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George Will explains Obama’s dependency agenda at CPAC 2010

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From Muddling Towards Maturity: George Will’s speech at the 2010 CPAC convention. He is a moderate conservative.

Part 1:

Topics: the conflict of freedom and equality, equal outcomes vs equal opportunities, wealth redistribution vs liberty, dependency on government, public sector vs private sector, cash for clunkers, state capitalism, credit, crony capitalism, subsidizing failure, TARP, profit and loss, risk, incentives, freedom to succeed or fail, cradle to grave welfare, SCHIP, socialized medicing, single payer health care, social security, medicare, vouchers, school choice, public education, public option, choice and competition, inter-state commerce.

Part 2:

Topics: health savings accounts, private property, stewardship and ownership, drug companies, health insurance, dependency agenda, entitlement mentality, lawsuits, trial lawyer lobby, tort reform, personal responsibility, stimulus, public and private sector wages and benefits, union payoffs, income tax, moral hazard, death tax, envy, farm subsidies, bureaucracy, schools vs families.

Here’s the graph he mentions of who pays for taxespays for taxes. High earners pay for everything and the low earners pay for nothing. High earners don’t depend on government but low earners do depend on government.

Part 3:

Topics: crisis as a means to enlarge government, manufacturing a crisis using massive deficits, environmentalism as a manufactured crisis, how bigger government means small individuals with less freedom, structure of american government, the founding fathers, free will, personal responsibility, small government.

By the way, many people are saying that Glenn Beck’s speech was the best of the conference. And you can watch it here at Caffeinated Thoughts. The best part starts at 25:25 minutes in where he explains being broke and turning his life around, and talking about the freedom to fail and personal responsibility.

UPDATE: ECM sent me this article about George Will’s appearance on ABC’s This Week.

Video:

Excerpt:

TERRY MORAN, HOST: There’s a sense that something is broken in Washington summed up this week by Senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) who announced his retirement. I think it’s fair to say he’s leaving in disgust. Here’s what he had to say.

SENATOR EVAN BAYH, (D-IND.): I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is much too much partisanship, and not enough progress. Too much narrow ideology, and not enough practical problem solving. Even at a time of enormous national challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.

MORAN: Is he right, George?
GEORGE WILL: Well, it’s hard to take a lecture on bipartisanship from a man who voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts, the confirmation of Justice Alito, the confirmation of Attorney General Ashcroft, the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. Far from being a rebel against his Party’s lockstep movement, Mr. Bayh voted for the Detroit bailout, for the stimulus, for the public option in the healthcare bill. I don’t know quite what his complaint is, but, Terry, with metronomic regularity, we go through these moments in Washington where we complain about the government being broken. These moments have one thing in common: The Left is having trouble enacting its agenda. No one when George W. Bush had trouble reforming Social Security said, “Oh, that’s terrible – the government’s broken.”

News

Rhode Island superintendent fires entire staff at unionized public school

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Story here on Business Insider. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

A school superintendent in Rhode Island is trying to fix an abysmally bad school system.

Her plan calls for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring.  The teachers’ union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands.

The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000.  This exemplifies a nationwide trend in which public sector workers make far more than their private-sector counterparts (with better benefits).

The school superintendent has responded to the union’s stubbornness by firing every teacher and administrator at the school.

ECM sent me this article about New Jersey earlier this week, which ruined my entire Monday.

Excerpt:

One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits — a total of $3.8m on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?

A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime. Is it “fair” for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?

The total unfunded pension and medical benefit costs are $90 billion. We would have to pay $7 billion per year to make them current. We don’t have that money—you know it and I know it. What has been done to our citizens by offering a pension system we cannot afford and health benefits that are 41% more expensive than the average Fortune 500 company’s costs is the truly unfair part of this equation.

And from CNSNews.

Excerpt:

Time.com reported last week that Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry estimated the government shut down cost taxpayers $100 million a day in labor that workers were unable to perform. That would suggest that the four and one quarter days the federal workers missed last week cost taxpayers about $425 million–close to the $445 million calculated on the basis that federal workers average $79,197 per year in salary not counting benefits.

The federal government was officially shut down on Feb. 8, 9, 10, and 11 and opened for business two hours late on Feb. 12.

Federaljobs.net’s Damp told CNSNews.com that not all of the more than 340,000 federal employees stayed home on those days. Some of these workers are designated as “essential” employees and are supposed to show up even when the weather or other conditions closes the federal government. These include, for example, law enforcement officers, key personnel with the Federal Aviation Administration, and workers who are needed for national security reasons.

“But I think it’s safe to say most of the workers did not go to work,” Damp said.

When non-essential federal workers are told to stay home because of a government shutdown, they still get paid, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

And also from CNSNews.

Excerpt:

State and local governments spent $1.1 trillion on employee wages and benefits in 2008. That’s half of what those governments spent overall.

And while the private sector job market remains bleak, there are more civil service jobs than ever. The federal Labor Department projects wage and salary employment in state and local government will increase 8 percent by 2018. That’s a comforting thought for anyone who has to spend time in line at the DMV.

Wish we could be as confident about the prospects for creating new corporate and manufacturing jobs to help pay for these new hires.

It’s not simply the number of new jobs that costs taxpayers. It’s that these government jobs pay more than ever. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that state and local government workers earn almost $40 per hour in wages, salaries and benefits. That’s more than 25 percent higher than the combined compensation of the average private sector job ($27 per hour).

One of the things that weights most heavily on my mind is the outrageous pay and benefits that are paid to public sector union employees. I am in the private sector and I have to pay these exorbitant salaries to people who have probably never worked a day in their entire lives! I have never had a moment’s peace in my career – the threat of layoffs has been a constant since I was doing internships during my undergraduate days. And I have two degrees in computer science!

Look, I’m a child of first generation immigrants, and I’ve been volunteering since I was 14 and working since I was 16 in high-tech. How can it be that people who cannot even teach children successfully can make so much money? It just is not fair, and I find it very depressing that I am paying for these layabouts. It makes me want to give up trying to do anything! The fact that Obama keeps raising public sector salaries in a recession does not help. And Obama opposes school choice, too.

I say abolish public sector unions, and abolish bailouts to private sector unions, too.

News

Are public sector union employees paid too much?

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From the Competitive Enterprise Institute. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The most recent BLS release on employee compensation (issued December 9, 2009) states that, during September 2009, “[p]rivate industry employer compensation costs averaged $27.49 per hour worked,” while, “[s]tate and local government compensation costs averaged $39.83 per hour worked” — a difference of over $12.00 an hour.

Moreover, a greater proportion of public employees get benefits, and they get greater employer contributions.

[,,,]And still that’s not all. As Don Bellante of the University of South Florida, David Denholm of the Public Service Research Foundation, and I note in our Cato Institute study on the topic, another benefit unionized government workers get is job security unlike any found in the private sector.

[…]Even worse, the greatest costs associated with public sector unions often do not become apparent for many years, in the form of pensions.

There’s a lot more here. It’s a nightmare. I try not to sound too upset about it, but it really is bad. Speaking as a private sector employee, I cannot afford ME and adult day care for government-employees who aren’t even accountable to their customers.