Tag Archives: GOP Primary

Scott Walker: eliminate NLRB, enact national right-to-work, ban federal public sector unions

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

I hope that by the end of this post, everyone will consider whether it makes more sense to elect someone who says they will do something conservative as President that they have already done in their state, as Governor.

The story is from the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

Republican presidential hopeful Scott Walker promised Monday to go far beyond what he did to rein in union power in Wisconsin if elected to lead the country.

The plan includes eliminating the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), eliminating federal employee unions and implementing a national right-to-work law. It will also do away with federal workers being allowed to do union work on taxpayer time.

[…]The plan would go far beyond the career defining reforms Walker pursued in 2011 during his first term as governor of Wisconsin. The changes to labor policy in the state, known as Act 10, mostly just outlawed mandatory union dues for state public employees.

[…]Critics have argued the NLRB unfairly benefits unions, often at the expense of employers and their workers. This includes changes to union elections, contracting and the franchise model. Walker also promised to outlawmandatory union dues for all public and private workers. A policy known as right-to-work.

[…]Walker also plans to end the policy which allows government workers to do union work on taxpayer time. The practice is known as “official time” on the federal level.

“In 2012, taxpayers subsidized 3,395,187 hours of ‘official time’ time spent working for the union or lobbying,” Walker noted. “That cost the taxpayers $156 million.”

“While the IRS was busy harassing conservative organizations they also had more than 200 federal employees whose only work was for the big government union bosses,” Walker continued. “How about the Department of Veterans Affairs? While more than 600,000 veterans were facing delays for medical care in the VA system, more than 250 federal employees.”

There’s no question in my mind that Walker has the strongest record of activism as a fiscal conservative in the GOP primary. He is only proposing to do at the federal level what he already has done at the state level. No other candidate has the record of past performance that Walker has. Been there, done that – wrote a book about it. It’s very important that we get the public sector unions out of politics, because they are always pushing for bigger and bigger government, which means higher taxes for you and your children. And of course the unions are pro-abortion and anti-natural-marriage. By the way, workers like right-to-work: a recent Gallup poll found that non-union workers are happier with their work than forced-unionized workers.

I expected Walker to do this if he were elected President, which is why he was my first choice for so long. (He is now #2, behind my #1 pick Bobby Jindal) It’s a shame that he had to tip his hand, because it will make it harder for him to win in the general election, now. I really think I might have to put him back in as my #1 choice because I think that getting rid of NCLB and public sector unions would be such an Earth-shattering conservative move. This truly would be on the level of some of the radically leftist policies that Obama pushed for. I trust Walker to do what he says, because of his record of achievement in Wisconsin along these same lines. This is not just talk.

People should have understood what they were getting in Scott from his past record, but I fear that many Republican voters (not evangelicals, of course) are not looking into the candidates’ backgrounds. They are being swayed by charismatic talk from leftist clowns like Donald Trump. They should be looking for proven leaders who have made good things happen at the state level – as governors, preferably.

By the way, Walker is one of one three candidates who has a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. The other two are Jindal (of course) and Rubio.

Related videos

Anyway, for the rest of this post, I want to include a few short, 5-minute, videos on capitalism and unions. These are all from Prager University, and I hope they help you to understand why you need to support the free enterprise system, and oppose public sector unions.

George Mason University professor of economics Walter Williams on “Is Capitalism Moral?”:

Entrepreneurship guru George Gilder on “Why Capitalism Works”:

City College of New York professor of political science Daniel DiSalvo on how unions influence politics:

Stanford University professor of political science Terry Moe on how teacher unions oppose the interests of students:

Please look into these issues, and consider supporting either Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal or Ted Cruz for President in the general election. These guys understand economics, and will get good things done if elected President.

Related posts

Fox News debate moderators focused on attention-seeking, not informing voters

First point, there was record viewership for the second debate.

The Washington Times reports:

The two-hour political extravaganza pulled in 24 million viewers according to initial Nielsen ratings numbers – breaking the all-time record for a non-sports cable event. 

[…]A good comparison here: the largest audience that any debate drew in the 2012 election was 7.6 million. 

