throughout the country, often through open forums and meetings and we have also consulted a wide variety of academics and researchers about the views of Muslims in America,” according to a March 8 statement from White House spokesman Nicholas Shapiro.
Among the Muslim groups with the greatest access to the White House are MPAC, based in Los Angeles, and the Islamic Society of North America, based in Plainfield, Ind. MPAC is an advocacy group with few members, and ISNA is a umbrella group for many groups and mosques that practice orthodox Islam, which mandates the subordination of democratic governments to Islamic rules.
Leftists like to fly the false flag of “liberal,” but they’re really not.