Tag Archives: Unions

News

Obama’s TSA nominee withdraws after lying to Congress about abuse of power

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Story from Yahoo News.  (H/T Ed Morissey of Hot Air)

Excerpt:

The Obama administration’s choice to lead the Transportation Security Administration withdrew his name Wednesday.

In a statement, Erroll Southers said he was pulling out because his nomination had become a lightning rod for those with a political agenda. President Barack Obama tapped Southers, a former FBI agent, to lead the TSA in September but his confirmation has been blocked by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who says he was worried Southers would allow TSA employees to engage in collective bargaining with the government.

Questions have also been raised about a reprimand that Southers received for running background checks on his then-estranged wife’s boyfriend two decades ago. Southers wrote a letter to lawmakers earlier this month acknowledging that he had given inconsistent answers to Congress on that issue.

Ed Morrissey writes:

There were at least three reasons why Southers’ nomination was going nowhere in the Senate.  When Congress created TSA and the Department of Homeland Security, it exempted both from labor laws that allowed unions to organize the workers, in order to avoid having labor problems disrupt national-security efforts.  Southers was seen as an appointee who would push for unionization by Senator Jim DeMint, among others, who held the nomination in order to get clearer answers from the Obama administration on their intentions.  That hold got lifted shortly after the Christmas Day bombing when the Obama administration complained that the Senate had prevented Obama from providing leadership to TSA, but Obama had taken eight months to nominate Southers in the first place.

It was at that time that Southers finally admitted that he had misled Congress during his confirmation process on his involvement in breaching privacy laws to investigate his wife’s boyfriend.  That involved two issues of trust: accountability to Congress and the security of private information being held by the government.  Not only did Southers himself twice breach the data, he also disseminated it — which is a felony, although long past the statute of limitations, presumably.  The Senate should not look kindly on appointees who begin their jobs by lying to Congress, and multiple holds replaced the DeMint hold as a result.  That has nothing to do with “political agendas,” but with Southers’ suitability for the job.

Another one bites the dust. Here’s a few of the previous failures.

News

How Obama rewards Democrat special interest groups

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One way to reward your favored special interests is to exempt them from the taxes that everyone else has to pay.

Consider this article from CNS News. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama on Thursday announced a plan to impose a new tax on banks to cover an expected $117 billion shortfall in the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). The tax would apply to 50 financial institutions, which have assets of more than $50 billion, and would constitute a 0.15 percent tax on the TARP liabilities of these institutions.

However, auto companies General Motors and Chrysler, which are not expected to pay back all of their $66 billion of TARP money, will not be subject to the tax. Also exempted from the tax would be mortgage institutions Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which are largely responsible for the financial meltdown in 2008.

What do you suppose that businesses do when the government tells them to pay more taxes? Well, they just pass that on to their consumers.

But there’s more.

Consider this article from the Heritage Foundation. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

After a long-week of negotiations, unions have won an exemption from the excise tax on high-cost “Cadillac” health insurance plans. The excise tax would fall on health insurance plans that cost more than $8,500 for individuals and $23,00 for families (the union deal reportedly slightly increases these thresholds) starting in 2013. It is one of the many tax hikes proposed by Congress to partially offset the cost of its take over of the health care system.

Obama’s union supporters are getting exempted from another tax that will be paid by non-unionized workers.

Commentary

What helps kids to learn? Parents, teacher unions or education bureaucrats?

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Christine Kim
Christine Kim

What’s the best way to help children do well in school?

On the one hand, social conservatives on the right favor the traditional family structure, complete with a father who lives in the home and is an involved parent. Parents have an incentive to help children do well in school because they are biologically linked to the children and they are paying all the bills at home. They are making sacrifices and they want to see some results.

On the other other hand, social liberals on the left favor raising taxes on working families, and funneling the proceeds to unionized public school teachers. Do teachers get paid more for improving the quality of education for students? Or do they get paid more for contributing to Democrats who will increase their salaries? Do they have an incentive to make children learn?

Parents vs teacher unions: Who does the best job?

Consider this research paper from Christine C. Kim of the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank.

Excerpt:

American taxpayers invest heavily in education. Last year, spending on public K–12 education totaled $553 billion, about 4 percent of gross domestic prod­uct (GDP) in 2006. For each child enrolled in a pub­lic elementary or secondary school, expenditures averaged $9,266 that year—an increase of 128 per­cent, adjusted for inflation, since 1970.

Despite this increase in public spending, student achievement and educational attainment over the last four decades has remained relatively flat. In 2007, a significant portion of students, disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, scored “below basic” in reading and math on the National Assess­ment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Sadly, in many of the nation’s largest cities, fewer than half of high school students graduate.

While academic research has consistently shown that increased spending does not correlate with edu­cational gains, the research does show a strong rela­tionship between parental influences and children’s educational outcomes, from school readiness to college completion. Two compelling parental factors emerge:

  1. family structure, i.e., the number of parents living in the student’s home and their relationships to the child, and
  2. parents’ involvement in their children’s schoolwork.

Consequently, the solution to improving educa­tional outcomes begins at home, by strengthening marriage and promoting stable family formation and parental involvement.

The PDF is here. In the rest of the paper, Christine supports her conclusions using evidence.