Anyone who drives Highway 101 through Santa Barbara County knows that the potholes here are more aptly described as cauldron-craters. Parts of the road appear to have been barraged by mortar shells. The freeway’s surface is so badly disintegrated that loose pieces of asphalt, some as large as golf balls, are thrown up with sling-shot like velocity by the speeding tires of cars and trucks. These projectiles indiscriminately strike anything in their path. Motorists have suffered dings, dents, cracked windshields and bent tire rims from driving California’s dilapidated highways.
Why do California’s main thoroughfares resemble Third World ox-cart trails?
How much of your paycheck is appropriated for taxes — 15 percent, 20 percent, more? How much are your annual property taxes? How much sales tax, utility tax, gasoline tax, room tax, fees and special assessments are you paying? The total is probably a third to nearly half of your income.
Our highways are in disrepair not because there is a lack of funds to maintain them, but because funds are being misallocated. Over the past decade, the state of California’s spending has increased well in excess of inflation and population growth. Increasingly, that spending has been on government itself — on public employees who enjoy pay and retirement benefits significantly more generous than an equitably balanced market mechanism would allow.
So, as motorists pay a big deductible to replace smashed windshields or bent wheels, consider it another tax going to support some public servant who will retire 10 years younger than most people can retire, and with a pension and health insurance most people can only dream of having.
This misallocation of tax money is the result of the alliance between public-employee unions and self-serving politicians grubbing for votes and campaign funds. Nevertheless, some people are uncomfortable with recent moves to weaken public-employee unions. Ultimately the argument against those moves assumes that unions are good and employers are not; that without unions employers will abuse and exploit workers. And, yes, history has shown that some of them will.
However, there is nothing inherent in organized labor that precludes it from also being abusive and exploitive. The insatiable, unreasonable, demands of the UAW have almost destroyed the American car industry. And, certainly, public-employee unions have sunk to a similar nadir of selfish greed that is bankrupting governments across the nation.
Not only is this greed draining our public treasuries, but it can also threaten sound public policy and safety. Thanks to their powerful union, California’s prison guards are among the highest paid public employees in the state. Nevertheless, some of them augment their incomes by smuggling in and selling cellphones to inmates — a corruption that has increased with alarming frequency. Current proposed legislation aimed at preventing prison inmates from acquiring cell phones, with which they have perpetrated various villainies outside the prison walls, is being thwarted by one of the lard laden requirements of the corrections officers union agreement. Prison guards are paid for “walk time,” the time it takes them to go from their cars to their posts. Having them pass through metal detectors, as the legislation proposed, would increase the walk time — for which there are insufficient funds in the plundered state treasury.
Neither unions nor employers are always good or always bad. They are centers of self interest; each with selfish goals that, left unrestrained, will threaten each center as well as the general welfare. They must be kept in balance. But, in a nation where ideology is replacing rationality, objective reasoning and, thus, balance are forfeit. Depending on which politics one worships, accepted absolutes dictate certain conclusions, such as unions or employers are either always good or always bad. The gridlock in Congress, in state legislatures and in local councils, results from the ideological gridlock in peoples’ brains.
Meanwhile, our deteriorating infrastructures and education systems are the result of our tax money going to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The asphalt crumbles and the potholes get deeper so that public employees can retire at age 55 with full or near-full pay and health care for life. In our public schools, class sizes grow larger, instruction is diluted, music and sports programs are curtailed so government and academic bureaucrats can continue to get high six-figure salaries — and so cops, firefighters and prison guards can retire at age 50 with full pay then take another well-paid government job somewhere.
It’s your tax money. Is this how you want it spent? If not, carefully consider the balance between labor and employer in the public sector.
— Santa Barbara political observer Randy Alcorn can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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