[…]And about that coverage on Thursday: Of the two-hour broadcast, the candidates collectively spoke for one hour and eight minutes total. Mr. Trump spoke for 10 minutes, 32 seconds, with Jeb Bush in second place at eight minutes, 32 seconds – this according to University of Minnesota political professor Eric Ostermeier, who tallied it all up with a stop watch and a spreadsheet.

[…]Trump and Bush were the only two candidates who reached — and exceeded — that mark,” the professor adds. “They received more than their equal share of speaking time while the rest of the field was shortchanged.”

In third place was Mike Huckabee at 6:40 followed by Sen. Ted Cruz (6:39), Ohio Gov.John Kasich (6:31), Ben Carson (6:23), Sen. Marco Rubio (6:22), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (6:10), Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (5:51), and in last place, Sen. Rand Paul (5:10).

The Fox News moderators spoke for 32 minutes – taking up about a third of the total on-camera dialogue.

The Fox News moderators spoke for 32 minutes. They should have spoken for 10 minutes total, and in fact I saw them say that they only intended to speak for 10 minutes, just after the early debate for second-tier candidates.

Conservative Mark Levin was not please with the Fox News moderators’ performance.

He says:

Lawyer, constitutional scholar, best selling author, and conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, in an interview on theBreitbart News Saturday radio program, expressed outrage at the Thursday night GOP presidential debate hosted by Fox News.

Levin asserted, “I think that we were all duped. The fact of the matter is that this was a ratings gambit.”

[…]Levin claims that “We the people” were overlooked in the debate, and the event became a media spectacle with more emphasis on the show’s moderators than on discussing the important issues that face America.

[…]Bannon observed that the debate reeked of “opposition research” and had a definite “adversarial” tone with the questions they asked Trump and others. Levin agreed and recounted that the question they asked Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker about abortion seemed prosecutorial in nature.

It’s not just that the speaking time was unfair, and actually favored the moderators, it’s that the moderators’ questions were almost entirely tabloid-style gotcha questions:

Levin described the debate as a failure to address the two hundred trillion that America faces in unfunded liabilities, the bankruptcy of the Social Security system, the fact that Medicare and Medicaid are on the brink of collapse, that our educational system costs a trillion dollars a year and is a “complete failure,” our immigration policy is a disaster, the EPA is destroying our economic system, and that our Constitution is being undermined. Levin rebuked Fox for wasting time on “pardon the phrase—trumped up stuff. To me it is such an outrage what took place. And it was planned. The questions were planned. I am very troubled by it too.”

I think Megyn Kelly in particular was a lousy moderator, and just approached the debate as a way to attract attention to herself. She was a disgrace. People say Fox News is conservative, but they were anything but conservative during the second debate. They were in it for themselves, and the Republican Party suffered. I might as well have been watching CNN, or even MSNBC.

Anyway with that in find, here are the changes in poll numbers following the debate: (H/T ECM)

Recent post-debate GOP primary poll
Recent post-debate GOP primary poll

Cruz, Fiorina and Carson helped themselves the most, and that’s exactly what I said in my previous post when I declared Fiorina the winner of the first debate, and Cruz and Carson the winners of the second debate.

Cruz and Carson did the best in Thursday’s top 10 GOP primary debate

Texas Senator Ted Cruz
Texas Senator Ted Cruz

It’s late Thursday night, so I am just going to round up a few clips that stood out to me.

Ted Cruz’s introductory speech:

Marco Rubio on helping small businesses:

Ted Cruz on Obama weakness with Russia and China:

Ben Carson on race relations in the United States:

Scott Walker defends his strong pro-life record:

Ben Carson on America’s declining military power:

Scott Walker defends his economic record in Wisconsin:

And Ben Carson’s short closing speech was the highlight of the night:

I like Scott Walker best in the second debate group, but he didn’t say much that I hadn’t heard before. I really think he is the guy to beat Hillary, especially since Jindal’s record in Louisiana is just not ready for prime time. Would like a Walker/Jindal ticket, with Cruz as Attorney General and Ben Carson as Health and Human Services Secretary and Carly Fiorina as Commerce Secretary and John Bolton as Secretary of State and Rand Paul as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Oh yes, please.